Islandhome

Islandhome #51

2009-02-18T22:12:00.001-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #51==

February 18th 2009

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Islandhome Online: Website next week! Eeee
Conflux Legends: A review of Conflux's EDH general material.
Epic Prerelease: A new game to check out this Sunday.

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($11 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: PTQ Honolulu in New Jersey
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1 PM

==ISLANDHOME ONLINE==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Next week, for Islandhome's one-year anniversary, I'll be launching Islandhome's website! It'll be a great change from this email newsletter, and will include things like user-submitted articles, a message board for organizing events and talking about the Long Island metagame, and more! I'll send out a notice when it's up!

==CONFLUX LEGENDS==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Another set, another batch of cards to look through for your EDH decks! Now there's five legendary creatures in this small set, but do any of them make the cut as potential EDH generals? Let's see:

Child of Alara - If your general would be put into a graveyard from play, you may remove it from the game instead. It's one of the most commonly used rules in EDH, so common in fact that no one ever opts to put their general into their graveyard on purpose... unless it has a good enough effect like Child of Alara. The Kid can be RFG'd and plopped into your library, but if your opponents don't have that option, they'll have to kill him and have all their stuff wiped out as well. He's five colors, so a five-color reanimator deck would be a good home for him.

Gwafa Hazid, Profiteer - There are certain card names that catch my eye when I see them, and when Gwafa Hazid, Profiteer showed up on the list of card names accidentally leaked a few months ago, I knew he'd be blue-white, and I knew he'd be involved with drawing cards... I just didn't think he'd give them to your opponent. As a 2/2, he's just going to die turn after turn, and if his bribes worked even after he left play, he'd be better.

Malfegor - Bolas's kid is pretty good, if you can build around him. There's a lot of card drawing, madness effects, and graveyard recursion in black, so maybe you won't mind discarding all those cards to decimate everyone else's creatures. Plus he's a 6/6 dragon, and the son of an Elder Dragon.

Progenitus - Protection from everything, including being a good EDH general. Even in EDH, he's almost entirely uncastable, and that protection from everything doesn't stop mass removal, which will probably be online by the time you get the mana to play him.

Rakka Mar - Ms. Mar's a limited bomb, true, but she's got too many strikes against her for EDH general purposes: she's mono-red, she's a 2/2, and her ability isn't the stuff generals are made of. Putting a 3/1 into play isn't good enough on a weak 2/2 to justify limiting yourself to one color. If you're looking for good mono-red generals, there's Heartless Hidetsugu and Kiki-Jiki, the latter of which is worth the fragile 2/2 body.

==EPIC PRERELEASE==

Author: Brian Paskoff

This Sunday at Brothers Grim, there's a prerelease for a new card game called Epic. It's made by some former high-level Magic players, and plays a lot like Type 4 Magic. Every spell is, well "epic"ally powerful, and everything costs either 1 or 0. I'll be there helping out and teaching people how to play, so come down if you want to try out a new game! Their website is epictcg.com, check it out!

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

After a short break, Islandhome is once again accepting guest articles from our readers!

If you've got an article you'd like to submit, send it to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com. Try to keep it a reasonable length - there's no word limit, but look at previous Islandhome articles for guidance - and avoid bad language and personal insults. Also try to maintain good grammar and spelling; doesn't have to be perfect, but you should see how long it takes me to spellcheck the Madonia Minute every week!

I can't promise every submission will make it into the next week's Islandhome, but I'll try to get as many in as I can, especially ones that are relevant to a previous/upcoming event.

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

One of the things I wanted to do was have an archive of past issues online so I could refer people back to them as well as let new readers peruse old issues to see what all the fuss is about. So I've archived all the old issues on the blogosphere at islandhomemtg.blogspot.com. Go and relive all the past moments of glory!

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

January 3rd - April 19th: PTQ Season for PT Honolulu

The next PTQ season kicks off January 3rd, and the format is Extended!

PTQs in our area this season:

February 21st - Edison, NJ
March 14th - Philadelphia, PA
April 4th - Iselin, NJ

No details for New York PTQs are available yet.

April 3rd - April 5th: I-Con 28
Magic events will once again be held at I-Con, which is at Suffolk Community College's Brentwood campus this year. I'll have news about what tournaments are going to be run as we get closer to April, but just like last time there'll be cheap drafts and constructed events all weekend long!

==STORE LOCATIONS & CONTACT INFO==

Brothers Grim
1244 Middle Country Rd.
Selden, NY 11784
Phone: 631-698-2805
Website: www.brgrim.com

Friendly Neighborhood Comics
19 Udall Rd.
West Islip, NY 11795
Phone: 631-470-7984

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #50

2009-02-11T22:26:00.000-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #50==

February 11th 2009

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Valentine's Day Massacre (on prices): Brothers Grim lowers their prices!
Confluxing Standard: Reviewing some of the hottest new cards from Conflux.

Wow, issue number 50!

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($11 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: <3>Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1 PM

==VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE (on prices)==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Brothers Grim is slashing their prices on draft sets of Shards of Alara and Conflux! Draft sets (three packs) are $9, while entry fees for FNM have been lowered from $13 to $11! That's the lowest I've seen for any sanctioned booster draft (most places in the US charge upwards of $15), so it's a great time to come down to Grim and draft with us on Friday nights!

Speaking of FNM, the promo for this month is Myr Enforcer. Come win one this Friday, they make great Valentine's Day gifts for that special girl or guy in your life!

==CONFLUXING STANDARD==
Author: Brian Paskoff

With the whole schedule of set design at Wizards of the Coast, it takes a good long while for answers to the most popular decks to show up. Faeries has been dominating Standard since Morningtide, and it took four whole sets for the "answer cards" to show up. Wizards can't just print one answer and hope it sticks, because if it doesn't work it'll be three or four more sets before they can try again, and Faeries will be out of Standard at that point.

The first one up is Volcanic Fallout. As the spoiler evolved, this card changed from a sorcery to an instant and was immediately deemed a Fae-killer. Jund Charm was used in Ramp decks alongside Cloudthresher to combat both Kithkin decks and Faeries. While Volcanic Fallout is good, it just adds to the number of minor board sweepers in standard: Jund Charm, Firespout, Infest, and even Pyroclasm are all heavily played, and it's hard to say where Volcanic Fallout fits in. Obviously, if your metagame is dominated by Fae, Volcanic Fallout is a great sideboard card. Each of the minor board sweepers in Standard has their own strengths and weaknesses:

Jund Charm is versatile, hurts reanimator decks, and can keep Kitchen Finks around for another go at persisting... but can't kill Stillmoon Cavalier, X/3s, or Burrenton Forge-Tenders.
Firespout deals one extra damage so it can kill a Cloudgoat Ranger or doubly-pumped up Kithkin, but is sorcery speed and can be stopped with a Forge-Tender.
Infest kills anything, including the problem creatures black and red can't usually deal with... but is sorcery speed.
Pyroclasm can wipe out the turn one Figure of Destiny, turn two Wizened Cenn play before it becomes a problem, but it's sorcery speed and only deals two damage.
Volcanic Fallout kills Fae and acts as a final Sudden Shock against control decks that have stabilized at low life because it's uncounterable... but not unpreventable.

The popularity of a new card will have everyone trying it out, and make life hard for Faerie players for weeks to come. Just don't get so sucked in by the shiny fresh-pack smell of Volcanic Fallout that you ignore your metagame!

Next, there's Scattershot Archer. 1/2s for G are rare, and the Archer was probably made to avoid getting picked off by a sideboarded-in Peppersmoke. Of course the real power of Scattershot Archer is its ability. With one tap, every Bitterblossom Token, Spellstutter Sprite, and Spirit token falls out of the sky. The Archer comes down on turn one, long before Faeries is ready with a Remove Soul. And if they tap out to Agony Warp it the turn after you play it, it's just another way Scattershot Archer saved you from a turn two Bitterblossom. However, being that it's only good against one tier one deck and one tier two deck (WB Tokens), I don't see it seeing serious play.

The last Fae-killer is the big one, Banefire. Being that I re-started playing Magic after a many-year hiatus around the tail-end of Ravnica block, I have many fond memories of Demonfire beating out the control decks of the time. While Demonfire was good, it required you to have no cards in hand to be truly devastating. And, it was used by one of the most dominate control decks of the time, Urzatron, which could ramp up its mana way faster than decks with lands that didn't tap for 3.

Banefire isn't so much of an anti-Faerie card as it is an anti-Cryptic Command card. When the best counterspell in years can't touch it, it's clearly an anti-control card. In fact, there are only three cards in the format that can deal with Banefire, and they're all red! Wild Ricochet, Shunt, and Swerve, to be precise. It's difficult to say for sure right now, but if Banefire becomes a problem, then one of these spells (most likely Swerve) will start to see some serious sideboard play.

Let's step away from the anti-control cards for a bit and get to the rest of the set. Every set's got those chase uncommons, and Conflux has a few goodies that will have you looking past the rares when you rip open a pack.

I'd feel like I'm neglecting something if I didn't talk about Path to Exile first, which is another one of those $3-4 uncommons (hello, Kitchen Finks). At one mana, Path is an amazing card, especially against decks that run zero or few basics, like Toast in Standard, Affinity in Extended, and... well, almost everything in Legacy and Vintage. There's really no discussion about the card's merits needed: you pay one white mana to make them trade their best creatures for a basic land, and that's that. One word of warning however: it'll take some players quite some time to get used to the idea that accelerating your opponent early on isn't a great idea. Already I've had players tell me that in their playtesting online, opponents have Path to Exiled their early drops on turn one or two. Without Tarmogoyf in Standard, there's really no reason you should ever want to do that.

Aggressive red-based decks get three attractive uncommons: Hellspark Elemental and Shambling Remains. Mono-red decks, what little there are left, have changed from mono-red to Rb, splashing black for things like Blightning, Thoughtseize out of the board, and sometimes Bitterblossom. Those decks will have little qualms about replacing Ashenmoor Gouger with Shambling Remains... although the possibility of a pumped-up Knight of Meadowgrain blocking it might. And that's basically the problem with Hellspark Elemental as well: It's a 3/1, and all sorts of bad things happen to 3/1's. The third card is the often-overlooked Goblin Outlander. Mono-red decks have had trouble with Kithkin ever since Blood Knight left Standard. Goblin Outlander doesn't have first strike, but against mono-white decks, it hardly matters.

Back onto more uncommons, Celestial Purge has to be one of the best sideboard cards in recent memory. It was just back in Shadowmoor that we got a spell that destroyed a black or red creature in combat, and now Wizards is printing cards that remove ANY black or red permanent from the game for the same two mana. It's just downright mean against Bitterblossom, Ajani Vengeant, Demigod of Revenge, and even Nicol Bolas.

And speaking of Nicol Bolas, it's a bit sad to see it being forced into decks where it doesn't fit. Obviously, it appears to be on the surface the perfect card for Five Color Control, but is it? Sure it feels great to take all those counters off Nicol Bolas and destroy your opponent's will to live, but compare it to Bolas's own Cruel Ultimatum: Cruel costs one less, "resolves" the same turn you play it, and can't be attacked, Oblivion Ringed, or burnt away. Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker is vulnerable to everything Cruel Ultimatum is... plus more. Of course, Cruel Ultimatum can't pick off or steal permanents, but since Nicol Bolas's first ability often is just an eight mana Stone Rain and his second isn't amazing against most creature-based decks in the format that rely on a lot of little creatures rather than big ones (and it delays his ultimate ability by many turns)... anyway, my point is that Nicol Bolas costs eight.

Five-color decks do get a bomb in Maelstrom Angel though; if it hits, playing a free Cruel Ultimatum is like... well, like taking nine counters off a Nicol Bolas. Playing ANYTHING for free in 5C is a good deal, from the lowliest Mulldrifter to a beefy Broodmate Dragon.

As for other rares, we finally have this block's Wrath of God: Martial Coup. Martial Coup, however, costs seven mana to be useful, while Wrath costs four mana. Among the cheap three-or-less mana board sweepers I mentioned above, the four mana Wrath of God is considered almost too expensive. Back in my day, we paid four or MORE mana to destroy all creatures... no, BURY all creatures! And we liked it! (Sorry, I just had a birthday and was reminded how old I was getting.) But anyway, if there was a block PTQ season, Martial Coup would see more play than a Pasgoyf, but since the only big block tournament is a Pro Tour, it will sadly only see play in niche decks.

There's a lot of buzz over Noble Heirarch, the new Birds of Paradise. It's nice to see a "Birds" that doesn't die to a Cloudthresher coming into play, but only time will tell if there's room for a one-mana mana-producing creature in Standard: Birds of Paradise and Llanowar Elf didn't really see play before.

I love Thornling. Don't get me wrong, big splashy green creatures are a favorite of mine (I named myself after the best one, don't forget), but Thornling came in at just the wrong time. With Oblivion Ring, Unmake, and now Path to Exile all heavily played, indestructibility just isn't a big deal. It could see play, but it's not as earth-shattering as it could be without so much RFGing in the format.

Well that about wraps it up for this week's Conflux Standard review. I wish I had space to review the entire set, but I don't want to load up your computer with megabytes or whatever. Stay tuned for more reviews in later articles!

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

January 3rd - April 19th: PTQ Season for PT Honolulu

The next PTQ season kicks off January 3rd, and the format is Extended!

PTQs in our area this season:

February 21st - Edison, NJ
March 14th - Philadelphia, PA
April 4th - Iselin, NJ

No details for New York PTQs are available yet.

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #49

2009-02-05T23:18:00.001-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #49==

February 4th 2009

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Conflux Limited Review

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft (Alara-Alara-Conflux) at Brothers Grim @ 7 PM
Saturday: Conflux Launch Party at FNC @ 1 PM ($26 entry)

Immediately following the Launch Party on Saturday is the 26th Annual Paskoff's Birthday Paskoff Cube Draft event and possibly dinner, so stick around after the event for some fun times! My birthday's on Sunday, but we're celebrating Saturday night.

Also, there is no event Sunday at Brothers Grim due to a Yu Gi Oh state tournament or something of the like.

The official Islandhome website will be launching in the next 2-3 weeks, just in time for Islandhome's one year anniversary!

==CONFLUX LIMITED REVIEW==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

The prerelease is over, and it was intenser than usual. Intenser's a word, right? Anyway, we had exactly 94 players at the prerelease, filling every seat we had. A grand total of twenty-seven teams also participated in Long Island's first Two-Headed Giant prerelease event in many years. People were very confused about the strange format, but everyone had fun. If you have any opinion on whether or not future Long Island prereleases stick with the traditional three-man teams or switch to Two-Headed Giant permanently, contact Gray Matter Conventions and let us know!

But the fun times with Conflux aren't over - there's a whole new weekend of Conflux fun, and with the set being legal for FNMs both Standard and draft on Friday, and Conflux release events this weekend (mine will be at Friendly Neighborhood Comics at 1 PM, see everyone there!), everyone's talking about what the new cards mean for constructed and limited.

For limited, nearly every card in the set is extremely powerful. When a set contributes only one pack to a booster draft and contains about a hundred cards less than the base set, it needs to have more bombs and less duds. Reviewing every card in the set would be quite tedious both for me and you, and while last week I talked about the various mechanics in the set, this week is all about the bombs - particularly the commons and uncommons, which is where the meat of your deck will lie. It's easy to tell that a rare or mythic is good for your deck, and it's easy to tell the ones you should ship to the next drafter. The other thirteen cards in the pack are the harder ones to choose from.

WHITE:

White's got a few playables in the lower rarities. Path to Exile isn't as much of a universal answer to everything as Oblivion Ring, but it's still amazing... just don't use it on an early drop, or you'll have your opponent accelerating into bigger threats than the one you removed. With the amount of multicolored creatures walking around, Celestial Purge might even be a high pick - and definitely sideboard material. White also has the best card in a cycle, a rare occasion; Gleam of Resistance is an excellent combat trick. +1/+2 is a big bonus, an giving your creatures vigilance - even a turn after you attacked - is well worth the five mana.

Stay away from Lapse of Certainty, it's certainly not as good as it looks on paper. It won't permanently deal with a threat. As a rule, I don't like to put cards into my limited decks when I can't guarantee they'll be useful 90% of the time I draw them. Asha's Favor is another one that looks better than it is; all the removal in the format makes playing Aura spells card disadvantage.

There's some strong creatures in white too. Aven Trailblazer is a very aggressive flier, being at least a 2/3 in every deck. Rhox Meditant is great if you're playing green, and passable if you're not. If you have the mana, Darklit Gargoyle can be good... though there are a lot better choices for fliers. After that there's not too much to write about: a too-expensive flier with a shroud ability that'll never be relevant, a Wall of Roots that can attack, another exalted dude, etc.

BLUE:

Card drawing, bounce, and counterspells are what you'd expect from blue spells, and you'd be right! Blue's basic landcycler isn't terrible, and for once makes a counterspell playable in limited. Worldly Counsel can be absurdly powerful in five-color decks, and what's bad about an almost-Impulse in a shard-based deck? And then there's Unsummon, which is... Unsummon. What can you say about a card as old as Magic itself?

For creatures, Esperzoa has some cute tricks to pull with Faerie Mechanist, which is another strong creature in an Esper-based deck. Speaking of artifact creatures, Scornful Aether-Lich is strong, even if fear isn't as relevant as it would be in other sets, and Parasitic Strix is yet another in a long line of playable three-mana two-power fliers. Brackwater Elemental might be worth the risk if your deck is aggressive enough, and that about wraps it up for blue's dudes.

BLACK:

Black has one good spell at common/uncommon, and that's Drag Down. Every other spell in the lower rarities is beyond awful, and if you have a common or uncommon instant, sorcery, or enchantment in your deck and it's not Drag Down you've done something horribly wrong.

Creatures though, black's got it good. Sedraxis Alchemist is nearly always just as good as Man-o-war, and if you've got the mana, Fleshformer is incredible. But where black really shines (ha) is Grixis Slavedriver, my favorite creature in the set for limited. It's at least two, and usually three and a half creatures in one. Unless it's removed from the game, it swings for four from the yard and leaves a zombie behind after it makes that final swing.

RED:

Red's got burn. It's also got a straight-up "destroy target creature" spell, and you don't see that printed on a red card too often. Sure Dark Temper requires you to have a black permanent, but that's easy enough to do. Fiery Fall's expensive, but it's got landcycling, so definitely playable. And then there's Ignite Disorder, a very powerful sideboard card that's almost maindeck material. Volcanic Fallout also joins Infest as a first pickable uncommon mass removal spell.

Red's creatures however are on the weak side. Wandering Goblins requires a heavy mana commitment, Dragonsoul Knight does as well (though it's certainly not terrible without the mana to pump it), Canyon Minotaur is good but oh-so-vanilla, and Toxic Iguanar is too killable to rely on. Viashino Slaughtermaster is very playable, and red gets so few Bears without drawbacks. Kranioceros is very good if you can reliably pump it, but expect to need to do so the turn you play it.

GREEN:

I want to skip over the spells and get right to the good stuff, but Might of Alara is actually good, and Spore Burst miiiiight be playable in a five-color deck. Nothing else is terribly worth mentioning; Filigree Fracture is a good sideboard card, of course.

But green has the best creatures, like Matca Rioters, a 3/3 for 2G... or a 5/5 for 2G. As I mentioned last week, Gluttonous Slime is a great combat trick, letting you sacrifice doomed creatures mid-combat. Ember Weaver would have been good as a 2/3 with reach for 2G, but with the potential to also have +1/+0 and first strike, it's astounding. Sacellum Archers can make combat tricky for your opponent as well as having a good body. And Beacon Behemoth and Wild Leotau are yet more cheap 5-power creatures.

MULTICOLOR:

The stars of the set are the multicolored cards. After feeling somewhat shoehorned into a shard for the first two packs of Shards of Alara, all the mana fixing in Conflux makes nearly anything splashable. There's only four multicolored non-creature spells at common and uncommon: first off, Countersquall. It's a counterspell, and doesn't hit creatures, the most important spells in limited, so save it for the sideboard against opponents with lots of removal. Exploding Borders is fantastic acceleration, and one of the few spells in the format that lets you accelerate lands into play. Of course the Tribal Flames effect to your opponent's face doesn't hurt either. Elder Mastery almost literally turns any creature into Nicol Bolas (the old school one, not the planeswalker), but like most Auras, the risk of card disadvantage isn't always worth the gamble... but Elder Mastery could pay off. Hmm. Lastly, there's Suicidal Charge. It's expensive, and the effect is very situational. I haven't seen anyone really attempt to play it yet, mostly for its expensive cost, but the effect is an interesting one.

The "protection bears" in Conflux are definitely nice. With everyone playing at least three colors, chances are your 2/2 will be safe from at least a third of your opponent's creatures. Fusion Elemental can be powerful in the right deck. It's not worth stretching your manabase to accomodate it, but if you're already in five colors, you can't say no to a cheap 8/8 with no drawback.

If you're heavy on the artifacts (and what Esper deck isn't?) you've got Sludge Strider. The life drain really adds up, especially during a stalemate. Esper Cormorants is another powerful Esper creature, sort of a lesser Tower Gargoyle. Shambling Remains is Ashenmoor Gouger's cousin, and unearth makes it even better. Then there's Knotvine Mystic, a powerful accelerator - drop it turn three, and with a land drop you have six mana on turn four. Naya's new best friend is Vagrant Plowbeasts, nearly just as good as Spearbreaker Behemoth and waaaay easier to pick up in draft. Hellkite Hatchling's a bomby flier as well, even though it requires at least one sacrifice to make it good.

LANDS:

Ancient Ziggurat: It's sort of hindered by the fact that it won't help you cast the 5-7 non-creature spells in your deck, so it's not terribly useful.

Reliquary Tower: Absolutely useless in limited, especially when your manabase needs to be consistent.

Rupture Spire: So glad this is common! It's one of the best mana fixers in the set.

Unstable Frontier: Functionally, this is just as good as Shimmering Grotto from a few sets ago, with one key difference: It helps out your domain spells too!

ARTIFACTS:

There's two solid mana fixers and one average one; Armillary Sphere and Mana Cylix fit into nearly every deck, while Kaleidostone doesn't really do much for you if you're not going five-color. It does replace itself however. The other two artifacts at these rarities are equipment. Manaforce Mace is perhaps too expensive for its own good, but the at-least +3/+3 bonus makes it playable. Can't say that much for Bone Saw, which is absolutely 14th pick material.

And that wraps up the commons and uncommons. As I said before, it's relatively easy to tell when a rare's good in limited, but I've compiled a short list anyway, sorted into three sections: the "bombs" are first-picks if you're in those colors or can splash for them, "playables" are good, but are often third or fourth picks, and "jank" are the cards that should stay in the pack. I didn't place any worth on card value in dollar amounts; if you want a Progenitus for your protection from things deck, by all means, take it!

BOMBS: Obelisk of Alara, Extractor Demon, Cliffrunner Behemoth, Paleoloth, Meglonoth, Malfegor, Charnelhoard Wurm, Giltspire Avenger, Child of Alara, Magister Sphinx, Maelstrom Angel, Worldheart Phoenix, Voracious Dragon, Rakka Mar, Goblin Razerunners, Banefire, Ethersworn Adjucator, Scepter of Dominance, Mirror-Sigil Sergeant, Martial Coup, Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker, Blood Tyrant, Thornling, Apocalypse Hydra, Sphinx Summoner, Obelisk of Alara.

PLAYABLES: Nyxathid, Cylian Sunsinger, Soul's Majesty, Noble Heirarch, Knight of the Reliquary, Exotic Orchard, Bloodhall Ooze, Inkwell Leviathan, Master Transmuter, Scepter of Insight, Telemin Performance, Wall of Reverence.

JANK: Conflux, Gwafa Hazid, Profiteer, Progenitus (uncastable), Sigil of the Empty Throne, Mark of Asylum.

======

Now I'm not the best drafter in the world by far, so if you have any comments on this article, let me know! Share your opinions on the bombs and duds in Alara-Conflux limited and I'll include them in next week's Islandhome!

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

January 3rd - April 19th: PTQ Season for PT Honolulu

The next PTQ season kicks off January 3rd, and the format is Extended!

PTQs in our area this season:

February 21st - Edison, NJ
March 14th - Philadelphia, PA

No details for New York PTQs are available yet.

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #48

2009-01-28T19:03:00.000-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #48==

January 28th 2009

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Peppersmoke

Conflux Prerelease

Conflux Prerelease Tips

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Saturday: Conflux Prerelease (See below for details.)

I won't be at Grim or FNC this weekend, but chances are some kind of event will take place at both locations.

==PEPPERSMOKE==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

So I had a minor health scare last week at FNC, but don't worry! It was a mere -1/-1 effect, so I'm okay. Thanks for everyone who lent their sympathy when I got back, and thanks to John Madonia and Ed Palm for helping to keep the event running in my absence. It was comforting knowing I wouldn't come back to the event and see the tournament had descended into anarchy and cannibalism.

==CONFLUX PRERELEASE==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

A prerelease is once again upon us! In only three days, you'll be ripping open fresh new packs of Conflux! The prerelease program has changed a lot since you last remember it, the most important being that there is only one, big flight instead of the usual multiple flights throughout the day. The "one big flight" thing is something I always felt should have been tried, as it lets you play against a wider variety of players than just the thirty-two or so that signed up for your flight. I do wish there were more than four rounds for such a large event, but that's what side events are for!

Registration for the sealed deck event will open at 9, and hopefully start at 9:30. The entry fee is $30, and with that, you get three packs of Shards of Alara and three packs of Conflux. Wait, isn't that a lot of packs? Well yes! Wizards has done away with tournament packs, so now you get three packs of Shards of Alara instead of a tournament pack of it. It's the same number of cards as were in a tournament pack, just with one less uncommon and one more common. Of course you also don't get the basic lands, so we'll be providing them for you free of charge.

There'll be four rounds in the main flight, and prizes will be given out based on your record. 3-1 gets six packs, 3-0-1 gets nine packs, and 4-0 gets twelve packs. Waaaay better than the piss-poor prize support Wizards forced on us for the Shards of Alara prerelease.

Three-player team events are gone as well, replaced with the ever-popular Two-Headed Giant format. Registration for this event starts at 1 PM, and costs $22 per player. Each team will get four packs of Shards and four packs of Conflux with which to build two 40-card minimum decks. Then they'll play three rounds of 2HG, with 2-1 getting six packs, 2-0-1 getting ten packs, and 3-0 getting fourteen packs.

Side events will be held based on product availability and player interest, starting at 11 AM. These will be sort of mini-flights, three round eight-man sealed deck tournaments for $30, where the prize payout is 7-5-3 instead of the main flight's 12-9-6.

The Long Island prerelease will be held at the Four Points Sheraton in Plainview, NY, 333 South Service Road off the LIE. I'll be head judging it once again, so come down and get your first taste of Conflux!

==CONFLUX PRERELEASE TIPS==

Author: Brian J. Paskoff

The full spoiler for Conflux is out on MTGSalvation , and now that we more or less know what every card does, it's time to get metagaming! (I say "more or less" because it's a well-established fact that as complete as a spoiler seems, there are always some key differences in cards between the rumored versions and the printed versions.) Your first order of business, of course, is limited, as it'll be the very first thing you do with the set. Like most second (and third) sets in a block, Conflux is very strong for limited play. With less variety of cards in a pack, Wizards has to make sure not to print too many "useless" cards, or the set will be no fun to draft. Also, while the big set contains the "staple" cards - things like your basic counterspells, spot removal, etc., smaller sets tend to have cards that are more specialized, and Conflux is no exception.

