Lee Shi Tian filled out his Standard decklist for Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir on October 11. He flew in from Hong Kong on very little sleep, lacking the playtesting he was accustomed to before a major tournament. Despite this, he made Top 8.In the Top 8 player profile, he alluded to the week that preceded his Top 8 placement:

Wizards’s coverage repeatedly mentioned how his deck was different from the “other Jeskai Ascendency combo decks.” They never took the actual step of using the deck’s name as given by the designer and pilot. When Top 8 decklists were posted, this is what we, the international community of players, will see from the Wizards of the Coast website:

While this is keeping with other moves Wizards has made involving accessibility for newer players and casual viewers, in this case, it is a specifically conservative political act. It’s not about crazy names or fear of trendiness—after all, we still refer to Cifka’s combo deck as Eggs and continue to argue about Affinity versus Robots in a public manner on coverage. It’s about the fact that if Wizards did allow this name to air as an official name, a large number of people would interpret it as Wizards allowing itself to be involved in a deeply political protest happening in Hong Kong right now.

Lee Shi Tian’s story would be covered in detail by sports press if he were an international athlete, but without community coverage, we may not know or understand what Umbrella Revolution is or why Wizards might need to avoid it. This essay will attempt to put this tweet into context:

I was sitting in my office this week, looking at a pile of loose boosters, and I began to reminisce of opening Ice Age packs with the Jester’s Cap on the booster wrapper only—because, to my teenage mind, the “best” card in the set will increase the randomness of my opening.

I scoured my other boosters and started to notice a trend. The booster art is chosen by rarity first, flavorful characters in the storyline second, great art third, and flavorful overall images to be included fourth. I’ve looked at the Standard environment but also chosen a pair of others. I like to see the cards themselves, yes, but also at what the cards are worth and, hopefully, maybe, if any of the artworks are award-winning. Shockingly, more trends emerge than I thought, even after this cursory look.

Let’s check them!

A few years ago, I was at an Open Series event with Brian Braun-Duin and a number of other SCG players. Brian was lamenting the manner in which he'd lost all of his games--the vast majority, if not all, had been to a miracled Bonfire of the Damned when Brian was far ahead. I don't recall a ton of the specifics, but Brian was playing a slow deck with light permission and Sun Titan for an inexorable kill… but certainly not a quick one.

When you consider the nature of Bonfire in that Standard era, it didn't just seem plausible that he was losing this way--it made perfect sense. Many decks were running four copies of Bonfire of the Damned, and with Brian failing to kill them particularly quickly they'd get many, many turns to find a miracle and either reset the board or outright burn him to death. Multiple miracles certainly wouldn't be far-fetched, though they would be unfortunate. Like many decks during that Standard era, he needed to either make his peace with it or adapt his tactics, employing some significant defense or a more efficient offense.

Early on in testing, we determined that the best two decks were Green Devotion and Abzan Midrange, so we set out to find a deck that could beat Courser of Kruphix. Some people were trying out constellation and control decks, others were focusing on midrange decks, and I was trying to find a good aggro deck. I tried a bunch of decks with Goblin Rabblemaster and/or Mogis's Marauder, but the only deck that I found that could claim a 50% or higher win rate against the Courser decks was Jeskai Fireworks. (The name Jeskai Wins seems horrible to me, and Jeskai Tempo or Jeskai Aggro wouldn't be accurate either, so I'll go with Jeskai Fireworks instead.)

After establishing Green Devotion, Abzan Midrange, and Jeskai Fireworks as the “Big Three” decks, we built sideboards and tested them against each other. Our initial feeling was that the metagame was like rock-paper-scissors.

I've long maintained the stance that while it may seem appealing, Magic and booze do not mix well. You simply cannot partake in both activities both simultaneously and optimally, and trying will always show you where your real priorities lie. For me, I always try and play Magic as well as I can, and alcohol serves as an active impediment to this. This was made abundantly clear to me at a cube draft the night before the Khans of Tarkir prerelease, where I drunkenly tried to draft combo simply because the idea of trying to pilot the deck in the state I was in amused me. I sobered up immediately and punted out a quick 0-2 before retiring to the couch to play Mario Kart and tend to my wounds.

They tell you to drink water at tournaments. Stay hydrated. You see, there's a lot of thinking going on in the average Magic tournament, and if you don't stay hydrated, your head's going to hurt a lot and it will make you very sad. Alcohol will only accelerate this process. This should be obvious enough to anyone, but people still Insist on trying to mix the two. It doesn't work. Trust me on this one. I've done the legwork.

With this being Multiplayer Week here on DailyMTG, and with multiplayer being my preferred format, I wanted to do something special. So I used the opportunity to give you the newest version of the Multiplayer Hall of Fame. I've wanted to do this since before I started writing Serious Fun, and there's no opportunity like Multiplayer Week to make it happen.

The Multiplayer Hall of Fame is the brainchild of the original Serious Fun writer, Anthony Alongi. He created categories and a rating system to rank every Magic card for multiplayer quality. Every few sets he would update the hall by adding new cards. He finally stopped in 2004, as the hall became too time consuming.

And I'm crazy enough to rate the last ten years of Magic cards.