Wednesdays are now Random Wednesdays! That means I may or may not post a random thought about pretty much anything I feel like in this sporadically updated blog. Randomly, today's topic is actually relevant to MTG:

I'm messing around with Standard decks and trying different cards. The opposing deck has an active Bloodchief Ascension. I've managed to play my fifth land and have just now managed to draw a second Covenant of Minds, which are utterly spectacular against Bloodchief...

Today, hidden among a host of other changes to the Comp Rules, WotC announced the mangling of Black's piece of the color pie:

"702.11
This is intimidate, an evergreen keyword that doesn't quite exist yet. A creature with intimidate can't be blocked except by artifact creatures and/or creatures that share a color with it. It's coming soon, so rather than renumber everything in a few months, it was added in early. (It essentially takes the place of fear, which will remain...

Are there flaws in your playtesting methods? Do match-ups that seemed easy unexpectedly destroy you in the tournament? Maybe you've fallen into one of these playtesting pitfalls. I'm not saying I know all the "best practices" of playtesting, but I've made quite a few of these blunders, so maybe I can help steer you closer to effective tournament prep:

Pitfall: Always test against the best versions of the enemy decks.
I'll admit, this pitfall is semantically ambiguous....

A little positive feedback I recently received about my blog entry, which included "Red Deck Loses" from Texas States, got me thinking about teams. One of the player's teammates appreciated the spotlight on the deck and gave me some pointers on playing it. It doesn't surprise me that the deck was the result of four players working together to develop a deck with the potential to hit the "big time." Teams are important if you take playing Magic the Gathering seriously. At...

I've got a bone to pick with all you Magic players out there. Well, not all of you, just the careless ones.

You see, there is a local card shop which opens a few boxes, but mostly they buy collections and sell the cards individually. The prices are always good, but the quality varies. In particular, the last collection they bought was full of cards that had been played without sleeves. I'm not talking minor wear from just one draft or sealed event - I'm talking some dirty cards...