Grand Prix Minneapolis, the tournament of over sixteen hundred players, just ended, and two results came out of it: Scapeshift is apparently a deck again, and this Meadery situation isn’t going away.What is The Meadery, and how is it different than Mead Hall?

To explain that, we have to discuss who Ian is. Ian Anderson was a screen-printing owner, a serial entertainment entrepreneur who had an idea. His idea was to utilize space.While Ian stated that the extra space he had in his tiny basement printmaking shop near Loring Park in downtown Minneapolis could be used to personally obtain wholesale comics for him and friends, he inadvertently disrupted an entire game and hobby store market.

A year and a half ago, Christmastime 2012 or so, he started a comics-oriented side business as a joke. His plan was not to even make money on this business. Hell, there wasn’t even a business plan.

What Ian Anderson and a friend had were all the necessary pieces to build not only a local gaming store, but a brand that would utterly disrupt an entire Magic: The Gathering market in a market of three million people—in less than a year.

I'm a man of value. When it comes to building and playing Magic decks, my favorite ones tend be the well-oiled machines that are greater than the sum of their parts. "Bolt your guy, attack you" tends to get the job done, but I'd much rather be fancy, given the opportunity.

That's why one of my favorite creatures in Magic is Bloodghast.

Whenever I see an early Bloodghast in a Cube draft, I almost always plan to wheel it and start looking for opportunities to build a deck around throwing it away over and over—mostly to Recurring Nightmare and Attrition, but I'm perfectly willing to debase myself for weaker options. I've even played the little guy in control decks as a Nether Spirit-style win condition!

I just love him.

That's why when I first saw the deck Sam Black started exploring in Legacy a couple of years ago, I became immediately enamored with the archetype. For reference, here's what I believe to be Sam's very first list, and a Deck Tech he did with Dane Young during a Baltimore Legacy Open.

Let's take a little history lesson!

When I look at Prophetic Flamespeaker I see huge potential, so when I have an idea that isn't entirely conventional I do what everyone should do:

I went to Anthony Lowry.

Ant is pretty much a breath of fresh air when it comes to bouncing ideas off someone. Like Johnny Number Five he loves input, so when I started going deep he was happy to oblige me.

You can view his article here if you want to see the final product of our brainstorming session, but not included are the multiple ideas we had about G/R Monsters, Red Aggro, or the R/B Midrange deck we came up with that looks promising.

What you see in his article is an R/B Aggro deck meant to take full advantage of Flamespeaker by dropping the curve like Seven Lions drop the bass and playing cards like Thoughtseize meant to ensure that Prophetic Flamespeaker connects. To further this point, we wanted to make him the baddest kid on the playground by adding bestow cards such as Mogis's Warhound, Gnarled Scarhide, and Herald of Torment. This deck is meant to kill with as much gas in the tank as possible; if Prophetic Flamespeaker connects once, that means two cards at your disposal. That means more removal, more creatures, and fewer resources expended from your hand.

However, I won't be talking much more about this deck since Anthony did a great job explaining our card choices in his piece.

Today we're going to talk about the art of brewing, why it's becoming a lost art, and how easily we could fan those flames of creativity once again in order to start churning out some truly awesome decks.

Most tactical decisions boil down to whether or not to cast a spell. The first thing we learn in Sealed is to hold our removal for the opponent's best threats, and to hold our best threats until the opponent is out of removal. In Legacy, we learn not to cash in our Brainstorms on turn one, instead holding onto them until we can pair them with a shuffle effect to extract maximum value.

Yet, there are few theoretical articles that specifically go into what makes it correct to not cast a card—partly because it's somewhat covered in more abstract concepts like sequencing or playing around the opponent's hand, and partly because Magic theory is underdeveloped.

This article focuses on holding cards because it tends to be much harder than casting them. On a basic level, we want to play our spells. It's satisfying. It's why we run them in the first place, and perhaps why we even play the game. If a card is sweet enough, simply resolving it grants a certain euphoria. Sometimes, we value resolving a card or sequence of cards more highly than winning the game. I spent a great deal of time trying to kill people with Chromanticore, for example.

I assume that most of my readers grasp the basic strategy of the game, that instead of automatically casting all spells at the first chance possible, they realize there are cases where it's best to try and maximize value.

Yet, sometimes value can be a difficult thing to ascertain, especially when it comes to a decision-dense format like Legacy. It gets even more complicated when we're not worried about getting the most out of our own spells, but hindering the opponent's.

Another Pro Tour draws near and I am once again proud to present a new issue of my Pro Tour Special. After interviewing only Pro Tour winners for the Born of the Gods Special, this time I talked to players that have not won a Pro Tour (yet). Every one of these players has made it to the Top 8 of a Pro Tour at least once—a focal point of this issue. Never having done well on the Pro Tour myself I can only imagine what it means to get so close to the biggest achievement in professional Magic just to stumble inches short of the finish line. I suspect it hurts a lot before you can really enjoy the pride that you deserve for making Top 8 in a Pro Tour. In this issue you will see what Sam Black, Patrick Chapin, Andrew Cuneo, Melissa DeTora, Patrick Dickmann, Kenji Tsumura, Owen Turtenwald, and Matej Zatlkaj have to say about it.

Brago's body convulsed, and he let loose a choking gasp. Selvala recognized it as his laughter. "Maybe... I should have listened to you. Maybe you should have made me listen."

Selvala's face flushed with anger. "Oh no. You don't get to put this on me. I warned you. In the very beginning, I begged you not to let the Custodi begin their treatments."

"But you relented. We still had so much work to do. For the city."

Selvala narrowed her eyes. The king had already said more in this exchange than he had in their last two dinners combined.

"What's going on, old friend? What has changed?" Her voice softened.

"In the beginning, you and I shared a vision."