The Illuxcon main show floor was intimidating to say the least. Every artist who had made it to that level was a highly accomplished professional. Being aware of how many of the artists were (and feeling guilty for not recognizing the others), I was hesitant to say anything. I don’t call them Art Heroes for nothing.

But when I approached Mark Poole, I found myself in the presence of a man who even by the high standards of the artists at Illuxcon was a really nice guy. He had a certain ease, intentionally unhurried, that permeated everything he did, his paintings included. Chatting in front of his table with a cup of coffee and smile, you’d never think this was one of Magic’s legendary Alpha artists; and in some ways, he isn’t. He’s just Mark, a guy who does what he loves.

In the aftermath of Pro Tour Khans of Tarkir, I spent a lot of time thinking about the deck I played. On the one hand, I absolutely loved the deck. On the other hand, I could feel the ways in which the deck was flawed.

One of the most important things you can do when you have a deck is truly have a full 75 card list. This isn't to say that you should have a 60 card deck and a 15 card sideboard. While that might sound sufficient, it really isn't. What you need is a coherent 60 card deck after you sideboard in every major matchup.

This was one of the failings of the deck I played in Honolulu. In the leadup to the event, I was initially "running" a 20-card sideboard. That is, I had about 20ish cards that I was considering for the deck's sideboard, and I hadn't fully determined which ones to work with. Sitting in the beach house with my team for the event, I remember saying to Neil Reeves and Ari Lax that what I really needed to do was finally finish making Elephants for the deck to wrap it up.

Ultimately though, I never finished doing that work. I was still wrapping up other kinds of work, perhaps to my own detriment. Several of the members of the team were working on Jeskai (I'm going to agree with Sam Black and say that this is perhaps the best name for it, the next best being "Jeskai Burn," but certainly not "Jeskai Tempo" or "Jeskai Wins") and I was giving input. There was a U/R Control deck that needed examination. There was looking at all of the various versions of Abzan. And there was just playing my U/B Control deck, trying to figure out the little details like the last bits of mana.

For reference, here is what I played in Hawaii:

The Vintage Championships at Eternal Weekend are only a few, short days away, and it's coming down to the wire to make a final decision about what deck to play for this exciting event.

First of all, let me start by saying that, in Vintage, there really are not any right or wrong choices when it comes to picking a deck. The cards that appear in basically any deck are incredibly powerful, and most "real" decks have a fighting chance of beating anything, good or bad matchups, in any given match.

The most important thing with regard to picking a Vintage deck (in my opinion, anyway) is to play something that you feel the most comfortable piloting. There are tons and tons of nuanced and complicated interactions in Vintage, and regardless of what the 'in-crowd' says is the 'best' deck, players have a much higher chance of performing well with decks where they understand what is going on at the highest level.

Since I already know that most players who are tuning into this Vintage installment are not actually looking for a deck to play, but are mostly interested in thinking about how to approach the tournament, I've decided to write this article from the perspective of which decks I think have the best chance (in the blind) of winning the Vintage Championship.

I love Khans of Tarkir draft. The morph mechanic has been implemented well, there is an interesting tension between card power and mana consistency, and it allows for many different approaches that can all work. At the Pro Tour, for example, Ari Lax drafted five-color morphs, while Stanislav Cifka pursued two-color aggro—and both of them went 5-1 or better!

Personally, I prefer decks with consistent mana, but this Limited format has been one of the most divisive in recent memory. There are so many different approaches to the format that it is hard to find agreement on card ratings, archetype preferences, or pick orders. This is great! It means that there's a lot to explore and that the format will remain fresh as it progresses.

It also means that I won't be able to offer anything close to a definitive format guide today. What I will offer is my perspective, which is largely in line with the view shared by team Cabin Crew. From our practice drafts at our cabin in the woods (we did around 15-20 of them), we concluded the following:

I've seen people expressing frustration with the new Legacy. For years, they could play an old faithful like RUG Delver or Shardless and, with slight tweaks to the sideboard, run the same list every week.

That's no longer the case, but you're in luck. This article is about identifying the decks that are adapting well to the post-Cruise metagame.

While creating the Planeswalker commanders was a strange evolutionary process, making the Time Spiral-esque legendary creatures was more straightforward. I met up with Ari Levitch from the creative team. He made a list of characters. I made a list of characters. Of course, if I was being ENTIRELY self-indulgent, all of the characters would be from Alpha through Alliances. But nostalgia means different things to different players, and I knew I would need to have characters representing different periods ofMagic's history.

There were a million black characters to choose from. Members of the creative department were really gung-ho to do Stitcher Geralf and Ghoulcaller Gisa, those feuding necromancer twins from Innistrad. The public had really latched onto those characters and was disappointed when Avacyn Restored rolled around and we still hadn't made legendary creature cards of them. Dan and James designed them to be opposites. One stitched multiple corpses together to make giant zombies, while the other would gladly chop a zombie in half to get two zombies!

White was a bit tough, but there were a decent number of good green candidates. One of the red characters on Ari's list really jumped out at me: Feldon, he of Feldon's Cane.

"Feldon's red? How do you know that?"

"I read it on the internet," Ari replied.

"Hmmm..."

Now I am a serious geek culture scholar squirrel. At various points during my life, I've owned more than 100 Star Wars books, wrote a bibliography of pulp science fiction author E. E. "Doc" Smith, and compiled an exhaustive timeline chronicling the history of the Ultramarines Space Marines chapter fromWarhammer 40,000. While I never got bit by the Magic fiction bug to that extent, I knew how to hit the books.