Worldwake Spoilers - Celestial Colonnade analysis

Well the buy-a-box promo card for Worldwake has been spoiled on the MTG Salvation forums within the past couple days. Lets take a look below:


(Source)

Wow. Not only are man-lands back but they are back with a vengeance. This card has the spike in me jumping for joy. What we have is a mana-fixing man-land that can be turned into a Serra Angel each turn for a slightly more prohibitive cost. Besides the normal perks of dodging sorcery removal and counters as a man-land, the creature has vigilance so it can be tapped for mana after you attack or still be used next turn for counters. If we get some better counters in Worldwake this will fit nicely into a blue / white control deck for sure.

To me this seems like it has the potential to be one of the best cycles of man-lands printed. Having a mana fixer early in the game that can be used as a beater in the late game is quite powerful even if it does always come into play tapped. I would assume we will only see an allied cycle on these lands in Worldwake but I guess we will have to wait for more spoilers to confirm this. I personally can't wait to see the rest of the cycle. If they are anything as good as this I feel these lands have the potential to be big in standard as long as the activation cost is correctly priced for the type of deck they are designed to fit into.

One thing that seems a bit odd to me though is why we are getting the first multi-color man lands in what has been said to be a very mono-colored block. The Leatherback Baloth I talked about in the last spoiler post only seems to support the mono-color theme but this card certainly does not. Is wizards so caught up in multi-color land cycles that they would go against the theme of a block just to print some interesting cards? Must every set contain a cycle of $10 multi-color rare lands? Are they doing these things to cater to the type II players out there? I guess we will figure some of these questions out as the spoiler season continues.

Future Consideration: Prophetic Bolt

If there is one part of my current cube that I am not happy with it would have to be my gold/hybrid section. It is only 50 cards that are made of of 5 of each of the 2 color pairs. I never really hit the many of the gold blocks so my cards are mostly old golds or hybrids from shadowmoor block. Of all of the color combos this has left my blue/red very weak and mainly agro creatures.

Lets take a look at the current lineup:

Inside Out
Noggle Ransaker
Noggle Bandit
Crag Puca
Dominus of Fealty

I would like at least 1 less creature to help push the blue feeling of these cards a little bit more that there is currently. After review, I have decided that I want to add in Prophetic Bolt. This card is a kicked Burst Lightning and an Impuse on one printed card for only a slightly more restrictive cost. The spell has both a very blue and very red effect and I like what it adds to the red/blue gold section of the deck. I think I can easily swap out one of the Noggles for it without missing them too much.

Have any input on this choice? Is there a better Red/Blue card I should be considering for my cube?

Worldwake Spoilers - Leatherback Baloth analysis

Another card for Worldwake has been spoiled over on the MTG Salvation forums. Lets take a look at the card from nivek99 below:


(Source)

This card certainly is as boring as it is powerful. Powerful in the sense that it is much better than the 5 existing GGG creature spells (click here for the otheres) but boring in the design space since it is only a vanilla creature. I am certain this will see some sort of play however as it avoids most damage based removal. This card really is doing what green does best which is dropping big creatures; however, it is doing it much more efficiently than usual.

I do like that mono color cards seem to be catching up in power level to all the gold cards in the Alara block, but you have to wonder at what point is lightning bolt going to be too weak for the current meta? How long will it be before players will start with 30 life to offset the power of modern cards? Is black going to be the new king of removal since even a Flame Javelin, one of reds best removal/finisher cards from shadowmoor, can not even slay the beast?

The scary thing is that with acceleration this can be a turn 2 drop. I am not trying to cause alarm and say "a 4/5 for 3! the sky is falling!" but if Worldwake is going to be a set made up of many strong mono cards like this it seems like it will upset the meta game alot. I am going to call it now, this will see standard play.

It is assumed that the card was an early leaked common promo for Worldwake. It seems to me that it really will be an uncommon given its similarity to Woolly Thoctar. It is an interesting look at what Worldwake may have to offer us as it is the first non-reprint spoiled for the set so far. The Worldwake spoiler season seems to be starting early so lets hope we keep getting a steady stream of leaks as it continues.

Weekly Roundup - 11/30 - 12/06

Weekly Roundup is a weekly overview (or roundup) of interesting articles that have been posted in the magic blogosphere...other than the awesome ones posted here of course.

Worldwake Spoilers

Worldwake Spoilers Begin - New Jace Confirmed! - Mananation.com

Mananation compiles the first scraps of Worldwake information together. Check out the first spoiled reprint and cards leaked from the intro packs. I am ready for this spoiler season to get into full swing.

Standard

Breaking Through - When Christmas Becomes New Year's - Channelfireball.com

I love witnessing when a new deck comes along and shakes up the meta of the competitive magic environment. If I was playing competitive Magic right now this would be the deck I would want to play.

DeckBuilding

Developing Your Planeswalker Algorithm - channelfireball.com

This article goes over all of the planeswalkers' abilities, when they should be used, and what decks to use them in. This was hands down my favorite article of the week.

R & D

Designing for Spike - Wizards.com

Any article about designing magic is a winner in my book. I enjoy the different magic psychological profiles and am glad to see that Magic's veteran R & D still "gets" the game after working on it for so long. I highly recommend this article if you have any interest.

