All the Articles on our Site
There are ways around just about every rule ever made by mankind. We’ve all learned to push the boundaries and discover which rules really apply and which ones are not fully enforced. Kids learn which parent to ask to get that extra TV show before bed. Students figure out which teachers are pushovers that let…
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Read Part 1 of this series – here! Completing the Transformation I was talking to a friend, Kevin Grigsby, who has bought and sold cards off and on since well before my start in the game. We discussed a story dating back to the unbanning of [card]Land Tax[/card]. It was the first time I was…
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“Half a denier for my bloody life story?!” “You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.” “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here—this is the war room!” A while back, we analyzed the different investment strategies implied by the Pick of the Week segment on the Brainstorm…
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to Serum Visions! This week, we are going to be talking about the most popular beer in the world: the lager. There is a beautiful and interesting history behind this type of beer that is hidden behind its most recognizable brand, Budweiser. While finding its roots in Austria in the mid 1500s, it…
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Greetings, Brainstorm Brewery readers! I am the editor of ye olde BSB, and though I have lurked in the background until now, I figure it’s time for me to come out of the shadows, at least momentarily. You may know me from my work on Quiet Speculation, but I’m not here today to talk about…
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(Cold)snap Back to Last Week Welcome back, readers of Brainstorm Brewery material. I think I’m getting into a routine where at the beginning of each article, I’ll bring up an insightful comment from the previous week to bring full attention to it. Last week we scratched the surface of token finance, and I forgot to mention…
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Let’s continue our discussion of the Unified Theory of Commander with a simple question. Would you generally rather be the player at the table with zero cards in hand or the player with a full hand of seven cards? No, this isn’t a trick question. It’s a thought exercise to make sure you are in…
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Greetings and welcome back! Before I get started on today’s topic, I’m going to address a few comments I saw on Reddit concerning my last article. A small portion of the comments asked me to be more specific with the picks I shotgunned. I chose cards that I felt were underpriced, were readily available, or…
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Last time, we outlined the environment that these picks were made, so if you haven’t read that article, please do so here. With that out of the way, today we can start digging deeper into how each host’s choices panned out. This time around, rather than compare opposite styles, we are putting the two more…
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Puzzle Box! This week we are going to be looking at the red section substitutions as we continue building our cube to optimize it for the four-man format called Twos. If you have been following along, there is a good chance that you will have a pretty good…
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Note on last week: Welcome back, new buyers and sellers of bulk shipping supplies! Before I go on this week’s rant, I want to take a moment of reflection on last week, and bring up a comment that Reddit User and store owner TheCardNexus brought to my attention. I showed you guys a place to…
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“I took the liberty of bullshitting you.” “Excuse me while I whip this out.” “I have half a mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.” Hello, Brainstorm groupies! When last we left our intrepid heroes, we were learning about the investment styles that each host was using to amass…
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Junk Midrange has been one of the fastest-growing decks in Standard of late, especially after Jeff Hoogland’s third-place finish at SCG Cincinnati. You can see his list here. I first saw this deck shell when Ryan Gerhart posted a top four at SCG Detroit with his list. I fell in love. The [card]Underworld Connections[/card] plus…
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Serum Visions! First things first, I must apologize for my absence these last two weeks. My wife and I are moving to Toronto and just did the big packing blitz. It left absolutely no room for writing. But here we are, back and ready to bottle! This week we’re…
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The Magic community has a lot of different definitions for the word bulk. Bulk rares are the [card]Conjured Currency[/card] and [card]Whims of the Fates[/card] of the world, the dregs of Magic cards that most often sit collecting dust until they’re shipped off to a dealer for $.10 or $.13 a piece. Bulk commons and uncommons are generally sold…
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It’s not that I’m a pessimist. It’s true that I recommend you mulligan like one when you play Commander, but I’m actually a positive person in general. I look forward to every new Magic set release. I pay attention to spoilers and get excited about cards that might fit into one of my EDH decks…
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“Cast [card]Immortal Servitude[/card] for X = 3… get back my whole graveyard…triggers…kill you?” Standard is not a format renowned for combo decks. Most of the time, we see a rock-paper-scissors metagame filled with aggro-midrange-control matchups, as opposed to the aggro-combo-control matchups we read and hear about when beginning to learn “Magic theory.” However, this is…
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The professor walks in on the first day of classes with a gleaming smile that could make your stomach turn to knots. There’s no way someone can be that happy. It’s the first day of MTG Appreciation 2100 [Ed. note: this explains why he’s so happy]. As an introduction, Professor Brightflame feels we should take turns…
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PLs4gxqbLAAD5bqyn6vroWK-yjZRSEO3J7&w=640&h=360] Divine Favor This week I’m pleased to welcome my good friend Jan (pronounced “Yawn,” he’s a dude) to the show to help take me through an MTGO Cube draft! As the title indicates, we wound up with most of the angel cards in the cube and played them to great success. This week…
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Last week in Eyes of the Watcher I discussed my first card: [card]Grove of the Burnwillows[/card]. I was trying a new style of writing in an attempt to engage my readers but I did not quite succeed. These first two articles were originally together as one, discussing two cards instead of the single one,…
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Currently Standard is just a big ole mess. Right now the options are endless—or so we believe. After a couple of weeks of tournaments, the metagame has been broken down and it seems you can’t just play what you want. Let me tell you why. [deck title=B/g Devotion, Andrew Tenjum, 1st Place, SCG Open Cincinatti]…
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About Last Week Welcome back, readers! Well, hopefully I still have a readerbase after last week’s article. If you’ll read last week’s Reddit thread for the article, you’ll see that several people brought up very valid arguments against my theory, and slapped me with some issues that I had left out. It’s enough for me to…
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I advised my readers in my previous article that acquiring mana was a big deal in Commander. As it turns out, it’s such a big deal that I wasn’t able to contain it all in one post. After we published the first piece, so many comments, questions, and (gasp!) criticisms came pouring in that I felt like…
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Newton’s First Law of Motion states, “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion.” At two separate parts in my financing “career,” I have slowed buying cards in order to catch up on other things. The second time this happened, I had a lot of unexpected expenses come up and had just…
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Play more spot removal. Play less spot removal. Play enchantment removal, some of which must exile or tuck. Play counters. Play mana ramp. Play wraths. Play enough threats. Don’t dilute your game plan. Play artifact removal. Play board wipes. Play enough lands (seriously, play enough lands.) Deckbuilding mantras for EDH come at us constantly. If we…
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