Marshall Sutcliffe, of the Limited Resources podcast, Limited Information series on DailyMTG, and Wizards Grand Prix and Pro Tour coverage fame, joins Gathering Magic to share his style of informative drafting by firing off a nuts and bolts Theros Draft.

Pro player Sam Black recently started a conversation among writers on whether the right play exists regardless of the players in a game or whether player strengths shape that play. Adrian Sullivan wrote an excellent article balancing all the factors, and in that article, he created an off-the-cuff list of eight Magic skills players might consider when determining their individual best plays.

As someone who's written both that many skills translate from casual to tournament Magic and that level of proficiency determines what you can do with a card, Adrian's list immediately struck me as a great springboard for understanding how our attributes shape our play and where we might improve. As Adrian put it,

Adrian's eight Magic skills are:

• Card Valuation
• Pacing
• Combat
• Counterspell Wars
• Life Management
• Bluffing
• Strategic Planning
• Mental Stamina

That's a great list by itself, but if you think of other skills, put them in the comments. Sensing where we are on each of brings gets us closer to the right plays in whatever Magic we're playing than cliché self-descriptors like, "I don't do aggro well," or, "I hate playing blue." With each skill, I'll list a common myth, whether the statement's simply untrue or too simple to be ordinarily useful, and use that to go into deeper discussion.

We at Gathering Magic are ecstatic about the Born of the Gods Prerelease this weekend, and we wanted to do something special for you to wrap up spoiler season. To wish Magicians every where a happy Born of the Gods Prerelease we asked fan artist Polish Tamales to create special tokens for your printing pleasure.

They are going to bring the cuteness to the kitchen tables when slinging your new favorite planeswalker Kiora, the Crashing Wave. Thank you, loyal and spectacular readers, friends and family, for joining Gathering Magic during spoiler season, and may the pack-cracking Gods shine favorably upon you this weekend!

I've mentioned before that I once took a years-long break from Constructed Magic, returning to the scene with Pyromancer Ascension. One of the first decks I acquired on my own shortly afterward? Dredgevine. A lot of variations on the Hedron Crab fueled Vengevine strategy popped up that year, and the one that caught my eye was Gerry Thompson's Knight of the Reliquary addition, which you can see here:

Dredgevine - Standard | Gerry Thompson

• Lands (25)
• 5 Forest
• 2 Island
• 2 Plains
• 4 Ancient Ziggurat
• 1 Celestial Colonnade
• 1 Halimar Depths
• 4 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Sejiri Steppe
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 4 Verdant Catacombs

• Creatures (33)
• 1 Aether Adept
• 4 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Enclave Cryptologist
• 4 Fauna Shaman
• 4 Hedron Crab
• 4 Knight of the Reliquary
• 2 Lotus Cobra
• 1 Meddling Mage
• 4 Noble Hierarch
• 3 Ranger of Eos
• 4 Vengevine
• 1 Linvala, Keeper of Silence

• Spells (2)
• 2 Path to Exile

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Pithing Needle
• 1 Emeria Angel
• 1 Meddling Mage
• 1 Obstinate Baloth
• 1 Qasali Pridemage
• 1 Path to Exile
• 4 Unified Will
• 3 Linvala, Keeper of Silence
• 1 Bojuka Bog

Buy This Deck

Aside: I don't think adding white actually made the deck better at its thing. In fact, I recall being quite amused by how many opponents fell over to Linvala while I floundered to do anything else relevant, leading me to start brewing up Linvala decks.

But I did really like killing people via Hedron Crab. Mulliganing to four and summoning three Vengevines on turn 2 is just the kind of dream I like to live!

As I promised last week, I'm going to spend today talking about some sweet Modern decks that I've been putting work into over the last couple weeks. However, before we get into the thick of it, I'd like to first tell you about my friend Elliot Wegman.

Elliot is one of my oldest friends and a big reason I started playing Magic in the first place. Although Elliot hasn't pursued Magic as competitively as I have, it has always had a place in his life. As fate would have it, Elliot recently moved down from New York to Richmond, Virginia.

So why is Elliot important to you? Well, Elliot is a certain type of Magic player. Like a lot of players, when Elliot joins a Magic tournament, winning is his main goal. However, he likes to win on his own terms. When it comes to deck design, he is a mad scientist of sorts. Conveniently enough, it just so happens to be the case that our own StarCityGames.com is hosting a Modern Grand Prix right in Elliot's backyard on the weekend of March 7th. Elliot and I are really digging deep to find an off-the-cuff deck for this tournament, one that actually stands a chance of winning. So far we haven't been a hundred percent successful in this venture. However, we have produced some crazy and fun decks and are learning more and more as we go.

The main way that we search for inspiration for these concoctions is simple: pop open the Gatherer engine and start flipping through cards until something hits home. So far we've found quite a few ideas worth working on. Today I'd like to take a look at three such decks we've pursued and see if anyone would like to pick up the torch with us.

he first time I remember hearing about Alexander Hayne was after he made the finals of Grand Prix Montreal before falling to Richard Hoaen. Hayne apparently made enough of an impression on the Limited master and GP Champion that Hoaen took Hayne under his wing to help him navigate the choppy waters of forty-card decks. Hayne would go on early the next year to win Pro Tour Avacyn Restored and has been a fixture on the Pro Tour ever since. During the last two years, he has been the Canadian National Champion, played in the Players Championship, and added four more Grand Prix Top 8s to his resume—including his victory in Vancouver this past weekend.

It was the third Grand Prix trophy for Hayne in the last six months, and his third win in his last seven GPs played. Also worth noting is that three of his five career Top 8s—and two of his three wins—have taken place in his home country. With Hayne—and the rest of Team FacetoFaceGames about to head to Spain for the upcoming Pro Tour, I caught up with the champion to find out how his life has changed over these two years, how he has evolved as a Magic player, and what the team's plans are for Spain.

Coming into Pro Tour Avacyn Restored, Hayne was not even locked into being qualified for his next Pro Tour. When he departed with his trophy in tow, he also had an invitation to the Player's Championship, the title of Canadian National Champion, and Platinum membership in the Player's Club. It would seem impossible for that to not have a huge impact on a young man's life.

This article is all about my current favorite deck in Standard, UWr Control: dissecting my card choices, how it plays out against the format's most played decks, and sideboard plans. Whether you are planning on playing control yourself, or just playing against it, understanding UWx control is important. This is a pretty typical UW control deck, with just a handful of splashed red cards adding any spice, so while I'm going to reference my exact list, almost everything is applicable to UWx decks generally.

The entire Born of the Gods spoiler has been spoiled, so it's time to analyze its impact on Standard. Today, I'll go over some of the most important cards for existing Standard decks and brew new decks around Pain Seer and Courser of Kruphix.

When considering a new set, I always tend to focus on costs that cost three mana or less. In my experience, the lower the mana cost, the higher the impact on Constructed formats. Cards with high mana cost may be splashy and exciting, but there is rarely a shortage of quality 4- or 5-drops. For example, replacing Stormbreath Dragon with Xenagos, God of Revels (if that switch is even correct) is unlikely to make much of a difference. You just replace one good card with another. In contrast, there tends to be less redundancy of cheap spells and lands, so those cards fill important gaps. With that in mind, the cards that stand out to me the most (besides Pain Seer and Courser of Kruphix) are the following: