Welcome to The Spotlight, my new series—which, over the next few years—will be shining a spotlight on community topics, conversations, and issues as they arise from the dredges of the interwebs. As tinkling bells of Christmas begin to grow louder and this year of Magic 2013 closes, I thought it only fitting to shine a spotlight on the year and all we accomplished, toiled through, and celebrated.

The first installment of this series, if you missed it, talks about my motivation behind this project and asked for nominations for cosplays that might embody the spirit of Magic. Basically, I’m indulging myself in an immersive crash course in modern cosplay that, I hope, results in an amazing MTG costume. My main goal is learning, a close second is excellence in execution, and after, that I would love to have the costume featured publicly somewhere. Cosplay is booming as a cultural phenomenon, and I’m glad. Final Fantasy, League of Legends, Diablo, and every anime under the sun are extremely visible. Magic should be, too.

Also, I need a reason to get in shape.

On Sunday, I went through all available Day 2 deck lists and noted the deck archetypes for each player. The metagame breakdown revealed that Blue Devotion and Black Devotion were the most popular decks on Sunday in Vienna.

Fortunately, I can do more with that data than just make a metagame breakdown. By combining the player-archetype data with the Day 2 standings and results, I was able to calculate the average number of points that each archetype scored on Sunday, as well as matchup percentages between the popular archetypes.

Let's start with the average number of points that each archetype (with 7 or more pilots) scored on the six Swiss rounds on Sunday. 9 points would be the average if no one would draw or drop, but since those things do happen, 9 points is slightly above average.

Counterspells are fundamentally different from almost every other kind of card. With counterspells, you can deal with anything—but only at a very specific time. Compare, for example, a counterspell to a removal spell. When they play a creature, I don’t have to Lightning Bolt it immediately—I can wait, and then, if it becomes a problem, I’ll kill it. With counterspells, I can’t do that. If I miss my window, it’s gone forever. I have to make the decision to counter the spell the moment it is played, without fully knowing how important it’s going to be to the game. I can’t assess only what it is doing now, but I have to think about what it’s going to do until the very last turn of the game. For this reason, counterspells are some of the hardest cards to play with. In today’s article, I’ll talk a little about playing counterspells and what I think are ways you might improve your counterspelling experience.

Magic the Gathering has grown. A lot. A year ago, getting a PTQ with more than 200 players was rare, and a PTQ that broke the 226-player, eight-round threshold was almost unheard of. Now it is becoming more and more common in some corners of the world. Some tournament organizers have risen to the challenge, renting out larger venues and bringing on larger judge staffs to accommodate. Some TOs have even moved the start times of their PTQs earlier in the day to ensure the event ends before 3 a.m. at a 24-hour coffee shop. But in other areas, players haven’t been so lucky: some TOs have started putting caps on attendance; some have just jammed more tables and chairs into an already over-crowded venue.

To help combat the issue of Grand Prix and PTQ overcrowding, and to account for the growth of the game, Wizards restructured the GP and PTQ system as outlined in Helene Bergeot’s article here.

Part of that restructuring involved changing the GP system so that if more than 1,200 players are in attendance, the number of Pro Tour invites doubles from four to eight. Moreover, if the event is super huge, all players with at least 39 points (13-2 record or better) get an invite. In addition to assuring that invites scale based on attendance, this also helps change the system so that you never have to play more than nine rounds of Swiss on day one and nine rounds total on day two, ensuring a healthy experience for players, judges, and TOs.

But all the PTQ system got was an extra season, which may result in more PTQs per year overall, but in some areas might also result in even fewer PT invites per season since there is now going to be a fourth Pro Tour. The issues of poor invite to player ratio? Not dealt with. The problem of long days? Not solved.

Naya has always been my favorite three-color combination. With its aggressive nature, reach, and efficient answers, the archetype is always a competitive deck in every format. I played it in Legacy and Extended for many years, during Shards of Alara Block Constructed, and in Standard both this season and for Pro Tour San Diego when Luis Scott-Vargas made his 16-0 run. So naturally, I'd like to discuss the state of Naya in Standard right now and how it fits into the metagame.

Going into Pro Tour Theros testing, I felt pretty far behind in Standard. I'd largely ignored Standard over the past year while mainly playing in Limited Grand Prix when I had the opportunity. I tried brewing a bit but couldn't quite find a deck that complemented my skillset. That's when I gave up on trying to create a breakout deck or otherwise break the format and settled on refining a known deck that I felt I could pilot well, and thus began my experience with Naya in the new Standard.

Devotion is a mechanic that scales endlessly. Nearly any X spell (such as Fireball) is a good example of a scaling spell. The amount of damage Fireball deals is only limited by the amount of mana you are willing to spend. Scaling cards are interesting because they allow you to play different-powered effect depending on the state of the game. Like other scaling cards, cards with devotion are similarly unlimited. Instead of available mana, a card with devotion counts the mana symbols on your permanents. Devotion is different than most scaling mechanics because many of your cards can count multiple times toward your scaling mechanic. A creature that costs counts for two devotion, so it is difficult to plan on a certain amount of devotion. This makes developing devotion cards very tricky, as we want cards to be fun in the most amount of situations possible.