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...

As you can see, this blog has not been tended to lately. I finally decided I would make it official and put the Panopticon on indefinite hiatus. The reason is that I am becoming more involved with the playing of the magical cards, and I have to pull time for that from somewhere. This blog is one of the places that has felt that priority shift.

I may occasionally post the odd random thought or point of interest, but for the moment, no effort will be made to populate this blog with...

I'm getting a little tired of the following exchange in the Casual Decks sub-forum of the MDV Deck Corner:

Opening Post:
Generic Response:
...

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...

In case you didn't know. I like the color Black in Magic: The Gathering. I build Black decks. When the decks aren't Black, then they splash Black. When the decks don't splash Black, you can be sure it crossed my mind to try Black in that deck.

However, I've been building decks using the new Conflux cards, trying to get a little creative, and I'm running into an irritating problem. What happens is that I'm designing and testing a new deck for Standard, sometimes a casual deck,...