You may find yourself straying from the comfort of a shard's three colors more often in Conflux. There's still a lot of support for Bant, Esper, Grixis, Jund, and Naya, but the mana fixing and five-color effects present in Conflux will make you want to find ways to produce all five colors of mana. Strangely, there isn't much acceleration in Conflux; most of the mana fixers either filter mana (such as the reprinted Mana Cylix) or get lands from your library into your hand. Each color has access to a spell that has "basic landcycling", an ability that lets you pay a cost, discard the card from your hand, and search your library for a basic land card. While the spells themselves aren't very powerful, you may want to include them in your limited decks. Early game, they might give you a land you need. Late game, they'll either grab you a splash color or let you play them if you don't need a land anymore. The white one pumps and untaps your creatures, the blue one is a five-mana counterspell, the black one absorbs four life from your opponent, the red one deals five damage to a creature for six mana, and the green one gives you eight life - none of them are terribly useless, but nothing you'd want to include in your deck if they didn't also Sylvan Scrying for two mana.

A while ago on the official site, Wizards promised to explore things more thoroughly rather than leave behind old abilities and bring tons of new ones in with every set, and that's definitely true here. Only basic landcycling, domain, and five-color spells and abilities are new here, while the abilities and mechanics from Shards of Alara are more fleshed out. In Bant, there's more creatures with exalted, but none that give an extra push to lone attackers like Rafiq or Battlegrace Angel. It seems Wizards is being cautious about making exalted too powerful. Esper has lots more artifact creatures, including its own Goldmeadow Stalwart, and Esper Aggro looks to be an amazingly fast strategy in ALA-CON limited. Grixis of course gets more unearth creatures, this time with more abusable comes into/leaves play effects. There's more devouring in Jund, my favorites being a new Nantuko Husk-like creature that can "devour" creatures while it's in play, and a creature with both flash and devour that will make for some devastating "damage on the stack" tricks. And Naya has more "5+ matters" effects, only this time they're on spells as well as creatures.

I'll have more Conflux limited strategies after the prerelease, because it's hard to know too much about it without seeing it in action! In the meantime, here's some general advice to help you succeed at the prerelease:

Read your cards! Especially the new ones. You're playing with new cards for the first time, and while you might know everything a Shards of Alara card does from the picture alone, you won't have the same instinct with Conflux cards yet. Many times a player will mistake a sorcery for an instant, or vice-versa. "Invisible" triggers like exalted might screw up your combat if you don't realize one of your opponent's creatures has it, and you could potentially leave yourself tapped out while not realizing your opponent has a game-winning unearth creature in their yard.
40 card decks are the bare minimum, and you should stay at 40 whenever possible. The only time I recommend going as high as 41 cards is when your mana curve is high and you need the extra land; don't try to squeeze in an extra spell. The tried-and-true spell-to-land ratio is 23 spells, 17 lands. Of those 23 spells, between 15 and 18 should be creatures, since nearly every game will be won in combat.
Use your mana fixers. Mana fixing in Shards/Conflux is really good, with Obelisks, Panoramas, tri-lands, Mana Cylix, and others. Staying within a shard and splashing a bit for the other two colors is probably a good idea.
Sideboard between games AND rounds. Since prereleases are limited tournaments that don't use decklists, you're allowed to change your deck between rounds. Use your experiences with the new cards each round to fix your deck for the next one using your sideboard (any cards in your sealed pool that aren't in your deck).

Good luck to everyone attending the prerelease this Saturday!

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

January 3rd - April 19th: PTQ Season for PT Honolulu

The next PTQ season kicks off January 3rd, and the format is Extended!

PTQs in our area this season:

February 21st - Edison, NJ
March 14th - Philadelphia, PA

No details for New York PTQs are available yet.

==STORE LOCATIONS & CONTACT INFO==

Brothers Grim
1244 Middle Country Rd.
Selden, NY 11784
Phone: 631-698-2805
Website: www.brgim.com

Friendly Neighborhood Comics
19 Udall Rd.
West Islip, NY 11795
Phone: 631-470-7984

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #47

2009-01-21T20:24:00.000-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #47==

January 21st 2009

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Mike Palm
Extended Comes to FNC!
Conflux Prerelease

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1:30 PM

This Saturday is a special event at FNC: Dress for Success! The best dressed person will receive free entry into the tournament, so dust off your best outfit and bring it!

==MIKE PALM==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

As anyone who's been to FNC in the past week has noticed, Mike Palm hasn't been around lately. It turns out he fell seriously ill last week, and had to be hospitalized for a short time. Ed will be running FNC for a while, although the hours (except Fridays and Saturdays) will be cut short somewhat. Our best wishes go out to Mike Palm and the Palm family, let's all hope for a speedy recovery!

==EXTENDED COMES TO FNC!==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

In celebration of the current PTQ season, I'm holding an Extended tournament at FNC on Saturday, January 24th. Yes, that's the same day as our usual Standard event, but don't worry if you can't or don't want to play Extended - the Standard tournament will go on at the same time as the Extended one. Unfortunately the laws of temporal physics or something like that will prevent you from playing in both events at the same time, so you'll have to pick which format you want to play. Entry fee will be $5, the same as any other normal constructed event; the only difference will be that you'll be playing with older cards. We need at least eight people for a sanctioned Extended tournament, so if you want to play, start building your decks now!

I've gotten some feedback since this was first announced, with some players hating the fact that both Standard and Extended tournaments are on the same day. I thought it'd be fun to have a choice of what to play, and since there are only so many days in the week to run Magic events on, Saturday was the only day. Later on in the season I might have a Saturday of just Extended, if there's enough interest, but I want to see how much interest I get this Saturday. Everyone should bring a Standard deck too, just in case! I know Mike Evans will be playing a super secret tech deck of my own creation if there's no Extended tournament, so that will definitely be interesting and intense.

==CONFLUX PRERELEASE==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

A prerelease is once again upon us! In only ten days, you'll be ripping open fresh new packs of Conflux! The prerelease program has changed a lot since you last remember it, the most important being that there is only one, big flight instead of the usual multiple flights throughout the day. The "one big flight" thing is something I always felt should have been tried, as it lets you play against a wider variety of players than just the thirty-two or so that signed up for your flight. I do wish there were more than four rounds for such a large event, but that's what side events are for!

Registration for the sealed deck event will open at 9, and hopefully start at 9:30. The entry fee is $30, and with that, you get three packs of Shards of Alara and three packs of Conflux. Wait, isn't that a lot of packs? Well yes! Wizards has done away with tournament packs, so now you get three packs of Shards of Alara instead of a tournament pack of it. It's the same number of cards as were in a tournament pack, just with one less uncommon and one more common. Of course you also don't get the basic lands, so we'll be providing them for you free of charge.

There'll be four rounds in the main flight, and prizes will be given out based on your record. 3-1 gets six packs, 3-0-1 gets nine packs, and 4-0 gets twelve packs. Waaaay better than the piss-poor prize support Wizards forced on us for the Shards of Alara prerelease.

Three-player team events are gone as well, replaced with the ever-popular Two-Headed Giant format. Registration for this event starts at 1 PM, and costs $22 per player. Each team will get four packs of Shards and four packs of Conflux with which to build two 40-card minimum decks. Then they'll play three rounds of 2HG, with 2-1 getting six packs, 2-0-1 getting ten packs, and 3-0 getting fourteen packs.

Side events will be held based on product availability and player interest, starting at 11 AM. These will be sort of mini-flights, three round eight-man sealed deck tournaments for $30, where the prize payout is 7-5-3 instead of the main flight's 12-9-6.

The Long Island prerelease will be held at the Four Points Sheraton in Plainview, NY, 333 South Service Road off the LIE. I'll be head judging it once again, so come down and get your first taste of Conflux!

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

January 3rd - April 19th: PTQ Season for PT Honolulu

The next PTQ season kicks off January 3rd, and the format is Extended!

PTQs in our area this season:

February 21st - Edison, NJ
March 14th - Philadelphia, PA

No details for New York PTQs are available yet.

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #46

2009-01-15T20:45:00.000-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #46==

January 14th 2009

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Extended Comes to FNC!
Drafting Don'ts: What cards to avoid

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1:30 PM

==EXTENDED COMES TO FNC!==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

==DRAFTING DON'TS==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

Like any aspect of playing Magic well, almost as much comes from being taught as it comes from playing. And if you want to learn what cards to draft, there are hundreds of articles on the web about that very subject, where strategists will talk about the best cards in Shards of Alara limited. But after three months of Shards, along with the good judgement every one of you has about how the game works, do you really need to be told yet again that Oblivion Ring, Branching Bolt, and Agony Warp are solid picks?

There are very few articles about the bad cards, the ones that should never make your deck unless you're struggling for a twenty-third card in your Naya deck and the store's out of Swamps. It's not uncommon for players to draft the lands out of packs rather than these cards, but sadly, all too often I see them being drafted at our draft tournaments, and can only watch sadly as they make it into players' decks. I can't stop people from drafting or playing with them at tournaments, but I can give you fair warning about them so you don't make the same mistakes!

There are actually two levels of bad - there's the regular ol' "don't take this card unless your only options are another card on this list" and "bad, but with some sideboard potential - but don't put it in your maindeck unless it's maybe your twenty-third card". And then of course there's the few exceptions where a rare card is bad in limited, but you might want to take it just because it's worth a few bucks.

Ad Nauseum - With any sort of stable limited mana curve, Ad Nauseum is too dangerous to risk it. It's a rare that almost pays for the pack it's in, and is played somewhat in Eternal formats, but it's not worth more than even a decent creature if you're trying to win.

Angel's Herald - Even if you have the mythic rare the Herald's heralding, they're very rarely worth playing. Pay no attention to the idea that playing it without the mythic is a good bluff - it never is.

Angelsong - Sideboard bad; it can be useful in the Naya vs Naya mirror. The cycling actually hurts it, because if you're cycling it early you're denying yourself the out later, and giving away that you have it for later games.

Banewasp Affliction - Not only do you need to make the enchantment stick, but then you need to find another way to actually kill the creature... which will probably only shave three or four points off your opponent's life total. This is truly one of the worst cards in the set.

Behemoth's Herald - See Angel's Herald.

Bloodthorn Taunter - Not terrible, just not good, or ever really useful.

Brilliant Ultimatum - If you're spending seven mana, and all of it's colored, and it doesn't win you the game, you know you've got a bad card.

Cathartic Adept - Chances are, you're only going to mill one or two cards before you need to use the Adept to block the much better creatures your opponent's playing.

Clarion Ultimatum - Play only if you've somehow drafted a constructed deck.

Crucible of Fire - In Lorwyn/Morningtide, this card would've been insane. In a format where all the dragons are rare and can win the game well enough on their own, well....

Cunning Lethemancer - You're going to have cards you want to hold onto for long periods of time, so forcing yourself to use them or lose them isn't good.

Dawnray Archer - Exalted's nice, pinging is nice, but a 1/1 for 2U isn't.

Demon's Herald - See Angel's Herald.

Dispeller's Capsule - Never play this maindeck ever.

Dragon's Herald - See Angel's Herald.

Etherium Astrolabe - Its only use is that it's the only artifact in the format that serves as a combat trick for Glaze Fiend.

Goblin Deathraiders - It's a goblin, a three-power creature with trample... but it's never worth attacking with it because it'll die to anything. It's not bottom of the barrel, but there's always something better.

Goblin Mountaineer - It's barely good in the sideboard.

Gustrider Exhuberant - Naya's creatures don't really need the help.

Immortal Coil - If the number of cards in your graveyard is higher than your life total, you're in bad shape, and this card's not going to save you.

Invincible Hymn - If you're on the play and play this card as soon as possible, you'll go up to 25 - not a very impressive number unless you're way behind already. And if you draw it late, it's worthless.

Jhessian Lookout - You have to be really struggling for creatures to play this.

Keeper of Progenitus - In a three color format, chances are your opponent will be thanking you for powering out their big spells.

Lich's Mirror - If you're going to lose once, you're going to lose twice... unless your opponent's sole win condition is milling you with Cathartic Adepts.

Lush Growth - It looks great, until you realize that it doesn't actually accelerate you. It's better to make sure your land base is solid than to waste a spell slot on a card that does nothing.

Marble Chalice - Gaining one life a turn isn't going to win you the game any faster, it just gives your opponents time to play better cards than you.

Mindlock Orb - It's so obviously bad in limited that I can only recall one time I've ever seen anyone play it.

Protomatter Powder - Yech. There's no artifact in the set that's worth eight mana to bring back.

Resounding Scream - The only bad Resounding spell.

Sangrite Surge - +3/+3 and double strike would be broken if this was an instant, so why is it priced like it was supposed to be one?

Savage Hunger - Some of the best big creatures in Shards help themselves and other big creatures, so wasting an Aura to give them a relatively minor boost usually isn't worth it.

Shadowfeed - Why are the cards with the best art usually so terrible? Unearth creatures don't come alone, so you'd need more than a single bullet to deal with a good unearth strategy.

Skill Borrower - The only artifact you might want to use this with is Scourglass, another rare. Definitely not worth revealing information to your opponent.

Soul's Grace - Basically amounts to "prevent all combat damage target creature would deal this turn... or a turn to be named later."

Sphinx's Herald - See Angel's Herald.

Thoughtcutter Agent - 1/1s for two are rarely good. Wasting mana every turn on a useless ping when decks are fast is just plain bad.

Tortoise Formation - Since only Violent Ultimatum targets more than one permanent, this basically boils down to a bad, narrow counterspell.

Vectis Silencers - A 1/2 for 3 is mediocre, especially when you need to pay just to make it semi-useful.

Viashino Skeleton - Another overcosted creature with an ability it should have for much cheaper. I think Wizards's intention was to make it a discard outlet for unearth dudes, but that didn't quite pan out.

Volcanic Submersion - If you have five mana and your opponent is in a position where destroying one of their lands would seriously hurt them, you've already won. It's a somewhat good sideboard card against Esper decks, but nearly any other removal spell in the format is just as good in that situation.

Lastly, I'd like to give an honorary mention to Hindering Light. While certainly not bad, its usefulness is extremely narrow. And since there are few spells that target players in the format, it's only good if you know your opponent is packing lots of removal... or a Cruel Ultimatum. The only reason I mention it here is that I often see players using three of them in their decks, which is overkill under any circumstances.

==EURO LANDS PROMOTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

So the other day when I received my latest FNM promos for Brothers Grim in the mail, I got a little extra surprise with it. Though to be fair it was only a surprise because I forgot I had signed up for it. See, Wizards is doing this promotion exclusively for FNM-hosting locations where they send out packs Euro Lands to those stores. But unlike the other promotional cards Wizards sends out, you don't get these for playing - instead, you get them for buying a full box of any Magic set!

The Euro Lands are special lands with artwork representing different locations throughout Europe. They came in three different versions depending on their wrappers, but the ones I got are the blue pack, seen here. They feature scenes of the forests of Schwarzwald, Germany, the Danish Islands of Scandinavia, the mountains of Vesuvio, Italy, the Scottish Highlands, and the swamps of Ardennes Fagnes, Belgium. This is the first time that these lands are available to players in the US, and they're quite rare. Five come in a pack, one of each land.

Supplies are limited though, so if you were planning to buy a box of Shards for someone as a holiday gift, do it as soon as possible! this promotion will be running at Brothers Grim only for as long as we have packs to give out.

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

January 3rd - April 19th: PTQ Season for PT Honolulu

The next PTQ season kicks off January 3rd, and the format is Extended!

PTQs in our area this season:

February 21st - Edison, NJ
March 14th - Philadelphia, PA

No details for New York PTQs are available yet.

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #45

2009-01-07T20:08:00.001-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #45==

January 7th 2009

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Conflux Spoilers

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1 PM
Sunday: Chaos Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 2 PM

==NEWS BITES==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

PTQs for Pro Tour Honolulu have already begun, with a couple of PTQs last weekend starting the season off with a bang. While there are no decklists available yet, next week I'll have a write-up on the format and a discussion on the winning decks so you can prepare for the PTQs in our area. Speaking of which, I'm still planning on sanctioning an Extended tournament at the end of this month at FNC, so start preparing! Odds are there'll also be a Standard tournament running at the same time, so you can pick which format you'd like to play that day.

We've had a lot of fun cube drafting on Saturday nights, so if you want to join in, let me know! I'll be bringing my cube again this week for some hot action after the tournament.

==CONFLUX SPOILERS==
Author: Brian J. Paskoff

The prereleases for Conflux are less than a month away, and spoiler season is in full swing, with multiple updates to the list of rumored cards every day on MTGSalvation's forums. As of the time of this writing, there are forty-three cards in the official unofficial spoiler. As usual, players are eagerly awaiting the new set, especially after waiting so long in between the release of Shards of Alara and Conflux. With Faeries dominating a metagame that hasn't changed much at all in months, even after the usually-metagame-warping Worlds, everyone's hopeful that some big changes will come with this small set.

The Orb of Insight is up and running, and if you've never used an Orb of Insight before, typing in any word will show you how many times it appears on cards in the set. I'll let you poke through the Orb yourself, but the biggest find so far is something with a mana cost of WWUUBBRRGG - yes, that's two mana of every color.

White is apparently getting a Memory Lapse for 2W. Although it's one mana too much to compete with the classic "counterspell", it still might see play in some non-blue decks that want to delay their opponents' answers.

White's also getting a new one-mana removal spell in the vein of Swords to Plowshares: Path to Exile. Instead of giving your opponent life in exchange for removing their creature from the game, Path to Exile lets them search their library for a basic land card and put it into play tapped. While this doesn't seem nearly as good as Swords, or even Condemn in some situations, it may just replace Unmake in certain decks. Personally I'm not too thrilled about accelerating my opponent into a Wrath or Cryptic Command if I'm an aggro player facing a control deck.

The question on everyone's mind when preparing for Conflux was what answers the set would give them against Faeries. Speculation was rampant on some kind of Engineered Plague variant, but it was obvious that nearly any black or blue "answer" to Faeries would end up in the tiny hands of the Fae to be used against other decks. But now it seems we know the silver bullet - or one of them, anyway, as "countered" shows up more than once in the Orb - a red instant called Volcanic Fallout. For 1RR, you get an uncounterable instant-speed Pyroclasm that also hits players. Now sure it doesn't permanently deal with some of the bigger threats in Faeries such as Bitterblossom or Mistbind Clique (if it's already in play), but wiping the field of Faerie Rogue tokens, Spellstutter Sprites, Sowers, Scions, and even swinging Mutavaults doesn't make it easy for Faeries. And since it adds two damage to the life loss they've already taken from Bitterblossom and Thoughtseize, you're that much closer to victory. Might Faeries start splashing white for Burrenton Forge-Tender out of the sideboard? Anything's possible, and Arcane Sanctums make it somewhat painless.

Faeries does get another tool though, sure to make their sideboards. It's a miniature Undermine, a Negate-variant for UB that counters a non-creature spell and makes that spell's controller lose two life. It's a no-brainer for Faeries to replace Negate in their sideboards with this spell, and even Toast might switch this in.

Domain is making a comeback in Conflux. While Shards was focused strictly on three-color themes, now that the Shards are coming together, mana fixing is more rampant, and you'll be seeing all five colors together much more often. Domain's even keyworded on cards like Might of Alara, a functional reprint of Gaea's Might. For one green mana, a target creature gets +1/+1 until end of turn for each basic land type among lands you control. The ability to give a creature +5/+5 for one mana at instant speed is quite strong, and it wouldn't shock me to see five-color aggro decks pop up trying to take advantage of this card in Standard and Extended.

Anyone who's seen the spoiled list of card names for the set has theorized what the card named "Conflux" would do, and for a while, it was speculated that the card would be a sixth basic land type, one that tapped for one colorless mana and did nothing else but add +1 to your domain spells. In truth, it's nowhere near that weird - Conflux is a 3WUBRG sorcery that lets you search your library for a card of each color and put them into your hand. It's sure to be used in five-color EDH decks... and not many other places.

For a long time, it was believed that Conflux would contain "enemy" tri-lands, ones that mirrored Shards's tri-lands but tapped for things like WUR and GWB. Now that we know three of the five lands in the set, this isn't a possiblity anymore, but that doesn't mean the lands aren't good: There's a reverse Reflecting Pool that taps for a color of mana your opponent's lands can produce, a Shimmering Grotto-like land that taps for colorless or taps to make a land you control any basic land type until end of turn, and a land that comes into play tapped, and taps for any color... but you need to pay 1 when it comes into play.

Conflux's prerelease is on January 31st, and while I'm not sure where it'll be yet, I'll be head judging Gray Matter's prerelease. Stay tuned to all the spoilers so you know what to expect on opening day!

==EURO LANDS PROMOTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

January 3rd - April 19th: PTQ Season for PT Honolulu

The next PTQ season kicks off January 3rd, and the format is Extended!

PTQs in our area this season:

February 21st - Edison, NJ
March 14th - Philadelphia, PA

No details for New York PTQs are available yet.

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #44

2008-12-31T19:25:00.001-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #44==

December 31st 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

News Bites
Death Cloud: Michael Evans goes 7-0 in a tournament!

Happy New Year! We return to our usual format after all this holiday stuff is over.

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1 PM
Sunday: Chaos Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 2 PM

==NEWS BITES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

The PTQ season for PT Honolulu is starting soon, and the format is Extended. Although the schedule isn't out yet because the Wizards site won't be updated until Monday, there are some PTQs (though none of I know of in our area) this very weekend! In preparation of the Extended season, I'm thinking about sanctioning some Extended tournaments at Islandhome-sponsored locations in January... possibly January 24th or 31st at FNC, depending on the PTQ schedule. Preferably later, since that'll give people more time to build decks for the format. If you want to play Extended instead of Standard one of those days, let me know!

We had a lot of fun last week in a five-player free-for-all multiplayer EDH game, and I'm hoping to do it again this week on Saturday at FNC! If you want to play, bring a deck! If it gets off, I'll post a write-up on it in the next issue of Islandhome!

My latest Cranial Insertion article came out Monday, so go read!

One of Islandhome's readers, Johnny Thorner, emailed me wanting to let everyone know that KB Toys is going out of business, and liquidating everything they have in the stores. Right now they're offering 50-75% off everything in the store, including CCG stuff like Magic, Yu Gi Oh, and Pokemon cards. I went to the KB Toys by me to check it out, and the selection was very limited, but you might be able to pick up some cheap packs for a limited time!

==DEATH CLOUD==
Author: Michael Evans

When Paskoff asked me to write a column about Extended I asked myself, "Who would ever take my advice on Magic?"

Nevertheless, I'm going to share my experience with you on what I know about the current Extended format and my recent experience winning the Magic-League Extended trial with my current favorite deck in the format, the almighty Death Cloud Rock. Take what you want from it, hopefully it gives you some insight.

At Pro Tour Berlin six of the top eight decks were the pesky Elfball deck. Elfball is a very fast combo deck that uses mana producing Elves and Glimpse of Nature to generate a big creature-playing/card-drawing turn to draw their win condition, which is usually Grepeshot or Predator Dragon tutored into play with Chord of Calling. This results in a very fast win on a good draw with a turn two or three kill. The key with the Elf Ball deck is the synergy between Birchlore Rangers/Heritage Druid and Nettle Sentinel. With multiple Nettle Sentinels and a Birchlore Rangers in play you can generate all the mana you need to play any creature you draw with Glimpse of Nature. Combine that with utility cards like Summoner's Pact and Weird Harvest to ensure you get the creatures you need, and you have a very consistent combo deck. On top of all that the Elf Ball deck can easily go with the "Man Plan" to beat down with many 1/1's on the first few turns.

Despite Elf Ball's dominance at Berlin, extended is a very diverse format right now. At worlds we saw an emergence of many other different decks. Zoo, Swans combo, Tron variants, Tezzeret, Death Cloud, Mono Red Burn, and all-in red all had good showings at worlds.

Another deck that had a strong showing was Faeries. We all know Faerie's Standard dominance over the last year or so, but Extended Faeries is a very different deck that is also emerging as one of the top three decks in the Extended format. Extended Faeries is a very creature-light Mono-Blue control deck that uses Venser, Shaper Savant, and the two creatures that lend their creature type to the deck, Spellstutter Sprite and Vendilion Clique. Those creatures seem unassuming at first(When a mono Blue Control player's finishers are 1/1 and 2/2 you may feel pretty good about yourself), but armed with one of the three or even four Jitte's the deck runs maindeck, you can be losing pretty quickly. The Faerie deck aims to draw cards and counter your spells in the early game, and and beat down with a Faerie equipped with a Jitte in the mid to late game. Riptide Laboratory and Repeal give Faerie's a very good late game plan with the ability to bounce Spellstutter Sprite or Venser repeatedly to counter or bounce any of the things you draw in the topdeck war. Another key card in the deck is Vedalken Shackles. Shackles is a powerhouse in this deck and especially good in the mirror match, allowing you to take control of anything they actually resolved.

Now we come to my favorite deck, an offshoot of my all time favorite archetype, The Rock. The Rock archetype is a mainly Black/Green (sometimes with one or more splashes) mid-range deck that packs hand disruption, creature removal, and big green creatures, generally running the most efficient of each of those card types in the format. The Death Cloud version uses Garruk and Golgari Rot Farm to generate mana to cast Death Cloud, a card that you are then built to recover from while for your opponent it's often the end. It's very hard to lose after resolving a Death Cloud cast at the right time. Yesterday I won a Magic-League Extended trial with the following list:

Lands:
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Swamp
4 Forest
3 Golgari Rot Farm
3 Treetop Village
2 Windswept Heath
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 Polluted Delta
1 Mutavault

Creatures:
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Kitchen Finks
3 Eternal Witness

Spells:
4 Thoughtseize
3 Putrefy
3 Garruk Wildspeaker
3 Crime/Punishment
3 Death Cloud
3 Damnation
2 Smother
1 Slaughter Pact

Sideboard:
1 Smother
1 Slaughter Pact
3 Pithing Needle
4 Night of Souls' Betrayal
3 Cranial Extraction
3 Choke

After looking at the succesful Worlds lists and testing a bit I settled on this list. It doesn't run bad cards like Utopia Sprawl and opts for Finks over Ravenous Baloth, with your 4cc slot filled up already and the ability of Finks to come back after a Death Cloud or to eat up two removal spells.

One card in this version that differs from last season's Death Cloud is Crime/Punishment. With Pernicious Deed rotating out of Extended in october, this ended up being a very fine replacement. It wrecks the Elfball deck and works as a versatile removal spell that can be used as an almost-Vindicate for any Enchantment, Creature, or Artifact in play, or a mass removal spell.

The favorable matchups for this deck are Elfball and Faeries. Some people say Faeries is a bad matchup(mostly Faeries players), but I've never had any trouble in that matchup, especially after sideboard.

Like many Rock decks, the rest of the field is mainly 50/50. The other combo decks can be beaten by hand disruption and Cranial Extraction or Choke. Zoo can be beaten with the right hands and smart play, but it is one of the weaker matchups. All-In red is also very hand-dependant, but mostly the opponent's hand. I chose to run a fair number of basic lands to counteract Blood Moon effects. The only unfavorable matchup based on my experience is Mono-Red Burn, as you have so many dead cards even after sideboard, and Death Cloud is all but useless. It is still very winnable though, as you can race them with Tarmogoyfs and happen to draw multiple Kitchen Finks.

In round 1 my opponent didn't show up, so I essentially got a bye.

Round two saw me beating Elfball 2-0. Elfball is one of the truly strong matchups for this deck, the best matchup in the format for it. Maindeck you have enough hand disruption and mass removal to deal with their 1/1's while disrupting their combo, and after sideboard it becomes a wash with Night of Soul's Betrayal.

In round three I faced the first Faerie deck of the day, and won 2-1. Game one I lost to Jitte, a card that really scares me in this matchup. In game two I sideboarded as follows: -3 Damnation, -3 Crime/Punishment, -2 Smother, -1 Slaughter Pact, + 3 Night of Soul's Betrayal, +3 Choke, +3 Pithing Needle. Night of Soul's betrayal is also very good against Faeries, limiting their ability to attack you to the 2 Vensers and Mutavaults in their deck. Needle is pivotol for Vedalken Shackles and Jitte, the two most powerful cards against you.

