1st place at Friday Night Magic

I came in first yesterday at FNM.

Mono Blue Control

This is an interesting deck I found on the forums. I tweaked it a little from the original list, and it's been playing fairly well for me.

GW Infect Revisited

It's been a while since I talked about an Infect deck, so today I'd like to bring back a deck that I think has some great promise, Green/White Infect.

Green Elves

This is a fun deck that I play when I have some spare time. It isn't super competitive but it is a lot of fun, and can do some crazy things once it ramps.

Post Ban Deck Lists

The ban of Jace and Stoneforge Mystic goes into effect this upcoming Friday. I'd like to go over a few decks that I feel have a strong chance of being contenders for the next few months until rotation.

June 20th and what it could mean to Standard

Tomorrow marks the day of the ban list update. Wizards will officially announce any changes to the banned list of cards that can't be used in Tournament level play.

5-1 with Mono Green Infect at FNM

Took my Mono Green Infect deck to FNM tonight and walked away with second place.

Red/Green Infect against Caw-Blade

Tonight I play against my friend playing a Caw-Blade deck.

Red/Green Infect against Machine Red

So I thought I would try something a little different today. Instead of typing up a whole series of games, instead I recorded them using CamStudio (Freeware). Take a look inside!

Bloodcrank combo

I'd like to take a quick look at today's Building on a Budget deck, based around the combo of Bloodchief Ascension and Mindcrank.

R/G Infect Aggro

Based around an older "Building on a Budget" deck called Rareless and Careless, I've made this new Infect deck. I noticed that the games that I was typically losing were games where my opponent got down an early blocker, and was able to prevent me for getting in for the last point or two of damage that I needed to win.

Pro Tour Nagoya and the new face of Standard

Pro Tour Nagoya has finished and the new face of Standard is beginning to take shape. Nagoya was a Block constructed tournament, meaning all cards needed to be from the Scars of Mirrodin block. The decks that we saw win today will be the shells that winning decks will adopt as soon as Zendikar rotates out of Standard in October.

StarCityGames.com Open Series: Denver

The Standard portion of SCG: Denver just finished a few minutes ago, and B/R Vampires has won it. This marks 2 SCG Opens in a row that Vampires has placed first. Of the Top 8, only 3 decks were U/W Vampires. Further breakdown after the break.

Mono Green Infect at FNM

I finally had a chance to take my Mono Green Infect deck to FNM yesterday. I won all of my matches except against a Caw-Blade deck and I finished in 3rd place overall.

Undefeated tonight with Mono Green Infect

I played 7 matches tonight on Magic Workstation and went undefeated. 3 matches against Caw-Blade decks (all U/W version, no Darkblades), one match against a Venser type deck,2 matches against Tempered Steel decks and one match against a Green Elves deck. Read more after the jump.

Machine Red and the Art of Aggro Proliferation

Maybe you've seen some people playing this deck, essentially it's a Mono Red deck, but runs a lot of Artifacts. It utilizes proliferation and Koth to beat your opponents.

Brian Kibler's U/B Artifact Aggro

A lot of you have probably heard of Brian Kibler already. If you haven't, he's a Hall of Fame player that has been playing Magic for over a decade, including several Grand Prix wins, and a Pro Tour win. He's famous for showing up to major tournaments with a deck that isn't anything like the top tier performers. Recently (last weekend) he went to Grand Prix Singapore with a U/B Tezzeret deck, we're going to take a look at it.

Green Infect in the Wild

So yesterday we brewed, today we set it out into the wild.

Mono Green Infect

I've spent the past week playing 3 different variations of Infect. G/W Infect (This list here), G/W/U Infect (Utilizing Stoneforge Mystic and Swords to give protection), and Mono Green Infect. Out of all of these lists, I feel that Mono Green is the best positioned. More inside!

Two Standard Tournaments This Weekend

Initial reports are starting to come in on both Grand Prix Singapore, and the Star City Invitational in Indianapolis. Initial reports are bleak, we're looking at another two tournaments that have the Top 8's dominated by Caw-Blade variants.

