Countdown to The 2017 Season Two Invitational Weekend!

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Newsletter
Thursday, November 23rd

Magic and 2017 aren't done yet! There's still a lot of money and a very pretty trophy to give out at the upcoming 2017 Season Two Invitational! So where to begin on preparation? Well, Sam Black is still one of the more revered deck builders in the game, so that's pretty good. And if you still somehow don't enjoy Modern, Jadine Klomparens has a few words of wisdom on how to warm up to the format. Then of course, there's always Ross Merriam to share some advice on how to keep your instincts in a format this wide open. You know what? You can't go wrong. Patrick Chapin is all over Modern, Brad Nelson is making it his next mastered format, and — what's that? The Invitational is half-Standard as well? Wow, this is going to be a big one.

— Danny West, Content Coordinator

Season Two Invitational Weekend December 1-3

January 6-7
Modern

January 20-21
Standard

January 27-28
Team Constructed

Incremental Control In Modern
By Sam Black  

Fatal Push is really the glue that allows this kind of deck to have any chance, and Path to Exile rounds it out nicely. Modern is in a very creature-heavy space at the moment, and dedicated removal spells are rarely a liability and almost always a necessity.

Flipping Search for Azcanta quickly is more of a nice bonus than a necessary component of using the card, so Thought Scour over Opt or Serum Visions isn't required, and, due to the fact that the cards in this deck all play extremely different roles from each other, a fairly compelling case could be made that the selection may be more valuable.

However, I think Thought Scour is kind of a package deal with Emrakul, the Promised End, and with three artifacts, three sorceries, four other creatures, five planeswalkers, seven enchantments, and enough lands and instants that I'll essentially always have one of each in the graveyard, I have enough diversity that I should usually have five to seven types in the graveyard by the time I'm thinking about casting Emrakul, and I like having the way to go over the top if my opponent does something bigger than the incremental advantage of my planeswalkers can keep up with.

Baltimore Open Weekend Winners

THREE YOUNG VETERANS CONQUER THE BALTIMORE TEAM OPEN

Michael Kurant
Standard Classic

Kazu Negri
Modern Classic

Jack Kitchen
Legacy Classic

How I Learned To Stop
Worrying And Love Modern
By Jadine Klomparens  

Highly diverse formats require a different skillset for success from less diverse formats, but it can be really hard to realize that. Competitive players have a set of skills that they are used to leveraging to find success, and when those skills stop producing the same results, the idea that other skills have become more important isn't always the go-to explanation. Instead, players fixate on how their skill is no longer helping them and decide the format just isn't as skillful as what they're used to.

If you are someone who doesn't like Modern, who talks about things like excessive matchup variance or the pairings lottery to explain that dislike, this article is for you. This is my effort to reframe the unique elements of the Modern format in a way that makes them interesting, challenging, and enjoyable, rather than strictly upsetting.

Don't Let Modern Leave You Behind!
By Ross Merriam  

I wrote two weeks ago about playing Dredge for the RPTQ since it seemed to me like the amount of graveyard hate was trending significantly downward, with some players eschewing it entirely. It was indeed the deck I started my testing with and the deck I played with the most over the last two weeks.

My results weren't stellar, but I wasn't seeing a lot of hate and my instinct that the deck was once again well-positioned was reinforced by the deck winning the Magic Online PTQ last weekend. More importantly, that winning list incorporated an interesting card, Burning Inquiry, which helps the most significant issue I was having with the deck: reduced explosiveness after the banning of Golgari Grave-Troll.

In the end I let the fear get me and I was left to watch Alex Majlaton take down the RPTQ with Dredge in dominating fashion. While I don't think Jeskai was a bad choice by any means, not playing a powerful deck with which I am quite familiar when it was well-positioned was a mistake. If you're the kind of player who likes to play linear decks, you have to take advantage of the weeks when the metagame breaks your way, and I failed to do so.