MTG Cosplay Challenge

Summary: Use cosplay as a cathartic vehicle to get over grandma and kick-start Mom’s “retirement” with a tangible project that taps into all her underused creativity that’s been atrophying for four-plus decades. I’m going to make Mom to help me build a killer Magic cosplay.

Where do you come in? Well, I hope you’ll be there along the way to offer input and come along on the fantastic voyage.

I’m not going to pretend to know more than I do—I’m a serious cosplay newb, but I’m the fastest of learners. And I’ll be learning about resources and techniques along the way, step by step, as you’re reading about it. I don’t know how many installments it’ll take or ultimately how long—but we’ll get there. My goal? Excellence.

I write a lot of words about Magic. Like, a lot. Especially during Grand Prix coverage, where we churn out articles at a pace that could make Buzzfeed envious. Just this past weekend, I wrote around two dozen articles ranging from around six hundred words to one mammoth piece of about four thousand words.

And that doesn’t even count the work done by coverage partner and this site’s esteemed editor Adam Styborski, who, while far less verbose than I (because no one likes the sound of his or her own written word more than I do), has a knack for knocking out pieces as well.

The point is that, over the course of a Grand Prix, Pro Tour, or normal weekly writing, Magic writers churn out a lot of words, and as a result, they take some shortcuts in phrasing. We can’t, for example, stop and explain what we mean by “exiled” every time, and we often find ourselves slipping into generally-accepted nomenclature (mise, Forced, Bob) without even realizing it.

Even worse, we sometimes say something that means something in normal English or even normal Magic English that means something different in high-level-tournament-Magic English or yet something else in Zac-Hill-high-level-tournament-Magic English.

Pro Tour Theros left us with over 20 hours of video coverage with brilliant plays, tense moments, and interesting interactions. However, 20 hours is a lot, so I selected five games from the Swiss rounds in Dublin that I personally enjoyed and/or found interesting enough to highlight. The combined length of these five games is a little over an hour.

In Round 3, Luis Scott-Vargas and Chris Pikula had a great game two. Chris played well, but I was particularly impressed by Luis’s plays. There were two that stood out:

The first interesting play was on Luis’s turn 3. Luis has two Islands and a Swamp in play, along with Shipwreck Singer and Triton Tactics in hand. Chris had merely played Mountains on his first, second, and third turns, and hadn’t played a creature yet. To put that in proper perspective: in game one, Chris had a very aggressive deck with a low curve and multiple Magma Jets. And it is important to note that Chris had kept his opening hand of seven cards.

The “obvious” play for Luis in this situation is to cast Shipwreck Singer, and to save it with Triton Tactics in case of a Magma Jet. But Luis doesn’t do that. Chris keeping a hand without an early creature just screams Magma Jet. And if Chris is holding Magma Jet, then Luis doesn’t want to allow him to scry into a 4-drop. Luis, who didn’t have a 4-drop anyway, just passes the turn, waiting until turn four to cast his creature. I believe this is the correct line of play.

I strongly believe that Elves is one of the top decks in Legacy. Unless people start not only throwing a lot more hate at it but also understand how the deck actually plays out post-board, Elves will definitely continue to put up numbers in the hands of competent players. But how did I arrive at this conclusion? My personal Eureka moment struck me when I was playing at the Bazaar of Moxen Annecy in May. Especially during day 1, the top tables were infested with Elves players tearing up the metagame. Back then I was on Shardless BUG and got my butt handed to me by some very good Elves players that were easily able to outplay me over the course of the game. The deck just felt invincible to me, and I remember how our resident Elvish Champion Lukas Maurer managed to take what is now Legacy's premier tribal deck all the way to the finals of Grand Prix Ghent in 2012.

After Annecy, I knew exactly which deck I wanted to focus on for future testing. Already having given it several successful tries in paper Magic, I decided to also start testing on Magic Online. After getting comfortable with the deck and 4-0ing several Daily Events, I started streaming my progress on http://twitch.tv/itsJulian. Playing in front of an educated audience helped a lot in playing a much tighter game and discovering potential loopholes in my sideboarding strategy.

The more I kept playing and winning, the more my feeling grew that Elves might still be flying under the radar for a lot of people. The deck just felt like the strongest 75 cards I had ever registered to any given tournament since the banning of Mental Misstep (and the sad departure of NO RUG it brought about). Yet many people failed to understand that this once niche and geeky tribal deck had risen to the very top of the format and was putting up very noticeable results! Following Lukas' great run with it at GP Ghent in 2012, LSV and Matt Nass had once again showcased the power of the deck to a broad audience at GP Denver in January. But with Deathblade being the talk of the town for almost the entire summer, Elves never got the amount of attention I felt it deserved.

Are you getting tired of seeing the same cards in your Commander matches? Has your local metagame devolved into too many "good stuff" decks and not enough difference? Is one deck blending into another?

Or perhaps your metagame is healthy, but you don't have the deck stock to build your next deck. What do you do when you have run out of Sol Rings and Duplicants, Eternal Witnesses and Acidic Slimes, or Swords to Plowshares and Paths to Exile?

That's where this series comes in. I take a popular Commander and build your typical "good stuff" deck around it. We put in everything that is gross, and I don't pull any financial punches. If the deck wants Mana Drain, Underground Sea, or Moat, then it gets it. This is the Cream of the Crop stuff. Then I set aside this "First 100" deck and get my hands dirty building a second deck. The "Next 100" uses all new cards and is a brand-new deck built around the same legendary creature.

After twenty years of making Magic, there are more than enough cards out there to build different decks around the same legendary creature.

I've already done Next 100 projects around Sygg, River Cutthroat; Rhys the Redeemed; and Prime Speaker Zegana. Today I am choosing another fun legendary: Glissa, the Traitor. Like the others, I have never built a Glissa deck before, so this should be something fun!

No matter where I go or who I talk to, there is a single, unanimous, most-popular question about my job: What is working in R&D like?Here. Join us for a day, and let me show you.