My story with Magic began at the Magic 2011 prerelease. I was going through a difficult time in my personal life. I was two weeks into my summer vacation after my junior year in college and one week into a job I loved. I needed something new and healthy to focus my time and energy on. I worked as a Game Specialist at Uncle’s Games teaching and selling games to families and gamers. This was a perfect fit for me, an avid board gamer.Freshly out of a relationship and couch-surfing, I was looking for any overtime hours I could pick up, and I managed to work on the Saturday of the prerelease. The atmosphere in the store was so exciting, and there were plenty of friendly faces. People were enthusiastic for the game they all came together to play. It reminded me of the energy conventions seem to spread across communities—how everyone feels connected to everyone else because we all know that we can relate on some level. It’s when we can finally fit in with a large number of people and not be considered weird for loving something, be it games, cosplay, fantasy, comics, or whatever! My attention was instantly grabbed by the Magic community.

My concept for this cosplay was, "What's Tamiyo look like at bedtime?" In her card art, Tamiyo wears a complex updo and very businesslike attire. I wanted people to see an intimate side of her while still being respectful of her understated aesthetic and demure personality. I built the set for the photo shoot out of stuff from my basement, including items from my Japanese grandmother who passed away last year. I wanted to depict Tamiyo in her own space in a room that reflects her curiosity and elegance. A muted palette seemed right, and I included items that could be mementos she might have collected on her many journeys.

Magic has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years, and while it is awesome the game is getting bigger and more popular than ever, it certainly is creating a unique set of (admittedly good to have) problems: older cards are becoming increasingly more expensive due to increased demand, and tournament attendance has gotten to a point that is difficult to manage properly.

To solve the first problem, Wizards has been trying to use promo cards and sets like Modern Masters to help bring relief to the marketplace. This has worked to an extent, but card prices are still very high.

For tournaments, Wizards has just announced a major change to the Pro Tour Qualifier system that has remained largely the same for what seems like forever.

PTQs as we know them, large tournaments that offer an invite and flight to the winner, now no longer exist.

I always build my seventy-five the same way: with the Elephant Method. I have no idea how it wound up with that name, and I can’t even remember where I first heard about the strategy--it was certainly before I had a name for it. However, it was most clearly demonstrated by Zvi Mowshowitz for this very site following Pro Tour Dragon’s Maze last year. Essentially, you build idealized sixty-card decks for each of your major matchups, and your goal is to emerge from the practice with seventy-five cards that get you as close to perfect in each as you can get.

How? In plain terms, you examine two things: points of commonality and cards with overlapping effects.

Pro Tour Magic 2015 is upon us, and this one will be interesting. I mean, every Pro Tour is sweet and the high point of a competitive Magic season, but the last Pro Tour of the year is special. While some players have clinched Platinum already, everybody else still has work to do. For some, this is a last chance to turn a poor season around with a great finish. For others, the primary goal is not to do too badly, because a 100th place secures Gold and thus another year of Pro Tour invites. And yet a few other players will compete for the remaining slots at the World Championship later this year.I don't think I have to stoke your enthusiam any further, and if it needs stoking, Rich does that better than I do anyway. For the Magic 2015 Pro Tour Special I have talked to one player from each of the four big Magic continents. I am very grateful to Fabrizio Anteri, Kuo Tzu-Ching, Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, and Conley Woods for taking the time and the effort to answer my questions!

The concept of mana curve is a fundamental part of Magic theory. The essence is that your deck should contain a balanced mix of converted mana costs so that you can use all of your mana efficiently on every turn. The concept has become so ingrained in Magic theory that laying out decks according to piles per converted mana cost has become customary.

But what is the optimal mana curve? Is there even such a thing?

The answer to this question will depend on many factors. An important one is how many turns you expect a game to last, i.e., the overall speed of the format. Let’s take Standard for example. Based on my experience, most games will have effectively ended by turn five. Maybe it takes a few more turns for the game to truly end, but usually one player will have an insurmountable board presence at that point. So, the thing that matters most is curving out in the first five turns. The ideal is curving out perfectly with a one-drop on turn one, a two-drop on turn two, and so on (which amounts to spending 1+2+3+4+5=15 mana over the course of the first five turns). Such a perfect curve would typically beat an opponent who only manages to cast, say, 10 mana worth of cards in the first five turns.

Accordingly, I am going to determine the 60-card deck that maximizes the total expected amount of mana spent over the course of the first five of turns. I will also do that for faster formats (where only the mana spent till turn 3 or 4 matters), for slower formats (where you want to curve out till turn 6), and for various 40-card formats.

To do so, I wrote a computer program to enumerate all possible decks and to simulate tons of games with each of them to estimate each deck’s expected total mana spent. The full code can be found here. It’s an adaption of the program that I used to determine the optimal aggro deck about a year ago.

If you are reading this then it means the 2014 class of the Pro Tour Hall of Fame has been announced during the live coverage of Pro Tour Magic 2015. These players were extended invitations after a committee of voters drawn from Wizards staff, tournament officials, and commentators along with members of the Hall of Fame and all players with 150 or more lifetime Pro Points had the opportunity to cast up to five votes from the following pool of candidates. Any players who appeared on at least 40% of the ballots get to take part in an induction ceremony at Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir this October.

Congratulations to five-time Pro Tour Top 8 competitor, World Champion, and Team Worlds Champion Makihito Mihara; four-time Pro Tour Top 8 competitor and Pro Tour Amsterdam Champion Paul Rietzl; and five-time Pro Tour Top 8 competitor and Pro Tour Yokohama champion Guillaume Wafo-Tapa.