In round four I faced yet another Faerie deck, and this time went 2-0 in a quick match that saw him getting bad hands in what I already find to be a good matchup for me.

In round five I faced off against a rogue Bant Aggro deck that actually gave me some trouble. It was very original and interesting, almost a Matt Brocking type of deck. Here was his list:

Lands:
4 Flooded Strand
4 Windswept Heath
4 Breeding Pool
2 Temple Garden
2 Hallowed Fountain
3 Forest
1 Plains
1 Island
1 Academy Ruins

Creatures:
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Troll Ascetic
3 Rhox War Monk
2 Llwanor Elves
2 Iwamori of the Open Fist

Spells:
3 Stifle
3 Oblivion Ring
1 Sword of Light and Shadow
2 Steelshaper's Gift
3 Bant Charm
4 Spell Snare
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
2 Umezawa's Jitte

Sideboard:
2 Glen Elendra Archmage
3 Krosan Grip
3 Engineered Explosives
4 Threads of Disloyalty
3 Worship

In game one I survived at 1 life, and in game 2 it was slightly less challenging with Thoughtseize coming out and an extra Smother and Slaughter Pact coming in.

Round six there were 3 players remaining, and I happened to get the bye, so I was in the finals.

In the finals I played one of the tougher matchups for Death Cloud, Zoo. I survived game one and quickly went to the board. Out came 4 Thoughtseize and in came Smother, Slaughter pact, and 2 Pithing Needle for any Jitte's he may or may not have(which I later found out he did in fact have). He won game two on double Tribal Flames for 5 when I was at 10 life. Game two I quickly dropped double Tarmogoyfs with a hand of removal spells and finished him off with the 4/5's.

I would advise anyone looking for a consistent deck with even or favorable matchups in the field to play Death Cloud. It's a solid mid-range deck with an auto-win card as a backup and a lot of room for tweaking in main and sideboard for your metagame.

That's it for me, see you all at FNC where you can see me and Paskoff playing with action figures.

-Michael Evans

==EURO LANDS PROMOTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

January 3rd - ?: PTQ Season for PT Honolulu

The next PTQ season kicks off October 4th, and the format is Extended!

PTQs in our area this season:

Schedule not up yet, check back later!

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #43

2008-12-24T22:48:00.001-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #43==

December 24th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Mox Tournament Results: Nestor "Nestor" Ramirez takes his Faerie deck to claim a piece of power in Grim's first big constructed tournament!

Happy Holidays!

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1 PM
Sunday: Chaos Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 2 PM

This week's tournaments will go on as scheduled, as I'm not going to be attending the PTQ in New Jersey after all.

==MOX TOURNAMENT RESULTS!==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Grim's Mox Emerald tournament was this past Sunday, and eighteen combatants braved the doom-and-gloom weather reports to compete for a valuable piece of power! The competition was fierce, and the metagame diverse. Fresh off its Worlds victory, Faeries was the most popular deck; four Fae lists showed up, although only one made top four. There were two copies of each Jund Ramp, Mono-Red, WR Reveillark, and surprisingly enough, Grixis Aggro. Aside from a lone Kithkin list and UW Reveillark, the other decks came in different varieties of homebrew: Planeswalkers, Bant Aggro, WB Reveillark, and BRG Tokens.

Nester "Nestor" Ramirez came away victorious, proudly displaying his Mox to the scores of spectators, confused Warhammer 40k players, and even the World of Warcraft players rose from their chairs to… well, they lent their silent respect while raiding, I suppose. Nestor faced a difficult challenge in the finals, as Ralph Navarra's Jund Ramp deck seemed specifically tuned to beat the little flying people, and Ralph had won the matchup 2-0 in the swiss previously. When Nestor tapped out for a Sower of Temptation in game one and Ralph's deck failed to cough up a Jund Charm, Cloudthresher, or even a Shriekmaw or Resounding Thunder, he knew the game was lost. In a following game, Nestor's board got swept by a Firespout, making the finalist slump in his chair… until he looked down and noticed his Faerie Conclave, a singleton and last-minute addition to the deck that dealt the final lethal two points of damage to Ralph.

Nestor "Nestor" Ramirez - Faeries
1st Place - Mox Tournament @ Brothers Grim, 12/21/08

LANDS:

4 Mutavault
6 Island
4 Secluded Glen
4 Underground River
4 Sunken Ruins
3 Swamp
1 Faerie Conclave

SPELLS:
4 Mistbind Clique
4 Scion of Oona
4 Spellstutter Sprite
2 Agony Warp
4 Bitterblossom
4 Broken Ambitions
4 Cryptic Command
2 Familiar's Ruse
2 Thoughtseize
3 Sower of Temptation
1 Terror

SIDEBOARD:
3 Jace Beleren
4 Stillmoon Cavalier
1 Oona's Grace
2 Negate
3 Telling Time
2 Thoughtseize

Interestingly, Nestor played only two Thoughtseize maindeck, making up for them with two additional counterspells: two copies of Familiar's Ruse, which could bounce a token, or even better, a Spellstutter Sprite to hard-counter a spell. All of Nestor's draw spells were sideboarded, presumably to board them in one games he planned to go long, the maindeck instead focusing entirely on Faeries, removal, and counterspells apart from the two Thoughtseizes. The Stillmoon Cavaliers have been the sideboard card of choice for many Faerie and Kithkin builds to fend off each other (and themselves in the mirror), and they surely would have come in handy against four other players in the event.

Ralph Navarra - Jund Ramp
2nd Place - Mox Tournament @ Brothers Grim, 12/21/08
LANDS:

4 Jund Charm
4 Garruk Wildspeaker
4 Fertile Ground
4 Chameleon Colossus
2 Resounding Thunder
4 Cloudthresher
2 Broodmate Dragon
3 Sprouting Thrinax
2 Shriekmaw
2 Mindshatter
2 Primal Command
3 Rampant Growth

SPELLS:
1 Mosswort Bridge
1 Llanowar Wastes
3 Reflecting Pool
2 Treetop Village
1 Mountain
5 Forest
3 Twilight Mire
3 Savage Lands
2 Swamp
3 Fire-Lit Thicket

SIDEBOARD:

3 Guttural Response
3 Thoughtseize
2 Loxodon Warhammer
3 Kitchen Finks
3 Firespout
1 Shriekmaw

It's always nice to inspire people, even if it is by being a terrible deck-builder: "I owe this to you, Paskoff," Ralph told me as he sat down to watch the top four match between Nestor and Ralph's friend Michael Innace, "I never would have thought of this deck if I didn't see your terrible list." Ralph had seen the Jund Ramp list I had worked on with Michael Evans, and had obviously made improvements on the list. Playing a grand total of seven two-mana ramp spells ensured he'd never miss a chance to accelerate on turn two, and Fertile Ground has great synergy with Garruk Wildspeaker - both for casting the green 'walker and for after he's in play. The Mindshatters maindeck were mostly for the strangely-absent Toast deck, but punished many players who left themselves tapped out for the devastating sorcery. Unfortunately, while Ralph's deck's astounding seventeen anti-Faerie cards powered him through his first match against Nestor in the swiss, he lost to him in the finals.

Michael Innace - Kithkin
3rd Place - Mox Tournament @ Brothers Grim, 12/21/08
LANDS:

4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Rustic Clachan
4 Rugged Prarie
4 Battlefield Forge
2 Mutavault
7 Plains

SPELLS:
4 Goldmeadow Stalwart
4 Figure of Destiny
3 Burrenton Forge-Tender
4 Wizened Cenn
4 Knight of Meadowgrain
4 Spectral Procession
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Cloudgoat Ranger
4 Ajani Vengeant

SIDEBOARD:

3 Wispmare
3 Wilt-Leaf Liege
2 Ajani Goldmane
1 Burrenton Forge-Tender
2 Mirrorweave
3 Reveillark
1 Oblivion Ring

Ralph Navarra joked about having to "twist Mike's arm" to get him to play Kithkin for the Mox tournament, and it seemed to have paid off all the way until the top four. Mike's list was unique for a Kithkin deck, with not a single Unmake or Oblivion Ring present in the maindeck… and only one Oblivion Ring in the sideboard. In fact, the only non-creature/creature-making spells in the maindeck were four copies of Ajani Vengeant: A multi-functional tool in the deck, and Ajani's Lightning Helix effect kept him alive against the many aggresive decks present.

Joseph Aprano - Mono-Red
4th Place - Mox Tournament @ Brothers Grim, 12/21/08
LANDS:

19 Mountain
3 Ghitu Encampment

SPELLS:

4 Demigod of Revenge
4 Fulminator Mage
4 Boggart Ram-Gang
4 Stigma Lasher
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Incinerate
4 Magma Spray
4 Flame Javelin
2 Unwilling Recruit

SIDEBOARD:

3 Everlasting Torment
3 Moonglove Extract
4 Pyroclasm
2 Wild Ricochet
2 Hell's Thunder
1 Knollspine Invocation

Joe's Mono-Red deck packed four Fulminator Mages in the main. Traditionally these have been played sideboard against Toast decks, but they also have use against other decks: the often-mana-screwed Kithkin, hitting the many non-basic white-producing lands, including the troublesome Windbrisk Heights; Faeries, which relies on consistent land drops; and any deck which plays Mutavault. Joe defeated Jay Imperiale in the top eight, winning his best matchup, and then losing to Ralph Navarra in the semi-finals.

So there you have it, the top four decks of Grim's first big Islandhome-sponsored tournament! Congradulations to all of their players, Nestor Nestor for winning the Mox, and everyone who came out to play! Best of all, everyone walked away with something, as Brothers Grim gave prizes out to the entire tournament! Brothers Grim will be hosting another tournament like this in March for a different prize, so look for details on that as we approach spring!

==EURO LANDS PROMOTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

The next PTQ season kicks off October 4th, and the format is Shards of Alara sealed deck!

PTQs in our area this season:

12/27 - Edison, NJ

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #42

2008-12-17T20:30:00.001-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #42==

December 17th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Worlds 2008
PTQ Report
Rumor Season

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1 PM
Sunday: MOX TOURNAMENT - Standard ($15 entry) @ 2 PM

This Sunday is the Mox Emerald tournament at Brothers Grim! At only $15 for the chance of winning one of the most powerful cards in Magic's history, you have nothing to lose! Other prizes will be given out as well, so bring your A-game!

==WORLDS 2008==
Author: Brian Paskoff

As another year wraps to a close, so does another Worlds, the biggest annual Magic tournament in... well, the world. Players from all over the world showed up to compete in a wide variety of formats to prove that they were the best player in the entire world (for a year at least), and after three grueling days, Finnish player Antti Malin was crowned World Champion, and the United States team of Sam Black, Paul Cheon, and Michael Jacob were champions of the Standard-Extended-and-Legacy team event.

Worlds seems to define the upcoming metagame each year, and judging by the top eight results, we're in for a slow Standard season. Five out of the top eight decks were Faeries, the other three being Kithkin, Toast, and Mono-Red splashing for Blightning. Though the entire tournament tested Standard, Extended, and drafting skills, the top eight of Worlds was played out with the participants' Standard decks. Antti Malin won with Faeries, defeating Jamie Parke's Toast deck 3-1 in the finals.

To be quite honest I'd really rather not talk about the disappointing playoffs; 5/8ths of the finalists playing Faeries is depressing. Jamie Park's Toast deck was interesting, playing Rhox War Monk in place of Kitchen Finks for a more consistent flow of life gain, and perhaps to negate the more and more common strategy of red decks sideboarding Magma Spray, and packing enough answers to Faeries that it should instill memories of the Affinity and Anti-Affinity days of Mirrodin.

One of the breakout decks of Worlds was WB Tokens. Though it didn't make it into the playoffs, it did contribute in Team USA's victory in the team event. With Cloudgoat Ranger, Spectral Procession, and Windbrisk Heights, the deck slightly resembles Kithkin. Except instead of relying on the boost of Wizened Cenn and Mirrorweaving Lieges, WB Tokens plays Thoughtseize, Tidehollow Sculler, and Marsh Flitter. Michael Jacob's Team USA deck even played four copies of Glorious Anthem, and even the obscure Head Games (I'll wait while you go search up what that does. Okay, back? Yeah, I forgot that was in Tenth Edition too.) in the sideboard. The deck is similar enough to Kithkin that it'll be interesting to see whether or not Standard has room for both of them. But as WB Tokens doesn't rely on a single creature type and is a new archetype, it has room for growth, whereas the Kithkin deck is more or less at a creative stopping point.

Extended was relatively free of the scourge of the Elves deck that was feared to carve a hole in the metagame. With only ten percent of the field playing the deck and none of them going undefeated, it feels like the deck is safe from its key cards winding up on the banned list. Aside from over 26% of the combatants playing Faeries in Extended, the format appears to be very healthy, and players should have a fun time in this upcoming Extended PTQ season.

I'd also like to congradulate Long Islander Jason Imperiale for getting 10th place at Worlds, a tremendous feat indeed... even if he was playing Faeries.

Next year's Worlds is in Rome, a little far for most of us to travel. But until then, we'll be feeling the tremors of Worlds 2008 shaking up the metagame for a long time!

==PTQ REPORT==
Author: Brian Paskoff

New York's Pro Tour Qualifier for Kyoto was bittersweet. It was a fun PTQ that ran smoothly and with an extremely high turnout (175 players total!), but it was also the last major event that will ever be held at Neutral Ground. For over thirteen years now, Neutral Ground has been the "mecca" of Magic, and is probably the most famous Magic store in the world; nearly everyone who has had any experience in tournament Magic has heard of the store. Even after the store moved from its original location about a year ago, stepping into Neutral Ground was like stepping into Magic legend, and many of the best Magic players in the world called the store their home during at least some point in their career. A special "thank you" to the staff of Neutral Ground for keeping the store running for over a decade and giving us all a great place to play. Hopefully someday Neutral Ground will come back in some form. Until then, New York City events will still happen... just at a different location.

As I said, 175 players showed up for the historic last Neutral Ground PTQ for a chance to win an invite to play in Pro Tour Kyoto. Limited events traditionally have higher turnouts than constructed ones, simply because the cost of building a limited deck is always the same (the entry fee for the tournament), whereas putting together a constructed deck costs a whole lot more.

Like all sealed formats, Shards is fairly bomb-reliant... though that doesn't mean bomb-dependant. True, those who opened bomby rares were better off, but play skill mattered just as much. Opening a few bombs never guarantees a top 8 spot, and I saw just as many Battlegrace Angels, Flameblast Dragons, and Hellkite Overlords at the lower tables than I saw at the top ones. The real key to victory in a limited event is knowing how to use those cards, and how to build your deck. It's easy to say you would've built a deck differently when looking at someone else's sealed pool, but constructing one yourself is a whole different story, especially while you need to get it right the first time.

Besides the rares, many commons contributed to game wins during the day. While watching matches, I started to realize that there were a few commons which were often responsible for winning games almost single-handedly. Resounding Silence is a powerful removal spell, and since many decks in the format are built around swinging with one or two powerful creatures at a time, Resounding Silence is a Fog effect combined with permanent removal. Guardians of Akrasa is a strong blocker, and although it can't deal with the many four-plus power guys in Shards, it does stall smaller creatures on the ground while pumping any solitary attackers you might have on offense. And finally, the number one common of the day seemed to be Vithian Stinger. The pinger was a problem for many players who couldn't deal with it; no one wants to waste their best removal spells on a 0/1, and so it was left alive to deal more damage on the whole than even a Bull Ceredon could do. It could ping an opponent at the end of their turn to whittle down their life total, make combat complicated by letting a 4/4 trade with a 5/5, and perform mean tricks with devouring it and then unearthing it. Even if it did get killed, it just turned into an emergency one damage sorcery spell.

As far as shards go, all the shards seemed to show up in relatively even numbers. Of course, it was hard to determine when half of the players were playing four colors. Naya was predictably the most popular, and Grixis the least, though all the other shards fell somewhere between, and it was hard to say that there was a dominant shard.

The next and last PTQ in our area is on December 27th in New Jersey, so if you haven't qualified for the Pro Tour yet, I hope to see you there!

==RUMOR SEASON==
Author: Brian Paskoff

With the prerelease for Conflux a little over a month away, it's time to start rumor season up! A few months ago, the complete Conflux card list was released with the names of every card in the set, the most exciting of which was Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker. And now the art for the card has been spoiled, and while we don't know what the Elder Dragon does yet, he looks like quite a beast... and even moreso in this official wallpaper, which shows Nicol Bolas fighting the four other Shards of Alara planeswalkers.

According to a source on MTGSalvation.com's rumor mill, Conflux supposedly has a few tools in it that'll fix the standard metagame by giving us answers to Faeries.

Little else is known about Conflux at this point, but Magic developers Aaron Forsythe and Mark Rosewater talked about a couple of things regarding 11th Edition at Worlds. 11th will be black-bordered, and have mythic rares (possibly the original Lorwyn planeswalkers). They also gave some cryptic maybe-clues about the appearance of Ravnica shocklands in 11th Edition, though similar rumors were floating around before 10th Edition saw print. The lands have generic names and bring back memories of the original dual lands that started out in the game, so they seem like a logical choice.

More rumors should start trickling in during the next few weeks. Spoilers for Morningtide (last year's February set) started a little before Christmas, so we should see a similar trend this year.

==EURO LANDS PROMOTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

The next PTQ season kicks off October 4th, and the format is Shards of Alara sealed deck!

December 21st - Mox Tournament at Brothers Grim
This December, Islandhome, in association with Brothers Grim, will be holding a giant Standard tournament. The first place prize will be a Mox Emerald, with many other prizes as well. Side events such as booster drafts and EDH multiplayer games will be held that day too, so keep reading Islandhome for more details!

PTQs in our area this season:

12/27 - Edison, NJ

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #41

2008-12-10T19:42:00.000-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #41==

December 10th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Islandhome on the Web
PTQ Weekend

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Saturday: Shards of Alara Sealed PTQ @ Neutral Ground!
Sunday: Chaos Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 2 PM

I'll be at the PTQ this weekend; see everyone there!

==TOURNAMENT REPORT==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Brothers Grim's FNM booster drafts are heating up! We had fourteen players at last week's draft, the largest turnout in quite some time. Michael Innace and Ralph Navarra split in the finals, just managing to edge out some tough competition. Lots of new players have been turning up to play in their first sanctioned Magic events there and fill out a shiny new DCI card, so if you haven't been down for a couple of Fridays, now's the perfect time to come down and meet new players!

FNC's finals were played out, as they very rarely are, and Jon Lorig beat David "The Wurm" Drebsky using a homebrew WB aggro deck that used the power of Nip Gwyllion, Edge of the Divinity, Nightsky Mimic, and Deathbringer Liege. It's quite hard to beat a turn two 4/4 lifelink, or a turn three 7/7 flier! I'll have more on this deck next week.

==ISLANDHOME ON THE WEB==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Hello and welcome to another fabulous edition of Islandhome! I have a special announcement this issue; for a long time now (41 weeks, wow! Not counting the old FNC newsletter), Islandhome has just been an email newsletter delivered fresh to you on Wednesday nights. It was great to receive a piping hot fresh-out-of-the-oven newsletter every week, but this also posed some problems. If I made a mistake in something, I'd have to send out an "errata" email, and since it was only once a week, I'd have to send update emails out. And there were countless problems with some of our readers not receiving emails for all sorts of reasons. For the past few weeks, I've been working in semi-secret to bring Islandhome to the web, and it's almost ready for release!

The Islandhome website will have all the regular information you're used to, but it'll be much easier for you to get that information - and there'll be more of it too! There'll be an event calendar, a searchable archive of articles, and ways to talk to other players from the area so you can organize drafts, playtest groups, etc. Next week I hope to have more updates for you

==PTQ WEEKEND==
Author: Brian Paskoff

New York's first (and last) PTQ of this limited season is this Saturday, and it's going to be a blast - almost two hundred players will compete for an invite to Pro Tour Kyoto. This is a sealed deck PTQ, and the last time many players will ever open a tournament pack. After this set, Wizards is discontinuing tournament packs, instead running sealed deck tournaments with three boosters of the last big set replacing that tournament pack. It's not a big change, to tell the truth; a tournament pack is basically three boosters in a box, just with one less common and one more uncommon, plus a bunch of basic land.

If this is your first big limited tournament outside of prereleases, releases, and FNM booster drafts, you'll notice a few changes between those smaller events and the way big sealed deck tournaments are run. When registration is over, the judges will seat everyone for what's called a "player meeting". The head judge will use this opportunity to make his announcements, including how many players are dueling, how many rounds you'll be playing, and instructions (more on those later). Meanwhile, the judges will hand out product to everyone - a tournament pack and two boosters, all Shards. When everyone's gotten their product, the head judge will give the word for everyone to open their packs. What's interesting about high-level sealed deck tournaments like PTQs is that the cards you open at this point won't be the ones you play with. Instead, you'll be writing the number of each card you got on a decklist, and giving both the cards and that list back to the judges. If you make any mistakes recording the contents of those packs, it's important to call a judge over right away so they can note it on the sheet so the player who gets your list isn't confused.

After about twenty minutes, judges will come around again to collect the cards and decklists and then pass them out at random to other players. Once you get a new set of cards, you'll open it up and make sure the list matches the cards you received. Then you'll have a half hour to build a minimum 40-card deck and mark down what you're playing on that same sheet. Another major difference between limited tournaments using decklists (like the PTQ) and ones without (like FNM drafts) is that once you've built your deck, you can't change it. You can sideboard cards in and out between games, but the first game of every match you play needs to be with the same exact list you marked down on your decklist. Building a sealed deck at a PTQ can be somewhat stressful because you know you'll need to play at least one game per round with that exact list, but that's just more incentive to build the best deck you can!

The top eight will be played out in a single-elimination booster draft, which is exciting to watch... and even more exciting to play in, so hone your limited skills for Saturday!

For more information, check out Gray Matter's website.

==EURO LANDS PROMOTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

PTQs in our area this season:

12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #40

2008-12-03T20:27:00.000-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #40==

December 3rd 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Banned & Restricted List Changes: Or lack there-of.
Hidden Away: Some Standard cards that don't see much play.

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1 PM
Sunday: Chaos Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 2 PM

==BANNED & RESTRICTED LIST CHANGES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

It's December, which means it's that magical time of year... you know, when the new banned and restricted list changes come out, just like it does three other times a year. But it seems Wizards of the Coast isn't quite in a festive mood just yet, and hasn't left us any freshly wrapped presents underneath the banhammer tree. True, there's a bunch of changes to formats no one plays, like the Magic Online formats Pauper, Prismatic, and "100 Card Singleton/Commander" (a silly little format made to emulate our beloved Elder Dragon Highlander using MTGO-ready cards and rules that don't make Magic Online programmers cry in their sleep.), but none to any paper format.

This was to be expected with Standard. Even though some may find the format boring right now, especially with a little over two months until the release of the next Standard-legal set, it's a healthy format, with no particularly broken cards. There's powerhouses that fit in many decks like Cryptic Command, and cards that make players cringe when they play against them such as Bitterblossom, but nothing bannable. If Tarmogoyf wasn't banned, these cards surely don't warrant it.

Extended was the biggest surprise to many, but the fact that nothing from the Elves! would be banned until after Worlds was spoiled way before the announcement. Wizards is making its Christmas gift list late this year, and changing the schedule for B&R updates to accommodate problems that reveal themselves during Worlds. Well, I'm sure that's not the only reason. Beginning immediately, these updates will happen on the 20th of March, June, September, and December, give or take a day or two if the 20th is on a weekend or holiday. So on December 19th, Wizards will make its final decision on whether or not to do anything about the Elves! deck that may or may not dominate Extended events at Worlds, and hopefully save us from all-Elves-all-the-time at Extended PTQs starting in January.

Legacy and Vintage are fairly healthy, and Wizards already took care of banning Time Vault before the card was even broken. Many players expected Wizards to further fiddle with the blue draw spells in Vintage, and it doesn't feel like a B&R update unless Gush's unrestricted/restricted/banned status is toggled. Like Extended, one or both of the Eternal formats will probably get updates towards the end of the month.

There is one change to care about before the "real" update happens, and that's in Elder Dragon Highlander. Time Vault is now banned in EDH, which is to be expected. EDH uses a card pool similar to Legacy and Vintage, and it's a much slower format than either of them, so it's understandable that players had more of a chance to set up abusive combos involving the newly errated card. Banning Time Vault means EDH players will have to rely on the more difficult (and therefore more fun) to set up combos to frustrate their opponents.

We've got nineteen days until the next update, so it's not that long to wait.

==HIDDEN AWAY==
Author: Brian Paskoff

It's no secret that I have some strange aversion to constructed Magic that doesn't involve hundred card singleton decks, but every once in a while I get the urge to start thinking up decklists, and I break out the binders and see what I can come up with. There are 1,481 cards in Standard right now, and even with that low number, only a small number are actually used. There are plenty of good cards that sit in binders and boxes, collecting dust because they're deemed unworthy to appear in a Standard decklist. But if you enjoy thinking up rogue decks, let's take a look at some cards that, although good, don't see a lot of play right now... and the reasons behind their solitary life. I'm thinking about making this a regular column, so I'm only doing a few cards at a time.

Doran, the Siege Tower
Doran was really, really good for a long time. "Rock" decks had reared their heads in Standard over and over, especially before Shards of Alara tore Tarmogoyf out of the format. Even then, the Doran decks didn't lose much, as they still had Thoughtseize, Profane Command, Chameleon Colossus, and even Bitterblossom to replace Goyf in the two-drop slot. A (technically) 5/5 on turn two or three spelt trouble for a lot of decks.
Why it's not played: Doran appeared in a handful of States/Champs top 8 decklists, but very few. Doran is one of those cards that requires a whole deck to be built around it, and the Rock archetype is traditionally a mid-range aggro deck, which most players feel is too slow for the metagame.

Oversoul of Dusk
It has protection from the three colors with traditionally the most dangerous removal spells, and it's a 5/5 for 5. Faeries can't touch it at all, and without a hand full of Cryptic Commands set on tap, have been known to scoop if Oversoul can stick to the table long enough to attack. It still shows up in Kithkin builds... though very rarely.
Why it's not played: Blue, black, and red are dangerous, but now white's getting in on the removal action, and Oversoul of Dusk can easily be taken out by Oblivion Ring. If the threat of removal isn't enough, Oversoul requires a very specific manabase to thrive, and only a dedicated green and/or white deck with no Mutavaults can handle casting it reliably... and there aren't too many of those. Even Toast doesn't want it, as green and white aren't usually high on the manabase priority.

Pithing Needle
The Needle was a hot card back when Kamigawa block was Standard, shutting down everything from Sensei's Divining Top to Umezawa's Jitte. When it was announced that Pithing Needle was being reprinted in Tenth Edition, prices shot up, and everyone scoured stores and trade binders searching for the card. But shortly after it became Standard-legal again, Pithing Needle's price dropped back down, and the card went right back into those trade binders.
Why it's not played: Because you're crazy, all of you! Nah I'm just kidding, you're cool. But seriously, Pithing Needle makes a great sideboard card. With planeswalkers popping up in more and more decks, it's only a matter of time before the ultimate one-mana answer to them sees play again.

Stoic Angel
Lightning Angel was a really good card a few sets ago, and Stoic Angel is clearly modeled after it. But despite numerous attempts to make it fit, only a fringey Bant Aggro deck that only made the playoffs at some smaller States plays it. What's not good about keeping aggro decks tapped down? Stoic Angel was expected to be a breakout star of Shards of Alara, and for a while, everyone was clamoring to get their hands on a playset.
Why it's not played: Stoic Angel is good against Kithkin as long as you can keep O-Rings and Unmakes away, but it's simply not that threatening against Faeries (which will counter it or kill it easily enough) or Toast, which doesn't play enough creatures to care. And even though Stoic Angel limits the number of creatures that can untap, it doesn't take it away entirely, letting bigger threats like Chameleon Colossus and Cloudthresher through.

