As I’ve mentioned many times before I use Magic Workstation for my deck building and testing. Jason mentioned that a guide on how to use this program would make for a helpful article. This article will assume you already have the program installed and set up with all the proper sets and images. It will focus more on the actual use of the program.

Working on this site has brought back the itch to write Magic articles. However I had no idea what to write about. After a week or two with no ideas Dustin planned out a small Peasant Magic tournament. Since I haven’t done a tournament report before this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

A while ago I posted a set review of sorts for Ravnica. This is a bit of a follow up. Now that the set has been out a while I have more data to work with as far as experience playing with the cards goes. I also think I’ve figured out what a few of the set’s sleepers are. Once again I’ll be ignoring insignificant or limited only cards and very obvious cards. You don’t need me to tell you that Birds of Paradise is good, Watchwolf is very aggressivly costed, and Caregiver is bad. Also if I have nothing new to say since the last review I will leave it out here.

Here I’ll be going over another forum deck. This one will focus on a few different concepts than the last.

I spend a bit of my spare time helping people out with their decks on the Casual Boards at magicthegathering.com.

Most of what goes on there is one person posts a deck and other people give suggestions on how to improve it. Helping on these boards has helped my deckbuilding skills tremendously and is what eventually inspired me to start writing Magic articles. Today I will look at a few decks I randomly spotted on the forums and post them here and after likely making fun of them (since they will likely never see this) will go about improving them as I would have if I posted in the actual thread. Partly this will help see how to improve your own decks (or other people’s) and partly this will just show you how much better at Magic you are than the average casual player.

In this article I’ll be taking a look at the soon to be released Ravnica: City of Guilds set and touch on some of the cards I find to be either interesting or useful. Also since I’ve actually been doing pretty well at predicting some of the cards that eventually wind up expensive over the last few sets I’ll be mentioning some of the cards I feel might go up in price after the set has been out a while. I was able to buy my copies of Vedalken Shackles for $2.00 each and Beacon of Creation for $1 each while both cards are well over $5 now. This can be helpful not only for not having to try and get the cards when they are so expensive but also the fact that you could possibly make a profit on them and sell them or trade them for other cards when they are worth much more than you paid for them.

Before I get started here I want to say that I’m sure most of you have noticed a drop in quality of these articles over the past few months. Just simply I ran out of ideas and forced myself to write those articles rather than have them be something I actually wanted to write. That is almost a sure way to end up with something mediocre. Because of this instead of writing an article every week I will be writing them whenever I feel like it. It could be every other week or one a month but hopefully not less than that (I wont promise anything though). If you pull the “filler” articles (like this week’s) I’m writing decent articles about that often anyway. It will likely be that unless I have an idea for a theory article (which are my favorites) most of them will now be about how a specific format looks and/or building a deck for that format. Maybe I’ll do a casual deck article every once in a while since I certainly haven’t stopped building crappy casual decks on Magic Workstation (phear Defense of the Heart.dec) but not too many since they are generally short and the deck are rarely actually good (though I could likely get most of them to work in our more causal metagame).

Another casual deck for this week. This time I’m going to try my hand at mono-artifact beatdown.

Now that it is over I’ll be taking a look at the world’s National’s results (or at least the ones where Saviors was legal) to see how the Standard format ended up. This is mostly as a review of what the format ended up being since 9th Edition is legal in the next large Standard tournament.

This article will be about a few of the major magic sites out there. I’ll cover both past and present but will likely completely forget a few important ones because I either had never heard of them or because they just slipped my mind.

Time for another bad rare deckbuilding article.

This time I’m going for a card that I’ve wanted to build a deck around since I first saw it in the spoiler.