Magic: The Blogging

Greetings to all the Magic: the Gathering players out there! My name is Jay Bailey, and my handle is Salivanth. I've played the game for a few years, am a very good local player (though not too good in the wider community), an experienced writer, and a quasi-experienced blogger. I do have another blog, which is linked to here, but it's not about Magic: The Gathering. It is, instead, about personal growth and development, one of my two passions (the other being, of course, Magic).

I have actually wanted to start this blog for several weeks now, but haven't been sure I have something unique or even useful to say. However, trawling the blogosphere, I've noticed a lack of good Magic strategy on blogs. There's lots of great strategy. There's lots of blogs. But the two rarely come together. So I'm here to make that union.

My aim is to provide my readers with daily, high-quality, original, and personable Magic: The Gathering content, tech and strategy. Nothing less to me will suffice (although quality may take some time to emerge as I get used to blogging about Magic.)

Most Magic blog posts are short. I'm a fairly verbose blogger, generally averaging 600-1000 words per blog post (at least on my first blog). I'll be covering a wide range of topic, from spoilers of new sets to tournament reports, to deck ideas. A link to my Magic: The Gathering-only Twitter account can be found here.

I go to FNM on Saturday (I live in Australia) so tomorrow I should be bringing you a tournament report as a post. After that we'll delve into the bottomless pit of Magic: The Gathering strategy. I can hardly wait!

My favourite, and by far most prolific format is Standard. I almost never venture into Extended, Legacy or Vintage, but am a halfway-decent Limited player. I LOVE drafting M10, and always end up with blue/black decks somehow. I also like drafting Shards/Conflux/Reborn, though not as much as M10. I usually end up Esper since only 2 Esper drafters are usually at the table, so I score lots of good stuff.

I'm currently playing a Kithkin deck, but it's a bit up in the air since M10 rotated in. Here's the decklist I hacked out:

20 Plains

4 Windbrisk Heights

4 Figure of Destiny

4 Wizened Cenn

4 Knight of Meadowgrain

4 Cloudgoat Ranger

3 Captain of the Watch

2 Goldmeadow Stalwart

4 Honor of the Pure

4 Spectral Procession

3 Ajani Goldmane

2 Path to Exile

2 Harm's Way

Sideboard:

4 Ethersworn Canonist

3 Stillmoon Cavalier

3 Burrenton Forge-Tender

2 Ranger of Eos

2 Harm's Way

1 Path to Exile

Notes on the deck:

Captain of the Watch: The Captain is just sick to flip off a Windbrisk Heights. He may cost 6 mana, but that's only one more than Cloudgoat, and he's excellent against Control. A control deck HAS to Wrath this guy, or die in short order.

I cut the Stalwarts since I didn't believe they were as useful as other cards in the deck especially since Turn 1 I was using Windbrisk Heights anyway.

No Mutavaults: I almost never activate them. 0 Mutavaults may not be the objectively correct decision, but it works for my playstyle. I've played about 40-50 games with the deck, and lost a couple of games because of Mutavault stopping WWW for Spectral...but I've never won a game thanks to Mutavault.

Harm's Way: Harm's Way is THE BOMB. Especially against Red decks. Nobody expects it. They don't play around it. It is just as good as Path to Exile, and including 2 of each makes my opponents play around both. I think HW may even be BETTER than Path as long as people don't expect it, hence the 3 Paths total, and the 4 Harm's Way total.

Ranger of Eos: Ranger of Eos into 3 BFT's spells death for the Red deck. Also, searching for Figures makes for great Wrath resistance. At 6 mana, a single Figure becomes an 8/8 deathstick in just 2 turns.

The rest of the deck choices are fairly obvious, so I won't present notes on them. Everyone knows Figure of Destiny is awesome, me saying it is irrelevant.

Wow, that's a long post. I think that basically wraps it up as an introduction.

The blog is going to be a pretty lacklustre effort for up to a week while I get everything running. I'm not Superman, it may take a few days to make everything start to work.

Until next time, may you make a good beginnning.