Troll Ascetic
It'll always be a highly-valued card, but the unkillable Troll Ascetic might as well be dead. It's a 3/2 for 3 that can survive nearly anything as long as you have the mana to regenerate it, and a Troll Ascetic with a Loxodon Warhammer on it will always inspire fear in any opponent's heart.
Why it's not played: Kitchen Finks. It's another 3/2 for 3, with a slightly more flexible mana cost and a comes-into-play effect that makes you not care if it dies. Combine that with Infest, a popular sideboard card that kills Troll Ascetic just as easily as Damnation did, and suddenly Troll Ascetic looks a lot more fragile.

==EURO LANDS PROMOTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

PTQs in our area this season:

12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #39

2008-11-27T20:39:00.000-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #39==

November 26th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Chaos Draft
Euro Lands Promotion: Buy a box at Brothers Grim, get some pretty lands!
Way of the Wurm: A guest article from David "The Wurm" Drebsky!
Guest Articles: Islandhome is once again accepting guest articles, so send 'em in!

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1 PM
Sunday: Chaos Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 2 PM

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Also John Madonia would like to state that this Saturday at FNC is "Dress for Success" day, and the best dressed will get free entry into the tournament for some reason, so get out your suit and ties!

==EURO LANDS PROMOTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==CHAOS DRAFT==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Sundays at Brothers Grim are the perfect days to try new things; there's no big tournament going on anywhere really, so we usually try to do a Chaos Draft. In a normal draft, everyone gets the same amount of product, usually three packs of Shards since that's the newest set. But in a Chaos Draft, everyone gets something different. Sometimes we throw a bunch of packs into a bag and let people pick them out one by one, so that no two players have the same product - and usually, no two packs are even alike. Some people don't like the idea of drafting and getting cards they won't ever play with, which is why sometimes we do a Standard Chaos Draft where all the packs are from sets that are legal in the current Standard format.

Drafting the same thing over and over again gets kind of stale, which is why Chaos Drafts are so exciting. Even though sets in different blocks each have their own unique themes, every set since Mirage has been designed with limited play in mind, so each set is guaranteed to have the staple cards you need for your draft deck. Look at any set and you'll see a good mix of bomby creatures, removal spells, enchantment/artifact hate, etc. Sets in concurrent blocks tend to overlap more than ones released further apart, as Wizards takes care to make sure there's a lot of synergy in Standard. For instance, at the Chaos Draft this past weekend I found some great synergy between persist creatures and Bone Splinters - I could just weaken my creature instead of removing it from play altogether, while still getting rid of my opponent's creature. And of course there's lots of synergy between the Lorwyn and Shadowmoor mini-blocks, as all of the tribes from Lorwyn/Morningtide are represented in Shadowmoor/Eventide... and some of them even make an appearance in Shards of Alara! And don't forget Eventide's Mimics and Hatchlings, which go great with Shards of Alara's tri-colored cards. So what usually happens during a Chaos Draft is that you'll start to notice things about cards that you never thought of playing with together before.

Here's my Chaos Draft deck from this past Saturday, so you can see some of the synergies available between sets. We used only Standard-legal sets, and let everyone pick their own packs, with the catch that they couldn't pick the same set twice. I chose Shards-Morningtide-Eventide, and ended up with this:

CREATURES:

Blister Beetle (2x)
Bog-Strider Ash
Carrion Thrash
Harvest Gwyllion
Hatchet Bully
Lys Alana Bowmaster
Moonglove Changeling (2x)
Rendclaw Trow
Scuzzback Marauders
Smouldering Butcher
Vein Drinker
War-Spike Changeling
Winnower Patrol (3x)

SPELLS:

Bone Splinters
Eyeblight's Ending
Obelisk of Jund
Pack's Disdain
Jund Charm
Violet Pall

LANDS:

7 Forest
3 Mountain
8 Swamp

With ten ways to hit kinship with Winnower Patrol in play, I was guaranteed to... well, never ever hit ever. But that's just my horrible luck; I don't think I've ever hit on kinship cards, even when drafting straight-up Lorwyn/Morningtide. Even though Lorwyn's creature types don't extend into Shards of Alara with the exception of Elves and Goblins, all of Morningtide's classes are well represented on Alara. Carrion Thrash was my only Warrior, though to be honest most of the Shards packs were a little thin in good creatures this draft, at least by the time they got to me. I did manage to pick up a Bone Splinters, which as I said went well with my persisting dudes, and a Jund Charm, which goes well in decks that play black, red, and green, or can splash for Jund Charm.

If you want to come check out this format, stop by Brothers Grim on Sundays! The entry fee is $13, same as any other draft, unless we happen to be using some crazy old packs like Urza's Legacy or something, which happens very rarely.

==WAY OF THE WURM==
Author: David "The Wurm" Drebsky

The Kithkin Concept

Many of you across Long Island have faced off against me in Type 2 and stared down the deck I have come to refer to as "The Legendary Kithkins." Originally when I built this deck, it was a Kithkin soldier deck based on the concept of Cenn's Tactician, Field Marshall, Mirror Entity, Preeminent Captain, Mutavault, Ballyrush Banneret, etc. Obviously it has evolved a great deal since then, particularly since the advent of Mirrorweave. The deck as I now play it has had very few modifications since Block season, with the bulk of the changes being in the sideboard. To date, the deck has taken down such players as Jon Finkel, Zvi Moshowitz, Rob Seder, and John Madonia (formerly ranked #1 in New York).

Having seen more than a few of my peers take a stab at building the Kithkin deck, I would like to share my full decklist with sideboard, and explain how to properly sideboard against the most popular decks in the format, and go into why I reject certain sideboard choices. I do not claim to be the definitive voice of Kithkin advocates, but I believe I have played the deck long enough to justify the claim that I know what I'm talking about.

Below is the list of my current Kithkin build. This is a complete custom build. No other Kithkin deck looks exactly like it, and its success speaks for itself.

I. The Deck

Land:

14x Plains
3x Mutavault
4x Rustic Clachan
4x Windbrisk Heights

Creatures:

4x Figure of Destiny
4x Goldmeadow Stalwart
4x Knight of the Meadowgrain
4x Wizened Cenn
2x Mirror Entity
2x Wilt-Leaf Liege
4x Cloudgoat Ranger

Other Spells:

2x Surge of Thoughtweft
4x Spectral Procession
3x Unmake
2x Mirrorweave

Sideboard:

2x Ajani Goldmane (Kithkin, Merfolk, sometimes Quick N' Toast, or any deck that runs a lot of aggro weenie creatures)
4x Burrenton Forge-Tender (Red Deck Wins, Quick N' Toast)
3x Oblivion Ring (Faeries, Merfolk, Elves b/c of Chameleon Colossus and Garruk, R/G/B tokens, Reveillark, or any deck that runs big creatures or a lot of planeswalkers)
2x Stillmoon Cavalier (Kithkin, Faeries, Mono Black Control)
2x Wilt-Leaf Liege (Reveillark, Kelpie, sometimes Quick N' Toast if they run Esper Charm)
2x Reveillark (Red Deck Wins, Quick N' Toast, Reveillark or any deck that runs a lot of mass removal)

II. Controversial Tech

Most Kithkin decks consistently reject Surge of Thoughtweft and Mirror Entity... I consider these good tech and they have bailed me out of a lot of close calls.

Surge gives the deck card draw and an extra unexpected combat trick, both of which give the deck teeth. White almost never gets card draw and sometimes the card you draw off the Surge will win you the game (or at least fix your draw), and instant speed pump can be priceless in much the same way that Rustic Clachan and Windbrisk Heights help further that goal.

Mirror Entity is an extra win condition almost by himself. Side ME out against any deck that runs Sower of Temptation, though. Usually if they try and steal him, you will have 3 basic options...(1) pay 0 mana with his activated ability and "wrath" the field in response, killing everything on your side of the field and fizzling the steal trigger (obviously not good for you, but better than letting opponent get control of a creature that will win them the game), (2) let them steal Entity, then Unmake the Sower after resolution (assuming you are lucky enough to have Unmake in hand), (3) let them steal Entity because you will win anyway (generally only when opponent is on low life and/or you have superior board position and them having control of Entity is not a big deal). Entity is the weakest link in the deck, you won't use him often...but the point is, if he sticks, the opponent is upset. And nothing is better to pop out of Heights than this guy...not even Mirrorweave. Just ask Jim Chianese about that one.

Some decks are phasing out Mirrorweave and Wilt-Leaf Liege...I don't really get the point, each of these cards is extremely powerful and a major asset to the deck. Simply put, Mirrorweave allows you to win games you're supposed to lose and come back out of nowhere or completely disrupt the opponent's combat phase. The Liege is a beater and a pumper and with the advent of new discard tech like Blightning and especially Esper Charm, this guy is truly king. In short, I don't believe either of these cards should ever leave the deck in its present form.

Also, the Wilt-Leaf vs. Thistledown debate...I'll be brief here, but simply put, us Kithkin players have learned from Block season and beyond that Wilt-Leaf is unquestionably superior to Thistledown. A few reasons why...he resists Firespout and most burn spells...he's a better target for Mirrorweave...he resists discard and can be played for free as a "must" effect if opponent forces him out of your hand. He's not a Kithkin and he doesn't have flash. So what? He's a threat by himself...as a 4/4 for 4, he's a must deal with. Thistledown costs the same...and is a wimp.

III. Rejected Tech

Some cards simply don't need to be used even though they are sick on paper. I reject Ranger of Eos as feasible tech; it is an okay card, nothing special. The main reason is that the 4-drop spot is dominated by Mirrorweave and Wilt-Leaf Liege and you usually want to side in Ajani Goldmane against the decks that would require bringing in the Ranger (like Quick N' Toast). The card is simply unnecessary and it doesn't further the cause of token overwhelm which is the real heart of the deck.

I also don't like Oversoul of Dusk; the card is good, but expensive and not always relevant. Yes, it's game-breaking against Mono Red but that deck is our easiest match-up and we can win without spending 5 mana on a card that can't even block Demigod of Revenge. Yes, it's good against Faeries but they can still tap it down with Cryptic Command and we simply don't need this giant win-more beatstick. We win in numbers. If we wanted big guys, we'd be playing Thoughtweft Trio.

Thirdly, Wispmare...this card hits basically 2 things, Bitterblossom and other Oblivion Rings. We don't need this against Faeries, half the time they side Bitterblossom out against us game 2 and 3 (bad idea on their part, the card is ALWAYS good against us), and Oblivion Ring speaks for itself as strictly more wide-reaching tech. Other O-Rings we can O-Ring ourselves, or just ignore. We throw out so many things that a few O-Rings shouldn't be anything we're afraid of.

Lastly, Elspeth, Knight-Errant. I'm not going to bash this card, it's actually extremely good but I have found few situations where I would rather not just play Ajani Goldmane. The card is strictly better for this deck and believe me, the opponent is more scared of Ajani than they are of Elspeth. We don't need more tokens, we have enough dudes that fly, and the opponent should be dead long before we would make our non-planeswalker permanents indestructible.

IV. Using Mirrorweave

Just a short explanation here on using Mirrorweave (it's an intricate card, obviously, with a crazy amount of rulings, which I would suggest reading up on), as some people I've watched consistently try to target Wizened Cenn or a Liege and just get in for ridiculous amounts of damage. While this is a good strategy, Mirrorweave is actually the most versatile card in the deck and you must try to get the most out of it. It rarely should be a "dead card" and sometimes the best way to use it is defensively.

Let the opponent swing, make your blocks, and then Mirrorweave one of the weakest targets. With a Surge of Thoughtweft in hand, or if you've already put counters on your guys a la Ajani Goldmane, you'll generally wipe out the opponent's forces completely if it was an alpha strike.

Also, very important...with Figure of Destiny, you can select it as a target, then make pumps if you have mana open...in many cases, your opponent won't have red or white mana available if you time this correctly (hell, it's even easier if they can't produce those colors in the first place) and this will give you a big advantage in combat. Plus, any guys you pump while they are Figures will stay pumped-up Figures when the Mirrorweave wears off. Thanks, layering rules!

One final thing, the timing of Mirrorweave is important. You don't always just let the opponent declare blockers or declare attackers and then use it before damage. Sometimes you want to use it before either declaration occurs (either due to triggers, strategic purposes, or some other reason). The point, look at the field and always consider the implications of your choice.

V. Sideboard Choices

What do you do about the sideboard? What comes in? What goes out? Read and learn what I consider to be the optimal choices against the most popular decks in the current format.

You're facing Red Deck Wins:

+ 4 Burrenton Forge-Tender
+ 2 Reveillark

- 4 Goldmeadow Stalwart
- 1 Mirror Entity
- 1 Mirrorweave

You're facing Faeries:

+ 3 Oblivion Ring
+ 2 Stillmoon Cavalier

- 1 Mirrorweave
- 2 Mirror Entity
- 1 Spectral Procession
- 1 Cloudgoat Ranger

You're facing Kithkin:

+ 2 Ajani Goldmane
+ 1 Stillmoon Cavalier
+ 1 Oblivion Ring

- 1 Mirrorweave
- 1 Cloudgoat Ranger
- 1 Spectral Procession
- 1 Plains

You're facing Quick N' Toast:

This one is tough, as there are several variants on the five-color control concept. This one addresses the "classic" choice.

+ 4 Burrenton Forge-Tender
+ 1 Ajani Goldmane
+ 2 Reveillark

- 4 Goldmeadow Stalwart
- 1 Mirrorweave
- 1 Mirror Entity
- 1 Cloudgoat Ranger

You're facing Doran or Elves:

+ 3 Oblivion Ring
+ 1 Ajani Goldmane

- 2 Unmake
- 1 Mirrorweave
- 1 Mirror Entity

You're facing Merfolk:

+ 2 Ajani Goldmane
+ 1 Oblivion Ring

- 2 Mirror Entity
- 1 Mirrorweave

You're facing Mono Black Control:

+ 2 Stillmoon Cavalier
+ 1 Reveillark
+ 1 Wilt-Liege Liege

- 2 Mirror Entity
- 1 Mirrorweave
- 1 Cloudgoat Ranger

You're facing Reveillark:

+ 2 Wilt-Leaf Liege
+ 2 Reveillark

- 2 Mirror Entity
- 1 Mirrorweave
- 1 Cloudgoat Ranger

VI. Closing Comments

The rest of my secrets you will have to figure out for yourself. I hope this Kithkin building/playing tutorial has been of help to some of you aspiring Kithkin players, or if you are on the other side of the field, to understand some of our thinking and get better in fighting against this extremely powerful aggro deck. There are literally a wealth of Kithkin builds, and many are splashing other colors. You may want to try looking at some of those. So far, splashing red or splashing black seem to be the best options. But I still stay true to mono white.

This isn't the perfect build for everyone. You have to play what you feel comfortable with. I like combat tricks and surprises (as anyone who has ever seen/heard me play Windbrisk Heights knows) over straight token overwhelming, and this build reflects that idea. That's all for now. See you all on the battlefield.

~ David "The Wurm" Drebsky

==GUEST ARTICLES==
Author: Brian Paskoff

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

PTQs in our area this season:

12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #38

2008-11-19T20:37:00.001-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #38==

November 19th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Weekend Tournament Report
News: A bunch of news bites that wouldn't fit anywhere else.
EDH: A peek at one of my newest decks to help you build your own!

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC ($5 entry) @ 1 PM
Sunday: Casual Day at Brothers Grim @ 2 PM

==WEEKEND TOURNAMENT REPORT==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Before we begin, a fond farewell to our foreign friend Jaroslav Nachtigall, who will be returning to his homeland of the Czech Republic, a mystical land full of eggs and zero Chinese buffets, if I've understood his stories well enough. Jaroslav played Merfolk and split in the finals with Michael Bauer's homebrew Elf Ball concoction, posing for a final picture with both of FNC's belts before heading off for a goodbye dinner at the Chinese buffet. Jaroslav may play one last US tournament at the Philadelphia PTQ this weekend (an event I'm sadly not planning on attending), but of course the last tournament he played in that mattered was FNC's last weekend. Good luck in the Czechleslovokian tournaments, Jaroslav!

John Madonia ended his long-time winning streak on Saturday by losing to David "The Wurm" Drebsky in an intense battle for the ages. Madonia played Merfolk in the event, lamenting over a round one bye, winning his next round, and losing to Wurm's pesky Kithkin deck in the third round.

Speaking of people we'll not see again for a while, Dave Porter, fresh off a recent retirement, came to Grim on Friday night and decided to play in the FNM booster draft, where he used the interesting strategy of drafting a two-color deck in this three-color format. Dave drafted straight up red/black, splashing green only for a single Sprouting Thrinax. Dave snagged every unearth creature he could, combining them with a pair of Bone Splinters among other removal spells. The expendable creatures were hard to remove, and Dave's deck served as a red/black weenie deck with Scourge Devils for alpha strike power. He split with Dean Duprez in the finals, whose drafting of Necrogenesis and Relic of Progenitus made it difficult for Dave's deck for it to do what it needed to, leading to an unintentional draw in an earlier round when neither's deck could win.

It seemed like the new big thing at FNC was Elf-Ball, with many players trying to port the Extended deck into Standard with mixed results. Michael Bauer and Jim Chianese both made it into the top eight with the deck. Although it lacks the massive draw power of Glimpse of Nature, the Standard versiono of Elves! still has draw in the form of Manamorphose, Elvish Visonary, and even a blue splash for Distant Melody. The deck could win with either a swarm of Elves or a huge Roar of the Crowd.

==NEWS!==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Don't forget, there's only one month until Brothers Grim's Mox Tournament! Make sure to playtest hard, because the competition for a shiny new old Mox Emerald will be intense for sure.

Thanks to an accidental screw-up at WotC's FNM distribution center, I received twice the number of Isochron Scepter promos I was supposed to. After contacting Wizards, they told me I could distribute the extras however I wanted at sanctioned tournaments. So, I've got a whole bunch to give out, way more than the eight I need for the two remaining FNMs this month. I'll be giving a bunch of them (and other foils!) out at Grim's Mox Tournament next month, but that still leaves me with extras... so I'll be giving some out at every sanctioned tournament I run.

My newest Cranial Insertion article went up on Monday, so go check it out!

There's a sealed PTQ this weekend in Philly, and although I won't be going, there's lots of our readers who are, so good luck everyone!

==EDH==
Author: Brian Paskoff

FNC is holding an EDH league thing on Friday nights, and while I unfortunately can't attend (I'll be at FNM at Grim on Friday), this combined with the recent EDH article on the official Magic site has gotten a lot of readers asking me for tips on building an EDH deck. So I thought I'd share one of my current EDH projects, Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper.

The idea for the deck came about when I noticed that my two "complete" - as far as an EDH deck can be complete - decks, Wort the Raidmother and Grand Arbiter Augustin IV, had no black in them. I had experimented with a mono-black Oona deck, using Extraplanar Lens and Gauntlet of Power to generate tons of mana, but that didn't work out too well - it was too fragile to counterspells and especially artifact hate. Green/black has always been a favorite of mine, so I tried a Savra, Queen of the Golgari deck. I used Grave Pact and lots of sac outlets to make sure my opponent had no creatures on the board, but I ran into a problem - some of the best spells that deal with sacrificing, reanimating, and swarms of tokens were in red, and I didn't have access to them. So then I settled on Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper, and came up with this list:

Creatures:
Deranged Hermit
Eternal Witness
Fleshbag Marauder
Genesis
Greater Gargadon
Indrik Stomphowler
Loaming Shaman
Marsh Flitter
Murderous Redcap
Mycoloth
Nantuko Husk
Nezumi Graverobber
Phyrexian Ghoul
Phyrexian Plaguelord
Sakura-Tribe Elder
Savra, Queen of the Golgari
Shriekmaw
Siege-Gang Commander
Silverglade Elemental
Solemn Simulacrum
Sprouting Thrinax
Stalking Vengeance
Sylvan Safekeeper
Symbiotic Wurm
Thelonite Hermit
Wickerbough Elder
Withered Wretch
Woodfall Primus
Yavimaya Elder

Spells:
Ashnod's Altar
Bitter Ordeal
Chord of Calling
Corpse Dance
Death Cloud
Dread Return
Fecundity
Fires of Yavimaya
Grave Pact
Greater Good
Harmonize
Harrow
Hull Breach
Kodama's Reach
Krosan Grip
Life from the Loam
Makeshift Mannequin
Natural Order
Pernicious Deed
Phyrexian Altar
Profane Command
Putrefy
Regrowth
Sensei's Divining Top
Skullclamp
Sol Ring
Sprout Swarm
Sudden Death
Torrent of Souls
Vicious Shadows

Lands:
8 Forest
2 Mountain
7 Swamp
Badlands
Barren Moor
Blood Crypt
Dust Bowl
Fire-Lit Thicket
Forgotten Cave
Gilt-Leaf Palace
Golgari Rot Farm
Graven Cairns
Jund Panorama
Karplusan Forest
Llanowar Wastes
Overgrown Tomb
Pendelhaven
Savage Lands
Stomping Ground
Sulfurous Springs
Tainted wood
Tranquil Thicket
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Vesuva

Basically, the theme of the deck is to sac creatures as often as possible for big results. Like decks in any other format, this one doesn't have just one way to win. There's numerous ways to make lots of things die in a turn, so Bitter Ordeal can strip an opponent's deck of win conditions. I don't like using the card in multiplayer games, because searching a single deck for each gravestorm copy can cause the game to come to a screeching halt for minutes. In fact, after my first multiplayer experience at GP Montreal, I swore I'd never use the card in a multiplayer game again; it causes everyone to want to take a break while you riffle through everyone's libraries.

The Shards of Alara junk rare Vicious Shadows is particularly devastating in this deck. If an opponent has any cards in hand, I should be able to sacrifice enough creatures in a turn to kill them. Hard-to-pull-off combos are a staple of EDH deckbuilding; lots of times deckbuilders will include cards just because they think "Wouldn't it be cool if I had this and this and this in play, and did this?" It's the same thinking that drives casual players to build decks, and EDH is a Timmy's paradise. I've had games where I've had out an Ashnod's Altar, Woodfall Primus, and a flipped Nezumi Graverobber, and could sac the Primus to the Altar twice, and then pay B to reanimate the Primus and start the whole thing over, destroying two non-land permanents in the process. It's a lot of setup, but isn't "B: Destroy two target non-land permanents" worth it? Never think an idea is too crazy to try to fit into an EDH deck, because even in a singleton 100-card deck, or especially in one, weird things can happen.

One of the biggest cards of the deck is Symbiotic Wurm. There's tons of synergy with sac outlets there, and he, along with smaller cousin Sprouting Thrinax, can generate some massive card advantage. Very often I'll sac him to something like Phyrexian Altar, and use the mana from that to reanimate him with one of my many reanimation spells, and sac him again. This can draw lots and lots of cards with Fecundity, generate lots of mana with Phyrexian Altar and Ashnod's Altar, and put a lot of tokens into play for swinging with Fires of Yavimaya.

Sticking to your theme is important. Lots of players tell me they start building an EDH deck, and then realize they're thirty-something cards over the limit. The best way to narrow things down to 100 cards is to cut out anything that doesn't fit the theme of the deck, no matter how good it may seem otherwise. I once tried to fit in Molten Disaster, Myojin of Night's Reach, and Akroma, Angel of Fury, among others, but they didn't fit the theme of sacrificing creatures for big effects, so out they went.

I hope this little peek into my mind helps you build your EDH deck. I won't be at FNC on Fridays, but any time you find me at either FNC or Grim, I'm usually up for a game!

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

PTQs in our area this season:

11/22 - Philadelphia, PA
12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #37

2008-11-12T17:09:00.001-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #37==

November 12th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Promo-rama: Wizards is upping the foils!
States 2008 Wrap-Up

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: FNC Grand Opening Sealed Deck ($30 entry) at FNC @ 1 PM
Sunday: Booster Draft at Brothers Grim @ 2 PM

I have some extra foils to give out for Friday's FNM at Brothers Grim. And good ones too, no Icatian Javelineers or Fiery Tempers! What are they? Well you'll have to come play to find out!

==PROMO-RAMA==

Wizards is going promo crazy! Not only do you get FNM promos just for playing (this month's is Isochron Scepter; that's right, come play FNM at Brothers Grim and you could win a foil alternate art Isochron Scepter!), but Wizards is also holding a special deal for the holidays. If you play in at least two FNM tournaments between November 14th and December 12th, you'll get a special foil Hypnotic Specter in the mail in your next Magic Player Rewards mailing. But to qualify, you must be signed up for MPR, so go on and register!

==STATES 2008 WRAP-UP==

States is over, and it was intense! We had 134 players total, just barely enough for eight rounds. Players from all over New York showed up to compete for prizes and receive the coveted Dauntless Dourbark promo (not a single copy of which made it into any of the 134 decklists present, oddly enough). The competition was fierce, and the metagame wasn't quite so diverse, but many of our hometown heroes perservered despite the intense competition.

Michael Evans went 6-2, just edging out of the top 8 in eleventh place. Evans was playing an Elf deck very similar to this one, which won Gamingetc's $3,000 tournament last month. There were a few tweaks to the deck, notably the presence of only one copy of Twilight Mire... simply because he couldn't find another one in time. His only loses were to a Faerie deck in an early round, a hard but not unwinnable matchup, and a seventh round loss to a 5-Color Control deck that was specifically tuned to beat aggro decks. The only other Elf deck I saw with a similar build wound up in 113th place, so it was either the missing Twilight Mires or Evans's play skill that propelled him to the top 16... and I'll leave jokes about which one it was up to the professionals.

Rogue decks at States were few and far between, a stark contrast to past State Championships, though I'm not sure of the reason for the change. I saw only one "Fellowship of the Rings" decks (the sixteen Planeswalker list), one tuned up Naya theme deck, and a mono-white Light from Within deck, and Omar Khater's Worm Harvest deck, among the handful of rogue decks in attendance. The star rogue deck of the show was Matt Brocking's Sanity Grinding deck, which FNCers know from his astounding record with the deck at Saturday events. Matt used Sanity Grinding combined with a deck full of five-mana Spirit Avatars, Memory Plunders, Cryptic Commands, and Oona to maximize his chance to grind his opponent's deck for huge numbers. In one late round, I walked by just in time to see him mill for 38, hitting two Godhead of Awes, a Ghastlord of Fugue, Avatar of Fealty, Overbeing of Myth, Memory Plunder, Oona, and two other Sanity Grindings, with a single Island as his only miss. Matt finished in 36th place overall with this list:

GRIND U

4 Dominus of Fealty
4 Ghastlord of Fugue
4 Godhead of Awe
1 Oona, Queen of the Fae
4 Overbeing of Myth
4 Boomerang
4 Cryptic Command
3 Evacuation
4 Sanity Grinding
2 Twincast
3 Jace Beleren
19 Island
4 Shelldock Isle

Sideboard:
4 Plumeveil
2 Vendilion Clique
1 Evacuation
3 Memory Plunder
4 Negate
1 Twincast

Another rogue deck that did fairly well was Mike Flores's RGB Ramp deck featuring cards like Farhaven Elf, Primal Command, and Broodmate Dragon. None of those cards see much play in the competitive tournament scene, but Flores brought back to old mana ramp deck that was thought to be dead after the rotation of Time Spiral block and Coldsnap. I didn't get a close look at the deck, but it's sure to be a popular archetype in the next few weeks. He finished in 14th place with a 6-2 record.

I hadn't been to the new Neutral Ground in months; previous Gray Matter events had been in held in the backup location, Fight House, while Neutral Ground underwent renovation. There were more lights in the bigger end of the room, more tables, and most importantly of all, air conditioning! I'm sure everyone is very thankful for that last one.

