It's the Magic: Eights of Fate

On July 21st, I was racking my brain to come up with a topic for the 22nd’s “It’s the Magic.” I try not to do blogs last minute; one of the reasons I do this is so that I can learn to write a bit better by practicing. I do slack off on the Magic stuff because it’s fun; the original runs on ITM were based on being so excited about Magic and wanting to share that.

But I’ve cooled off a bit about it lately and in the third week of work, it’s hard to find something Magic-related to really do with whatever small pool of cards I’ve brought on board. Yes, Magic 2012 is out and it’s shiny, but it’s not…news worthy. There are thousands of sites speculating about which Magic card is going to be the next Primeval Titan (Hint: It’s Primeval Titan). I knew people liked lists though (Thanks, Cracked), so I just decided to jot down my “Top X things for magic” this week where X is the number of things I could think of without making shit up.
 

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Top 8 Magic Things For This Week Two Weeks Ago

 1. A series of decks for the stack

I finally made two decks to show how the stack worked. I was just drawing from Scars of Mirrodin block boosters, so I wasn’t working with optimal card selections or a lot of repeats. I haven’t used them to teach anybody yet, but I’m happy with the results.

Viral Drake is strong and I’ll probably take it out, but it’s the only real hitch. I’ve got the Glissa’s Scorn versus any artifact with Phryexia's Core match up, green buff spells (like Mutagenic Growth) versus weakening (Dismember) where the order of resolution matters, and Conversion Chamber versus Spine of Ish Sah that make artifact activations look like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly are all leaving me very satisfied.

Ultimately, I’m going to add some of the cards I initially wanted, but playing through now is satisfying. I’ll probably do a few more run-throughs and make some tweaks before I start upgrading them with non-Scars cards.

2. Sundial of the Infinite
“During your end step-“

3. Last Monday’s Funny Paper Tiger

4. Scrambleverse

Scrambleverse So fun. So clunky. I’d much prefer an X-Based implementation that you give away a nonland permanent to a player at random, then that player gives away a nonland permanent, and so on and so forth X times. Again, I like the card. I like what it does, but the execution is rough.

5. The 22nd’s It’s the Magic

6. My Scars of Mirrodin Cards

After doing all of those one-man drafts and making decks to work with the stack and talking about them, I’m finally looking at the cards I’ve been opening lately. I’m pretty excited about them. I’m actively eager to run a white deck that’s got eight Porcelain Legionnaires and Priests of Norn. The deck will also have other cards (probably Plains, but I can’t guarantee you won’t just see clones and shit so I can effectively run more of the other two.)


7. Last week’s It’s the Magic

8. Scepter, Crown, and Throne of Empires, or rather, the complaining about thereof.

 

Man, I don’t like cards that refer to other cards by name. It’s not classy. It’s not intuitive. I know the throne/crown/scepter thing is indicative of fantasy tropes, which is the point of the core sets, but I don’t think that that some variant of “Legendary Metalcraft” would’ve necessarily been a bad thing here. Also, making them Legendary.

“Oh what, those old things I have lying around? Those are my four scepters of all my empires. Yeah, multiple empires per scepter. We’re talking mega-empires.”