Zendikar Multiverse Outtakes - Wizards.com

A look at the lighter side of designing magic. While not incredibly deep or insightful, I did get a few chuckles out of some of the designer comments posted for cards in Zendikar during the design process.

Limited

JBoots Drafts Zendikar #6 - Mananation.com

I have found this series to be the most interesting limited coverage on the web. I may not always agree with his picks and from time to time he does make play mistakes, but being able to watch a draft from picks to finish has really helped boost my skills in the format. If you have any interest in drafting you need to watch all of JBoot's videos now.

EDH

EDHing Your PDS: Slivers Deck - 99edhproblems.com

A much different look at turning the premium sliver deck into an EDH deck than was posted in last week's weekly roundup. A good read for all of you who are interested in the format.

Card Synergy - Your First Combo

I am not sure if this is necessarily the case anymore but when I started playing Magic: The Gathering players started from humble beginnings with limited card pools. It wasn't unusual for people you play against to be using 5 color 150 card decks that consisted of their his or her entire collection. Because of this phenomena their didn't seem to be much card and deck synergy from most players beyond Keldon Warlord and the other 6 creatures that person had in play.

I too might have turned out to be another player like this had it not been for a lucky pull from my revised sealed deck/tournament pack and three booster packs that made up my initial magic collection. I was fortunate enough to pull both a Thicket Basilisk and a Lure in my collection of cards. In terms of modern magic this could hardly even be considered a combo. More modern cards like Turntimber Basilisk or even Stone-Tongue Basilisk have a little bit of this combo built into a single card. Back in the early days of magic though this was super secret tech and a great way to get card advantage over an opponent (not that we knew what that was back then mind you).

After the first time I cleared the board using this combo my opponents were stunned. My 2/4, Deathtouch for 5 become the bane of all the other local players. My green/white/red deck become feared by my opponent. Anytime I would play the basilisk I would just leave it on the sidelines. It would never attack or never block to avoid dying to Giant Growth or Lightning bolt. It would sit waiting for me to draw my lure as it waged psychological warfare against my enemies. My opponents knew that their creatures' days were numbered.

Overall, I feel lucky that my first magic cards had some synergy together. It allowed me to take a serious look at the game that made me develop more as a Johnny/Spike instead of being a Timmy who stacked his deck with Craw Wurms. It was the start that led me into playing competitive magic as well as made me focus more on maximizing my deck choices. It also lead me down a path where I would eventually even scoff at the my original combo. Sometimes I wonder what kind of magic player I would have turned out to be if that lure would have been a wanderlust instead . I can honestly say I am glad I don't know.

What was your first combo? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Worldwake spoiler season is starting

Well it looks like it is that time again. Mananation has kicked off the Worldwake spoiler season with this post on their website. In addition to that, MTG salvation has started off the spoiler list on their site here. While I doubt I have enough clout to be able to have any cards to spoil for you all at this point (though I would love to if you are reading this wizards), expect commentary on spoiled cards here on Mana Workshop as the spoiler season picks up and moves into full swing.

Taking the Sliver Premium deck to EDH

Originally when I set out with the goal of using the Sliver premium deck I was excited because I thought it would be a pretty unique idea; However, it appears that I was not alone in this idea. The deck lends itself very well to the singleton format because if you take out all the nonbasic land duplicates you have a list of 50 cards which is half of your EDH deck right there. It would leave you with the following cards:

Singleton precon list

When I started working with this decklist my goal was to use these 50 cards for the base. The more I looked worked on the deck the more frustrated I got. Slivers just don't seem to work that well in a singleton format. There is some redundancy in different sliver's abilities such as a few that offer trample and 2 that offer +1/+1. but without the redundancy that you can get from having duplicate effects on the battle field you often have to lose abilities to use the sliver sacrifice abilities. This became frustrating enough for me that I have decided to focus mainly on the cards to play and will forgo creating a final deck list.

If you want full deck list ideas then take a look at 99edhproblems or MTG Deck Source who both also have taken a look at this issue. I feel both of these decks make the right choices in terms of what slivers to play so instead I will focus on the tribal cards you will want to play along with your slivers.

The Cards to Consider

Shared Triumph - The enchantment version of sinew sliver. Anything that is going to boost our slivers power and toughness is going to be worth taking as most of them are small bodies.

Urza's Incubator - This is a nice card to play because many slivers have a single colored mana and many colorless. Since some of slivers seem to cost too much for what they do I feel this card is a good fix for that problem.

AEther Vial - A nice way to work around color screw and ramping out some additional slivers.

Cryptic Gateway - This card will allow you drop in multiple fatties a turn or flash in a sliver during an opponent's turn.

Patriarch's Bidding - This card can be a nice win condition if you use something like Necrotic Sliver to clear the board and set yourself up for the next attack with all of your fallen slivers.

Unnatural Selection - another card that is harder to remove than your Amoeboid Changeling that will allow you to take multiple creatures from your opponent per turn with your general. It also works well with Peer Pressure but I am not sure that would be worth taking on its own.

Mana Echos - This card is awesome if you are playing sliver queen. It allows you to create as many tokens as you want or to drop a giant fireball on an opponents head.