The top 8 was definitely not diverse at all: Three Faerie decks, two Kithkin, two 5-Color, and one fringe-y Mono-Red deck splashing black for Blightning. New York is a very competitive area and many players tend to play proven builds - not a bad thing, but it makes for a fairly boring top 8. I didn't stick around to see who won, anticipating the long train ride home after an exhausting, but fun day of judging.

I managed to snag the final standings as the top 8 was starting, so here's how some of our dear readers did at States (apologies to anyone I might have glanced over):

11th - Michael Evans
27th - Jim Chianese
36th - Matt Brocking
37th - Michael Lapine
58th - Anthony James
59th - Tanner Nowicki
85th - Omar Khater
92nd - Robert Towers
98th - Lee Cruceta
102nd - J.R. Tolentino
114th - Chris Neilsen
122th - Mr. Wiggles
126th - Lisa Mercogliano

Congradulations to everyone who came out and competed in the 2008 State Championships!

==CRANIAL INSERTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

New Cranial Insertion from me on Monday! I know it's earlier than I said, but the schedule got switched around a bit. So luckily enough, I get the first post-States article (the one two days after States was written before States took place), so it'll include all your questions from Saturday!

==RULES CORNER==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Q. My opponent has a Gaddock Teeg and a Reveillark in play. If I I wrath the board, can he bring Teeg back?
A. Yes! ...But Teeg's in play, so you couldn't play Wrath of God to begin with. This is one of those things where a judge might answer differently at Regular REL than he would at Competitive or Professional RELs. It's very dangerous for a judge to answer questions that aren't directly asked; in this case, the question was "Can Reveillark bring Teeg back with its trigger if both die at the same time?", not "Can I play Wrath of God with Teeg in play?" At a Regular REL tournament like FNM however, a judge might (but doesn't have to) feel inclined to steer the player away from making an illegal play.

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

The next PTQ season kicks off October 4th, and the format is Shards of Alara sealed deck!

December - Mox Tournament at Brothers Grim
This December, Islandhome, in association with Brothers Grim, will be holding a giant Standard tournament. The first place prize will be a Mox Emerald, with many other prizes as well. Side events such as booster drafts and EDH multiplayer games will be held that day too, so keep reading Islandhome for more details!

PTQs in our area this season:

11/22 - Philadelphia, PA
12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #36

2008-11-05T16:55:00.000-05:00

==ISLANDHOME #36==

November 5th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Local News: News about FNC and Brothers Grim you need to know!
Cranial Insertion
PT Berlin Results

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Saturday: State Championships at Neutral Ground, Registration @ 9 AM
Sunday: Booster Draft at Brothers Grim @ 2 PM

I'll be judging States this Saturday, and everyone should be there!

==LOCAL NEWS==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Here's a bunch of information tidbits about FNC and Grim:

Well the new FNC is open, and twenty combatants came to FNC on opening day to duel among the towers of comic book boxes and sealed boxes of Bella Sara cards for the chance at winning some major packs - an entire box was given out for the twelve player sealed tournament, while even more packs were given out for the eight-man single-elimination unsanctioned Standard event! The new store is a much further ride for me (*grumble*), but much bigger. We pretty much have the entire size of the old store, sans-walls, to play in. And even though we'll miss the ices place, there are many other food locations around the new FNC, including a full-fledged deli next door and a nearby bar for all our over-21 readers. I won't be there this Saturday thanks to States, but I was happy that I could be there for the grand opening. Thanks to everyone who came out to see the new store!

FNC will be holding a Timetwister tournament sometime in the near future, so watch for details about that!

Brothers Grim is holding a Mox tournament, with the grand prize being a Mox Emerald. I'm not quite sure of the date yet, but it looks like December 20th or 21st are the best days - let me know which one works for you! The format will be Standard, and of course there will be other side events (EDH anyone?). More details will more than likely be in the next issue of Islandhome, so mark your calendars for next Wednesday!

I'm currently working hard to figure out some fun alternative Magic format events to try out on Sundays, and they'll be announced soon. If anyone has any ideas on alternative formats or fun tournaments, feel free to suggest some! Specifically, I'm looking to start cube drafts (using a different cube each time) as well as bringing Chaos Drafts back to Brothers Grim.

==CRANIAL INSERTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

As everyone knows (or is just finding out if this is your first time getting Islandhome), my first Cranial Insertion article on mtgsalvation.com came out on Monday! Go read it if you haven't - there's twenty two shiny rules questions, including some good information for future reference. The more you know about the rules, the better plays you can make! Unless you're a judge, in which case your play skill is actually inversely proportional to the amount of rules knowledge you have.

==PT BERLIN RESULTS==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Even though we're still in Shards limited season, it's kind of hard to test for a format where your decks are completely unknown before you go in. So, everyone's gearing up for the next big constructed season, and that's Extended season starting in January. With the rotating out of Invasion and Odyssey blocks and Seventh Edition, players were struggling to figure out what to do with the loss of so many cards. Practically every deck got shaken up, with some archetypes disappearing altogether. Pro Tour Berlin was the first major Extended tournament post-rotation, and everyone was looking forward to it, eager to see what the Pros would come up with.

The biggest surprise from the PT was the astounding results of "Elf Ball" decks. Heritage Druid, Birchlore Rangers, Glimpse of Nature, and Nettle Sentinel provide the mana acceleration and card drawing engine necessary to either play a bunch of green spells and fire off a lethal Grapeshot, or massive Predator Dragon, or even the random Brain Freeze. Strangely, this seems to be a twist on a casual Standard deck that didn't make much of a splash in that format. The bulk of the deck is made up of Standard legal cards, the biggest missing pieces being Chord of Calling and Glimpse of Nature. A grand total of six out of the top 8 decks were the Elf-Ball archetype, a staggering number only rivaled by Faeries back at the peak of its popularity. Pro Tour top 8s are usually very diverse, but this deck took the field by storm.

Although Elves made a strong showing in the final tables, the most popular deck of the Pro Tour was Zoo. This wasn't a big surprise to any Magic player who had even a small amount of tournament knowledge, as the lure of Wild Nacatl was too strong for over 25% of the Pros to resist. With Zoo able to play a 2/3 or a 2/2 (that becomes a 3/3 next turn) on turn one, Zoo set the bar for fast aggro decks extremely high. Ethersworn Canonist was another useful card that found its way into many Zoo decks' sideboards, being an excellent storm-combo killer as well as a decent body. Still going with the 2/2s for 2, many builds ran Tidehollow Sculler to limit their opponents' options. One of the biggest things Zoo lost after the rotation was Vindicate, but that was easily replaced by a slightly-less-universal answer: Oblivion Ring. However, Zoo decks were little match for the Elves decks which could win as quickly as turn three, and despite the huge amount of decks at the PT, none of them made it to the top 8.

There's lots of buzz about Elves, but the breakout hit of the Pro Tour was a little deck called "Tezzerator", named for the planeswalker who is the centerpoint of the deck (and I'll let you guess who that is!). The main part of the deck bears some similarity to the Wizard decks of last Extended season. In fact, every creature in the deck is a Wizard: Vendillion Clique to either filter unwanted cards or check out an opponent's hand, Venser for bounce and Riptide Laboratory shennanigans, and Trinket Mage to fetch out Engineered Explosives, Chalice of the Void, Aether and Pyrite Spellbombs, Pithing Needle, Tormod's Crypt, etc. And if Trinket Mage wasn't enough search power, Tezzeret himself can fetch out bigger artifacts such as Vedalken Shackles, Trinisphere, and Ensnaring Bridge.

Faeries made the top 8, though I think it's just because it legally has to make an appearance in the top 8 of every tournament at this point no matter what the format. Extended Faeries has the benefit of having access to all the toys Standard Faeries no longer has, like Ancestral Visions and good two-mana counterspells (and then some!). Umezawa's Jitte replaces Loxodon Warhammer, and lets it pick off pesky Elves, while Riptide Laboratory can do some very mean things with Mistbind Clique and/or Spellstutter Sprite.

To be honest, the lack of Affinity at the PT surprised me, as well as many other people. In the weeks leading up to and immediately after the rotation, there were many players groaning about how Affinity was going to be the dominant deck of the format, since every single one of its core cards was still legal, and it could be backed up by Alara's Master of Etherium. It was widely speculated that Hurkyl's Recall was reprinted in Tenth Edition was a direct attempt by Wizards to give players a fighting chance against the deck. But, Affinity's numbers at the PT were extremely small, perhaps due to the fact that would-be Affinity players were anticipating lots of anti-Affinity sideboard tech. And there were plenty of Katakis, Shattering Sprees, and Ancient Grudges in sideboards.

We still have two months before Extended season, so there's plenty of time for the metagame to change. After a strong finish at a big event, decks tend to get "hated out". With many players anticipating playing many carbon copies of those decks, they'll add things to their sideboards to deal with those archetypes. Expect to see some major changes in these decks by January!

==RULES CORNER==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Q. If I see a player making an illegal play, do I have to report it?
A. It's not just judges who have a responsibility to make sure tournaments run smoothly and fairly - it's also up to you the players to make sure this happens! If you see a player making an illegal play, whether it's playing a spell for the wrong mana or forgetting a trigger, it's your obligation to tell a judge. Don't interrupt the match though, that's Outside Assistance; just quietly find the nearest judge and tell them what you saw.

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

The next PTQ season kicks off October 4th, and the format is Shards of Alara sealed deck!

November 8th - State Champs
States makes a return on November 8th, with a massive Standard tournament in each state! New York's will be at Neutral Ground, as usual. Everyone who enters gets a free foil Dauntless Dourbark, and each player who makes top 8 gets Shards product, a playmat, and the winner gets a plaque and free entry to Gray Matter constructed events for an entire year!

December - Mox Tournament at Brothers Grim
This December, Islandhome, in association with Brothers Grim, will be holding a giant Standard tournament. The first place prize will be a Mox Emerald, with many other prizes as well. Side events such as booster drafts and EDH multiplayer games will be held that day too, so keep reading Islandhome for more details!

PTQs in our area this season:

11/22 - Philadelphia, PA
12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #35

2008-10-29T17:47:00.000-04:00

==ISLANDHOME #35==

October 29th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

FNC Grand Opening
Cranial Insertion
States '08 Metagame Breakdown

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: Spooooooky Halloween FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim ($13 entry) @ 7 PM
Saturday: FNC Grand Opening Sealed Deck ($30 entry) at FNC @ 1 PM
Sunday: Booster Draft at Brothers Grim @ 2 PM

==FNC GRAND OPENING==
Author: Brian Paskoff

FNC is dead! Long live FNC! Sorry.

FNC is reopening its doors at a new location: 19 Udall Road, West Islip. We're going to have a lot more space to play in now, so no one will need to play on counters, and the "bigger boned" players won't need to squeeze in to find places to play. To celebrate the new digs, we're having a FNC Grand Opening Sealed Deck Tournament this weekend! Entry fee is $30, and of course there will be fabulous prizes and stuff to go with it, like a full box of Shards of Alara and a bunch of foils (including Figure of Destiny and Ajani Vengeant promos!) so come and check out the new location!

==CRANIAL INSERTION==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Big announcement! Monday, November 3rd will be my first article for MTGSalvation.com's Cranial Insertion, their weekly rules article. I'll be one of the official writers for it, which means I'll have a new article up there about every three weeks. I'm honored to have gotten selected among all the other candidates who applied, because Cranial Insertion was one of the things that helped me immensely on my way to becoming a judge. Before I took the judge test, I read CI every week, and back-articles as far back as I could. I even contacted Eli Shiffrin, one of the writers and editors of CI, who's become one of my best friends and judge mentors. And now I get to be part of that team! If you're looking to become a judge, or just polish up your rules knowledge, there's few resources out there as good as Cranial Insertion.

Don't worry though, I'll still be bringing you Islandhome every Wednesday as usual! In addition to the questions I get in the CI Mailbag, I'll also be answering the questions YOU send me in my articles, so send them in!

I'd like to thank both Dr. Tom and Urchin, writers of CI who are stepping down for various personal reasons, for writing over the years.

==STATES '08 METAGAME BREAKDOWN==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Next Tuesday is the election, and next Saturday is States. Even if you're not old enough to vote, you can still do your patriotic duty by playing in the 2008 State Championships! It's Standard, a format most if not all of you are familiar with... but States will have some tougher competition than your local tournaments - not because people at FNC, Grim, etc. aren't competitive players, but because there's a wider range of players, decks, and a more competitive atmosphere. I've got some tips to make things go smoother for you. Not just play tips, but tournament tips in general from someone like myself who gets to see the grand-plan of things players don't get to see.

Be very, very careful about foils. Foils have a tendency to warp for any number of reasons: humidity, left out of a sleeve too long, left in a sleeve too long, because you looked at them funny, etc. You can play with foils of course, but I'd advise against it if you have only certain cards foiled. For example, if all your basic lands are foil and no other cards are, this is a problem. If you only have your Cryptic Commands foil, it's a problem too. A good way to test your foils is to shuffle your deck and look at it from all angles. Cut your deck a few times and see if you can cut to your foils; even "most of the time" is bad. This will be an issue with promo Figure of Destinies. Players are frantically searching for non-foil Figures to use in their Standard decks just for this reason.

States will use decklists, and it's been a while since I've talked about those. We judges use decklists at tournaments to make sure everyone's playing a legal deck. Sixty or more cards and a fifteen or zero card sideboard, all of those cards Standard-legal. When you're filling out your decklist, make sure you count the final list at least twice; have a friend verify it if you want. If you make a mistake and leave a card out, it's a game loss - and since we're checking lists during round one, you'll get that game loss at the start of round two. Not good, no matter how you did in round one. Be careful of confusing names on your lists too. There's some leeway on ambiguous card names, but if we can't make a reasonable guess, it's going to make us hunt you down for it. Back in Time Spiral days there were a lot of these problems, like the two Akromas, but there aren't many in current Standard. Still, when in doubt, write the full name of the card! Decklists aren't that scary though, under 5% of decklists come up with a problem.

Now for talking about the actual metagame and not just the meta-metagame! Decklists from tournaments all over are coming in, and it's becoming apparent that the metagame is diverse. The decks that seem to be making top 8s are: 5C Control, Faeries, Kithkin, Mono-Red, 5C Merfolk, Reveillark, Doran, and Elves. That's more or less in tier order, with the most popular and better-performing decks at the start there and the lower tiers towards the end, though not necessarily totally in that order.

5-Color control, i.e. the deck formerly known as "Quick n' Toast" or just "Toast" is by and large the most popular deck right now. Prices of Reflecting Pools and Cryptic Commands are sky-high right now, and will probably stay that way until after States. The deck doesn't need much of an introduction at this point. It sets up in the early game, stabilizes with mass and spot removal, and turns the tide with Cruel Ultimatum and a horde off efficient creatures like Mulldrifter and Kitchen Finks. Expect to play against this a lot at States, where there's a lot of players who can afford the expensive deck. Its main weakness is that it takes a few turns to set up, and because it wins most games by taking a beating and then recovering, it'll stay down if you can beat it in the early-game.

Faeries has replaced Rune Snag and Ancestral Visions with Broken Ambitions and Thoughtseize, and now uses Agony Warp in place of Nameless Inversion. Besides that, it's mostly the same deck as it used to be, sometimes sporting a Loxodon Warhammer, a trick that hasn't been tried since the early days of Faeries. (On a judge-ly note, watch out for players trying to equip their Faeries with a Scion of Oona in play!) Some even use Jace to get better card draw in a pseudo-Phyrexian Arena style. It's still heavily reliant on a turn two Bitterblossom, and still gets overran by a good Kithkin or RDW hand.

Kithkin has made a couple of adjustments to the 5C-dominated metagame. There's less reliance on Mirrorweave and more on global effects like Glorious Anthem, which can combine with Wizened Cenn or another Anthem to put most of the creatures in the deck out of Firespout range, a very important card for the deck to avoid. It still doesn't stop Wrath, but there's not much to be done about that except Reveillark or the old tactic of not over-extending.

Mono-Red or RDW (Red Deck Wins) is the oldest archetype in the game, and doesn't disappoint. Flame Javelin, Incinerate, Lash Out, Figure of Destiny, Boggart Ram-Gang, Demigod of Revenge (let the trigger resolve!) and every other red spell you'd expect is in the deck. Magus of the Moon would make the deck obscenely powerful in the current Reflecting Pool format, but unfortunately without that the deck needs a fast start to beat the overwhelming control decks.

5-Color Merfolk is a relatively new deck, and even though it's not tier 1, it's a strong deck. Even though it's a Merfolk deck in name, while not every creature in it is a Merfolk, every creature is a Wizard. Stonybrook Banneret makes Sage's Dousing a better Mana Leak, makes Nameless Inversion cheaper, and enables a turn three Chameleon Colossus, which is probably the best Merfolk ever printed. Of course, the obligatory playsets of Reflecting Pool and Cryptic Commands makes it one of the more expensive decks in the format, and it has similar trouble against Kithkin and RDW as Faeries does.

Reveillark is a hard deck to play in this format, because relying on five-mana creatures in decks that aren't already putting pressure on the board is hard to do. There's no Momentary Blink or possibility of an infinite combo anymore, so it's partially a reanimator deck now, using creatures such as Tidehollow Sculler, Sower of Temptation, Mulldrifter, and Glen-Elendra Archmage, getting them back via Reveillark or Makeshift Mannequin.

Then there's Doran and Elves, which are basically sprung from the same archetype, Rock. Both decks rely on quick beats backed up by hand disruption like Thoughtseize and/or Tidehollow Sculler in Doran's case. Both decks can put a big threat out on turn two: Either Doran or Wren's Run Vanquisher, and can recover in the late-game with Profane Command. These two decks probably changed the least after the last rotation.

And of course you could always go rogue. States is the tournament many players come to test out their custom creations, such as the Sanity Grinding deck Matt Brocking played last week using all the five-mana blue Avatars from Shadowmoor/Eventide and other blue-heavy spells to make sure he usually hit for over thirty cards with Sanity Grinding.

In closing, if you want to see what you'll be up against next Saturday, take a look at the top 8 decklists from Neutral Ground's anniversary tournament. The decks there are probably going to be the same ones you'll see from most of the players there, almost card for card.

==RULES CORNER==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Q. At our FNM, the draft lands are kindly provided by the store, but some of them are in bad shape from being used so much and being so old. Can I still use them, or do I have to buy sleeves?
A. If your lands are marked, you're going to have to either find lands that aren't marked, or use sleeves. It's nice to share lands, but any card that gets shuffled and played with a lot will be noticeably more worn than the fresh new cards from the packs you just opened. You get a few new fresh lands in the packs in Shards of Alara, but on average you'll only get three - not enough to build a 40-card deck with. Single packs of fifty sleeves are cheap, and will last you many drafts if you're good to them.

Q. My friend was looking at my trade binder the other day for Figure of Destinies, but he didn't want my promo ones because he said he wouldn't be able to use them at States. Is he right?
A. Well, sort of. If all the copies of Figure of Destiny in his deck were foil and nothing else was, that'd be a problem. Foils tend to warp and bend differently than non-foil cards, no matter how careful you are or what kind of sleeves they're in. If you can shuffle a deck and cut to the Figures even "most of the time", that's Marked Cards - Pattern, an automatic Game Loss. It always comes down to the head judge's discretion if he or she determines your cards are marked, but chances are if you suspect they are, then they are. BUT, avoiding foils altogether is a drastic measure! You can avoid Marked Cards penalties by making sure you have a decent distribution of foil and non-foil cards so that when you shuffle, you don't always cut to a foil, and keeping your cards in sleeves when you're not using them - they won't warp noticeably unless they're left out too long. To calm your worries even more, practically everyone has foil promo Figures at tournaments, and 99.5% of them aren't in danger of getting a Game Loss.

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

PTQs in our area this season:

11/22 - Philadelphia, PA
12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #34

2008-10-22T16:43:00.000-04:00

==ISLANDHOME #34==

October 22nd 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

FNC is Moving!
States '08
The Future of Magic
Madonia Minute

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC @ 1 PM
Sunday: Casual Day at Brothers Grim @ 2 PM

==FNC IS MOVING!==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Friendly Neighborhood Comics will be moving to West Islip on November 1st, and to say goodbye to FNC's original location, we're having a huge tournament this weekend. Come down, play for big prizes, and join us in the last tournament at FNC Islip! (As John Madonia IMs me five thousand times a day, "fnc u!")

I'll miss the little store I helped build up over the last two years, from a little store with a half dozen players with 86 card "green decks" to a thriving store with Grand-Prix-top-8 level decks piloted by skilled players, the same ones who two years ago were playing Blaze in their red decks. I don't mean to sound like I'm taking credit for the drastically improved skill level of players (watching me play, you'd think I'd have players still playing giant mono-colored decks) - I'm proud of everyone's effort to be the best player they can be, and this goes for every Islandhome reader. It seems like every once in a while, some new player comes to FNC with a "Pro" deck because they heard FNC was a "kid's store", only to get smashed into the losers' bracket by the skill of the "kids" they thought they were sure to beat.

Hopefully this tradition continues at the new FNC, where the bigger venue and location on a main road will attract many more players. FNC has a casual atmosphere with lots of friendly competition and nice players, and I hope to see everyone there on opening day!

==STATES '08==
Author: Brian Paskoff

In just over two weeks, as we find out who the next President of the United States is (Tarmogoyf '08!), Magic players all over the country will be participating in their state's State Championships! After cancelling one of the most popular annual tournaments, Wizards has caved in to popular demand and has brought back States. A casual-competitive level event, States appeals to everyone, and the fact that there's no Pro Tour invite or large cash prize on the line makes it a much friendlier playing environment than a PTQ.

Entry fee is only $25, and everyone who plays gets a free foil Dauntless Dourbark. I know - not the most exciting card in the world, but it's a collector's item that you can't get anywhere else. In previous years, pre-cancellation and resurrection, Wizards printed a special full-frame chase rare for everyone who placed in the top 8. Because they didn't have time to print a new card after reanimating the State Champs program or some other reason, there's no top 8 promo this time around. Instead, everyone who makes it to the top 8 table gets a Predator Dragon playmat that's sure to raise a hefty price on eBay. The winner of it all though gets a new prize: free entry to all Gray Matter constructed events for an entire year! That's right - you can play in every Gray Matter constructed PTQ for free, with nothing at stake other than your rating and pride!

John Madonia has some ravings about the Standard metagame in his column, but I'll offer some of my limited expertise on constructed right now. I'll go out and say that five-color control decks will be by far the most popular choice, probably rivaling Faeries's showing at some large Standard tournaments pre-Shards rotation. With the best mana fixing ever in Standard (besides Reflecting Pool + City of Brass), Toast decks can play any card they want. The major weakness of the deck is that it relies on big spells, like that oh-so-trendy Cruel Ultimatum. Thanks to lots of mass and spot removal, as well as life gain, Toast can swing back around after being battered down in the early game.

A small percentage of the field will be packing anti-five-color decks. Toast has trouble wth quicker decks that pack counterspells of their own, such as Faeries. That archetype seemed to be dead after it lost Ancestral Visions and Rune Snag, but its good matchup against Toast even without its most powerful spells might give it renewed life... at least until Toast loses popularity.

I'll have more Standard metagame review next week's article, as I expect the majority of the decklists from States to come straight out of this weekend's StarCityGames $5000 tournament this weekend.

==THE FUTURE OF MAGIC==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Welcome to the world of tomorrow! Well, not just yet. It's going to be about three months before we even get a look at a new Magic card, so get used to Shards of Alara. On Monday, Wizards released the official name of the third set in the Alara block: Alara Reborn [ARB]. According to the little bit of information given about it in the press release, Alara Reborn is going to be all about the five Shards coming together to become one world again. As anyone who's remotely interested in the fluff behind the game is aware, Alara block's storyline is about the post-post-apocalyptic plane of Alara after it was torn apart into five different worlds by something called "The Sundering". Conflux, apparently, is all about the five Shards starting to rejoin, as seen in the promotional art on the back of some token/tips cards. That art seems to show Progenitus, the giant hydra god sleeping beneath Naya (see Relic of Progenitus and Keeper of Progenitus), invading Bant and about to enjoy a nice angel food cake.

So what does all this nerdy storyline talk have to do with the game itself? Well, for one thing, it gives us some clues about the theme of the next two sets. Conflux is widely believed to be the "enemy shard" set, just as Eventide mirrored Shadowmoor by switching from allied color pairs to enemy color pairs. Blending the lines between the shards would be a good mechanical way to show the reformation of Alara, and even better, gives us some new colors to work with, such as BGW - Doran colors! However, it'd present some difficulty with limited. Players have already learned that there are two ways to draft Shards of Alara: either stick rigidly within a particular shard, or go four colors with enough mana fixing to make it worthwhile. Introducing enemy shards in the third pack would make it hard for the first option to work, especially if there were the same ratio of good tri-color cards to non-tri-color cards as in Shards. You'd be forced to go at least four colors, or ignore the tri-color stuff entirely.

On the bright side, there are hints of strong "all color" mana fixing in Conflux. Out of the leaked card names, two stand out as possible mana fixers. There's Obelisk of Alara, which if it follows the theme of Shards of Alara's Obelisks, will be a mana fixer. And the generic name tells us it has something to do with adding mana of any color. Then there's Mana Cylix, a one mana artifact reprinted from Planeshift that lets you tap it to filter any color mana into another color. Shards purposely avoided mana fixers that added mana of any color to your mana pool, but with Conflux having at least one such fixer confirmed, you shouldn't be too afraid of being mana screwed in a four or five color deck.

As for Alara Reborn, it's anyone's guess as to what they're going to do with the colors. Will it mix and match color triads from all over the back of the Magic card? Be a four-color or even five-color set? Or do a total 180 and be a strictly old-school-Magic feel set with no multicolored cards whatsoever? The possibilities are wide open, and we'll have to wait until at least late March to find out what Wizards has in store for us, because the set itself will be released April 30th.

After Alara block is all done with, the block code-named Live, Long, and Prosper kicks off with Live, sometime in the fall of 2009, which will give Lorwyn, Morningtide, Shadowmoor, and Eventide the boot out of Standard. But before that, probably in June or July if history is any indication, 11th Edition will be released. 11th Edition will be the smallest core set in Magic's modern history, with only about 229 cards (the final number has yet to be released). 11th Edition may or may not have black borders like 10th; that too has yet to be determined. But the most excitement over 11th Edition comes from speculation over what rare lands will be in the set. The dual lands in core sets are perhaps the most important cards they add to Standard. For a long while now, we've relied on the classic painlands - well, not so much anymore with Vivid lands, Reflecting Pools, and Shadowmoor/Eventide filter lands allowing all five colors of mana to be produced by turn two - but there is a lot of hope that 11th Edition will reprint the shocklands from Ravnica block.

Personally, as someone who played back then (and without the sizeable collection I have now), I'm not looking too much forward to a possible future containing the shocklands as the defacto land in Standard. Standard decks in the Kamigawa/Ravnica and Ravnica/Time Spiral days could cost hundreds of dollars on the manabase alone, with every deck featuring multiple shocklands - some of which cost over twenty dollars! On the other hand, in a much smaller set, shocklands would be easier to obtain than they were back then... but I'd still expect the most popular shocklands to breach the $20 barrier, at least at first.

Whatever new things Magic brings to the table (literally) in the next few years, the game will stay as fun as it's always been. New sets are always exciting, and you'll be cracking packs of Live before you know it!