Green White Infect places 4th in a Pro Tour Qualifier

Last weekend a player placed 4th at a Pro Tour Qualifier for the Pro Tour Philadelphia tournament. It uses the same general Green Livewire shell as my Green/Blue deck, but forgoes Blue in favor of white.

Magic Workstation Part 2

Welcome back to part two of our two part series for Magic Workstation.

Setting up Magic Workstation for Magic: A Beginner's Guide

So you want to play some matches online, but you're tired of trying to do fancy things with Skype and trying to share parts of your desktop, or going oldschool and just pointing your webcam at a table. Well, allow me to introduce you to some free software you might find helpful, Magic Workstation.

Putting the Lash back in Infectwire

I know, I know. Just last week I took Livewire Lash out of the deck in order to put in Piston Sledge. But I went back and looked at my reasoning. I said that I could keep my creatures alive long enough for Piston Sledge to matter. Well, how was I keeping my creature alive? By casting Instants at them. What Equipment was it that worked really good when the creature was being targeted by a bunch of spells? That's right.

Soul Sisters

My wife has been slowly learning Magic, and tonight she wanted to play a game against me. I set up her laptop to run Magic Workstation, and showed her how to build a deck in there, and then helped her put together a Soul Sisters deck.

Cast Genesis Wave for 20, Hilarity Ensues

I'd like to take a step back from my infect deck for a few days to play with a deck that might as well be a coin toss. Defender Wave. If you haven't tried it yet, you should, it's fun!

U/G Infect wins a 55 man trial tournament

Congratulations to Mobius1 for winning a Magic-League trial tournament with U/G Infect and earning himself 2 byes into the Master Tournament. Let's take a look at his decklist.

Infect at FNM

So close. Went 3-1 at FNM, and came in 5th due to tiebreakers.

Infectwire loses the wire

It's been almost a week since I last updated you on my Green/Blue Infect build. I've made several more changes, and the new version of the deck is playing very well online and in testing. I recently won a T2 tournament on Magic-League with it.

Sealed Deck Building with D

A commenter left me with a list of cards he had opened from 6 packs, and asked for help making a sealed deck out of it. Let's see what he got.

Sealed Deck Building with D

A commenter left me with a list of cards he had opened from 6 packs, and asked for help making a sealed deck out of it. Let's see what he got.

Wizard World Series Big Apple: Top 16

This past weekend was the TCGPlayer.com Wizard World Series Big Apple in New York at the Penn Plaza Pavilion. Again, we are greeted with the Top 16 nearly filled to the brim with Caw-Blade decks. However, 4 decks this weekend were not in the ubiquitous Caw-Blade shell.

A Game of Thrones

First of all, I must apologize for being so late to the party. A Game of Thrones was first printed nearly 15 years ago. You'll have to forgive me though, as I was only 12 at the time.

StarCityGames.com Open Series: Louisville

The second Standard tournament after the release of New Phyrexia has finished (For the most part). I'll be looking at some of the top decks that made it in, and criticizing some as well. Check it out.

Infectwire at FNM

So I took my latest evolution of Infectwire to my local FNM tonight. It didn't perform quite as well as I had hoped, but a lot of that was due to my inexperience against some of the new decks that came out.

Infectwire Evolved

I've been playing a lot of online matches with my version of Infectwire, and now it has a little less wire in it, but it's still doing pretty good.

Mono Black Control

Today I'll talk about a deck that I've been having fun with on magic-league matches, Mono Black Control.

Sealed Deck Match

After much discussion on the forums, there were in fact a couple mistakes that I made in my deck. Read on to look at the changes.

Sealed Deck Building with D

Greetings readers!

Today, in keeping with my theme of sealed decks, I will be opening 6 boosters and building myself a 40 card sealed deck. I'll be going the route that most events have gone, and do 3 packs of Scars, and 3 packs of New Phyrexia.

Now, enough time talking, lets crack some packs!