Door of Destinies - A solid pick for any tribal deck. This works even better in EDH since the games tend to allow for a slower curve.

Harsh Mercy - A cheaper almost wrath. Much like Patriarch's Bidding this card will most likely work out better for you than your opponent unless they are playing a heavily tribal deck as well.

More Changelings

Since the precon is ok with going with changelings I feel like its ok to add some more to the mix.

Changeling Titan - Other than your large legendary creatures you don't have too many options on large bodies to play as slivers. I like changeling titan because if you have mana issues he is not too hard to drop into play either.

Chameleon Colossus - a pump-able body that gets all of the bonuses of your slivers? yes please. Some might say it is a big commitment to green, but when I was working on the deck originally I found my list was shaping up to be a 5 color green sliver deck. Your millage my vary.

Mutavault - If you thought mutavault was rude in fairies think again. In this deck, mutavault becomes the most disgusting land ever printed. Good times.

Mirror Entity - I like this card here because i feel like our slivers are almost too small to make the difference in the late game sometimes. Being able to pump them up seems like a good fix for that problem to me.

Conclusion

While this obviously doesn't take you to a full deck it certainly gives you a good idea on what cards you want to go with. When I started looking at putting a deck together for this I actually found that selecting the slivers was the easy part. I have to pour over set lists to really be able to find the cards that I liked to fill out the tribal support the way that I wanted to. Hopefully you all found this helpful.

Sorry for the lack of a full decklist. Between my poor mana fixing cards and the issues I came up when designing a sliver EDH deck I came to the conclusion that it was not the deck I wanted to play after all. Hopefully for those of you that do want to play EDH slivers the tribal cards and changeling selection will be of some use to you. If you are interested in some of my picks, my work in progress decklist can be found here. Some of the picks are a little wonky and wouldn't have made the final cut and I never got around to completing the mana base. Sadly I doubt the deck will ever be completed as I have lost interest for the reasons I have stated above.

What cards would you play in a EDH sliver deck that are pissing?

Custom Magic: Blood Purge

Custom magic is a series where Berserko designs magic cards because he feels like it.

This week on custom magic we are going to be looking at a custom black card. As you all may know by now, I have been designing a cube. One of the biggest issues I have while working on my cube is finding cards to help colors other than White and Green deal with artifacts and enchantments. Of all of the remaining colors though, black in particular has been a big challenge.

Sure black can gets colorless sweepers like Nevinyrral's Disk but that really seems to go against a big black design philosophy. They want quick results no matter the price. If it will get you in a good situation in the long run then life is a small price to play. On that note, I present you with (the tenitively titled) Blood Purge.



I think this card is very powerful and to me embodies what black is all about. I have thought about tweaking the life amount and adding the ability to target lands, but that is the kind of thing that would require more play testing to find the right balance. As a first draft though, I really like the feel and raw power that is there. One thing that I really like about the card is that it also gets around the common problem that black has with removing creatures of its own color as well. I know I am ready to sleeve this one up and give it a shot.

What is your take? Good card? Bad card? Worse version of an existing card? Don't quit your day job? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Card Doctor: Squire

"Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse./ Of his stature he was of even lengthe,/ And wonderly deliver, and greete of strengthe."

-Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Oh Chaucer, had I never played Magic: the Gathering there might have been hope that I would have been able to enjoy reading The Canterbury Tales. All I could think about in my Sophomore English class was the terrible card from The Dark, Squire. I am sorry sir but your unfinished tails of travelers telling stories on the way to Canterbury never stood a chance when all I could think about was this

I know creatures have come a long way over the years but even for when it was released this card was bad. Give me a Savana Lions or a White Knight over this creature anyday. A Squire brings on imagery on someone rising to nighthood not a boring vanilla 1/2 for 2. Youthful Knight is even more interesting than that and even he is pretty boring by most people's standards as well.

Come to think of it from the name and theme maybe he was an attempt to try fix squire. I had always assumed that he was a watered down White Knight but I could see how inverting the power and toughness of squire and giving him first strike would bring his power level playable. This is already a fix that wizards explored though so we have no interesting in fixing the card buy going down the same road that they have already traveled. Lets take a look at the problems with the card.

PROBLEMS
1) Underpowered

Plated Sliver is a 1/2 for W that provides a +1 toughness bonus to all other slivers. it only costs one mana and is already leaps and bounds better than squire with the same power and toughness.

2) Boring

Vanilla creatures are boring and in this case simply adding an ability to our redesigned creature is also a bit boring since this is a design article and not just another printed common that people will pass over. If we were looking to take the easy way out we would just drop the mana cost to one, call it unplayable in anything but limited, and then be done with it. I am in the mood to put my thinking cap on so that means we will explore what it means to be a squire.

While I am not the biggest fan of cards being designed around theme, having knights getting some sort of bonus from a squire or having a squire itself be able to become a knight seems likes a fun theme to build into this card. I would say that design by theme has been the cause of some strange and often underpowered cards. Often it also it has ended up with cards that have abilities that are out of color (erosion comes to mind). Never the less if we keep this in mind while designing the card I think we can come up with a fluffy and in color type of ability.

3) The laughing stock of the Magic community

I will just leave it at this: From the Vault: Squire.