==MADONIA MINUTE==
Author: John "Metagame" Madonia

I sit amongst the 10,000 or so Big Gulp cups that surround by twin bed as I write to you this October. An autumn night with leaves falling slowly and a brisk wind forcing a light sweatshirt to be worn as a trip to the drug store awaits. I peer out my window and notice a young specimen maybe 19 or 20 years of age, female, jogging to her hearts content as my hearts races yearning to speak to her. She passes by my home each evening around 8:00pm usually in a swift manner with her blond hair waving along as she shirt slowly moves around as each passing step my heart palpitates and hungers for one opportunity to be great and have that courage to go over to her and tell her that she's the most interesting person I've ever met and that I promise not to call her 24/7 and call her self-absorbed. And yet I sit here, yet again with my heart buried in my hands wanting to reach out, but I cannot handle the possible rejection that has hindered my fourfathers (spelled this way on purpose) I cannot bear to hear the words im not going to date you, I will instead continue to play Diablo 2 and wear pleather jackets and one day find that special one that will allow me to take me to a place many men know well, the sushi date 08.

The preceeding paragraph has little to do about Magic but it had sentimental value and needed to be addressed.

Reveillark has been one of my favorite non-blue cards printed in recent memory. The first decks packing this card were built around infinite damage and infinite life-gain. Even the best of players had difficulty piloting this deck and with a near unwinnable game against Faeries, so it feel by the wayside. At the end of the Time Spiral Standard season, the deck made its return as a tempo-based control deck winning various Grand Prix.

I decided to try and look at some cards that could fit well in a Reveillark themed deck. I looked at the current metagame as Five Color (5c), Faeries, Kithkin, Elves, Merfolk and Red based variants. I feel at an average States event that a solid 25-30 percent of the field would be piloting 5C. You need to be able to have a strong matchup against the deck if you have any shot at doing anything this season. The only problem is it's near impossible to fight their spells, as they can play any card in the format. Some of their lists play Cruel Ultimatimum, some have Negate to counteract them. Your best plan at the moment is to fight their mana-base. Although we don't have Magus of the Moon at our disposal, we do have various spells to keep their game in check.

I started building with the core cards:
4x Reveillark
4x Mulldrifter
4x Cryptic Command

Most decks pack these cards in 4-ofs. Mulldrifter is a key creature and reanimator target. Of course any control deck has to pack Cryptic Command.

Utility Creatures:
4x Tidehollow Sculler
4x Fulminator Mage

Anyone that used Mesmeric Fiend knows how good this type of card is. It's Thoughtseize 5-8 in the early game and forces your opponent to waste spot removal on a Grizzly Bear. It's usually never a dead draw, as it's at worst a 2/2 and it also gives information, which when your opponent has card(s) in his hand can be crucial for decision making.

Fulminator Mage plays a similar role to Stone Rain in the old Magnivore style deck. It can severely hurt 5c mana and taking out a stray Mutavault or Windbrisk Heights.

So we have 20 cards, 16 creatures. Other utility cards are crucial to our gameplan. I attempted each Charm with limited successes, except for Esper Charm and Bant Charm. I decided on 3 Esper Charm and 2 Bant Charm as I feel the early Bitterblossom pressure is too important to ignore. Bant Charm is for the the stray Collosus or Demigod that slips through your removal package.

So to update
4x Tidehollow Sculler
4x Mulldrifter
4x Reveliark
4x Cryptic Command
4x Fulminator Mage
3x Esper Charm
2x Bant Charm

We tried Bitterblossom for a short time, but it counteracted everything I wanted to do with my deck. I felt that although my three-to-five drop slots are consistently powerful I need spells on the beginning of my curve. I looked at a utility card like Unsummon and Boomerang which in theory would allow tempo and great opening. Boomerang never seemed like a dead card was especially damaging early. So I decided on 4.

4x Boomerang
3x Thoughtseize

I feel any control deck I play needs to have either Cryptic Command or Thoughtseize main deck. I feel that any advanced knowledges helps me prepare much stronger, like which spell to Rune Snag or Mana Leak, and which spell warrants a game breaking spell.

3x Makeshift Mannequin

This inclusion is more or less an obvious include.

Mana
4x Reflecting Pool
2x Mystic Gate
2x Sunken Ruins
2x Vivid Meadow
2x Vivid Creek
2x Vivid Marsh
3x Fetid Heath
1x Arcane Sanctum
1x Island
1x Swamp
1x Plains
1x Underground River
1x Adarkar Wastes
1x Caves of Kolios

I usually don't have mana issues, so I usually use my normal formula to tabulate the mana correctly.

Sideboard choices

3x Ajani Vegenant
This card is a pseudo Tangle Wire and Lightning Helix foiled into 1.

4x Kitchen Finks- I feel that I have enough early tempo to disrupt the control decks and to an extent Kithkin decks. This helps the mono red matchup immensely.

3x Wrath of God - For the Kithkin matchup. If the deck becomes overwhelming for our deck then utilizing these maindeck would come to the forefront.

3x Negate - Countering a Cruel Ultimatum for two mana sounds really good, also forcing an early Spectral Procession to not resolve can work wonders for you.

2x Hallowed Burial - Also helps our Kithkin matchup, good tech for the mirror as well.

If Paskoff allows me to make the deck this week, I might play it at the last FNC event in history.

Appreciate the time,

John Madonia

P.S

Here are the players that are on the inside track to making the Madonia Invitational Top 8

David Drebsky
Nestor Nestor
Joe Aprano
Mike Bauer
Dan Gould
Mike Evans
Mike Innace
Lee Cruceta
Dylan Duprez
Jim Chianese
John Lorig

Top 8 will be announced next week!

==RULES CORNER==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Q. Can I make a Cryptic Command counter itself with Swerve?
A. Technically, no... although Swerve can be used to counter a counterspell. Spells on the stack can't target themselves, it's put that plainly in the rules. However, you can target the Cryptic Command with Swerve, and as Swerve resolves, change Cryptic Command's target to Swerve itself! Swerve is still a legal target, since it's still on the stack while it's resolving. Swerve will finish up, and Cryptic Command will still be pointed at it. But when it tries to resolve, it'll find that its new target is illegal and Cryptic Command will be countered. There's one sticky little caveat here though - if Cryptic Command has two targets, it's not a legal target for Swerve, which needs a target spell with a single target. Cryptic's "tap all creatures your opponents control" and "draw a card" modes don't target, but "counter target spell" and "return target permanent to its owner's hand" modes do, so as long as Cryptic Command has one and only one of those targeted modes chosen, it's a legal target for Swerve.

Q. If I Twincast a Torrent of Souls that had both red and black paid to play it, do I get to return a creature and give all my dudes +2/+0 too?
A. If black was paid to play Torrent of Souls, you get to Zombify a creature, and if red was paid, your guys get +2/+0 and haste. But nothing was paid to play the copy of Torrent of Souls, so it'll just be a priority speedbump on the stack, doing absolutely nothing when it resolves. You pick a target before you actually pay for the spell though, so you can bluff your opponent by picking a target for the copy and hope they fall for it by countering it. Of course, that won't work on anyone who's read this article!

Q. I have a Runed Halo out naming Wren's Run Vanquisher, and an Empyrial Angel in play. If I don't block my opponent's attacking Wren's Run Vanquisher, does my Empyrial Angel die?
A. It depends - do you want it to? There are two replacement effects both tugging at the damage about to be dealt to you: Runed Halo is set to prevent the damage, and your Angel wants to take the damage for you. Since you're the affected player, you get to choose which replacement effect (well technically protection's effect is a prevention effect, but same difference) happens first. If you let Runed Halo prevent the damage first, Empyrial Angel will have no damage to soak up and deathtouch won't trigger. If you let Empyrial Angel take the hit, the Vanquisher's deathtouch ability will trigger, destroying the big bad mythic rare.

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

PTQs in our area this season:

10/26 - Rochester, NY
11/22 - Philadelphia, PA
12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==STORE LOCATIONS & CONTACT INFO==

Brothers Grim
1244 Middle Country Rd.
Selden, NY 11784
Phone: 631-698-2805
Website: www.brgim.com

Friendly Neighborhood Comics
3 Grant Avenue, Suite 2
Islip, NY 11751
Phone: 631-470-7984

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #33

2008-10-15T19:02:00.000-04:00

==ISLANDHOME #33==

October 15th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Sealed Deck and Standard at Brothers Grim!
Draft Walkthrough: A complete Shards of Alara draft, from start to finish!
Madonia Minute

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC @ 1 PM
Sunday: Sealed Deck ($20 Entry) at Brothers Grim @ 2 PM

Due to popular demand, I'm sanctioning a Standard event on Friday night at Grim and seeing how it goes. We'll also be running a Sealed tournament this Sunday at Grim, with an entry fee of only $20, the cheapest I've seen since booster packs were $1.99.

==DRAFT WALKTHROUGH==
Author: Brian Paskoff

So I was watching TV at 11:30 PM on Sunday when suddenly, I hear the tell-tale bloop noise of an incoming IM message - it's my friend Vic Naqvi from Canada, asking if I want to draft. Rather than pack my passport and at least two pairs of socks and hop on the next flight to Toronto, I fire up NetDraft and connect to him while we post the IP address in the Magic-League chatroom. Within minutes, the draft fills up. NetDraft is a little weird; there's no print runs coded in yet, so packs you see in NetDraft won't always come up in real life. You could potentially see NetDraft packs that are all green cards. Usually though, a pack's a pack, and unless you memorize certain print runs, it's not an issue, and truly weird packs are rare. Shards of Alara packs are coded as having 14 cards to make up for the fact that real packs are 14 cards plus a basic land. And lastly, there are no foils in NetDraft - just like at a Nationals or Pro Tour draft, the possibility of a foil replacing a common is zero. So NetDraft is a good approximation of a real draft, but not a great replacement for the real thing.

This issue I'm going to walk you through my draft. I'm not the best drafter in the world, but I've been playing for a long time and hopefully I'll be able to help those of you who are just starting out in limited. I've pointed out my mispicks and why I should've taken the other cards, and contrary to popular belief I sometimes know what I'm doing.

NetDrafts aren't tournaments; you're only paired against one person, who will be sitting across from you so you're not cutting each other. After everyone pairs up, Vic seats everyone across from each other and presses the start button, and off we go!

1:1 - Memory Erosion, Necrogenesis, Angel's Herald, Jhessian Infiltrator, Agony Warp, Marble Chalice, Vithian Stinger, Cancel, Bone Splinters, Shadowfeed, Grixis Panorama, Wild Nacatl, Call to Heel, Windwright Mage.

Agony Warp is the clear winner here, nothing else even comes close. If it wasn't there, it'd be a little more difficult. I don't want to be roped into Naya this early with Wild Nactl, or Esper with Windwright Mage. It's too early for a mana fixer, counterspells aren't outstanding in limited, and the rare is unplayable because there's no mill strategy to build around in this set. Agony Warp can 2-for-1 a lot of the time, and can always 1-for-1. Plus, it leaves me open for either Esper or Grixis. This is a good start for me, because I'm not a strong enough drafter to figure out where I'm going if either of my first two picks don't set me on the right path.
PICK: Agony Warp

1:2 - Ooze Garden, Sigiled Paladin, Tower Gargoyle, Magma Spray, Waveskimmer Aven, Obelisk of Bant, Dispeller's Capsule, Soul's Fire, Steward of Valeron, Resounding Silence, Viashino Skeleton, Grixis Panorama, Rip-Clan Crasher.

Tough choice here. Tower Gargoyle moves me into Esper, Magma Spray moves me into Grixis. This early in the draft I should mention the other good cards, notably Waveskimmer Aven, Steward of Valeron, Resounding Silence, and Rip-Clan Crasher, all of which would put me in four colors, and I wasn't planning on discarding my Agony Warp this early. Soul's Fire is situational, so I try to avoid it; they table anyway. There are times in this set where two damage won't stop a big threat, but a 4/4 flier for 4 is always good. I take the Gargoyle and hope I don't regret it later.
PICK: Tower Gargoyle

1:3 - Blood Cultist, Mighty Emergence, Scourge Devil, Etherium Sculptor, Obelisk of Esper, Viashino Skeleton, Cloudheath Drake, Gustrider Exuberant, Guardians of Akrasa, Bant Panorama, Vectis Silencers, Kederekt Creeper.

Kederekt Creeper is the best card in this pack. I'm sure to see every other card in this pack many times in the draft, but not the "damned if you do block, damned if you don't" Creeper. It's not too late to switch into Grixis, and not too early to rule out four-color entirely, either. The only other alternatives I see are Obelisk of Esper, Guardians of Akrasa, and Cloudheath Drake. Etherium Sculptors are plentiful and I wouldn't worry about those right now even if I was going to try to force Esper.
PICK: Kederekt Creeper

1:4 - Sangrite Surge, Demon's Herald, Bant Panorama, Tortise Formation, Gift of the Gargantuan, Relic of Progenitus, Cylian Elf, Kathari Screecher, Etherium Sculptor, Shadowfeed, Deft Duelist.

Gift of the Gargantuan is a powerful spell, but I'm nowhere near green. There are two good creatures in this pack in my possible colors: Kathari Screecher and Deft Duelist. The flier has evasion, and Deft Duelist is a great two-drop that dodges all sorts of removal. I took the Deft Duelist, though looking back on it, Kathari Screecher would definitely have been the better pick because it kept my color options open; I was in blue no matter which shard I ended up in.
PICK: Deft Duelist

1:5 - Dawnray Archer, Thunder-Thrash Elder, Qasali Ambusher, Bone Splinters, Gustrider Exuberant, Glaze Fiend, Naturalize, Soul's Grace, Goblin Mountaineer, Etherium Sculptor

So I'm in Esper now, and my options are pretty limited in this pack. Every card I could possibly pick is the type of card that will go back around the table: Bone Splinters, Glaze Fiend, and Etherium Sculptor are my best bets. I'm not a fan of Bone Splinters in anything but Jund, Glaze Fiend is good but there's no telling how many artifacts I'll actually get at this point in the draft, and Etherium Sculptor helps me out with my chronic mana-screw. So I take the Sculptor.
PICK: Etherium Sculptor

1:6 - Ranger of Eos, Fire-Field Ogre, Grixis Battlemage, Courier's Capsule, Tortoise Formation, Call to Heel, Undead Leotau, Mosstodon, Deathgreeter.

Strangely, the only outright terrible cards in this pack are Undead Leotau and Tortoise Formation. That's a late Mosstodon, which means green's open, but it's kind of hard to go down that road now. Since this is NetDraft, I forgot Grixis Battlemage had a Merfolk Looter ability until it was too late, but it's not a huge loss. Still thinking in four colors, I take the Fire-Field Ogre. Courier's Capsule or the combat-trick-disguised-as-a-terrible-card Call to Heel would have been good choices. I also have to mention Ranger of Eos. Akrasan Squire, Feral Hydra, and Wild Nacatl are the only good one-drops in Shards limited. Unless you have multiples of those or are rare-drafting, there's usually not a good reason to pick the Ranger.
PICK: Fire-Field Ogre

1:7 - Exuberant Firestoker, Thoughtcutter Agent, Jungle Weaver, Soul's Might, Rip-Clan Crasher, Akrasan Squire, Druid of the Anima, Gustrider Exuberant.

If Thoughtcutter Agent was a 2/1 or even a 1/2, I'd take him. There's a Rip-Clan Crasher and a Druid of the Anima in this pack still! Some lucky drafter is in Jund or Naya and is all alone to enjoy all this green. Akrasan Squire is a solid one-drop that's even good late in the game. Nice to see it seventh pick.
PICK: Akrasan Squire

1:8 - Punish Ignorance, Carrion Thrash, Tortoise Formation, Knight of the Skyward Eye, Call to Heel, Volcanic Submersion, Cathartic Adept.

Even though counterspells are "meh" in limited, Punish Ignorance is pretty good. Carrion Thrash is a great beefy creature that, for some reason, always winds up going late. Tortoise Formation is awful anti-removal; I remember when it cost 1U and could be a 2/2 creature if you tapped the right mana (Plaxmanta). For some reason I took Knight of the Skyward Eye, but I can't remember why. Oh well, if Cylian Elf is playable, a white one should be too.
PICK: Knight of the Skyward Eye

1:9 - Memory Erosion, Necrogenesis, Marble Chalice, Shadowfeed, Call to Heel, Windwright Mage.

Wow, the Windwright Mage came back! Usually, seeing one Windwright Mage late means you'll see more, because a mana-intensive 2/2 lifelink isn't that great unless you can reliably give it flying.
PICK: Windwright Mage

1:10 - Ooze Garden, Sigiled Paladin, Obelisk of Bant, Dispeller's Capsule, Viashino Skeleton.

Obvious pick here, the Sigiled Paladin. And, with the picking of a double-white two-drop, I erase all notions of going four-color. Sorry, Kederekt Creeper and Fire-Field Ogre.
PICK: Sigiled Paladin

1:11 - Mighty Emergence, Etherium Sculptor, Viashino Skeleton, Gustrider Exuberant.
PICK: Etherium Sculptor

1:12 - Demon's Herald, Tortoise Formation, Shadowfeed.
PICK: Shadowfeed

1:13 - Soul's Grace, Goblin Mountaineer.
PICK: Soul's Grace

1:14 - Deathgreeter.
PICK: Deathgreeter

2:1 - Crucible of Fire, Jhessian Infiltrator, Savage Lands, Scavenger Drake, Obelisk of Jund, Cloudheath Drake, Blightning, Ridge Rannet, Jungle Weaver, Volcanic Submersion, Dragon Fodder, Steelclad Serpent, Skeletal Kathari, Obelisk of Esper.

Bad pack for me, bad rare for anyone. Scavenger Drake fits any black shard except Esper, so my choices are Cloudheath Drake, Steelclad Serpent, Skeletal Kathari, and Obelisk of Esper; none of those are really first-pick material. But, Cloudheath Drake is a flier, and goes great with a turn two or three Etherium Sculptor.
PICK: Cloudheath Drake

2:2 - Vicious Shadows, Wooly Thoctar, Algae Gharial, Jund Charm, Bone Splinters, Viscera Dragger, Grixis Panorama, Sanctum Gargoyle, Tortoise Formation, Resounding Wave, Steward of Valeron, Resounding Roar, Gustrider Exuberant.

Wow, Wooly Thoctar and Jund Charm. If I was in Grixis or Naya, I'd splash for the Jund Charm, and I almost consider hate-picking it for a few seconds. If Sanctum Gargoyle wasn't in the pack, I probably would, but a Gravedigger that flies, becomes cheaper with Etherium Sculptor, and both survives and helps me recover from Jund Charm fits my deck much better.
PICK: Sanctum Gargoyle

2:3 - Stoic Angel, Bant Charm, Kiss of the Amesha, Skeletonize, Cathartic Adept, Deft Duelist, Resounding Roar, Mosstodon, Oblivion Ring, Soul's Grace, Gift of the Gargantuan, Tidehollow Strix.

Twelve cards left in the pack and there only two bad ones (Cathartic Adept and Soul's Grace). Obviously the two guys next to me aren't in Bant, and look at all that green! I almost consider splashing for Bant Charm for a moment before looking down and seeing Oblivion Ring, which is technically more fragile, but deals with more than Bant Charm does... and doesn't require me to stretch my manabase.
PICK: Oblivion Ring

2:4 - Keeper of Progenitus, Demon's Herald, Esper Battlemage, Metallurgeon, Resounding Wave, Dispeller's Capsule, Courier's Capsule, Coma Veil, Windwright Mage, Elvish Visionary, Relic of Progenitus.

Wow, lots of stuff for me. Esper Battlemage picks off little guys and makes combat tough. Metallurgeon is deceptively powerful and even I overlooked it. Resounding Wave is okay as a normal spell, and great when you can cycle it. Courier's Capsule draws cards, but I'm sure I'll see more. Finally there's Windwright Mage. I already have one, but it's a better creature in multiples, and so in it goes. I'm not entirely sure I made the right choice, but I know I didn't make a bad one.
PICK: Windwright Mage

2:5 - Mighty Emergence, Topan Ascetic, Dragon's Herald, Steward of Valeron, Incurable Ogre, Undead Leotau, Blightning, Cathartic Adept, Shore Snapper, Elvish Visionary.

Not a playable card in my colors, and definitely none playable in my theme. Shore Snapper is an average creature, made worse by the fact that every time I pick it, my opponents don't play Islands.
PICK: Shore Snapper

2:6 - Clarion Ultimatum, Exuberant Firestoker, Blister Beetle, Obelisk of Esper, Cylian Elf, Dreg Reaver, Courier's Capsule, Gustrider Exuberant, Knight of the Skyward Eye.

The Obelisk is tempting, but Blister Beetle is so much more fun! Besides killing any X/1, Blister Beetle can kill off any creature that survived combat damage with one damage shy of lethal.
PICK: Blister Beetle

2:7 - Bant Battlemage, Dragon's Herald, Obelisk of Grixis, Deathgreeter, Relic of Progenitus, Banewasp Affliction, Cylian Elf, Resounding Scream.

Yuck. I could take Obelisk of Grixis, but then I'd be tempted to splash red. I don't have any high mana cost cards where I'd need the extra mana accel, and I'm sure I'll come across an Esper one later. Bant Battlemage is fine, it gives my guys evasion.
PICK: Bant Battlemage

2:8 - Grixis Battlemage, Drumhunter, Behemoth's Herald, Obelisk of Naya, Savage Hunger, Etherium Sculptor, Dreg Reaver.

Grixis Battlemage is a great draw engine, and Etherium Sculptors are a dime a dozen.
PICK: Grixis Battlemage

2:9 - Crucible of Fire, Obelisk of Jund, Ridge Rannet, Jungle Weaver, Volcanic Submersion, Obelisk of Esper.

PICK: Crucible of Fire. Just kidding. Obelisk of Esper.

2:10 - Vicious Shadows, Algae Gharial, Tortoise Formation, Steward of Valeron, Gustrider Exuberant.

Hate pick time! Even though no one's playing green....
PICK: Steward of Valeron

2:11 - Kiss of the Amesha, Cathartic Adept, Resounding Roar, Soul's Grace.

Well that's late. Kiss of the Amesha isn't exactly a bomb, but it's not exactly eleventh pick bad either.
PICK: Kiss of the Amesha

2:12 - Keeper of Progenitus, Relic of Progenitus, Demon's Herald.

PICK: Relic of Progenitus

2:13 - Mighty Emergence, Dragon's Herald.

PICK: Mighty Emergence

2:14 - Clarion Ultimatum.

PICK: Clarion Ultimatum

3:1 - Master of Etherium, Thoughtcutter Agent, Kiss of the Amesha, Naya Battlemage, Cathartic Adept, Shore Snapper, Druid of the Anima, Coma Veil, Angelsong, Marble Chalice, Bant Panorama, Cavern Thoctar, Volcanic Submersion, Glaze Fiend.

Wow! Not only is my rare in my colors, it fits my deck perfectly! The only other comparable card I could've opened in the rare slot is Sharuum the Hegemon. But before I slam that down, let's just see what else is in the pack. Naya Battlemage is good for the Naya player, as it taps down threats. Kiss of the Amesha and Glaze Fiend are the only other things I'd consider taking in this pack if Master of Etherium wasn't there.
PICK: Master of Etherium

3:2 - Where Ancients Tread, Sunseed Nurturer, Sigiled Paladin, Tidehollow Strix, Obelisk of Esper, Bloodthorn Taunter, Onyx Goblet, Welkin Guide, Dragon Fodder, Wild Nacatl, Call to Heel, Steelclad Serpent, Obelisk of Bant.

Where Ancients Tread is a huge bomb that no one's paid much attention to yet. With the amount of green going around though, I don't think anyone's in a position to abuse it to its fullest, however. Tidehollow Strix has flying and deathtouch and is an artifact creature - what more could I want?
PICK: Tidehollow Strix

3:3 - Scourge Devil, Bant Battlemage, Grixis Panorama, Windwright Mage, Sighted-Caste Sorcerer, Savage Hunger, Hissing Iguanar, Wild Nacatl, Dispeller's Capsule, Sigil Blessing, Gustrider Exuberant, Godtoucher.

Nothing's better than the Windwright Mage. Other notes - Hissing Iguanar is great in a Jund deck, Wild Nacatl fits in the Naya deck no one is playing, and Sigil Blessing would have been taken already if the two guys to my right were in WG.
PICK: Windwright Mage

3:4 - Ooze Garden, Exuberant Firestoker, Rockslide Elemental, Puppet Conjurer, Lightning Talons, Steelclad Serpent, Courier's Capsule, Hissing Iguanar, Deathgreeter, Thorn-Thrash Viashino, Glaze Fiend.

There's a couple of filler cards for my deck in this pack. I like Puppet Conjurer because he makes chump blockers and pumps Master of Etherium, but I like the card drawing power of Courier's Capsule. If I had to do it all over again, I might've taken the Conjurer since I already had Kiss of the Amesha and Grixis Battlemage for drawing power... but once again, it's not a massive loss.
PICK: Courier's Capsule

3:5 - Grixis Battlemage, Sunseed Nurterer, Deathgreeter, Call to Heel, Carrion Thrash, Lush Growth, Cavern Thoctar, Hindering Light, Jhessian Lookout, Bloodthorn Taunter.

The thing about taking Hindering Light is that you feel obligated to use it, and it's a dead card when you're down in board position and your opponent is swinging away at you. So I'm looking at Grixis Battlemage and Call to Heel here, and I take the creature.
PICK: Grixis Battlemage

3:6 - Mighty Emergence, Drumhunter, Wild Nacatl, Glaze Fiend, Dregscape Zombie, Kederekt Creeper, Deft Duelist, Onyx Goblet, Resounding Wave.

Kederekt Creeper this late is weird, since I'm getting a Grixis vibe from the drafter on my right. Drumhunter is amazing in a Naya deck, and so is Wild Nacatl, so I don't need to say anything more about that. Deft Duelist is good, but I've got enough already and it's strictly an early-game creature. Glaze Fiend goes great with my artifact theme, and I love having multiples, so pack three is my last chance. Runner up: Resounding Wave.
PICK: Glaze Fiend

3:7 - Sangrite Surge, Obelisk of Grixis, Esper Panorama, Skeletal Kathari, Marble Chalice, Godtoucher, Gift of the Gargantuan, Volcanic Submersion.

Gift is late. I could take the Panorama, but I don't want to get stuck on colorless mana in my deck with three Windwright Mages. Skeletal Kathari is an underrated flier, in black of all colors. And it goes great with the Puppet Conjurer I didn't pick!
PICK: Skeletal Kathari

3:8 - Cunning Lethemancer, Angel's Herald, Dregscape Zombie, Angelsong, Volcanic Submersion, Court Archers, Rip-Clan Crasher.

Medoicre cards, and two great cards that aren't in my (or anyone's) colors. Cunning Lethemancer could be annoying, but it wouldn't make my deck, that's for sure. Angelsong is a cute combat trick that can cycle when I don't need it, but the problem is, you can cycle it when you don't need it. Drawing Angelsong early means you'll cycle it, and won't have it when you need it later. Plus, unless you're digging for some mass removal (which I don't have), straight up fog spells aren't that great in limited. Dregscape Zombie probably won't make my deck, but I take it anyway. If this were a real draft, I might've hate-picked either green card.
PICK: Dregscape Zombie

3:9 - Cathartic Adept, Angelsong, Marble Chalice, Cavern Thoctar, Volcanic Submersion, Glaze Fiend.

Easy mode. Glaze Fiends in Esper are sort of like Mimics in Shadowmoor/Eventide drafts.
PICK: Glaze Fiend

3:10 - Where Ancients Tread, Sunseed Nurterer, Sigiled Paladin, Onyx Goblet, Steelclad Serpent.

Like I said, no one realizes how bomby Where Ancients Tread can be. Were this a real draft where I was going to play more than just the player across from me, I would've hate-picked the enchantment. But I decide to make life hell for the guy sitting across from the drafter next to me and let it go. Meanwhile, my choices are between Sigiled Paladin number two, or Steelclad Serpent. I probably should've taken the Paladin, but since this wasn't a real draft, I decided to experiment with Steelclad Serpent to see how powerful it is in an artifact-based deck.
PICK: Steelclad Serpent

3:11 - Savage Hunger, Dispeller's Capsule, Gustrider Exuberant, Godtoucher.

