A New Start #1

Hello and welcome to my first article on the Magic General. First of all my name is Ryan Clark and go by RedVelvet on MTGO and Cockatrice (for playing legacy and vintage because we all know what it’s like to get old cards on MTGO). Im also on Twitter @RedVelvetMTG. I’m always open for new people who enjoy magic so don’t be afraid to message me and follow me on twitter.  With that said Ive only been playing magic for a year now but have quickly moved up to where I regularly attend local PTQ’s (with spurts of success) and now hope to reach the next level and actually make a Pro Tour.  One of the main goals of me writing for this blog is to help improve my game.  I’ve been a regular reader of many pro players online articles, many of which said one of the things that helps their game the most is writing about it because it forces you to collect honest data and not be bias in your decisions. I hope for people reading this will learn from the stories and ideas I’ve accumulated over the past year and will continue to advance on.  Anyways now that you have a small sliver of info on me  I will just finish this article talking about the FNM I went to last week with Cal. In his post before Friday he was right that I was going to play tempered steel, however with a few pesky scars commons missing and realization of our local metagame I talked myself out of it.  I ended up playing a friend’s Esper “planeswalkers” deck because he couldn’t go and I wanted to try something different… (not that different). I have the “”s around planeswalkers because that’s what he called it even though it only had 1 Karn 1 Giddeon 1 Elspeth and 1 Lilliana…. Let’s just say my opponents were right to think they were playing against esper control and not planeswalkers. When I looked through it I noticed one other problem… 1 copy of lingering souls. I had some of his other cards with me he wanted to trade which included 7 lingering souls so I know it wasn’t card availability so I called him up to see if he just messed up the conversation went a little like this….

Him: “hello”

Me: “You’re an idiot”

Him: “what?”

Me: “how many copies of lingering souls are in your deck?”

Him: “just 1 it’s not THAT good”

Me: insta hang up.

It might sound like we are fighting here but we are just best of friends and give each other as much grief as possible at the others expense.  Needless to say after our conversation I fixed the souls problem but didn’t have enough time to really work on the whole deck so I don’t think its really worth showing the list. Just know there were 4 planes walkers and two Elesh Norns and the rest pretty normal for either espercontrol or planeswalkers…. Without the counter spells…. Oh wait I lied… he had TWO mana leaks and that’s it…. Didn’t really see them till my opponent’s would have enough mana to pay for it. Anyways I ended up only going 1-3 even though I force game 3s in all rounds I lost (going 2-0 in the win) wasn’t really blown out except for when my opponent played. Phyrexian Obltterator pass. Play Falkenrath Aristocrat swing for 9. Play another swing for 13… sick. Anyways better luck next week.  Remember to follow me on twitter @RedVelvetMTG and check back next week for a new (in more detail) article yet to be decided on. Untill next time this is Ryan, may you never get mana screwed.