Solutions

Forgive me me if the wording on any of the cards I post is a little off from the printed grammar on modern cards. The majority of cards I own are older so wizards might have rephrased the way that they state some play mechanics now. That being said, dere is my first attempt at making an interesting squire card:



I like this card a lot from a thematic perspective. He starts out as a simple square that aids a knight more so than being useful on his own but then when he becomes a knight himself and can take on his own squire (hence the returning the card to your hand). Even though the card itself could ironically die to the card we are redesigning that is terrible I feel this card would be great in a tribal knight deck.

Sadly though this card seems to play too much like a blue card to fully make me happy. I decided to hit the drawing board once more and came up with this:




Ultimately I am pretty happy with this design. Normally this sort of ability is seated pretty deeply in the Red or Black parts of the color pie but we can make an exception for the theme we are going for. I like the idea of white having a "field promotion" type tutor that allows them to replace current creatures in play. For this creature, combat damage seems like a good trigger for the ability since he is being promoted to a knight for a job well done. Perhaps this is an idea I will explore further when designing sets for my custom card article.

The only adjustment I feel the Aspiring Knight needs is a limit on the converted casting cost. I think a limit of 3 would be a good number. It would allow for the possibility of indirect mana acceleration for white in a way that no other color really has a strong hold over yet. I suppose both cards could also use a rarity bump up a level as well but since I do not work on the wizards team it isn't quite as important to nail down the rarity level.

So readers, is this a good thematic fix? How would you fix try to fix squire?

Review: Premium Deck Slivers

The premium sliver deck has been out for a little over a week now and I just finally got around to picking up my copy from my friendly local gaming store. I paid $5 above retail but that is really nothing compared to the $30 markup they had on the Garruk vs. Liliana Deck but I digress. It was a small price to pay for the instant gratification of having a fully foil deck of my favorite tribe dating back to tempest.

The packaging itself is nice and follows the recent trend that wizard's marketing department has pushed of showing off some of the product from the display. The packaging matches the cards as well as the inside by having a nice foil shine as well. As players, we don't give two craps about how shiny the box is. We are already hooked on the game and just want to get to the shiny cards inside.

Lets go ahead and jump to the contents:

60 foil cards
1 - foil deck box
1 - non-foil 20-sided spin-down dice

Even though I am a long time player this is my first fully foil deck. The cards themselves are very nice quality compared the the foils I remember from the past. I have memories of pulling foils from boosters that were already slightly bowed at the center. I am very impressed to see just how much better the foiling process has gotten over the years and so far the cards seem to be holding up holding up well.

The card selection is very sliver heavy, which is good, but i was disappointed that some of my favorite slivers were not included in this deck (including my favorite sliver of all time Chameleon Colossus har har). Overall though the gives you many different sliver abilities by giving you few redundant cards. Generally I would say that it weakens the deck a bit because it is harder to get the effects that you want, but I would argue that this deck is much more playable than the starter decks that Wizards has released in the past. The one fortunate side effect of the card list is that it makes it very easy to make this a starting point of any sort of singleton format deck...say EDH for example. Expect a post on this exact topic to be posted on Friday.

Without getting into painstaking detail about the complete contents of the deck list, I would like to comment on the rares included in the set. Instead of the usual 3 rares that you would get with an intro pack, this set is loaded full of 6 foil rares that seem to range from average to above-par with the quality that you would expect with an intro pack. The Rootbound Crag will certainly be welcomed in my seeming unbalanced collection of red / green non-basic lands without any complaints from me.

As for "the general" of this set, I am a little disappointed. Sure we get the ability of Sliver Legion from the Coat of Arms but I would have much rather seen a little bit of price control on the secondary market and seen Sliver Queen be reprinted. For me that will always be the most iconic Sliver legend and I would love to have been able to get my hands on another copy cheaply.

I understand the justification for having the overlord there. He combos with Amoeboid Changeling to be able to take over your opponents creatures. I personally feel that since it is a combo that relies solely on 2 cards in a full 60 card deck it should have almost just been left out. Don't get me wrong I am glad there was one one Amoeboid Changeling in the sliver deck.

This is mainly a matter of personal play style, but for as hard as the Overlord is to get into play I would rather have the Queen or Legion for the same cost. He does make the best EHD general for the tribe however so if you are interested in using this deck to get in the format then it really is a fortunate choice on Wizard's part. While being able to get the slivers that you need is a great ability, I would personally rather be able to dump massive amounts of sliver tokens on the board. Again, the queen isn't necessarily always better but it does fit my play style better and is the original Legendary sliver so it would have been nice to see it featured in this deck.

My biggest complaint is actually with the deck box. The box looks great and all but unfortunately even though their is plenty of width in the box beyond the deck the box is too narrow to be able to fit a sleeved deck into. Sadly that just means one less bonus from this set because there is no way that anyone in their right mind is going to play a fully foil deck unsleeved. It really is a shame because foiled deck box matches the cards and theme of the deck so well.