I decide to stick Dispeller's Capsule in my sideboard for any Oblivion Rings or Where Ancients Treads I go up against.
PICK: Dispeller's Capsule

3:12 - Ooze Garden, Deathgreeter, Glaze Fiend.
PICK: Glaze Fiend

3:13 - Deathgreeter, Bloodthorn Taunter.
PICK: Death Greeter

3:14 - Mighty Emergence.
PICK: Tarmogoyf

So I've got a great Esper deck. Only a Sharuum, a few more Sanctum Gargoyles, and another removal spell or two would put this draft in my all-time top five. Signals are important in a draft, which is why I'm hammering the point home that red and green were wiiiiiiiide open. Cards like Court Archers and Rip-Clan Crashers shouldn't table, ever. I didn't realize it while I was drafting, but in hindsight after typing all this out, white was the heaviest drafted color, maybe blue as well. I didn't survey everyone in the draft, but I'm sure more than two people were going for Bant.

I know I made a lot of mistakes that drafters better than me reading this will probably shake their heads and go "Tsk, tsk, that Paskoff, what a terrible drafter, my word!", but it all worked out in the end for the most part.

I build the deck quickly in NetDraft and export it so I can open it in Magic Workstation where I can look at it in greater detail. Here's what the deck looks like:

Creatures (18): Tower Gargoyle, Deft Duelist, Etherium Sculptor, Windwright Mage (3x), Sigiled Paladin, Cloudheath Drake, Sanctum Gargoyle, Blister Beetle, Grixis Battlemage, Master of Etherium, Tidehollow Strix, Glaze Fiend (3x), Skeletal Kathari, Steelclad Serpent
Spells (5): Agony Warp, Oblivion Ring, Obelisk of Esper, Kiss of the Amesha, Courier's Capsule

I have eighteen creatures, a little on the high end, which means I have to play somewhat aggressively. I also have only one trick - Agony Warp. Although to be fair, I didn't have much of a chance to pick up any others, though I might've taken Resounding Waves in place of Esper Battlemage and/or Glaze Fiend if I realized I was going to have only one playable instant... but again, that's something that comes from experience. You can know what cards you've taken easily, but it takes a lot of skill to analyze what cards you need while you're drafting.

Magic Workstation has all sorts of neat tools to analyze a deck. I've got ten two-drops, seven three-drops, two four-drops, two five-drops, and two spells that cost six or more. That's a lot of two-drops, but they're all really good. It also shows that I'm fairly even on the total mana symbols for each of my three colors. Ten white, thirteen blue, and twelve black. It could be very safe to play six Islands, six Swamps, and five Plains, but I'm a fan of the "23/18" school of limited deckbuilding and I put in six of each land. Your mileage my vary.

There are a whopping fifteen artifacts in the deck, thirteen of which are artifact creatures, making Glaze Fiend very playable. Just try getting thirteen playable blue/green spells in Eventide to set off your Shorecrasher Mimics!

Vic was in more or less the same colors as me, except he fell into the trap of splashing for a fourth color, red. This can happen often in a draft. The signals you're sending out get weaker and weaker the further away from you they get, and the furthest point is the person sitting directly across from you. So while I cutting off good Esper cards from the people sitting to my right and left, Vic had no idea what I was doing. He just knew that some good Esper cards were coming his way because no one near me wanted to fight me over them. We usually end up sharing a shard.

In game one, I knocked him down to four life early, but he recovered with a Sharuum the Hegemon off the top, bringing back a Cloudheath Drake and backed up by a Metallurgeon to regenerate his blockers on defense, and my 6/6 Tower Gargoyle (Master of Etherium + Sigiled Paladin) just couldn't break through. Game two went better for me, with my deck performing as it should and breaking through his defenses with fliers and a timely Blister Beetle. Unfortunately in game three, Vic got horribly mana-screwed, drawing nearly every non-Island land in his deck while all his blue cards remained stuck in his hand.

If you have any questions about why I picked/didn't pick a certain card, or comments about the draft, let me know! Hopefully you'll learn from the picks (and mistakes!) I made and can use this knowledge next time you draft.

==MADONIA MINUTE==
Author: John "Metagame" Madonia

Public Service Announcement. There are only two events left in the first and only Madonia Invitational and it's an intense setting as three different winners have been crowned. The first week was won by one of our dearly departed combatants that for the sanctity of this column will be kept nameless. Week 2 was handled by David 24/7 Drebsky (Wurm) with the only deck he realistically plays well, Kithkin. Week 3 was won by a Madonia/Chianese Joint that didn't lose a match on the weekend, even in batting practice.
Full standings are available through me, I will not post them here as to allow for tension to build.

FNC closing :(

Hopefully the majority of everyone knows this, but our Islip chapter of FNC will be shutting its doors for the last time in late October. I personally am saddened by this as I was a founding father of the Magic scene there and have helped bring it from the ground up. We put a lot of work in getting people in the building and keeping them there, so it's tough to see it go because of an increase rent cost and horrific economy. They will be moving to a main road in West Islip, which although seems quaint and all, is not FNC. I would ask that anyone that goes to the new store refer to it as Friendly Neighborhood or something to that effect. The people may transfer but the memories and the namesake will not. I can remember like it was yesterday our 10th Edition release. We had players on dumpsters on cement playing on hoods of cars, wherever there was space people were playing. Everyone was fantastic all day and the tournament ran perfectly, especially considering we had 55 or so players. People were there to have fun and enjoy themselves which was what it was about. If you were there that day, you probably had a blast, if you weren't you wish you would have been.
I'm sure the move is needed as far as finances go, so I wish them the best of luck and hope for continued successes, I'll just miss our little store that has no business having 30+ people in it, but we did anyway. We didn't have a store to call our own in Islip for a really long time after fire-gate, so we embraced this store and welcomed it finally a place that wasn't 40 minutes away. I think we did a hell of a job with it, for last year we had the highest turnout average of any other store in the entire state. So for everyone that made it an awesome couple of years I appreciate it.

FNC 2006-2008 RIP

Decklist of the Week

4x Ad Naseaum
4x Semsic Assault
4x Idylic Tutor
4x Diablic Tutor
3x Pyroclasm
3x Wrath
4x Kitchen Finks
7x Mountain
4x Swamp
3x Plains
4x Sungrass Prairie
4x Graven Cairns
4x Fetid Heath
4x Reflecting Pool
2x Vivid Marsh
1x Vivid Meadow
1x Vivid Crag

It's not a tournament level deck, but something to have fun with at a local tournament :)

==RULES CORNER==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Q. Do I have to name what land I'm searching for when I crack a Panorama?
A. While you're allowed to tell your opponent what you'll be searching for, you aren't forced to pick a land type until you're rummaging through your deck. You can just pick up your deck and search away while the ability is resolving. This way you don't have to memorize how many lands of each type are in your deck before you pop that Panorama.

Q. What happens when I Magma Spray a Kitchen Finks?
A. Magma Spray has made its way into the sideboards of many mono-red decks because it deals with persist so well. Magma Spray resolves, dealing two damage to the Finks, and then state-based effects are checked. Finks has two damage on it, so the game says it gets destroyed and put into the graveyard - but Magma Spray's replacement effect replaces the "going to graveyard" event with "going to the RFG zone".

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

PTQs in our area this season:

10/26 - Rochester, NY
11/22 - Philadelphia, PA
12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==STORE LOCATIONS & CONTACT INFO==

Brothers Grim
1244 Middle Country Rd.
Selden, NY 11784
Phone: 631-698-2805
Website: www.brgim.com

Friendly Neighborhood Comics
3 Grant Avenue, Suite 2
Islip, NY 11751
Phone: 631-470-7984

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #32

2008-10-08T20:21:00.001-04:00

==ISLANDHOME #32==

October 8th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Post-Rotation Standard: Welcome to the new Standard!
Shards of Alara Limited Tips
Madonia Minute: Some decklist with almost as much 1-ofs as an EDH deck.

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim @ 7 PM
Saturday: Standard Constructed at FNC @ 1 PM
Sunday: Casual Day at Brothers Grim @ 2 PM

==POST-ROTATION STANDARD==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Fall brings a lot of changes; cooler weather, leaves changing color, and an all-new Standard format. Almost nine hundred cards have left the format, and we only get 226 new ones, so the Standard card pool is noticeably smaller. The first sets of new blocks often come with big shifts in the metagame, even though they may happen gradually. Without knowing what to expect at FNMs and the like, players often stick to the old pre-rotation archetypes, adding new cards to replace the ones that cycled out. Those players eventually find that either the new additions make the deck work just as good or better than it did before, or the old archetype proves too weak to survive in the new meta. Rogue decks pop up, and either don't last through testing or get tweaked into powerful new format-defining decks. Whatever you feel like playing, here's a few ideas to keep in mind.

1. Don't play a new card just because it's new. I often browse the Standard forums of websites like MTGSalvation.com to see what everyone's working on, and quite often there will be decklists using 90% new cards. Stuff in the new block is designed to have synergy with other stuff from the new block, but Wizards makes sure there's synergy between blocks as well. It's okay to get excited over new cards, but don't neglect Lorwyn/Shadowmoor block(s) because you're too busy looking at the new cards to remember there's alternatives.

2. Go rogue! Now's the perfect time to test new deck ideas, because everyone else is doing the same thing. I know I keep repeating myself, but every format-defining deck started out with someone testing it at an FNM and tinkering with it until it reached perfection.

3. Test, test, and retest. Play against your friends with your new decks in Magic Workstation, Apprentice, or the increasingly unpopular and outdated Real Life. Goldfish the deck by shuffling up and dealing yourself out hands, playing a few turns in to get a feel for the deck and how it can win under the most optimal conditions; this is probably the best way to test your manabase and make sure you're not getting land/color-screwed half the time.

Now on to the decks themselves. Here's a few decks I've noticed, either new or old with tune-ups.

Faeries: Faeries loses two very important things: Ancestral Visions, and Rune Snag. Visions was a free draw spell, and without Rune Snag, Faeries has no access to a good two-mana counterspell. Ponder and Broken Ambitions are the best replacements for these two cards, and they're not nearly as powerful. Faerie decks were already on the decline thanks to the popularity of Mono-Red and Kithkin, but the loss of two staple cards might just push the archetype into tier 2 status.

Red Deck Wins: Mono-Red loses a lot, but it also gains a lot. Blood Knight was the best answer to Kithkin, Magus of the Scroll and Keldon Megaliths provided reliable burn every turn, Skred cleared even huge creatures out of the way, Sulfurous Blast filled in for an instant-speed Wrath of God on most occasions, and Magus of the Moon single-handedly stopped five-color decks from running rampant. For replacements, it's hard to say. Stigma Lasher might make its way maindeck for lack of a better two-drop, Hell's Thunder fits nicely in Magus of the Moon's slot now that there isn't any hate for non-basic lands anymore (Fulminator Mage is just a Stone Rain if you're relying on it to break up Quick n' Toast's tempo, it doesn't have the lasting effect of Magus of the Moon), and Lash Out fills in for Skred in a pinch.

There are two cards people are on the fence about: Blightning and Magma Spray. Blightning requires you to splash for black, and although it's great early game, it's mediocre after a few turns where it'll either get countered by control decks or hits an empty handed aggro player. Magma Spray is great against RDW's worst enemy, Kitchen Finks, and stops Mulldrifters pre-Mannequin, but belongs in the sideboard if anywhere at all.

Kithkin: Kithkin loses nothing whatsoever from the maindeck, only missing the occasional Disenchant, Mana Tithe, Sunlance, and Ronom Unicorn from sideboards - and those are all easily replaced. Unlike other decks where whether replacement cards are good enough is a deciding factor, Kithkin will only lose popularity if the metagame shifts enough for swarm aggro decks to lose ground.

Tokens: I was so disappointed to think of this deck off the top of my head after building my Sek'kuar token-themed EDH deck, and then start talking to people and realize everyone thought of the same idea at the same time. Sprouting Thrinax just looks so good next to Nantuko Husk and Bitterblossom that it's hard to resist trying it out. Tokens is really much more Wrath-resilient than any other aggro deck, as nearly every spell puts more than one creature on the field. Goblin Assault seems like a good idea on paper, but in practice you can't really amass a large number of tokens with it, and the one extra mana cost than Bitterblossom really hurts it. And don't forget the power of Torrent of Souls, Furystoke Giant, and Seige-Gang Commander to really give a boost to your little guys. The only downside? Playing with Dragon Fodder makes me nostalgic for Mogg War Marshal.

Quick and Toast: With a new multicolored set out and the rotation of Magus of the Moon, Toast has little trouble reliably playing five colors. All five Charms are good cards to look at; especially Bant Charm, which is better than Putrefy in this deck, and everyone who's been playing for a while remembers how powerful that card was. Even though Toast is a control deck, it never relied too heavily on Rune Snag in the first place, so it won't mind continuing to use Broken Ambitions just like it did in Lorwyn/Shadowmoor Block Constructed.

Solar Flare: This is going to be an off-shoot of Quick and Toast, playing (at least at my first impressions) the same kind of Vivid lands + Reflecting Pools manabase. The difference is that instead of controlling the game with Cryptic Command while beating in with Mulldrifters and tokens from Oona while wiping the board with Firespout, Solar Flare relies on reanimating big creatures much easier than just casting them. Makeshift Mannequin'ing an Empyrial Archangel is going to be hard for a lot of decks to beat. Solar Flare was a big deck back when I first re-started playing, and I even made top 8 with it in my first tournament back to the game, so I'm glad to see it possibly make a resurgence. However there's a lot more graveyard hate now than there was two years ago, from the uncounterable Faerie Macabre to the pesky Relic of Progenitus, so Solar Flare players are going to have to figure out how to beat the hate if they want to make tier 1.

Stoic Angel Control: There's little to dislike about Stoic Angel in a format that's expected to include lots of swarm-based aggro decks like Tokens and Kithkin. Those decks just can't survive only being able to untap one creature per turn, so if Stoic Angel sticks, you're going to win the race. Super-exalted creatures like Battlegrace Angel and maybe even Rafiq of the Many himself can make your Stoic Angels even more dangerous, and of course Bant Charm, Wrath of God, Oblivion Ring, Cryptic Command, and Kitchen Finks are all in-color and balance out the rest of the deck.

There's more decks out there of course, but these are the ones I've heard the most buzz about. Saturday is the first post-rotation Standard event at FNC, and I can't wait to see what everyone brings!

==SHARDS OF ALARA LIMITED TIPS==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Now that the prereleases and releases are over, PTQ season is officially underway, and sealed's the format to learn. Because PTQs use decklists, you won't be able to change your deck between rounds; the best you'll be able to do if you realize you made a mistake deckbuilding is to hope your deck performs well enough during the first game of each match and then sideboard into the "correct" configuration after game one. But don't worry, I've got some tips to make sure you get it right the first time.

After watching players at the (pre)release events and testing numerous sealed games myself both in Real Life and on Magic Workstation, the most intriguing thing I've noticed is that Naya is by far the most popular shard in sealed. With many good creatures and spells at common in red/green/white, it's very easy to put together a consistent, balanced deck with enough removal and creatures to power your way through the tournament. Naya has the biggest creatures for the cheapest cost, and at all levels of rarity. It's got access to all the red removal spells from Jund, Oblivion Ring for those pesky planeswalkers, and of course green doesn't disappoint as the color with the best creatures. Exalted is the specialty of Bant, but frankly, there are only two good blue creatures with Exalted - both of them are GWU, and one of them's a mythic rare. Your Woolly Thoctar thundering into the red zone backed up by a pair of Court Archers can definitely cause your opponent to have to make some hard choices about which of their creatures they want to keep alive.

Naya's theme is big creatures and big effects for discount prices, a mainstay of limited, and requires no special cards to "build around". If every card is good, the deck will perform consistently every time. Now compare that to Esper, the WUB shard. Its theme is artifacts, but the only permanents that are guaranteed to be artifacts are the ones that are all three Esper colors. You could have white spells from Naya and Bant, and black spells from Jund and Grixis, and so on - none of which will match your artifact theme. The same goes for Bant (how many exalted or goes-good-with-exalted creatures are you going to open?), Grixis (unearth isn't something exactly build around), and to a slightly-lesser extent, Jund (devour sets you up nicely to be two-for-one'd or more and is therefore hard to count on). In draft, all shards are equal, because you can pick and choose which cards you get so you can build up the synergy. But in sealed, where you're limited to what you open, it can be much harder to focus on a shard's theme - but Naya has the tried and true premise of playing big creatures and attacking. While it is possible to have a great WUB deck that isn't based around artifacts, the best WUB decks will be the ones that rely on the synergy of Esper's artifacts.

This isn't to say other shards can be built as well - if you've got a Cruel Ultimatum combined with a pair of Kederekt Creepers, it may be time to look into Grixis, for instance. I saw and built more Naya decks than anything else, but I did see some very powerful Bant, Esper, Grixis, and Jund decks as well. Don't be afraid to build a non-Naya shard just because I said Naya was the easiest; quantity doesn't always equal quality!

I've been talking a lot about the shards, but as anyone who's played limited knows, there's always the temptation to splash for one more color than the set would seem to steer you towards. In most sets, you'd want to splash for a third color. In Shadowmoor/Eventide, the "mono-color" block, you'd want to splash for a second color. And in three-color Alara, you'll often be tempted to splash for a fourth color. Every mana fixer in the set is clearly based around a three-color shard, which makes it somewhat difficult to consistently get your fourth color. If you're playing Jund (BRG) and want to splash for a blue card, you'll want to pick up a Grixis tri-land, Panorama, or Obelisk. While those will let you get blue, black, or red, they don't give you green, one of your main colors. There's been tons of times I've seen players get mana-screwed, somehow getting access to two colors and their splash while never drawing their third main color.

So how do you figure out your lands? The usual way of counting the number of mana symbols in each color and then using those numbers to figure out the land ratio still works, but it's complicated when you have things like tri-lands and Panoramas. You won't always open a tri-land in your shard, but ones that tap for at least two of your colors should be an auto-include. Assuming that you have no tri-lands or Panoramas, most decks will probably use a 6-6-5 ratio (i.e. six Plains, six Islands, and five Swamps), or even 6-6-6 for all you fans of 23+18=41 limited decks and/or Iron Maiden.

There are sealed PTQs in every month for the rest of the year, although the one and only New York PTQ is two months away. Of course there are booster drafts every Friday at Brothers Grim, so come down and play!

==MADONIA MINUTE==
Author: John "Metagame" Madonia

Hello and welcome to the 10th edition of everyone favorite weekly article, The Madonia Minute.

I've decided this week to give Paskoff a week off from editing and make my points clear and concise.

Today I am going to allow my loyal readers into my testing quarters and show everyone my deck choice for this weekend and my choice for States which is a month away.

Cruel Madonia

Creatures

4x Mulldrifter
4x Kitchen Finks
1x Nuckalvee
2x Shrikemaw
1x Reveliark
1x Fulminator Mage
1x Unearth guy

4x Cryptic Command
2x Esper Charm
4x Bant Charm
1x Bitterblossom
1x Mannequin
2x Broken Amitions

2x Cruel ultimatum
2x Pyroclasm
1x Firespout
2x Wrath of God
1x Infest

1x Cascade Bluff
2x Sunken Ruins
2x Flooded Grove
2x Mystic Gate
4x Reflecting Pool
4x Vivid Creek
3x Vivid Grove
3x Vivid Meadow
2x Vivid Marsh
2x Island

Sideboard

3x Fulminator Mage
4x Thoughtseize
1x Wrath of God
1x Cruel Ultimatium
1x Oona's Grace
2x Broken Ambitions
3x Nameless Inversion

This is the deck I recommend for an open field. It punishes mediocre draws, and forces your opponent to be on the back foot in the mid-game, where your deck is geared to take.

Kithkins - Our plan is too stay alive in the early turns, we don't take any useless damage from our mana sources, so kithkins best start has us at 13 on turn 3. Our game from there has us on an early Pyroclasm, or firespout, to put them on the defensive. Your creatures are stronger than them in the late game and their answers to recurring threats aren't good. Your Charm takes care of any Wilt Leaf, or Glorious Anthem problems that can occur. Kithkins should be one of, if not the most popular deck at states since it loses nothing. Be able to have a commanding advantage against them is important. Kithkin is very focused on Firespout and can have the tendency to live and die on the back of it. A lot of lists I've seen floating around have 4 Burrenton Forge-Tenders in their first 60. We decided on a lone Infest for the troublesome one drop replacing a Firespout, which at 3 mana doesn't kill your problematic card when needed. Wrath of God also doesn't target so if its giving you fits you do have myriad ways around it and Nameless Inversions for game 2 and 3.

Faeries - Ancestral Visions, not Bitterblossom, was the most important card for Faeries. With Visions rotating, the deck becomes very control heavy, with more counterspells and various splashes. I've seen lists with Chameleon Collosus main deck and also Doran finding his way into the land of Fae. The streamlined variant is a lot more dependent on Bitterblossom. They need to have that early drop to make Mistbind Clique functional as well as Spellsutter Sprite a hard counter. I was testing primarily as the Faerie player and the games I was winning, I had early Bitterblossom pressure. I won 4 out of 11 pre-boarded games and each game I lost I was really far behind, even on a turn 3 bitterblossom, Esper Charm is too good against the Faerie player, hitting bitterblossom and also their hand, its also a far superior Counsel of the Soratami especially at instant speed. Mistbind Clique is still problematic, but over half or your cards are instants, so it does allow you to still float mana and utilize your hand.

I've seen other decks like Elves, Merfolk, combo decks with infinite returning of artifacts. Burn is still the bane for the 5-color deck. Your spells are fair (except Cruel Ultimatum) and they just continue to pepper you with burn spells. If burn continues to be prevalent then a possible Runed Halo sideboard would be worthwhile. The format is still wide open so its a tough call.

If anyone has Cruel Ultimatiums and would like to trade them that would fantastic as we own Zero.

I built this deck on the back of the typical 5-color variant. Effective mana, Cryptic Command, awesome spells. I didn't want to make 'another' 5 color deck. I wanted some similarities, but a devastating finisher at the end.

Quick note about Sealed and Drafting. I smashed Paskoff in three consecutive sealed battles and I've noticed that RGW (Naya) is easily the best combination if your pool is eh. I think I had GW in every pool I've built. The exalted mechanic is amazing, I think its the best limited mechanic in a long time. It forces so many mis-blocks and math errors. I think the set for limited purposes is awesome. Id draft it anytime anyone's up for it. Constructed not so much as it took me 50 or so hours of over 125 decklists to come up with something to print this week. Obviously I have a lot of free time and with my commitments to playing magic more or less over, I want to help everyone improve, if it means winning an FNC event or preparing for a PTQ or beyond, let me know if I can help. Ill sit down with anyone that needs help with testing, deck building, confidence, whatever it is I can probably help. Don't think its weird to ask for help, I know its only a card game but when you put time into something you should want to do the best you can. Maybe you're out there reading this and saying, wow he's got an ego, or he isn't that good...etc. People are of course entitled to their opinions and that's what great (the only thing at the moment) about our country. I'm doing what most people won't do, trying to help others get better at something I'm relatively decent at. Besides Gerry Thompson and his group, I probably produce the strongest tournament level decks format after format. In the past year I've produced Doran Zur, Pickles with Black, Teferi/Doran Control and now Cruel Madonia. I also helped produce fringe decks like Goats that could have won the PTQ with more testing and a stronger player (no offense to Dylan, he didn't have enough games with the deck.)
I know my article isn't supposed to be about how great I am, because I'm not great. I just know peoples reaction to when someone is willing to help them improve they get defensive and place themselves in denial.

Girl tip of the week, not brought to you by Evans:

Always attempt to use Magic terminology when speaking to a young lady. It makes you sound smart and worldly.

Social Gathering tip of the week, not brought to you by Paskoff.
To help socially awkward guys, (Paskoff this one is for you buddy) don't invite your date to a place that smells like fish, its not a good omen for the rest of the night.

Songs listened to while writing this masterpiece

Fall Out Boy - Dead on Arrival
Fall Out Boy - Grand Theft Autumn - Where is your Boy
Brand New- Jude Law and a Semester Abroad
The Entire Forever the Sickest Kids Album, if you haven't heard them, definetly recommended.

Thanks for reading,

John Madonia

==RULES CORNER==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Q. If Magma Spray a Makeshift Mannequined Mulldrifter, will it get removed from the game?
A. Don't mull over this much longer - the trigger set up by Makeshift Mannequin will go off when Mulldrifter becomes the target of Magma Spray, jumping to the top of the stack and resolving before Magma Spray ever sets up its replacement effect. Mulldrifter will go back into the graveyard, and then Magma Spray will be countered due to lack of a proper target.

Q. I play Soul's Fire, making my Woolly Thoctar deal damage to my opponent's Doran. In response he Terrors my Thoctar. When Soul's Fire resolves, will it use last known information to deal damage equal to Woolly Thoctar's last known power?
A. When Soul's Fire tries to resolve, it'll find that one of its targets (the creature that would deal the damage) isn't in play anymore and therefore isn't a legal target. One target is still legal, so Soul's Fire isn't countered... but there's nothing there to do damage anymore and Doran will keep his place as kind of the 5-power (well, technically) three-drops.

Q. How does Soul's Fire work with Doran, anyway?
A. Not very well. Doran might deal five damage most of the time, but that's because his ability lets him swing his butt around in combat. That might not be the best metaphor, but to put it simply, Doran's power is zero and that's all Soul's Fire cares about.

Q. Sarkhan Vol's in danger from a rampaging, uh... Homunculus token! Can I flash in a Qasali Ambusher to protect him?
A. If Sarkhan Vol is the only one being attacked, your Ambusher will stay lying in wait in your hand. Qasali Ambusher's ability says it only works if creatures are attacking you. However, if your opponent is sending at least one creature your way while attacking Sarkhan Vol with others, you can flash in your blocker. Once it's in play, it doesn't need to protect you, it can also run to Sarkhan's aid to protect him as well. Or you can choose to make it not block at all, which defeats the flavor, but not the function of the card.

Q. A Hissing Iguanar, a Saproling token, and a Cylian Elf all die to an Infest. Will the Iguanar get to do two damage to my opponent?
A. Hissing Iguanar has a leaves-play ability, specifically one that says to the graveyard from play, so it gets to look back in time to see what else left play at the same time. Its triggered ability will see two other creatures being put into the graveyard from play, so you'll get two triggers.

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

PTQs in our area this season:

10/11 - Edison, NJ
10/26 - Rochester, NY
11/22 - Philadelphia, PA
12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==STORE LOCATIONS & CONTACT INFO==

Brothers Grim
1244 Middle Country Rd.
Selden, NY 11784
Phone: 631-698-2805
Website: www.brgim.com

Friendly Neighborhood Comics
3 Grant Avenue, Suite 2
Islip, NY 11751
Phone: 631-470-7984

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #31

2008-10-01T18:34:00.002-04:00

==ISLANDHOME #31==

October 1st 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Shards of Alara Prerelease Recap
Shards of Alara Theme Tournament
EDH Review: Five brand new generals and new cards to consider for EDH!
Madonia Minute: In which Madonia rants about prerelease prizes and some Shards deck ideas. Also a tournament of some sort.

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Friday: Shards of Alara FNM Booster Draft at Brothers Grim @ 7 PM
Saturday: Shards of Alara Launch Party at FNC @ 1 PM
Sunday: Shards of Alara Launch Party at Brothers Grim @ 2 PM

This week is the first Shards of Alara booster draft, as Shards comes out and becomes legal on Friday.

