Introduction? Who needs an introduction when we have lists to get to? Buzzfeed gets away with a short (nonsensical) paragraph to introduce its lists, and they receive roughly a million hits every second, give or take. People don’t want paragraphs . . . they want lists punctuated by numbers!

Give the people what they want! Here’s every list you could possibly want about Magic 2014. Every. Single. List.

There are a lot of new pieces of artwork in Magic 2014 with a few new themes that will be influencing the visual style of Magic for some time. I decided to go through all the new art instead of just picking and choosing. Musing will ensue, knowledge will be shared, and fun will be had. Art info will flow in . . . I hope.

A couple of big points:

• There was a massive overhaul on the style guide on armor for women. Okay, guys, we get it and appreciate it. Just so you know, it is okay for some women to show their bodies. Women do that sometimes. Overall, A− work.
• Wizards, can you urge artists to post art on their blogs, websites, or social media pages upon release? It’s great for community-building to urge them to show their greatness, it’s cheap advertising for you, and it helps us Vorthos folk enjoy the art. Post it on your blog ASAP! Tumblr is full of Vorthoses who love the art. Give it to them! Maybe a list e-mail would work.
• Black cards are all very, very dark. It might help drafting, but they swim too much together in the set.
• The plane M14 is on is supposedly Shandalar, but you’ll notice a bunch of other locales represented. I don’t feel this is a bad thing, just something to be mindful of in the future.
• Good god, there’s a lot of purple in the set. Seriously, count the pieces with it.

Onto the art!

As I said last week, this will be the final edition of Top Decks. If we had gone two more weeks, it would have been nine years. Nine! Years! The punks. Can I say "punks"? It's my last Top Decks. I'm saying "punks" at least three times.

/mic drop

Anyway, this sorta goodbye will be a retrospective of ten big things you could have learned from The Column Formerly Known As Swimming With Sharks, my ten (well, ten-and-a-half) favorite columns, and finally my Hall of Fame ballot for the year 2013.

On August 2-4, 2013, the World Magic Cup will be held. One of the formats that each National team has to tackle is Team Unified Standard. In this format, each team member plays a Standard deck, but there is a team-wide restriction: no more than four copies of any card (except for basic lands) may appear across a team's three Standard decks.

This restriction yields an interesting deck construction puzzle, which does not have a straightforward solution—simply selecting three arbitrary archetypes need not work. Take, for example, the combination of Junk Reanimator, Jund Midrange, and American Flash. Sure, these are distinct archetypes in different colors, but they still have a lot of overlap: Thragtusk, Restoration Angel, Overgrown Tomb, Woodland Cemetery, Pillar of Flame, Abrupt Decay, and more. Splitting up those key cards significantly weakens the decks, so it will be very difficult to run them side-by-side.

But what combination of Standard decks does work? How do we minimize the overlap? These are exactly the questions that I will analyze in this article.

The StarCityGames.com Invitational in Somerset, New Jersey is set to be played a mere two weeks from now. That's rapidly approaching, and whilst many an article has discussed the kind of impact M14 is going to have in Standard, there hasn't been much at all about Legacy.

In fact, Legacy seems to have mostly slipped by under the radar. You could say that Legacy discussion has been akin to a barren Wasteland. I think it's time we buckled down and Pondered some of the changes that Legacy is going to have to deal with, lest our hopes and dreams be Stifled when we play the format next. Unrelated little known fact: my second-favorite long-running daytime soap opera was probably Daze of our Lives. Like sand through a Scourglass...

Considering a full 50% of the Invitational features the Legacy format, it's probably worthwhile to take some time to consider how things might be different now than they once were.

And oh, how different they will be. In a format as ancient as Legacy, things tend to remain stagnant for long periods of time. New cards take longer to shake up the format, and things have a way of eventually achieving a level of stability, at least for a time.

That's not going to be the case this time. It may be feasible to assume that Legacy is going to be relatively the same as it was the last time we saw it featured at the SCG Open Series in Worcester, Massachusetts. Normally, I think it would be, but something kind of cropped up a bit in the meantime that may throw a wrench into the mix. An entire new set was printed.

That set didn't offer much for Legacy. With that being said, there is a little something else.

The rules have changed. That does offer a lot for Legacy.

A lot of people ask me for help with booster drafting. I wish so badly it were the kind of thing where I could take 20 minutes of my time to listen to how they draft, tell them what they are doing wrong, and how to fix it. It just isn’t. Booster drafting well is incredibly complex.

The best way I can describe it is that there are two ways: The easy way and the hard way. If you draft the easy way all the time, you can spike when things line up your way and you are perfectly live to 3-0 and draft good decks when they do, but around half the time you will not end up with a good deck at all and will be liable to 0-3 or 1-2 your draft. If you draft the hard way you can have a good deck in 90% of your drafts. Sound great? What’s the problem? Well the hard way, is hard.

We don’t often get to hear about what happens in Japan, which puts Japanese players at a big disadvantage when it comes to things like community contributions being considered for the Hall of Fame. Is there anything you’ve done for the Japanese community that you think is worth sharing?

A long time ago, I used to collect the local players and we’d go on the Tour. Since I became employed, I’ve always been busy, so I’ve been indebted to the community. Thank you always.

Other than your five Nationals Top 8s, what other accomplishments do you have that are not listed on the stats page?

I have designed various decks! They are: CAL (2005 GP Kitakyuushuu), RazorTron (2005 JAPAN nationals), Gargadon-Lark (2008 PT Hollywood), and 64 Omen Valakut (2011 GP Kobe). I’m very sad we don’t have extended anymore. Recently, I’ve designed 4C Reanimator (No Mana Elves, IN Boros Reckoner & Blasphemous Act).

(Mihara also won Team Worlds in 2011 – PV)

What is your best memory from Magic?

Of course, it is the 2006 World Championships.