Picking at Scars Part 4

Mike Flores and I sat down to discuss our exclusive preview card, Painsmith, from the soon-to-be-released Scars of Mirrodin. We did manage to talk about this intriguing little two-drop but of course the conversation meandered and we covered a bunch of other cards that have been spoiled thus far. The topic of an old vs. young battle of the Pro Tour All Stars also came up and Koth the Hammer may have been mentioned once or twice in passing as well.

Picking at Scars Part 3

Mike Flores and I sat down to discuss our exclusive preview card, Painsmith, from the soon-to-be-released Scars of Mirrodin. We did manage to talk about this intriguing little two-drop but of course the conversation meandered and we covered a bunch of other cards that have been spoiled thus far. The topic of an old vs. young battle of the Pro Tour All Stars also came up and Koth the Hammer may have been mentioned once or twice in passing as well.

Picking at Scars Part 2

Mike Flores and I sat down to discuss our exclusive preview card, Painsmith, from the soon-to-be-released Scars of Mirrodin. We did manage to talk about this intriguing little two-drop but of course the conversation meandered and we covered a bunch of other cards that have been spoiled thus far. The topic of an old vs. young battle of the Pro Tour All Stars also came up and Koth the Hammer may have been mentioned once or twice in passing as well.

Picking the Scars Part 1

Mike Flores and I sat down to discuss our exclusive preview card, Painsmith, from the soon-to-be-released Scars of Mirrodin. We did manage to talk about this intriguing little two-drop but of course the conversation meandered and we covered a bunch of other cards that have been spoiled thus far. The topic of an old vs. young battle of the Pro Tour All Stars also came up and Koth the Hammer may have been mentioned once or twice in passing as well.

Mike and I will have a four part podcast going up over the weekend where we discuss this card and a handful of the other cards that have been officially previewed thus far (*cough*Koth*cough*) but I wanted you to get a look at Painsmith in the meanwhile.

This is going to be a brutal card in Limited with any one-drop Infect creatures that might be lurking, unspoiled thus far, in the new set. With Infect the Painsmith will be crafting far more than two damage if the enhanced creature gets through. Keep in mind that dealing in poison counters is effectively dealing double damage to a player — this is not The Sliver Kids kind of poison counters. +2/+0 represents 20% of a players life total when dealt in poison and that is not even counting the base damage that the creature is doing — and it is not accounting for playing more than one artifact in a turn.

For Constructed… I am not so sure about this one although she can do some filthy stuff in a black-green deck that also has Carapace Forger and Ezuri’s Brigade — especially the latter. You can hold back your artifacts, play them out to turn on the Metalcraft of the Brigade and attack for 10 or even 12 points of tramply, deathtouchy goodness. If you can just find a way to bounce and replay your Memnites over and over again you can create a lethal attack out of nowhere but I will be content to use this guy as a Rancor-ish effect that keeps dealing and dealing as long as I can play artifacts.

Tune in over the weekend to get MichaelJ’s take on this card and a handful of the others.

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

This is a recent email that I received from Paul Jordan aka PJ, that I thought would be useful to all of you Top8Magic fans. The images did not come out in the post, but the original file is here: Draftcap Instructions.

Enjoy

Matt

Draftcap Instructions (Courtesy of Paul Jordan)

Creating your own “Drafting With” series is pretty straight-forward. All you need is Magic Online and your own webpage. If you don’t have a webpage, you can easily create one at Google, which is what I’ve done.

Creating your webpage

To start a webpage at Google, first make sure you are signed in. Then just go to More > Sites

Then click on Create New Site. Go through the steps, choosing your site name and URL and you’re done.

Recording drafts on MTGO

Go to Menu > Settings > Gameplay and make sure the box for “Enable Draft Recorder” is checked.

MTGO will record all packs and picks and put them into Documents > Games > Magic The Gathering Online > Drafts as text files.

Converting those text files

Go to http://www.zizibaloob.com/convert_images.html and paste the contents of the text file into the Image Converter box and hit Convert Draft. Now there will be 3 boxes on the screen:

Image Converter (where you pasted your text file contents)

Output (what you copy for future use)

Preview (what it will look like on your webpage)

Copy the contents of the 2^nd box (output) onto your clipboard for the next step.

Adding a draft to your webpage

Back at your page in Google, click on Create Page. Enter in a page name and URL. If you’re going to be doing multiple drafts, you probably want a standard naming convention (draft_## or something like that) but it isn’t necessary. Once you have your name and URL, click Create Page. You’ll have a screen something like this:

Click on the HTML button on the top bar and paste the output from the draft converter and hit update. Now your screen should look like this:

You can now add comments, your decklist, or anything else. When you’re done, click Save on the top right of your screen. That’s it, you’re done.

Note – if you want to keep your decklist, you need to save it separately in MTGO during deck construction. To do this, when building your deck click “Save As” and save it as a text file. Then you can just copy/paste it into your commentary.

When I was writing my preview of Baloth Woodcrashers I was aware of Oracle of Mul Daya via unofficial spoiler pages but since I try to only talk about cards that are on the official Zendikar Visual Spoiler on the mothership I could only reference it obliquely. Sure enough the Oracle was added to the rapidly expanding official page that next morning so I will talk about it now in what I hope is first of a series of looks at the cards from the impending release. So what does the future hold for the Oracle?

I love this card; absolutely love it. I am not sure if it will prove to be tournament viable or not (insert obligatory comment about it dying to Lightning Bolt and Doom Blade here) but it is the closest green will ever come to having a high velocity enchantment like Future Sight to tear through your library. If you happen to be in Columbus, Ohio for the Saturday Prerelease I will be looking for a copy of this card to put right into my EDH deck – along with a much harder to find Misty Rainforest. But I can easily see this card being played in decks that are 39 cards smaller as well.

If landfall has any Constructed impact – and I think it will – then this card will provide fuel for that linear. I discussed in the Woodcrashers preview that a card like Knight of the Reliquary allows you up to four landfall activations in one turn if you play a fetch land, activate it, and fetch another fetch land with your Knight. So does the Oracle, provided there is some permutation of two fetch lands between your hand and the top two cards of your deck.

(By the way, in case anyone is still sleeping on Knight of the Reliquary, let me remind you that it did win an Extended Grand Prix toward the end of last season.) Read the rest of this entry »