I recently had a chance to talk to another Art Hero of mine: Scott Kirschner. Scott’s work dates back to the early days of Magic. His work is genuine, edgy (literally), and emotionally intense. He paints with color, but also with stories, ideas, and symbols. In my opinion, his work stands up better because it was done with heart—and with the intent to speak to the human experience, regardless of the fact that it’s fantasy art.

I’m an avid infect fan. It’s my Modern deck of choice, and I have to rewrite my “One Deck, Three Formats” article sometime in the near future. I just love that every card in my hand brings fear to my opponent. Counterspells don’t make me nervous, but a Might of Old Krosa will kill me if I don’t have something to stop it. Any deck that makes me excited about every top-deck is one I want to play. I ran track, and that visceral feeling of wind in my hair is what I’m looking for in my deck. Then again, I ran hurdles and hit more than my share of them. Ahem.

This past weekend’s announcement of bringing the Onslaught fetch lands back to Standard and Modern in Khans of Tarkir has me thinking about a few cards I tested for my infect deck in the past. Most notably, with the addition of red, Assault Strobe allows for turn-two wins, Ghor-Clan Rampager gives evasion and pump in one spell that’s uncounterable, and finally, Flesh // Blood allows for a second-main-phase wins with Blood after attacking, when your pump spells last until end of turn...

Yeah, that’s a filthy win condition.

I tried to make R/G infect work in the past, and again, I tried to make it work. It didn’t work again, but iteration is a necessity in deck-building. Both decks are attempts with some testing, and I encourage you to submit comments and inclusions!

The early Khans of Tarkir previews are in. There was a jolly fun worldbuilding panel at PAX Prime.

The fetchlands originally printed in Onslaught Block are back.

There's lots to talk about with these early glimpses of the plane of Tarkir, but first I'm going to get a little meta. There wasthis other announcement by Mark Rosewater on 25 August, and while others have discussed some of the consequences, I want to focus specifically on the consequences for the Creative side of Magic R&D.

I was inspired to build the one-drop cube while musing about various custom cube concepts. I very much enjoy cube, but the aspect I find most interesting is the actual building of the cube--creating an inner metagame, evaluating power levels, and correctly deciphering the relevant resource exchanges are all interesting to balance.

For most people cubes fall into two camps: powered and unpowered. While we're all aware of what these labels mean, what might not be as readily apparent is what they are: rule sets. Limitations. Restrictions. The cubes created under these labels operate differently from one another, and within those differences lie opportunities to create, to innovate, and to explore cards in different ways.

Slow play is one of the least called penalties in Magic. Despite everyone agreeing that slow play is a serious issue at competitive-level play, it remains one of the penalties that’s awkward to talk about with players and other judges. For the most part we’ve eliminated the stigma but slow play is given a huge degree of latitude. Why is this?

From our experiences, it comes down to two primary reasons:

1) Judges have no useful guidelines in place other than the all-encompassing, “When you get bored.” Since many judges aren’t competitive players, many have no real sense of how long players should and shouldn’t take. Obviously once you watch enough of a format, you’ll learn it, but that’s no substitute for actually playing with a deck like Pod or Storm.

2) Judges are loathe to get into arguments and slow play almost inevitably ends in one. The DQs I’ve been a part of have gone more smoothly than slow-play calls. In essence, calling a player on slow play is often interpreted as, "the judge just called me stupid." There’s just no other way to explain the sheer anger I’m confronted with as the result of the equivalent of a simple poke.

My goal with this article is not to address the second point, as I honestly don’t know a sure-fire answer to it. If anyone else does, they should share the secret. Judges far kinder than us have gotten reamed for calling the same penalty. So let’s focus on the first point and draw up some useful guidelines.

Dragons once thrived on the plane of Tarkir. They spawned from mighty elemental storms, filled the sky with their destructive breath, and terrorized the five ancient warrior clans. But the dragons met their fate long ago. For many years, the clans fought a war against the dragons for their own survival, hoping for some way to gain an advantage in the struggle. At a crucial turning point more than a thousand years ago, the dragon tempests stopped coming, and no new dragons were spawned. Their numbers thinned, and the tide of the war changed.

In the gaming world and in Magic, gaining an advantage means gaining an edge relative to your opponent. Last week, we discussed card advantage. How you can make plays—either by earning more cards or by destroying opposing cards—that will lead to getting ahead of your opponent in resources.

A game of Magic is a struggle to set yourself apart from, and ahead of, your opponent. With that in mind, there exists an entire category of cards which seem, at first glance, nearly impossible to use effectively. These are cards that feature symmetric effects. A symmetric effect impacts both players the same way, so it's difficult to glean an advantage from one under ordinary circumstances.

Nevertheless, some of the most powerful cards in Magic feature symmetric effects—including the preview card I have at the end of the article. If you have the creativity and the vision to find a use for them, you can wield weapons other players cannot. A proper understanding of symmetric effects will give you an advantage in both deck building and gameplay.