For the first time in almost a year, it was time for some toddler-free, purely indulgent, out-of-town, adult fun. And by “adult,” I mean Magic, of course.

Under the pretense of working a card-alterist gig (okay, I did actually do some work), I convinced my mom to agree to an overnight babysitting stint. My son wasn’t sorry to see me go. Various disruptions to the usual babysitting schedule meant he and I’d been together 24/7 for the past two weeks, and even the resilient bromance of the Megaman series had suffered, and X and Zero needed to spend some time apart (I’m Zero). I dropped my son off at my mom’s at 4:45 A.M. on Saturday, and he ran into grandma’s arms without as much as a backward glance. See you Sunday, X. You break my heart. Love, Zero.

Dude, where’s my Sigma virus? Scene from Megaman X6.

Freedom, freedom, freedommmmmm! I zipped back to our house in the dark, eager to take a nip from my flask and load up the rest of our gear and @Hackworth. I hadn’t run an alter booth for a long time, so the prospect of working a Journey into Nyx Pro Tour Qualifier was really exciting. When Dan Tharp of Card Kingdom contacted me about the gig in late January, I’d just come off a really writing-heavy year working on producing Bennie Smith’s The Complete Commander eBook. The excuse to pick up a brush for a bit was timely.

This past week, I was able to gather five friends and draft the Cube for the first time since my monstrous Born of the Gods update. I always look forward to the first Draft after an update; it’s like a prerelease. I am able to see if any of the new cards make an impact and whether the changes I attempted to seed sprouted into things that actually matter. The event itself was interesting. We drafted, and we then randomly selected teams afterward...

In the aftermath, I was talking with Steve about why the Draft played out the way it did. (As a side note, I find having a debrief with the drafters to be an incredibly valuable tool, as it can provide the much-needed outsider’s perspective. Tunnel vision is a real thing, and this can help combat singular viewpoints.) Steve is an accomplished Magic player, having won Grand Prix Columbus in 2007, and he has worked in game design. To put it another way, whenever I tell our fearless editor that I’m going to draft with Steve, I can almost feel the jealousy drip through the message window; Steve’s insights are priceless.

I was explaining to Steve an idea I had of comparing the contents of my Cube to that of some of the “great Draft formats.” The two I picked were triple Innistrad and triple Rise of the Eldrazi, and with the help of my friend (and Common Cause cohost) Mike, we crunched the numbers on the removal in my Cube and in these sets. The goal was to see how my Cube stacked up against these sets, considered to be all-time greats.

I'm Alex Majlaton, and I love Affinity. It's by far my favorite deck in Magic. The first time I played it in 2004, when it was legal in Standard, I managed to make Top 8 of Mid-Atlantic Regionals, earning me an invite to US Nationals, which was my first premier event. Since then I've had a very hard time playing anything else in a format where some version of the deck is both legal and competitive (and not even necessarily the latter sometimes).

I've cashed six Modern Grand Prix with the deck, making Top 8 of three of them. The content coordinator of this website likes to refer to me as "the best Affinity player in the world." Whether or not that's actually true, I have a ton of experience and a considerable amount of success with the deck in Modern, and this is my attempt to share as much of it with you as I can.

If you've ever been in job where you sell things, even for just a day, you're probably familiar with a scene from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin's character delivers a powerful, vulgar speech about sales. The mantra "Always be closing" took on a life of its own, as it's a compelling idea: If every step you make is toward completing the sale then you should be completing more sales than if you weren't.

Of course, there are problems with forcing every interaction to move down the sales path. Success comes in many forms, not all of which are winning. But what is success without victory—closing the sale?

The truth is that this article probably won’t be helpful for very long. Storm put up the best record of any deck in Valencia, winning nearly 60% of its matches. The Pantheon members who played the deck won two out of three of their matches, excluding draws and mirror matches. Even if you exclude The Pantheon, the other storm decks in the field managed to best 50%, if only just barely. Wizards hates this. I’ve heard many times that their unofficial policy is to ban cards until I stop playing the deck. I’m not really sure why they hate Storm so much. Living End is a “lamer” combo with almost no decision making required. Burn plays like a combo deck (Did I draw 18 points of damage and the land to cast it?) that also lacks choices, and Wizards seems totally fine with the creature combos of Pod and Splinter Twin.

There would certainly be worse things for Magic than having a good, difficult, skill-intensive combo deck that is very easily hated out. It’s also nice to have decks in the "eternal" format that attack the game from different angles. Storm as a percentage of the metagame easily gets into negative feedback loops. There is a card that says 2W: Storm loses the game. While it’s technically possible to beat Rule of Law, nobody is going to be excited to sleeve up Storm when half the decks have three Rule of Law in the sideboard.

Despite all of this, I’m pretty sure that Storm is going to actually be dead at the next banning. So until then, go forth and play with the last remaining bastion of old-school, real Magic.

This late in a Standard season, I tend to get bored. Usually I’ve been playing the same deck for a while, and it gets to a point where I just can’t stand the thought of sleeving up the same deck for another week’s worth of events. I don’t have infinite opportunities to play—even in low-stakes events like FNM or Game Day, sometimes you just get a hankering for something different, and need to express yourself through your deck list. I decided I wanted to do something new and different for Game Day last weekend, and I didn’t care if I won or lost, as long as I had fun with something off the wall.

It was with this in mind that I asked my teammates to help me come up with a halfway decent Phenax, God of Deception deck.