Despite my seemingly critical tone for most of this interview I really like this deck. I have always been a big sliver fan and I hope that the next Magic block is 'The Sliver Cycle'. The set has some decent cards as a starting point and it is certainly cool to be able to get some of this cards in foil form since that was not an option on the older ones. Overall, I would say this set is worth it. There are certainly some questionable omissions though. Essence Sliver is one of my favorites and could have gone a long way on helping make this a much more potent deck. I have to say though for the $40 price point happy with how playable this deck is. Lets hope the intro packs take note or at the very least that Wizards keeps making interesting theme sets such as this one.

What is your take on the Premium Deck Series? Did you like the sliver deck? What deck would you like to see next in the series? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Budget Alternatives: Baneslayer Angel

Budget Alternatives is a series that points out replacements for the $200 playsets that plague Magic. We start things off aggressively by looking for cheaper alternatives to the $50 mythic rare, Baneslayer Angel.

A big part of my magic career has been creatively working around the fact that I am too cheap to drop a few hundred dollars to make a deck. I try to keep my budget around $60 a deck max since I am no longer a competitive player. Sadly trying to add a baneslayer angel to my deck would result in me having the filling the rest of the deck up with 59 plains.

WARNING: Since I enjoy coming up with deck lists for cube drafting and EDH the cards I review will not be limited to standard legal cards.

Breaking down the card

Baneslayer Angel
3WW
5/5
Flying
First Strike
Life Link
Protection from Demons and Dragons

Price: $50

At a glance This seems to be the most undercosted card that has ever been printed in the history of magic...maybe even more so than Ancestral Recall...Which is saying something. 5 abilities on a 5/5 creature for 5 mana? When I first saw this card I thought it had a cost of 6 and I was still floored. I am amazed there is room for flavor text with all of those awesome abilities on one card. I am still in shock just thinking how much better this is than my old personal favorite white flier from the 4th edition days, Serra Angel.

I spent some time looking at options of cards with the same converted mana cost in white. I can't honestly say that things are too pretty...I have color coded the individual abilities of the Budget Alternatives in the following way:

Green - Advantage
Yellow - Even or same ability
Red - Weakness

Lets just jump right in taking a look at Battlegrace Angel.

Battlegrace Angel
3WW
4/4
Flying
Exalted (Whenever a creature you control attacks alone, it gains +1/+1 until end of turn)
Whenever a creature you control attacks alone, it gains lifelink until end of turn

Price ~$2

Alright so best case scenario this card on it's own is a 5/5 Flying, Lifelink. That leaves us short first strike and the 2 protections. Honestly, I could care less about the protections as they are very specialized corner cases of protection from Red and Black but losing the first strike certainly does make the card weaker. Also if you aren't playing the the strength of the exalted ability what you really have is a Serra Angel without Vigilance. In an exalted theme deck I would still say the power level of the card is closer to a Baneslayer Angel, but if money is no object then the mythic rare still wins out by a long shot.

World Queller
3WW
4/4
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may choose a card type. If you do, each player sacrifices a permanent of that type.

Price: ~$1

I know what you are thinking...this article just jumped the shark (not yet it does that later). It may not look like a baneslayer and it really even isn't a close approximation of it in terms of abilities, but it does have the ability for card advantage if you are using it to remove card types that you do not have in play that your opponent does.

The Johny in me is screaming at myself to make a deck around this card. The Spike in me tells him to shut up and buy a baneslayer. The penny pincher in me tells him to shut up and that I need to spend my money on others this time of year. I think I might play this card in a white/control deck just because it is interesting. This is very much a your miliage my vary kind of pick however.

Oversoul of Dusk
W/G W/G W/G W/G W/G

Protection from blue
Protection from black
Protection from red

Price ~$2

Now here is a card that I loved to see in a draft. It is a shame that it is not standard legal anymore because this card is good against pretty much everything except a Baneslayer Angel. While the lack of First Strike and Lifelink are noticeable losses I feel that the overall evasiveness and defensive ability of the Oversoul of Dusk makes it a better card in many ways. While it can't fly the Oversoul does dodge 3/5 of the color wheel. Sadly though the casting cost makes it much impossible to splash white to add it to a deck, something that can be done with the Baneslayer much more easily.

Will an Oversoul of Dusk win you the game when your opponent has the Baneslayer out? No...at best he negates the lifelink ability on the Baneslayer and worst case teaches you to bring a creature with protection from white next time. I still love this card though even though it is no Baneslayer.

Divinity of Pride
W/B W/B W/B W/B W/B
4/4
Flying
Lifelink
Divinity of Pride gets +4/+4 as long as you have 25 or more life.

Price ~$4

Another non-standard legal card but at least this one looks promising. If we learned anything from the oversoul it is that we need lifelink to beable to outpace our opponent. On turn 5, It is clear that the baneslayer is still the better card, however if a Divinity of Pride is on the table longer than the baneslayer there is a good change that the divinity will be the larger creature and be able to take on the the Baneslayer head on. For your $4 a pop this might be the winner for a non standard mono-white deck replacement.

An $8 - $12 playset is too much you say? alright fine, we will go down to the uncommon rarity but I am going to warn you going down to a 50 cent playset budget is going to take it's toll. Let's take a look at Shepherd of the Lost.