==SHARDS OF ALARA PRERELEASE RECAP==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Well the prerelease is over, and players have had their first taste of Shards of Alara limited. The amount of three and four color decks were staggering, as players embraced the multicolor theme and enjoyed being able to play nearly every card they opened. Mythic rares were the stars of the show, and since they have about a one-in-eight chance of showing up in place of a regular rare and there are six rares in every sealed pool, most players cracked at least one. Cruel Ultimatum was definitely the card players wanted to open, and anyone who did was on it like white on rice, stretching their mana-bases to play it if they needed to. It's that game-breaking.

I have to address something here that was a big issue at the prerelease, and that's the prize structure. Wizards recently took over the prerelease structure, giving them complete control over everything: prize payout, entry fees, and format. Gray Matter was not allowed to hold their usual bonus flights at discount rates; instead, players needed to pay full price for another full four-round flight. We were also not allowed to host any drafts. We've never held a booster draft at a Long Island prerelease even though they were offered every time, but the Gray Matter events in the city often had multiple drafts going. Most importantly, our prize payout was changed, almost cut in half by Wizards. Many players were disappointed in going 4-0 and only getting eight packs, and many more dropped out after their first loss, knowing they could win two packs maximum. Unfortunately all these things were beyond our control, and hopefully Wizards hears the disappointment from players in time for Conflux's prerelease.

One other thing that was changed was the lack of a participation pack given out to players who didn't have a good enough record to win any prizes. We couldn't give these out anymore, but most players didn't realize that they did get the extra pack after all - instead of a tournament pack and two boosters like previous big set prereleases, players got a tournament pack and three boosters. So you did get a participation pack - you just got to play with it! Still, I realize that getting the pack upfront as part of your sealed pool doesn't carry the same feeling as getting one at the end that you can sit down with and open on your own.

I hope everyone had a good time at the prerelease despite the prizes. Gray Matter's plans for Conflux are unsure as of this time, but we'll see what's going on as we get closer.

==SHARDS OF ALARA THEME TOURNAMENT==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Wizards is trying out a new experimental format for Shards of Alara's release events: the "theme tournament". The theme of Shards of Alara are, well... the shards of Alara, and the theme tournament is based around those shards. At our release events this weekend, you'll get your usual sealed deck product, but things will be a little different from there on. Once you open your packs and sort your cards out, you'll need to pick one of the five shards and build your deck using exclusively those colors, sort of like EDH. Unlike EDH, the only mana symbols that matter are the ones in the mana cost of the card itself; mana symbols anywhere else on the card are fine, but won't serve much purpose as you can't add out-of-shard mana to your mana pool - you just get colorless mana instead.

Here's a quick look at the rules:

You only pick a shard when you're constructing your deck. You don't need to pick one before you open your product. You also don't need to tell your opponent which one you're playing, though they'll probably guess.
The colors in mana costs of cards in your deck can't contain colors outside of your shard. For example, if you're in Bant, which is GWU, you can't play Ajani Vengeant, because he has a red mana symbol in his mana cost.
Mana symbols anywhere else on the card don't matter. You can play Bant Battlemage in your Naya deck, even though there's a blue mana symbol in its activation cost.
If anything would add mana of a color not in your shard to your mana pool, it adds colorless mana instead. You can have Forests in your Grixis deck if you want, but they'll tap for 1 instead of G. (This also makes it impossible to actually use Bant Battlemage's blue ability in the example above.)
You can change your deck between rounds (and between games) just like any other limited event that doesn't use decklists. However, you'll need to either stay in your shard or switch to a new shard altogether.
Not following the shard rule in a theme tournament is, unfortunately, a game loss. Just like playing Akroma in your Standard deck is illegal (as of this Friday), so is playing a blue card in your Jund deck. But don't worry, it's very easy to stay within a single shard!

Of course there are alternatives (possibly) if everyone doesn't want to do the theme tournament thing. I'll be trying to run other sealed deck events (same price, prizes, and Ajani Vengeant promos, just without the theme tournament deck construction rules), booster drafts, etc. those days as well!

FNC's release event starts at 1 PM on Saturday, and Grim's starts at 2 PM on Sunday. Whether you come to one or both, have a good time and good luck!

==EDH REVIEW==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Every time a new set comes out, the thing I look forward to the most is finding out what new EDH generals there are. As you can imagine, Eventide was disappointing in that regard, but once Shards of Alara's tri-color theme was revealed, the set was all but guaranteed to have a cycle of juicy three-color legends with abilities based on the shards they came from. We haven't had an opportunity like this since the Planar Chaos dragons, so it's time once again to sharpen your deckbuilding skills on five brand new generals.

Kresh the Bloodbraided - Good BRG legends are hard to find, and the best before now was Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper. Both legends have the potential to be based around saccing your own guys and benefiting from them going to the yard. Kresh gets huge, and Sek'Kuar makes more guys to sacrifice. There's one important difference though, and that's that Kresh will get bonuses even if a creature is put into anyone else's yard. If you're planning to win on general damage, Kresh is the way to go, but for utility, there are better BRG generals.

Mayael the Anima - There are definitely lots of bomby creatures in EDH that have 5+ power, and Mayael can easily get them into play. Even though she's only three mana, powering her fragile 3-toughness body out as early as possible isn't the best idea. The best plan is to get her in play and ready to activate on your next turn, or even the same turn with something that gives her haste. Six mana is a lot for her activated ability, as most 5+ power fatties in EDH are going to cost you six to eight mana in the first place, but ripping those big creatures from your library into play without worrying about a Cryptic Command, Desertion, or Hinder ruining your plans is worth the investment.

Rafiq of the Many - Rafiq is the most dangerous aggro general in Shards, able to come out on turn three with the right acceleration and easily able to win the game on general damage alone if he comes out early and bashes every turn. Combine him with things like Umezawa's Jitte, a Sword of Something and Something Else, or a Loxodon Warhammer and he can be a huge problem. And being in blue means you can have the countermagic needed to keep him alive from pesky removal spells. Even if he's not the one doing the swinging, creatures like Exalted Angel and Battlegrace Angel (the angel with exalted) or creatures with better evasion abilities than Rafiq himself can do some hefty damage.

Sedris, the Traitor King - Poor Sedris is in the wrong colors. If he was white, you could work out some amazing things with unearth and blink effects. My excitement when I thought about cards like Reality Ripple were short-lived when I realized that phasing not only doesn't get around the remove-me-forever trigger of unearth, but won't let the creatures' comes-into-play abilities go off. You can use things like Voyager Staff if you want to abuse unearth, but your options are limited. This all isn't to say Sedris is a bad general, far from it! UBR are powerful colors, and Sol'kanar has been an EDH favorite for years. If you want your big creatures with splashy comes-into-play abilities to go out with a bang, Sedris is a great general.

Sharuum the Hegemon - Sharuum has an unassumingly powerful ability. The ability to resurrect a single artifact when she comes in, even if it is just a one-shot deal, is very strong. Creature reanimator decks are very popular in EDH, and now thanks to this mythic sphinx, decks based around artifact reanimation are possible as well. Plus she's positioned just right on the color wheel for blink effects, letting you abuse her comes-into-play ability to get back more and more artifacts. Sadly, black's contribution to an artifact-based deck are fairly limited, as black is historically the color that has the least to do with artifacts. Only Beacon of Unrest comes to mind, actually. Since she is an artifact creature, she's especially fragile, but she is a 5/5 flier that can beat in and win the game on general damage if conditions are right.

Of course, legends aren't the only thing a set brings to EDH, there are individual cards as well. Next time I'll review some of the more EDH-worthy additions ALA brings to the format, but until then, feel free to look yourselves!

==MADONIA MINUTE==
Author: John "Metagame" Madonia

The following is composed with hatred in my heart and my blood boiling over.

I'm honestly thinking that Wizards is trying their hardest to turn their customers against them. First they cancel states (which has subsequently, thanks to a core group of premier tourney organizers, got states back on the schedule) which for many people is the pinnacle event of the year. Who doesn't want to compete for the title of State Champion? It also has a casual/competitive feel, which gears towards the new player and the group that enjoys playing homebrew decks. States is the best time of year for the non-Pro Tour player, which this 'grassroot' campaign was supposedly geared towards. I'm glad tournament organizers across our great nation decided to bring back the event, which is all profit and limited overhead, which you think Wizards would like.

Saturday September 27th. My day begins and my clock says 6:55, so it looks like I can stop for some heart attack on a roll and get to Dan's house to begin the activities. Of course, as with every magical endeavor, a cataclysmic event happens, Steve Kelly's car decided to break asunder and not start. After attempting to jump start his car to no avail we began our trek to the event. We arrived at around 7:44 am to a heroes like welcome. There was also a beauty pageant next door with girls way too young to be wearing that little clothing. I was in my element as I am a fan of girls, unlike the majority of my surrounding peers, but I knew I had to become a champion in what would be my last prerelease for many moons.

I decide to fork over 30 dollars, even though we are in a great depression, to duel against 31 other combatants. After signing up I just decided to look at the wall because I thought I saw a spider, but it was just the prize structure. If I 4-0 the event I get a whopping EIGHT packs. If I lose one round I'm playing for two packs. Round 1 I get paired against Dan Gould! I opened quite possibly the worst pool in creation, I showed other players my cards, and the expressions were the same as mine: disdain. It seems like it's a recurring nightmare when I sealed. I was defeated soundly by Dan and decided at that time to have fun. I played my entire pool. My deck was 190 cards and my round 2 opponent who was twelve also beat me 2-1 and I found myself lost but seeking a first win. I ended up winning the last two rounds with my original build and more or less finished with Magic for the day.

I was honestly surprised how little people were there, usually with a new set a big crowd shows for the events. The dealer table said that he didn't get anywhere near even 150 unique visitors to the tables. He usually has between 250-300 people at a normal prerelease and even though he did well for the day as far as sales, he saw a stark difference in player quantity.

Wizards has to stop alienating their players. How do you charge the same fee but drastically cut the prize support? The biggest thing I saw was people were truly upset about no participation prize. Most people play the events to have fun, and not to win. That pack at the end was always something to look forward to. Wizards doesn't like the big tournament organizers, the ones that don't have a storefront or sell their product day in and day out. Prereleases are meant to be held in large venues, not in 15'x30' card shops. I always like seeing people I normally don't see at these events. FNC is good for a Saturday event, but having a prerelease there with the same 25 people doesn't do anything for me.

Wizards officially will not get another dollar from me either. I got a ton of feedback from people about my decision to step away from the game. After the way everyone was treated this past week, I'm definitely confident that my decision was correct.

I'd like to announce with the permission of FNC my final event.

The Last Word
My last ever Magic tournament
Friday November 28th 2008 12pm
Saturday November 29th 2008 12pm

I will, of course, be playing in both events. Friday will be a sanctioned booster draft or sealed. Prize support will be determined before the event. The top four players from the event will qualify for the top 8 which will take place on Saturday evening.

Saturday will be a Standard event. The top 8 players from that event will make the Saturday final.

Top 8 players will then play for a to be determined cash first prize. Once I talk to the Palms, I'm sure it will be worth everyone's while to show up and play. No fee will be charged to the top 8 players. It will be a single elimination format, winner takes all.

I hope everyone can join me for even one of the two tournaments, I'm sure FNC will have great sales that day and hopefully we can make a great weekend over it, this event will also coincide with their 2nd anniversary.

I'll leave everyone with some Shards-centric decklists.

Doran Faeries

3x Doran
4x Mistbind Clique
4x Spellsutter Sprite
4x Scion of Oona
4x Cryptic Command
4x Bitterblossom
2x Punish Ignorance
3x Nameless Inversion
3x Esper Charm
2x Firespout
3x Broken Ambitions or Thoughtseize
3x Mutavault
4x Reflecting Pool
4x Secluded Glen
3x Twilight Mire
3x Vivid Creek
3x Vivid Marsh
1x Vivid Crag
1x Crumbling Necropolis
1x Wanderwine Hub
1x Island
1x Swamp
1x Underground River

SIDEBOARD:

4x Sower of Temptation
3x Broken Ambitions or Thoughtseize
4x Bottle Gnomes
2x Firespout
2x Infest

Stoic Day

4x Mulldrifter
4x Kitchen Finks
4x Stoic Angel
3x Battlegrace Angel
1x Twilight Shepherd

4x Cryptic Command
4x Bant Charm
4x Wrath of God
4x Condemn
3x Oblivion Ring
2x Scourglass

Land-base incomplete

Solar Flaring

3x Mulldrifter
3x Kitchen Finks
2x Shriekmaw
3x Reveillark
1x Oona, Queen of the Fae
1x Sphinx Sovereign
1x Sedris, the Traitor King
3x Merfolk Looter
3x Makeshift Mannequin
3x Bitterblossom
3x Esper Charm
3x Cryptic Command
3x Wrath of God
3x Thoughtseize

Land-base incomplete

Kithkin

4x Goldmeadow Stalwart
4x Figure of Destiny
4x Knight of Meadowgrain
3x Knight of the White Orchid
4x Spectral Procession
1x Ranger of Eos
3x Cloudgoat Ranger
4x Wizened Cenn
2x Wilt-Leaf Liege
3x Oblivion Ring
3x Unmake
3x Mutavault
4x Windbrisk Heights
4x Rustic Clachan
13x Plains

Burn

4x Mogg Fanatic
4x Figure of Destiny
4x Hell's Thunder
4x Demigod of Revenge
4x Boggart Ram-Gang
4x Incinerate
4x Flame Javelin
4x Tarfire/Shock
4x Lash Out
2x Unwilling Recruit
19x Mountains
3x Ghitu Encampment

These aren't finely tuned decks except the Stoic list and the Doran Faerie list. They're soft scale decks to test with and see what unfolds.

Thanks for reading,

John Madonia

==RULES CORNER==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Q. If I have a Lich's Mirror, can I concede the game to set it off?
A. I got this question a lot after the card was first rumored, but I didn't want to answer it until I was sure. Luckily, the comprehensive rules' wording regarding conceding the game are being changed to solve this little issue. When you concede a game, first you leave the game, and then you lose the game. Since you left the game, Lich's Mirror wasn't under your control when you lost, and its effect won't happen.

Q. I lost the game, but I had a Lich's Mirror out! Once I restart, can I mulligan my new hand of seven cards?
A. While you're at 20 life, have a (possibly) fully stocked library, and seven cards in you're hand, you're not actually restarting the game. You're stuck with whatever those seven cards are, and if it's a bad hand you're going to die again very quickly.

Q. Can I cycle a Resounding Roar even without a creature in play to give +6/+6 to?
A. With no one around, you can roar as loud as you like... your opponent might give you a funny look though. You can cycle Resounding Roar without a target, because the cycling ability itself doesn't require a target. Its triggered ability won't go on the stack because there's nothing to target, but you'll still be drawing a card.

Q. With Dragon's Herald, can I sacrifice a Sprouting Thrinax to go get a Hellkite Overlord?
A. No, you need to sacrifice three creatures - a green creature, a red creature, and a black creature. I'm not sure why it takes three creatures to find a big, angry dragon, but it does. You can sacrifice the Dragon's Herald as part of the cost, since he's red and his ability doesn't require him to also be sacrificed. That way, you only need two other creatures. I kept trying to think of a joke starting with "So a green creature, a red creature, and a black creature walk into a bar...." but I don't want a mass un-subscription of Islandhome....

Q. I have an Empyrial Archangel out and my opponent attacks with a Kederekt Creeper that I don't block. When the damage is redirected to the Archangel, does it die from deathtouch?
A. It will. Redirected damage is still coming from the same source, so Kederekt Creeper is just taking the long-route to get to the Archangel. It'll try to deal two damage to you, but that damage will just be redirected to Empyrial Archangel and deathtouch will trigger. It's important to note that deathtouch doesn't care if the Archangel has shroud, because the combat damage trigger doesn't actually target anything.

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

October 4th (Saturday): Shards of Alara release event at FNC
More details soon!

October 5th (Sunday): Shards of Alara release event at Brothers Grim
More details soon!

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto

The next PTQ season kicks off October 4th, and the format is Shards of Alara sealed deck!

PTQs in our area this season:

10/11 - Edison, NJ
10/26 - Rochester, NY
11/22 - Philadelphia, PA
12/13 - New York, NY
12/27 - Edison, NJ

==STORE LOCATIONS & CONTACT INFO==

Brothers Grim
1244 Middle Country Rd.
Selden, NY 11784
Phone: 631-698-2805
Website: www.brgim.com

Friendly Neighborhood Comics
3 Grant Avenue, Suite 2
Islip, NY 11751
Phone: 631-470-7984

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY

Islandhome #30

2008-10-01T18:34:00.001-04:00

==ISLANDHOME #30==

September 24th 2008

==IN THIS ISSUE...==

Shards of Alara Prerelease
Madonia Minute

==THIS WEEK'S SCHEDULE==

Saturday: Shards of Alara Prerelease
Sunday: Chaos Draft/Cube Draft at Brothers Grim @ 2 PM

==SHARDS OF ALARA PRERELEASE==
Author: Brian Paskoff

This Saturday, Gray Matter is holding their usual prerelease at a different location, the Sheraton hotel in Hauppauge right on Motor Parkway. Unlike in-store prereleases, you'll be able to play in multiple flights as well as 3-man team events, and get to play against players you haven't met before.

As with every Long Island prerelease, the format is sealed deck - you'll get a tournament pack and three boosters of all Shards of Alara product to build a minimum of a 40 card deck. Since there's no decklists used, you'll be allowed to change your deck between rounds, which is perfect for experimenting with new cards. If you've played in more than one set's sealed format before, you know that each set has its own unique strategy for deck construction. Shards is no different, well, except for being different from all the other sealed formats before it; in that case, it's the same. ...Right, moving on.

Shards of Alara focuses on three distinct "Shards", represented by three colors in a row on the big color wheel (look at the back of a Magic card to see what I'm talking about). Each Shard feels like a mini-block with its own unique themes, and sometimes keywords. There are also many three-color cards, which makes constructing stable manabases somewhat difficult, more on that later. You may have heard of the "build within a Shard" rules for deck construction, but rest assured that is only for the Release Event, not Prereleases. Even with that restriction off the table, you're more than likely going to want to stay within a Shard's colors for two reasons: One, the number of tri-colored cards makes it hard to splash for a fourth color or play three colors that aren't in a Shard, and two, every mana fixer in the set fixes mana only within a Shard's colors. There's the comes-into-play-tapped "tri-lands", the tri-fetch-lands, and the three mana Obelisks that tap for any one of a Shard's colors.

Luckily, all of the lands in the set are either common or uncommon. There are no rare lands in Shards, which means it's easier to pull a mana-fixer in your three colors. In Shards of Alara limited, it's going to be very important to get all three colors down as early as possible. Since there's only one two-drop in the set that costs two mana of a single color (Knight of the White Orchid, which costs WW), you want to be able to produce three colors by turn three. If you're playing Esper, and you're lighter on black than the other colors, your mana base might look something like six Plains, six Islands, and five Swamps, with non-basic lands replacing some of those if you have them. Of course, you can play a Grixis tri-land in your deck - it does tap for two of the colors you'll need.

Limited is a creature-based format. Most of your victories will be earned in the red zone, so focus on getting about fifteen to eighteen creatures into your deck. The rest of your spells should focus on removal, combat tricks, and utility stuff like mana fixers or big splashy effects like a Wrath. Narrowly useful spells like artifact/enchantment removal you might want to avoid putting into your maindeck and instead sideboard them in when you need to.

Whatever you build, I hope to see everyone there on Saturday! Don't forget, everyone (while supplies last) gets a free Ajani Vengeant promo just for signing up to any event!

==MADONIA MINUTE==
Author: John "Metagame" Madonia

My article will contain limited Magic content this week. Today I have a lot to say.

I personally don't like anything about Shards so I'll keep my opinions, though aplenty, to myself for once.

In the past few months I've found myself slowly distancing myself from Magic. I took up a bowling league on Friday's which also happens to be everyone's favorite Friday-to-do FNM. That particular tournament is geared toward the casual player, with cool promos and limited risk involved. I used to enjoy drafting with friends but as the time has progressed I've become complacent and bored of the same format and the same people. I've also noticed on Saturdays that the sole reason I attend the tournament is to see my friends and not engage in any Magic activities. I've gotten to the point where I think I've accomplished everything I need to accomplish as far as Magic goes. I've qualified for three Pro Tours, been the highest rated player in New York State, and met countless people that have shaped who I am today. Most people know my "remand" story where, although I may make light of it, I was placed under arrest and put in jail for a night. You might think "it was only a night" but the ramifications of my actions could have cost me a lot more then a night in jail.

My parents have always supported anything I've done. I'll be straight forward I was a complete loser two years ago. I was 10,000 dollars in debt had no insurance or license and lost my girlfriend of three years because why should she lower herself to someone like me. To see the look of shame and disappointment on my parents faces really took a lot out of me. I never wanted to see that look ever again, I lost their trust, their respect, and their believe in me.

I told myself that everything I do, I need to do it to the fullest. I toiled around at jobs and have finally settled into a wonderful job making a good salary with a full benefit package. Two years ago I had no idea about a 401k now I have 4,000 put away for my retirement. I also have money in the bank and bought a 30,000 dollar car with full knowledge that any slip up and I'm back to square one. I felt that I needed something real and this would show me responsibility and the wherewithal to get my life back on track.

Fast forward to Saturday. I finally realized I've turned full circle and I am a completely different person than I was before. I'm disappointed that Innace thinks that we (Paskoff and I) manipulate tournament results to get my rating up. For the most part, I earned a lot of those points, some people gave me wins since they knew I was trying to qualify for the pro tour and it wasn't a necessity to hinder my quest. Did people give me wins, yes, did I earn a lot of those wins, yes. I played just this last week and played every match and won each match with a well above 2000 rating. Furthermore if Paskoff had the ability to manipulate ratings everyone would be a 2000 methinks.

This article isn't about my rating, because honestly its not important to me anymore, I just never want to be viewed as the old John Madonia. Mike feels that he gets slighted at FNC because I have some vendetta against him. As far as a personal vendetta, I don't have anything against him or Grippa. I don't enjoy when Grippa attempts to talk to me like I'm an idiot, because also like him, I am a college graduate, and I'm more worldly and intelligent than people think. Have I been a little overbearing on Innace, I very well could have been, but don't bring other people into the fracas that have nothing to do with the situation. Dan Gould is one of my good friends as everyone knows. He made a judgment call where Innace attempted to counter a Demigod but didn't let the trigger resolve. Dan, stating he was playing to win the game, said that it comes back because of a layering effect that allows Demigod to hit the yard and then trigger the effect. Innace was noticeably disappointed and upset that the situation happened and how Dan handled it. I full understood his frustration that he felt he was being slighted by Dan, but to then to lump him into our personal affairs was uncalled for. Dan wasn't trying to do anything to 'help madonia' he was following a trigger rule that is correct in the rules of the game, was it friendly, maybe not, but he, not myself was playing the game.

I finally realized after an awkward hour or so that I'm getting to old for the high school drama. I'm to the point at 24 where I need to start looking for apartments, a stable relationship,and my future. Magic is become a part of my past and i realized that Saturday. Moving towards the present and future I'm not sure if the game holds the same importance in my life especially when peoples enjoyment of the game is being tainted by inane drama. I want everyone to play at FNC, I don't want the tournament to be about Innace and I, or Grippa and Paskoff, people go there to have a good time and I apologize if I ruined that for anyone, including Innace.

I've enjoyed Magic for over 10 years and will always hold great memories for me. I've decided that Shards of Alara will be my last set and I will wind down playing by the turn of the year. I know it won't be easy to just stop playing, im sure it will be a tough process, but I know this is the time I need to do it.

I will be at the prerelease playing in the tournament and the three man team event. I will not be at FNC's Shards event, I'll start slowly not showing up at FNC every week til the point where I won't be in the fray anymore.

I'd personally like to thank everyone for reading,

Good luck,

John Madonia

==RULES CORNER==
Author: Brian Paskoff

Q. I play a Demigod of Revenge, with no others in my graveyard. My opponent jumps in and plays Cancel, and counters the Demigod without saying anything else. What happens to the Demigod?
A. A big part of Magic is communication, and the [O]fficial stance on Demigod of Revenge is that its triggered ability is supposed to be a skill-tester for control players. When you play Demigod of Revenge, the spell goes onto the stack, you pay its costs, and then the triggered ability goes on the stack above it. This all basically happens at once; there's no "before the trigger goes on the stack" moment where players can do anything. Then your opponent plays Cancel, and the stack looks like this, from bottom to top: Demigod, Demigod trigger, Cancel. The last thing to be added to the stack is Cancel, so that resolves first, and Demigod is countered and put into the graveyard. Now the only thing left on the stack is the Demigod trigger, and when that resolves, the Demigod they just countered comes back from the yard. Ouch!

The only way to stop the Demigod from coming back into play is letting the triggered ability resolve, and for that to happen, a player has to actually demonstrate that they're doing that. The best way of course is to say "Okay, trigger resolves, then I counter the original." If there's any Demigods in the yard, they'll come back in, but the one just played will stay in the yard.

Q. Why doesn't the player playing Demigod need to announce that the trigger is being put onto the stack?
A. Triggers aren't really "announced", they just happen. Demigod's trigger is somewhat unique in that it doesn't have any kind of physical hint that it's on the stack. For example, a player might grab their pen if there's a trigger on the stack that'll change their life total, or reach over to remove a counter from a suspended card, or go into their deckbox for a Faerie token off Bitterblossom. Demigod's trigger doesn't have any in-game requirements either, like picking a target. Sower of Temptation's trigger isn't "announced", but picking a target is a clear indication that it's on the stack. It might be nice if your opponent told you Demigod's triggered ability is on the stack, but he's not required to.

Q. Does Ethersworn Canonist's ablity only work the turn it comes into play? It says "this turn", not "every turn".
A. What turn is it? This turn! When a static ability says "this turn", it really does mean "this turn", i.e. the turn you're reading the ability. It's like saying "right now". Other examples of this kind of wording include Goblin Cohort, which can definitely attack every turn that you've played a creature spell and not just the turn it came into play (if it had haste).

Q. I have a Recumbent Bliss on my opponent's Diety of Scars, and he also has a Scuttlemutt. If I play a Glamer Spinners, do I have to move the Aura from the Deity to Scuttlemutt?
A. The Recumbent Bliss can stay right where it is, as long as you don't target the Diety of Scars. Glamer Spinners' ability only requires a creature to be targeted, so targeting something that doesn't even have any Auras on it is fine.

Q. Do tokens go to the graveyard?
A. Yes, but they're not there long. State-based effects will cause them to cease to exist if they're in the graveyard, or any other zone besides in-play.

==THE ISLANDHOME BLOG==

==UPCOMING EVENTS==

September 27th: Shards of Alara prerelease
Gray Matter is hosting the Shards of Alara prerelease at the Sheraton hotel in Hauppauge, which will have dealers, team events, and multiple flights you won't find at in-store release events. Click here for details and directions!

October 4th - December 28th: PTQ Season for PT Kyoto
The next PTQ season kicks off October 4th, and the format is Shards of Alara sealed deck! The PTQ schedule should be released within the next few weeks.

October 4th (Saturday): Shards of Alara release event at FNC
More details soon!

October 5th (Sunday): Shards of Alara release event at Brothers Grim
More details soon!

==STORE LOCATIONS & CONTACT INFO==

Brothers Grim
1244 Middle Country Rd.
Selden, NY 11784
Phone: 631-698-2805
Website: www.brgim.com

Friendly Neighborhood Comics
3 Grant Avenue, Suite 2
Islip, NY 11751
Phone: 631-470-7984

==FIN==

See everyone this weekend!

Got forwarded Islandhome and want to sign up? Send an email to IslandhomeMTG@gmail.com!

-Brian Paskoff
L1 NY