What If: Cascade Was Never Invented?

Hi guys! Zendikar's been out for a while, so now we're going to do a metagame breakdown of Standard. Aggro is still powerful but Control certainly has a good presence as well. Let's see what we have...


Boros Bushwhacker


Maindeck:

Creatures
3 Elite Vanguard
2 Goblin Bushwhacker
4 Goblin Guide
3 Kor Skyfisher
4 Plated Geopede
4 Ranger Of Eos
4 Steppe Lynx

Instants
2 Burst Lightning
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Path To Exile

Planeswalkers
2 Elspeth, Knight-errant

Basic Lands
4 Mountain
6 Plains

Lands
4 Arid Mesa
4 Marsh Flats
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Teetering Peaks

Sideboard:
2 Baneslayer Angel
4 Manabarbs
3 Oblivion Ring
2 Burst Lightning
4 Celestial Purge


Boros Bushwhacker is still one of the top decks in Standard. It kills most Control decks before they get online, but has a bad matchup against Eldrazi Green, which sweeped a few States tournaments.


 Eldrazi Green


Maindeck:

Artifacts
3 Eldrazi Monument

Creatures
3 Ant Queen
4 Elvish Archdruid
4 Elvish Visionary
3 Great Sable Stag
4 Llanowar Elves
2 Master Of The Wild Hunt
4 Nissa's Chosen
2 Noble Hierarch

Planeswalkers
3 Garruk Wildspeaker
4 Nissa Revane

Basic Lands
20 Forest

Lands
4 Oran-rief, The Vastwood

Sideboard:
1 Eldrazi Monument
3 Pithing Needle
3 Great Sable Stag
3 Mold Shambler
3 Mycoloth
2 Windstorm



Eldrazi Green plays out a lot of "must-deal-with" threats, and it's a pretty good deck. Against these decks are the control decks:


RWU Planeswalker Control


Artifacts
4 Courier's Capsule
1 Obelisk Of Alara

Creatures
3 Sphinx Of Jwar Isle

Instants
1 Essence Scatter
2 Flashfreeze
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Path To Exile
1 Swerve

Planeswalkers
4 Ajani Vengeant
1 Chandra Nalaar
2 Elspeth, Knight-errant

Sorceries
4 Day Of Judgment
3 Mind Spring

Basic Lands
3 Island
2 Mountain
3 Plains

Lands
3 Arid Mesa
2 Crumbling Necropolis
4 Glacial Fortress
2 Jungle Shrine
3 Scalding Tarn
4 Sejiri Refuge

Sideboard:
1 Pithing Needle
3 Celestial Purge
2 Essence Scatter
3 Flashfreeze
3 Oblivion Ring
3 Earthquake



This is one of the 'decks to beat' at the moment, since there are few ways to gain card advantage in Standard at the moment, and planeswalkers are a big one.


That's all we have time for today! Tomorrow we'll talk about W/U Control, Red Deck Wins, and Emeria decks. See you tomorrow!

What if: Magic Had A Sixth Color?

I can't make any non-standard mana symbols on Magic Set Editor, so I've done the best I could with the tools available. Just imagine it as purple.

Welcome back to Magic Academy 2.0! I am your host, Salivanth, and today we're going to be concluding the series on color by talking about the last color, Purple. You can find the link to the white portion of the series here, the blue portion here, the black portion here, the red portion here, and the green portion here. 


From the Magic 2010 excerpt:

Purple is the color of exile. Many of it's mechanics relate to exile, and it is the only color than can bring cards back from exile that weren't sent there for a particular purpose, such as Oblivion Ring. Purple can deal with any type of permanent, but it's usually only temporary, or it's quite expensive.Purple goes well with white, because white exiles cards. Purple is also the master of time, able to skip phases and even turns. Since Time Spiral, it has exclusively had the Suspend mechanic, which exiles a card for a certain number of turns before it can come into play. Purple is a clever and powerful color. It's allies are white and blue. It's enemies are black, green and red.

Purple's race in M10 is the Tempalken, offshoots of the Vedalken who were sent out for their experiments with time, which the vedalken believed was not to be tampered with, for fear of the consequences.


Purple has a lot of ways to use exile for their own gains. The most simple one is exiling cards, but other colors can do that. Purple also has the ability to give up time later in order to play a cheaper spell. Example:



Okay: but we want ways to USE exile. What's UNIQUE to Purple? This.




Then there's the pumped up version:



Purple is also a control color. Here's a card that makes waves in Standard as a piece in the popular MirrorStag combo deck:



The combo focuses on exiling a Mirror of Fate (which it does by self-milling along with graveyard exiling) and playing a Stagnation. Next turn, it plays Mirror of Fate, sacrifices it, and you get all the cards in your library except for seven lands exiled. Then you can play any card in your deck, and it's basically impossible to lose.