Shepherd of the Lost
4W
3/3
Flying
First Strike
Vigilance

Price $0.10

If this card was printed back in visions I am pretty sure it would have been a rare. Honestly this card can't hold a candle to Baneslayer Angel. This suggestion is only being thrown out there for completely casual magic players who buy 1 pack a year of whatever booster is sitting on the checkout counter at WalMart. The only advantages it has is one less white in the casting cost, Vigilance (so you can attack and still chump block your opponents Baneslayer after attacking), and that it is $49.90 cheaper. It certainly seems like it might be a decent limited creature, but it quickly gets the wind taken out of it's sails when compared to a card of the power level of the Baneslayer Angel. Honestly though if this was a 3W creature it probably make the cut a little bit better but as it is it is far from a replacement for the Baneslayer

Maybe you can convince your little brother that you will trade him 4 Shepherds of the Lost for his Baneslayer to help make his angel deck better. You can even throw in a Coat of Arms to sweeten the pot even more so his Shepherds will all be 6/6. 5 cards for one? That is totally card advantage for your brother (Now the article has jumped the shark)!

Conclusion

Sadly after taking a look at the options it certainly doesn't look good for standard players. Casual players have many more choices available to them and will have a much easier time trading for some of the rares from shadowmoor that are no longer standard legal. I might actually make more sense in this case to not try to worry about playing an approximation of such a powerful creature but to maximize your ability to simply remove such a threat. As a white player dropping $20 for a play set of Path to Exile (or $0.50 for a play set of the slightly less reliable Journey to Nowhere) to protect you from $200 worth of angels might be the right choice for a budget player in this economy.

Are their any obvious 5 converted mana cost white creatures that I missed readers? I only really looked back as far as Shadowmoor for the article seeing as that newer creatures seem to be more powerful than most of the older cards that I from long before that. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Future Consideration: Lightning Greaves

Future consideration is a series of articles that analyzes cards that I am considering adding to my cube. Each post offers an in-depth look at why the card might be cube worthy.

Our first look at cards for future consideration is taking a look at the artifact Lightning Greaves. This is a cheap artifact that can be equipped for free and provides the equiped creature with both shroud and haste.

This card was actually recommended to me by a friend of mine. After looking into it I have to agree that it fills a need in my cube. Currently there are only a handful of of equipment cards in my deck and even fewer creatures with shroud. With Red, Black, and White being very removal heavy, I feel that there needs to more protection from removal without adding many more protection from color cards. The added bonus of this being an artifact is that all decks can benefit from the card.

Apart from it filling a need in my cube, when you evaluate the card on it's own it seems very under-costed for the bonuses it provides. Haste and Shroud are both abilities that are very heavily seated in the Magic color pie. Being able to add these abilities to any deck for a cheap casting cost and free equip cost this card makes itself a great candidate for any cube. I will be picking up a copy of this card next time I order singles for sure.

Crafting Your Cube: Mana Fixing

Today we are going to take a look at mana fixing and how I addressed it when crafting my cube. While there is quite a bit of color fixing in green and some in other colors as well today we are going to only look only at the non-color specific versions of fixing in my cube. If you wish to view the contents of my cube links are available on the side navigation to the full listings.

Below is a list of the current color fixers in my cube:

Mirage CIPT fetch land cycle

Bad River - swamp/island
Flood Plain - island/plains
Grasslands - plains/forest
Mountain Valley - forest/mountain
Rocky Tar Pit - mountain/swamps

Lorwyn vivid land cycle - 2 time mana fixer

Vivid Meadow
Vivid Crag
Vivid Creek
Vivid Grove
Vivid Marsh

Other Lands

Gemstone Caverns - Luck based but works better in a 40 card deck
Shimmering Grotto - mana fixing at the cost of tapping an extra land
Reflecting Pool - Helps fix issues where you need multiple of one type of mana
City of Brass - Fixing at the cost of life

Artifacts

Lotus Petal - One use fixing and acceleration
Expedition Map - Fetch the land you need
Elsewhere Flask - Fix to one color while removing all others
Prismatic Lens - Shimmering Grotto the artifact


Compared to most cubes, this is very limited color fixing. Many other cubes run as many as 30 mana fixing lands alone. They use the full cycles of rare pain, fetch, shock, and duel lands, etc. While in the future I plan on adding the cycle of 10 pain lands to my cube (once I get the five I am missing that is), one of my design goals of my cube was to make sure that people wouldn't be able to splash color using non-basic lands/artifacts alone. To complete this goal I started out with a small amount of color fixing to err on the side of caution. I plan on building on this foundation as I grow my cube beyond 360 cards however.

The correct amount of fixing for your cube is really a matter of preference of you and your other players. The more fixers you have the easier it is to splash colors for powerful spells and the more powerful the drafted decks will be. Finding a good balance may take a few drafts so feel free to experiment to find the amount that works for you. Keep in mind that most of the cards I have included in my cube are some of the weakest fixers that you can include.

Have any experience creating a mana base for a cube? Let us know what lands/cycles you have used in your cube in the comments.

Publishing Schedule

Hello Mana Workshop Readers. The flow of articles has felt a little disjointed as things have been getting started. I have taken some of the content that I have written and the ideas for columns that I have and laid out a basic publishing schedule for the site to follow. Next week will be a test run of this so everything is subject to change during or after that. The schedule is as follows.

