Building Blocks

It's been a while since we've talked about a single card's journey through Standard.  Let's remedy that.  When's the last time you were terrified of a white creature with flash?  Archangel Avacyn?  Spell Queller?  Heron's Grace Champion?  Well, the card on the table today might be the best of the bunch.  Hailing from Avacyn Restored, this angel came out of the gate swinging and only stopped when it rotated.  Time to be scared of four open mana again, Restoration Angel is the topic of discussion!

It's been a while since we've talked about one tournament in depth, so we've decided to cover the last tournament in the biggest standard environment of all time - GP Copenhagen 2008.  The format?  Time Spiral/Coldsnap/Lorwyn/Shadowmoor.  The decks?  Surprisingly, not a Spellstutter Sprite to be seen.

Travel back over a decade into a standard metagame that we really couldn't find information on!

We're headed back to the Time Spiral block to talk about how a single card created an archetype.  Mystical Teachings doesn't look like it should be incredible.  Four mana instants that don't directly impact the board typically aren't even good, let alone format defining.  This, however, is the exception.

Coleman still won't let me do Thepths, so instead you get to listen to us blather on about a Tier 2 deck that deserved better.  Vampires are here!

One of the most important things Wizards does to attract new people to Magic is the prevalence of pre constructed decks.  This idea has been around for practically all of Magic history in various forms - starter decks, tournament decks, duel decks, the list goes on.  We're going to talk about one of the later iterations of this idea, the Event decks from Mirrodin Beseiged to Battle for Zendikar.  There's as many hits as there are misses, but definitely all interesting!

One of the oldest adages for deckbuilding is to split the types of spells into thirds - twenty creatures, twenty spells, and twenty lands.  What if you just cut out almost all of the spells and put more creatures in?  You'd probably end up with a deck looking like the one this episode.  Long before terrorizing Modern players, Champion of the Parish had a more than respectable run in Standard at the helm of a different human-centric aggro deck.  Hold on to your life total, it's probably running away from you soon, Naya Blitz up to the plate!

We're joined by a special guest this episode - Melvin the Muppet from the Ponder Podcast!  He's here to talk about the most important cards in any Standard format, lands.  Lands really do impact how a format is shaped.  We're covering the last five years of Standard and giving a brief overview of the ways that those particular formats were shaped by the lands available.

Stop us if you've heard this before.  Cheap artifact creatures benefiting from a powerful two mana artifact practically takes over a tournament, sending four people into the final day of Worlds.  We've already covered the most famous instance of this scenario, but this is one we enjoy more.  How powerful can an anthem really be?  When there's a bunch of two power creatures attacking, the answer is quite powerful indeed.

About six months ago, we took a break from our normal programming to refresh our brains by asking some questions about the other person's Magic career.  We're taking another one this week, the topics of discussion include the worst punt in a PTQ, what song is playing when brewing, and what decks shaped our early Magic memories.  Enjoy!

What do you do against Jund?  That was the question on the mind of the players at Worlds 2009.  Play Mono Red and try to sneak under Sprouting Thrinax?  Play some kind of Spreading Seas deck to attack the manabase?  The mirror?  All of these options have their strengths and weaknesses, but none of them won the tournament.  That honor belongs to the subject of this episode, a Mike Flores designed Naya deck featuring some of the more overlooked creatures in the format.  Baneslayer Angel and Bloodbraid Elf on the same side of the field?  Sure thing.  Lightsaber is here to slice up Jund!