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Theory Behind Magic: The Up Coming Regional (Part 1)

With the release of Planeshift, the card sets allowed in this year's regional tourney are all out, unless Wizards of the Coast suddenly decides to release 7th edition before April. So have you decided what deck you are going to play yet? If you haven't, here are a few thoughts that may help you decide.

I think not many people would argue if I say that W/U control is the strongest deck in the format right now. With its board control, counter spells and superior card draw, W/U control can defeat most decks in the field if the player can survive 7 turns, which isn't too hard with 4 Wrath of God in the deck. With additions such as Meddling Mage, W/U can better handle potential threats like Blastoderm.

Yet is it the best deck to play in a tournament? It is if there are not so many similar decks in the field already. U/W is always slow when playing the mirror match, a couple of unintentional draws will probably cost your position at the top eight even if you are playing the best deck. The chances of mirror matches are high if you play U/W because:

a) It is easy to make, just copy a deck list off the net.

b) The cards are not too expensive even though there are Absorbs and Wrath of God, but still much cheaper compared to Fires, which runs Rishadan Ports and Urza's Rage.

c) As I said, this is the best deck to play at the moment, so it would be popular to those who want to win, which means everyone.

Another reason that I think you should avoid playing popular decks is because when two people are playing similar decks, it really comes down to who got the better draw, which made the game totally luck dependant, something that I don't have a lot of. Skill is important too, but it is secondary in these scenarios in my opinion.

Rebels are also pretty popular at the moment, probably more popular than Fires at the moment, after Kai Budde won at Pro-Tour Chicago with it. The strength in rebel decks is the rebels' ability to summon other rebels, which allows players to get around my most hated card Counter Spell. The Lin-Sivvi (with 2 v's, remember that when you write you deck list) factor allows players to chump block fat creatures from Fires and resurrect them with Sivvi. In the end, you would find that you are going die horribly in the hands of a bunch of 1/1 creature that you thought you killed. I think rebels would be a good deck to play as long as they have an answer for mass destruction cards like Tsabo's Decree, Wrath of God and Simoon.

The third deck that I want to discuss is Fires. It was once dubbed the best deck in the format and to some people it probably still is. There is no doubt that a third turn Blastoderm with haste is great and the deck's power may have been enhanced with the addition of Shivan Wurm. However, the main problem I see with Fires is that if the opponent can stall you off until you exhaust your hand, then the game is as good as theirs because most fires players pack 4 Birds of Paradise, 4 Llanowar Elves and around 26 lands to ensure that a third turn haste Blastoderm can come out in time. This means that there will be a lot of wasted draws as soon as your threats run out, and land everywhere. Some people pack Meteor Storm to offset this disadvantage but that means you have to wait two turns for four damage which is way too slow. There is a reason why so many Fires deck failed at Gencon and I think this is one of them.

Well, that's enough from me for the moment but I'll come back to talk about Blastogeddon, B/U discard and R/B Machine Head next month. Hopefully you would be able to decide on a deck to play by then.

The man with no Fires
Minga Wong