Cube Mondays

Crafting your Cube - A series that looks at design consideration and attacking issues that exist when creating a cube (available at 12:01 AM central time).

Future Consideration - Card Analysis on cards that I am considering for my personal cube (available at 12:01 PM central time).

Budget Tuesday

Budget Alternatives - A series that searches for cheap replacements for overpriced cards. This week we take a look at the mighty Baneslayer Angel (available at 12:01 AM central time).

Open Topic Wednesday

Open Topic Article - This week I will be reviewing the recently released sliver premium deck (available at 12:01 AM central time).

Designer Magic Thursday

Card Doctor - A series of articles where I try to 'fix' overcosted cards to be more viable (available at 12:01 AM central time).

Custom Magic - A post with a custom designed magic card for you every week (available at 12:01 PM central time)

Johny Friday

Deck list - A weekly deck list for any number of random formats. This week we will be looking at EDH slivers (available at 12:01 AM central time)

No Tagline Saturday

Card Synergy - A look at potential card combos spanning the full card set of magic (available at 12:01 AM central time)

Roundup Sunday

Weekly Roundup - A look at the best articles from other Magic blogs (available at 12:01 AM ventral time...notice a pattern?).


Phew! That is a lot of content for one person to write. This week is going to be a trial run to see if this schedule is too demanding for me. I am making good progress on the articles so I expect to be able to finish everything this week. If I need to I will adjust the amount of content in future weeks and try to give myself at least one day off. Please leave words of encouragement or any feedback that you might have in the comments.

Crafting Your Cube: Guidelines

There are many things to take into consideration when you are coming up with the list for your cube. Before I started picking out any of my favorite cards to put into my cube list I wanted to have a lay down some guidelines to help me come up with my list.

1) All cards are legal

I knew that I didn't want to limit myself in anyway when constructing my cube. Some people like to create block, pauper, or even standard cubes. As I stated in a previous post, part of the reason why I created a cube was to make the most of my old favorite cards while still playing on an even playing ground with any other people I was playing with. I decided I wanted to take this one step further and not worry about any card banned/restriction statuses. All cards were fair game.

2) No Proxies

Many players proxy powerful cards such as the power nine in order to be able to draft some of the most powerful cards that have ever been printed. Personally I made the decision to only work with cards that I already had. Again, This was largely motivated by the desire to be playing with my favorite cards more so than trying to lower the power of card pool. That being said, I would gladly play those cards and many others if I had them.

Not using proxies also allows me to gradually buy singles in the deck and will allow me to keep growing my cube. Some people might not want to put down the money for more expensive cards and I completely understand that. It is really just an issue of personal preference.

3) Drafted Decks with Constructed Power Level

I was looking for a power level closer to a constructed type 2 deck rather than the usual power level of a drafted deck. This again is really a personal preference. For my first cube I really wanted to make things as powerful as I could while still following guideline #2.

I have also toyed around with the idea of making a cube made up of what I feel the worst cards in the game are. It would certainly be much cheaper than getting some of the cards I plan to acquire in the future, but this did not align itself with my original goals of making my cube so if I plan on ever using bad cards it will be for a separate cube entirely.

So with these guidelines in place I took the plunge and started selecting my cards. The first pick seemed like an easy enough choice to me. It was the first card that ever got me excited about playing blue: Man-O'-War

Weekly Roundup - 11/22 - 11/29

Weekly Roundup is a weekly overview (or roundup) of interesting articles that have been posted in the magic blogosphere...other than the awesome ones posted here of course.

General

A Magic Journey - Wizards.com

I generally am only really a fan of the R & D and design articles that are posted on the official magic website but this article instantly took me back in time to the being a forth grader playing Magic on the playground during recess. I think this might actually be my favorite Magic article of all time. It hooked me in for the ride and was very well written.

Why Design Magic Cards? - Mananation.com

An interesting look at designing magic cards and the effects that custom cards have on various formats. I had never really thought beyond the effect a card would have on constructed. As someone who enjoys designing cards it makes sense to me that drafting would be the fairest way to introduce a new card to help mitigate balance issues. I highly recommend this article for anyone who is interested in R & D.

Secondary Market

Baneslayer Angel - The Perfect Storm - Mananation.com

I am not very into the secondary market. I don't really speculate much on cards in the new sets and I generally don't even buy a huge amount of singles other that when I am trying to build a tribal deck of some sort. I really only go as far as thinking about how much money I would need to spend to reacquire my playset of Cursed Scrolls and Sliver Queens that I sold off when my interest in Magic was waning when I was in high school. This article really sucked me in and got me thinking about all the factors that ultimately create high prices on chase rares, only to have the bottoms fall out on them once they go out of rotation in standard (unless the card is named Sliver Queen it seems...).

EDH

Derfington’s Corner: Playing with Fire – Jaya Ballard - I Got 99 Problems But a General Ain’t One

A great look at making a mono red EHD deck. The article explains and justifies the reason for the cards in deck and includes a link to a proper decklist at the end. I really prefer having a deck explained to me before I get caught up in looking at the list and trying to figuring out the reason for card choices on my own. Great read. Can't Recommend it myself.