Purple's second main power is the power to manipulate time. Whether through sacrificing it:



such as with Temporal Bandit, a Johnny creature, or through gaining it, with the more tournament-worthy Time Warp.




Lastly, Purple has the Suspend mechanic in it's M10 arsenal. Time Spiral gave it to all the colors, but Purple got it back after that set. Here's a suspend card that can ONLY be suspended:



And that's all we have time for today. Join us next week as we delve into Strategic Attacking and Blocking.

Until next time, may time be on YOUR side.

What If: There Was No Such Thing As Blue?

Greetings, readers. I've decided to take a break from serious posts about PTQ's and catching up on Magic to write a more whimsical post. I hope you like it. If you do, leave feedback in the comments. Positive feedback = I'll do it again.

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What if there was no such thing as blue? There are five colors in Magic, and these colors make up the color pie. So what would happen if one of them was eliminated?

Card draw, counterspells, flying and flash are all a big part of the game, so we can't just get rid of them entirely. We'd need to give them to the other colors. So without further ado, let's move into the fictional Zendikar previews, but without blue in the midst...

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Welcome to Zendikar Preview Week on mtgsalivanth.blogspot.com! We've already shown you Kicker, Trap and Landfall on the site, so let's have a look at some more generic cards.

Our first card is one you've all seen before, so let's show you it before we get to the good stuff:

Our next card came from something we figured we needed in Red: decent card draw. Drawing two cards for four mana in M10 simply wasn't enough to let Red keep up with the other three colors. Even Green had better card draw than Red with Harmonize. So we made a card that we feel really symbolises Red's flavour: if you're willing to go all-out, you'll receive a pretty neat reward.

Check out Burning Inspiration:

This card is pretty good in Draft if you draft the right deck to make use of it, and it'll probably see play in Constructed too. Could this push Red Deck Wins into the top decks?

The next card to show you has an interesting design story. R&D wanted to make a red counterspell, since it's hardly fair for Red to miss out when everyone else gets a cut, but counterspells aren't exactly random. We tried with different variations, like "Counter target spell with an odd converted mana cost", but eventually we figured out what was wrong.

We were coming at the problem from the wrong angle. Being able to play the card was pretty random, but what we wanted were the kind of cards where when you PLAYED the spell, you didn't know what would happen. Of course, that was weak in a counterspell, so we decided to give Red a helping hand with counterspells, without quite giving it the same level as the other colors.

I think the solution we came up with is a good one. Let's give a warm welcome to Chaos Swerve.

The templating here is pretty confusing, so let me explain. A spell is only a spell while it's on the stack. Once it's off the stack, if it's not a permanent, it leaves the stack and goes to the graveyard, and if it is, it becomes that permanent type. So essentially, we have a card that counters a card half the time, but if you counter a counterspell with it, it will always counter the spell. So we have, rather unusually, an anti-counterspell counterspell: a great way of letting Red fight counterspells without giving it the same level as White or Black, the primary counterspell colors (Green, of course, only getting counterspells to protect itself and it's permanents).

The next card to show you is a multi-color card. Multicolor will only show up on a few cards in Zendikar, but the ones we have are quite good. Here, we originally had the following card:

4GW

Instant

Counter target spell. You may put X +1/+1 counters on target creature, where X was it's converted mana cost.

However, this card felt too much like Draining Specter from Time Spiral, which essentially did the same thing in mono-black.

So we decided: What if we made an 'either-or' card rather than a 'both' card?

This led to Managrowth:

Managrowth will often go one way or the other, but it can lead to good 'Magic stories' when your opponent makes the wrong choice. All in all, it's a fairly elegant design.

The next card came from a need to make mono-green a bit more powerful. Mono-green by definition has a hard time dealing with creatures, but it is the master of Flash and of Deathtouch, so when you combine them you get a strong card, as evident in Winged Coatl, the 1GW card from Alara Reborn. But it wasn't quite enough: so we decided to make a better one.

Winged Coatl 2.0 is here: Venomweb Spider.

And now it's time for the last one. We've deliberately saved the best for last: Mind Crush is certain to become one of the power cards in the set. Rather than set it up, we'll just show you this powerful counterspell:

So now you have it folks: some of the goodies from Zendikar. We've got more next week as we discuss the design of the Trap mechanic, why we brought back Kicker, and more. We'll also have a couple of preview cards for you, so be sure to tune in.

Until next time, may the answer to your problems be elegant.

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Well, I certainly hope you found that interesting (and I hope I didn't butcher your writing style TOO badly MaRo, if you're reading this). Remember: if you liked this post, be sure to tell me on Twitter or via the comments, and I'll do some more every couple of weeks.

Until next time, may you explore the hypothetical.