@metaknightmare: The Rise of a New Limited

This guest blog comes to us today courtesy of Zack Levine aka @mtgmetagame. If you’re interested in contributing, email me at bmoreno54@gmail.com. Now, enjoy the rest of the post.

Finally, it’s over.

I guess I should introduce myself first. I’m a magic player who mostly drafts, I took the break from magic almost everyone does from dissention to eventide, started drafting again with Shards/Shards/Shards, and I’m also @metaknightmare on twitter. When I started back up, I was terrible (I picked etherium sculptor over tower gargoyle once). However, eventually I became relatively good in the format, and usually ended up in the top 3 of drafts at my nearby store. I haven’t made the investment to fully get back into constructed yet, but I plan on it after my finals this year. After Shards/Alara/Reborn became M10, I started winning even more. These two formats were ones I understood, ones I could draft well, and ones I could win with.

Breaking Block: Where Should I Wedge This Stick? Part 1

When you approach a deckbuilding exercise, for instance Pro Tour San Juan at the end of May, you are going to spend a lot of time poring through spoilers and brainstorming new creations. Sure, there’s a wealth of 2-set information to use as a jump off point, but the influx of cards from Rise of the Eldrazi and metagame influences from players who aren’t weaned on MTGO queues means that you and your team will have to figure out a lot for yourselves. It’s an exciting time, but also an overwhelming one.

You may prefer to play a certain kind of deck all the time, in which case your job is a lot easier. Just find the best tools available to that strategy. Probably though, your goal is a comprehensive (or as close as you can get) understanding of the new metagame and a reasonable prediction of what the best deck is going to be. To that end, you can, of course, bash your head against a brick wall. Eyeball cards that seem good and groups of cards that seem synergistic and throw best-estimate lists together. Throw them against each other and you’ll see what sticks out. Accentuate the strong parts, refine the numbers, sand off the soft masses. Decide these are the decks people will be playing. Then set about trying to beat those decks.

Polly Wanna Morph

One of the two best ways to cheat an Eldrazi into play is Summoning Trap. But I already built a deck around that, so now I’m gonna look at the other one…Polymorph, of course. Polymorph decks are pretty much always around, with the latest batch including finishers like Progenitus and Iona, Shield of Emeria, each of which is sufficiently hard to kill. Progenitus kills in two hits while being largely unblockable and only dies to wrath effects. Iona needs 4 turns to do the job, but she turns off all of the removal (usually decks lean on one color for it) and supplementary game plans as well. Emrakul seems to be an upgrade to both. He matches Progenitus’ speed at ending the game and is only slightly worse at the resource denial aspect than Iona is. Due to annihilator 6, when you ‘morph into Emrakul your opponent has a turn to operate and recover and that’s usually it.