The Sliver Hive - mtg deck source

I seems that I not the only one who came up with the idea of turning the new premium sliver deck into an EDH deck. Unfortunately, I am still working on my list as it will be the first EDH deck I have made in a very long time. Fortunately, mtg deck source does a good job of adapting the deck to EDH and chances are does a better job overall that I have so far. Expect to see my deck list on the subject in the coming week.

Other Formats

The Stack and Back - wizards.com

A look at an interesting alternative format where players share a common deck. The mechanics of it reminded of a little bit of a simplified form of Mental Magic, a format I haven't played since tempest. I might give this one a try sometime and then keep the deck set aside for Mental Magic play as well.

Cube Synergy: Crucible of Worlds

When I was creating first creating my cube I started by only really thinking about the power level of the individual cards and not thinking much about synergy. While it is important to think about the strength of a given card when you are trying to create either a cube or a deck, some cards do not become truly powerful until until you combined them with other cards.

A good example of this is the card Crucible of Worlds. When I first evaluated the card I was looking at it mostly as a anti-land destruction card and put it into my maybe pile as it did not seem like it would add much to my cube. When I was finalizing the cube I came across the card again and couldn't believe that I almost passed it up.

Crucible of Worlds becomes much more powerful when you combine it with fetch lands. this card combo allows you to thin your deck of lands and fix any mana issues you might have as well. If that weren't enough, if you have a creature with a landfall ability in place you can keep bringing your fetch lands back every turn to continue to trigger landfall. Imagine the number of tokens that you can get in play if you had a Rampaging Baloths in the battlefield.

This card becomes even more disgusting though when it is combined with Strip Mine or Wasteland. This simple 2 card combo gives you renewable land destruction every turn. In the case of Strip Mine you can completely land lock your opponent or in the best case destroy their lands completely if they do not continue to drop them.

While Crucible of Worlds alone might not be powerful enough to justify a first pick from a pack over some of the more powerful stand alone cards in a cube, the Johnie in me will still be tempted to pick it every time for some of the tricks that I might be able to build as I draft my deck.

Berserko's Cube

Here is the contents of my cube that I will be discussing in future articles. The list is being being hosted on MTG URL but sadly I had to split it in two parts to get the whole thing to show up correctly. Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments.

Part 1
Part 2

The Call of the Cube

I got pulled into Magic again by drafting shadowmoor with a few friends about a year ago. After a few drafts I caught the Magic bug all over again. I tried to get back into competitive play and even when to a few tournaments. Things went much better than I thought they would. I used a friend of mine's elf deck and ended up pulling 17th out of 50 with a deck I had never played before. I really had missed the game.

Overall my experience rejoining the competitive magic world ended up with me spending money on a few boxes and finding that the competitive environment has devolved into most people playing buying singles for decks that they have found online. The game moved too quickly for me now. It seemed that new sets were constantly being released and I did not want to be constantly sinking money into the game or take the trill away that come from opening packs. At this point I stopped playing again and missed the entire Alara block. Standard was no longer the environment for me.

Looking at my collection again, I was left once again with the thoughts of what to do. I no longer enjoyed standard due to having to shell out big money to stay competitive and felt like my collection was incomplete if I only had one or two copies of a good card instead of a full playset. I did enjoy drafting but what is the point of paying for cards that I am only going to use once if that is the only type of magic that I play? I needed a solution that would allow me to get the most out of my old cards and enable me to play cards that I only had one copy of to the fullest. Fortunately, I found cube drafting.

The basic idea behind cube drafting is to create a pool of cards to use for a draft. As such, the minimum card pool should be set to 360 cards to be able to support an 8 player draft. Typically, the cube also only uses one copy of each card. The cube draft format seemed to solve all of my main issues I had with the game. I could use my `one-of`s, I got the same style of gameplay that I enjoyed from drafting, and I could use my full collection of cards. Cube drafting would also allow me and my friends to play games at a power level above that of a normal draft by being able to choose which cards would be drafted ahead of time.

I have spent the last week going through my collection and assembling some of the best cards and limited bombs and with the help of the donations of a stack of cards from a friend of mine I was able to complete my first draft of the cube. I broke down the cards for my cube in the following way:

52 cards of each color (260 total cards)
50 gold/hybrid cards (5 of each 2 color combination)
50 Artifacts/land (some fixing and some colorless lands)

I will post a full card list for the cube soon. For those who are interested in learning more about cube drafting, I found cubedrafting.com to be a great resource in coming up with good ideas for cards to use. Between the site owner's cube and the threads on their forum I was able to include and remove a few cards from my initial list based off of the other cube owner's experiences. Expect more posts on the subject as the play testing begins.

Welcome to Mana Workshop

Welcome to the newest blog on the MTG block. Mana Workshop is a site that will host articles about cards analysis, synergy, combos, and alternate game types including cube drafting and Elder Dragon Highlander.

The plan is to provide content that is interesting to player types of all skill levels. Chances are this will not be the blog to follow if you are hoping for coverage of the pro tours and professional magic. While the site will take a look at cards in standard, new sets, and cover the rumor season of upcoming sets, there are no plans to limit the content to such a narrow scope.

Thanks for visiting and stay tuned for new content coming soon.