We have been trying to figure out why people run Deep Analysis for a long time now. It looks like a bad card. Why would you pay 6 mana and 3 life at Sorcery speed for 4 cards even if you can split it up over multiple turns. Opportunity never saw play and it is an Instant and doesn't cost you life. I've tried to use it and it always seemed pretty crappy.

As such I decided to do some research on the decks that use it and how it is done. A Deep Analysis of the card if you will. Well here it is:

Another attempt at building a deck around a bad rare.

This time around I'm going for a bit more of an odd choice. False Cure can be useful as a sideboard card against decks that gain a lot of life, such as the extended deck Life. However actually designing a deck around the card will likely be quite difficult and will probably result in a crappy deck. Score.

Jon's been doing everyone a favor and writing about all matters of constructed-related things and I can say for everyone here that it's been exceedingly educational. But Jon hasn't touched on a format that I can safely consider my area of expertise.

I am, of course, talking about limited. You know: draft and/or sealed. Specifically I'm going to touch on the more common of the two in this article: draft. Most of us rarely if ever play sealed. Truthfully, the two formats may be under the same banner, but they're vastly different.

Probably the most important thing to know about limited is the environment itself. In a booster draft, it's vital to know what to expect in terms of cards, in terms of how they interact with each other, and also in terms of what to expect other people to be doing.

I'll go through each of these points with examples.

Card advantage can be a little different in multiplayer than in a duel. Look at the most common way of determining card advantage in a duel, counting cards. If player A plays a Terror on one of player B's two Serra Angels he traded his one card for his opponent's one card and did not create card advantage or disadvantage (this is called maintaining card parity). If Player A had instead played Wrath of God and killed both Serra Angels he traded one card for his opponent's two cards. This is a card advantage of +1. Similarly if player B then plays Concentrate he trades his one card for three new cards gaining a card advantage of +2. What we are doing is comparing the amount of cards lost/gained by each player.

How does this counting method work in lets say a 3 player game? In the first example where player B's Serra Angel is killed by player A's Terror. Player A still maintains card parity with player B but what does it look like from the perspective of player C? Player A used one card to deal with one card of player B's. This means from player C's point of view two of his opponent's cards were dealt with without using any of his own. This is easily an example of card advantage. He got a +1 card advantage relative with player A and +1 relative to player B. If you go back to player A's point of view he ended up with card parity with player B and -1 card advantage with player B (or +1 card disadvantage).

So a one for one trade results in an overall card disadvantage but what about the second example where player A Wraths away player B's two Angels? Player A's card advantage relative to player B is still +1 but what about to player C? It would be -1 because player A used one card and did not deal with any of player C's cards. Could you consider that player A ended up with card parity (since -1 + 1 = 0)? He still used one card to deal with two so that can't be the answer but clearly this trade still benefits player C who just saw 3 cards go away without expending any of his own (+1 relative to player A and +2 relative to player B). I don't think there is necessarily a clear cut easy way to count card advantage in multiplayer as there is in a duel. Since every interaction happens differently from each player's point of view you can either look at it relative to each player or as a whole from a neutral position. Which is the correct way? I don't think either is either correct or incorrect which makes it not so easy to determine. At the very least it is something interesting to think about that I haven't seen being discussed elsewhere.

So what does any of this matter and how can you take advantage of it? Well one thing that should be very clear is that the best place to be in in player C's seat. If you can get your opponent's to deal with each other's threats it can mean nothing but massive card advantage for you. So what types of cards will encourage your opponents to deal with each other's threats? Generally since you can't control what your opponents are playing you will have to provide them with the means to do it. This generally means some type of symmetrical card. I believe I have recently found a good one.

Often strategies that work in duels are quite terrible in multiplayer. Something like a red land destruction deck stands no chance at all against multiple opponents since there will never be enough Stone Rains to keep everyone hurting for mana. There are also strategies that are terrible in duels but gain a lot of power in multiplayer. This article will go over some strategies of each type as well as some general multiplayer strategy and deckbuilding advice.

I had enough fun doing the last deckbuilding exercise that I felt I should do more. I'll probably do one every so often from now on. This time around I'll be basing it around a bad rare. I'll be following the same format and even using the same test decks as last time.

This article will cover how to build a blue-based control deck, how to play it, and also how to play against one. The examples will not only include Mono Blue Control but a couple of other blue heavy control decks as well. Control decks form a very large and important part of our metagame so I feel it is important to understand them even if you don't want to actually build one.

Yeah, I said this was a two-part article and this is a third part. The reason for this is two-fold. First the deck from part two basically, well, sucked. I mean it wasn't totally worthless but seemed to just be adding those extra colors because it could rather than actually because it would make the deck better. Echoing Truth is a pretty decent bounce spell but when you get down to it is still just a bounce spell and bouncing a permanent is rarely as good as actually killing it. Magma Jet is a good burn spell but Echoing Decay can kill pretty much anything it can and there is no shortage of other playable black removal in today's Standard. Meloku is a powerful finisher but so is Kokusho. The deck would be much better as a two-color deck and thus just turns into B/G Controlwhich is already an established tier 1-2 archetype. Since I want something new this just wont do. The other reason I'm adding a third part is because I may have come up with the answer.

Last week I looked at a few decks in the current standard environment and showed that most are based on older decks. This week I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to take an old deck and try and make a Standard version. At first I was just going to update it with new cards but with most decks that would only result in a few changes and would be more like just tweaking the deck slightly. Choosing the deck was actually very difficult and I'm still not sure I chose the best deck. I looked at more than 300 old decklists trying to find one that was both interesting enough to update as well as one that is old enough that it hasn't been used in a while. After the first hundred or so decklists the only thing I found that might work was Machine Head. This was before I decided on making it standard legal. While I do like that deck and it does fit the criteria when I tried to figure out what I would do with it I found I'd only make a few changes. Noticing this lack of change made me realize that if I made it Standard legal I'd actually be forced to make a new deck. This sounded better but this particular deck wouldn't have that exciting of a change and would likely be inferior to both a mono-black or mono-red deck in Standard. While I wasn't looking to make anything tournament viable I was still unhappy with what I could turn the deck into. So I looked for a new deck. After another 200 or so lists I think I finally found what I was looking for. Behold type 2 with Mirage+Tempest blocks legal 5-Color-Green.

Sometimes the best place to look for new ideas is in the past. After all if something was good before it can likely be good again. In fact take a look at the current Standard environment (or at least the pre-banning environment minus affinity). What are the top decks, and where did they come from? This is going to be a two part article with the first part covering the current standard environment and what each deck owes its heritage to and the second part will look for an old tournament deck and try to reinvent it in a casual standard environment.