Top8Magic Fans,

We are proud to announce that Deckade is now available on Amazon for the Kindle. Click on the link below to order your copy.

Michael J. Flores: Deckade at Amazon’s Kindle Store

We hope to have the iBook, Nook and Google Edition out in the next month.

Also, stay tuned for exciting news regarding My Files Part 1 and some new Top8Magic books!

Best

Matt and BDM

I made a post earlier this week on twitter via @top8games that  “I am amused by people who say “Tier 1 only, no red deck pls” in the Tournament Practice room.” I was trying to test out a PTQ winning decklist and as soon I would play Quest for the Pure Flame, Howling Mine, or Goblin Arsonist I could not get any “serious” players to stay in the game. I ended up hopping over to the 2-Man queues and picking up a virtual third of a box in pretty short order — call it collecting on Goblin insurance Money.

Goblin Insurance Money
Hugh Raynor — Winner
PTQ Amsterdam: Sydney 6/21/10

3 Howling Mine
4 Quest of the Pure Flame
1 Searing Blaze
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Burst Lightning
4 Staggershock
4 Forked Bolt
4 Hell’s Thunder
4 Goblin Arsonist
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Goblin Guide
16 Mountain
4 Teetering Peaks
Sideboard:
3 Mana Barbs
3 Unstable Footing
3 Mark of Mutiny
3 Punishing Fire
3 Earthquake

According to tournament organizer Lindsay Heming the finals — which saw Hugh facing off against the wildly popular Turboland deck — went something like this:

Hugh led off with Mountain and Goblin Arsonist. His opponent Martin played a land of his own. Hugh untapped and played another Arsonist, laid Quest for the Pure Flame and attacked for one. His opponent played land number two. Hugh topped off his Quest at four counters by playing Hellspark Elemental and attacking with all three creatures — his opponent fell to 14. The opponent played Explore and two lands and passed the turn. Hugh sacrificed the Quest, unearthed the Elemental and attacked for 10 and finished him off with a doubled Burst Lightning.

I did not get the play by play notation for game two but despite his opponent turboing out Jace and a sideboarded Pelakka Wurm the red deck was able to win easily.

WorldWake Preview Part 5

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

WorldWake Preview Part 4

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

WorldWake Preview Part 3

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

WorldWake Preview Part 2

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

WorldWake Preview Part 1

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

Top8Magic Fans,

BDM just got back from a week at Wizards and the Columbus Pre-Release and I will be interviewing him on Tuesday afternoon EST. We would love to get some fan questions in there for the podcast. Here are some ground rules:

1) Identifying Yourself - Please give us a name and location to mention on the podcast.

2) Confidentiality - We will try our best to answer your questions to the best of our ability, but some information will be confidential.

Now post your questions!

Best,

Matt

Paul Jordan is a frequent contributor to Magicthegathering.com, former NJ State Champion, and a teammate of Steve Sadin and Michael J Flores at Pro Tour Charleston, where they finished in 26th place as Team Two-Headed Giant. Steve (who did an excellent job of coverage at UK Nationals) sent Paul the breakdown of decks and Paul has produced the following analysis of the Standard rounds in his first ever piece for Top8Magic.com.

Thanks to my once and future teammate, I was able to do some number crunching on UK Nats. This won’t be a full-blown thing, as it was a pretty small tournament, but there should still be a nugget or two worth exploring. Let’s take a look, shall we?

U.S. and Japanese Nationals saw victories from 5Color decks built around the powerful sorcery, Cruel Ultimatum. In England, they took note and filled their deckboxes with Vivid lands and Reflecting Pools in hopes of adding another title to Grixis’ mantle. What they got, however, was something quite different. Instead of a field full of Faeries, White aggro decks and Elves this was one littered with Blightning and Jund decks — along with the ever-present mirror match.

5Color Control decks remained the most popular, eating up 17% of the field in the UK , though it did lose about 5% over Japan and the US. Faeries, White Aggro and Elves! all lost between 5 and 10% of their share of the field, largely being supplanted by Jund and Blightning. The UK also seemed to fill out the ranks with a much larger variety of onesy-twosy decks that had their own categorization. Steve Sadin already did a breakdown for the mothership here, so I won’t delve much further into it, but you get the idea. It was a vastly different field.

A lot of people no doubt noticed the 58% win rate of Blightning decks over two National tournaments and chose it as their weapon of choice as a result. With so many more people running the deck, it was not likely to sustain the great numbers. As expected, there was a drop, but it still came through, with a very manageable 52%. Nothing dominating going on there, of course, but still worth keeping track of. Surprisingly, the pitfall for this deck seems to be in quote-unquote random decks. Jund and 5CC, the two most popular decks outside of Blightning, were both handily kept in check at 79% and 56% respectively, but Blightning only won 44% of its remaining matches, with each minor piece of the metagame taking a bite. None of those decks faced Blightning more than 8 times, but they all combined to put some serious hurt on the would-be best deck.

So what was the best deck? It is a little difficult to say. With such a small tournament, and such a wide variety of decks, there were a lot that had very few matches played. This led to some difficulty in really understanding how each deck did. So you could say that Doran and its 18 matches at 79% was best, or Kithkin at 25 and 64%, or Elves! at 47 and 60%. I could understand an argument for any of those. I’d lean towards Elves! stirctly due to sample size, as losing 4% over almost double the matches from Kithkin is, well, pretty good.

Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to infer any concrete meaning from this tournament, as the most matches of any one deck against another was 16 (Blightning vs. 5CC), which is an extremely low number with regards to sample size. What we can look at, though, is the overall performances. So while this is going to be the end of the analysis, I’ll send BDM and Matt a spreadsheet that hopefully they can link you to if you want to come to your own conclusions.

UK Nats Spreadsheet