New Phyrexia Launch Party

I checked out another store for the New Phyrexia Launch Party. I wasn't able to go to one on Saturday due to my wife graduating (congrats wife!), but fortunately a nearby store was holding their event on Sunday. Either I've been lucky or most game stores are just filled with friendly people. I believe it is more of the latter. Read on to hear more.

Drafting Tips for New Phyrexia

Today I would like to go over a couple incredibly powerful (draft) cards that are often passed over. These cards are often ignored because their power level seems weak to players used to standard deck construction. List following the jump.

Friday Night Magic Draft

Red infect is a real archetype now. I drafted what I considered to be one of the worst decks ever tonight, and I ended up going 3-1. Read on to look at some of my picks.

Testing Infectwire Part 3

Yesterday we battled through a 3 game match against a White Weenie deck trying to abuse equipment, today we face down the reining king, Caw-Blade! I've made some minor tweaks between the games yesterday and today, check it out after the jump!

Testing Infectwire Part 2

Yesterday we battled through a 3 game match against an Exarch/Splinter Twin deck, today we face down a Puresteel White Deck in a cage match to the death! Check it out after the jump!

Testing Infectwire

Transcribed a 3 game match against a New Phyrexian Grixis-Exarch-Twin deck, check it out after the jump!

Infectwire post NPH

Last week I posted the deck that I had been running at my local FNM, and I also gave a short list of what cards from New Phyrexia would be good additions. I've been playing and tweaking my list for the past week on Magic Workstation, and I think I'm ready to release the list I'm going to be using. List and explanations after the jump!

New Phyrexia Pre-Release

I return today victorious.

I am sorry to those of you out there that didn't pull any mythics, apparently WOTC wanted me to have them all instead.

But before we get into that, it was pretty interesting just getting to the pre-release. More after the jump.

Possible Thievery

I returned today from FNM defeated. I lost 2-1 to a Vengevine deck in the make-it-or-break-it round. I had him at 3 poison counters, with a Livewire'd Corrupter on the field, and he drops an Eldrazi Monument on his turn, attacking for 15 flying with me at 13 life. My next draw would have been a Distortion Strike, combined with the Prey's Vengeance  in my hand, it would have been 11 more infect damage. So close...

But that's not the worst thing that happened...

Secret tech for infect

5 months ago, one of the R&D folks at Wizard posted an article about the future of infect. Apparently, the Future Future League had found an amazing card from Zendikar block that made green infect decks amazing.

Staying fit at home and on the road

Because of my job, I am on the road roughly one week out of each month. This means staying in cheap hotels, jet-lag, and unfamiliar locations. None of which help when you're trying to stick to an exercise plan.

Magic Workstation

Ever wonder where these tournaments for cards that haven't even been released yet are happening?

Infectwire

So I've been playing an infect deck at my local FNM for the past few months to great success, find the current deck list after the jump.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog!

I am an engineer and a part-time video game designer. I first began creating video games in high school, developing little games on TI calculators for my friends, and I've been hooked ever since. I program in multiple languages; Java, C++, Basic, and a couple of PIC specific assembly languages, and I'm currently wasting time creating small games in Visual Basic for Excel.

Most recently I created a port of the popular board game Pandemic in Excel, and I also replicated the flash game Recordshop Tycoon (Without the physical placement portion of store layouts, I couldn't easily code in a way to allow drag and drop graphics that the game would check). Both games were mostly thought exercises, finding effective ways to code common game elements (like the AI of customers in Recordshop, or the GUI in Pandemic). With both games I ended up spending more time programming them than ever actually playing them.

I'm currently working on my first game that will actually be released. It's an adventure type game that is a combination of some of my favorite game elements. It has "army" recruitment and upgrading reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics or Pokemon, a combat system similar to Magic: The Gathering, and a world structure that is procedurally generated like the world of Minecraft. The game is being programmed in Java, specifically for Android devices.

Anywho, look forward to future posts about video games and Magic: The Gathering.