http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/gpphi05/welcome

I hope they start adding some fun commentary and whatnot soon.  Right now it's just the standings.

It's too late, you've riled them.

I would also like to register my enjoyment of the notes.  Jolly good.

That vow has a cool effect, the title is way more black than the previous attempt, and its effect is definitely in black territory.  Top notch, wot wot.

With the inclusion of Vow of Silence and Vow of Poverty, it might be fitting to include a Vow of Chastity.  With Vow of Poverty moving to green, the Vow of Chastity would fit in nicely in the white spot.  However, it doesn't really fit flavorwise with the currently proposed options.  Perhaps a Moat variant would suit it well.

These lands would blow Type II wide open.  The drawback of coming into play tapped hardly offsets the powerful ability granted by these lands, as is evidenced by the success of Bosejiu in Tooth and even Mono-Red.  Also, these lands being legendary is not nearly the drawback it would be for other lands, since in the case of multiple copies, the prior copies could be sacrificed for tremendous gain.  I could see control decks in Type II packing 3 or 4 copies of the appropriately colored lands in their decks.

Vow of Perpetual Care is so much weaker than the rest.  Not only is the effect much weaker than the rest, but it has the second easiest to trigger sacrifice effect, next only to Vow of Silence.  The name is also very clunky and out of flavor.  Perpetual Care sounds white.  Maybe it should return creatures from the graveyard and a more reasonable sac-trigger would be when a creature enters your graveyard?  The flavor being that you vow to give these creatures life, and if they die, then you broke your vow.  Vow of Eternal Life, perhaps?  Not too good a name, but hopefully someone else will make a better one.

This is a line I hear tossed about rather frequently whenever the 2000 election is brought up.  After the election, the media undertook the task of recounting the ballots in Florida.  While in a number of scenarios (varying in numbers of counties recounted or degree to which damaged or questionable ballots were counted) Bush emerged the winner, he most certainly did not come out ahead in every situation.  One scenario in particular stands out.  As the Washington Post headline puts it, "Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of All Uncounted Ballots."  Here's a quote from another Post article:


Here's a link to the article for those who want to follow up: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A12604-2001Nov11&notFound=true

This by no means proves that Bush stole the election in Florida.  I saw that statement out there and I felt it best not to leave it unmentioned.  The real meat and potatoes of the election theft is in the handywork of then Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush.  Earlier that year, Florida hired ChoicePoint to remove convicted felons from the voter rolls.  However, ChoicePoint was far too zealous in their quest to remove felons, as they ended up removing felons who had their civil liberties restored, people who had only committed misdemeanors, and people with names similar to those of a felon.  In total, 57,700 voters were purged from the rolls that year.  Later statistical analysis suggests with 99% certainty that at least 90.2% of removed voters should never have been removed.  Roughly 88% of those removed from the rolls in this purge were Black, which stands in stark contrast to the 11% of the Florida population which is Black.  Blacks tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic (93% of Florida Blacks voted for Gore in 2000) and about 51,000 were no longer eligible to vote, although about 45,000 of them should still have been.  Juxtaposed to that figure is the whopping 0 Hispanics removed from the rolls.  Bush received 67% of the Dade County Hispanic vote in 2000.
     Also, it would be a shame to forget that ChoicePoint has some hefty ties to the Republican party.  Gregory Palast of Salon.com can break that down:
Here's the link for that story: http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/04/voter_file/print.html

     Recap: Florida, under the stewardship of Harris and Bush, hires ChoicePoint, a company with significant ties to the Republican party.  Then ChoicePoint is urged by the state to loosen their already lax requirements for purging individuals from the voting rolls.  Tens of thousands of Floridians are undeservedly unable to vote.  Far overrepresented in the disenfranchised are Blacks, who tend to be staunch Democrats.  Hispanics, a more Republican oriented minority, are left unscathed.  End result: Potential Gore voters are disenfranchised by the tens of thousands and Bush claims the White House with a 500 vote lead over Gore.

For more information on this topic, Wikipedia has an excellent entry for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File

It is spelled necessary. 

It's mildly ironic that this post is in fact unnecessary. Next time, send a PM or just ignore it.
-Jacob

3 Lightning Bolts, how manly.

Actually, from what I've gathered from the MWS horror stories thread, Godot has just set up an MWS server for TMD.  The IP for that would be 67.165.209.105.  This could be quite useful if more people knew about it.

I saw too much of myself in that.

Asian Foil Lion's Eye Diamonds?

Did I miss something?

Best Modern Guitarist: Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave)
Best Composer: John Williams, Mark Mothersbaugh

5 Underground Sea
4 Tropical Island
1 Tundra
1 Plateau

Revised duals represent!

EDIT: +1 Underground Sea and Plateau

Thanks for the clarification.

How can you activate Chromatic Sphere's ability in the middle of casting a spell?

Much like Vampiric Tutor, the additional cost of skipping your next turn with Meditate is now part of the resolution.

During the summer, I had myself a fun time mixing a GAT, Welder Mud, and Slaver list together.  I'd agree that the resulting multiplayer games were some of the wackiest I've played to date.

Oh joy of joys.  No more discussing B/R changes for a few months.  Sooper.

Oh yeah, the restriction of Trinisphere could lead to a fresh wave of innovation.  That might undo a good deal of the general uninterest of late.

From what I remember from MaRo's articles, sets are designed roughly a year before they are sold.  Do any of the cards here have a time frame that would synch up with that?

Ancient Tomb is an incredibly cheap card, especially after its banning in extended, and can do a pretty bang up job filling MWS' shoes.

It doesn't seem much has been done to encourage the Oath aspect of this deck.

In addition to the Funeral Pyre in the board, you can run a Crop Rotation in the main to ensure activating the Oath.

To help find the single Oath copy in the deck, I would consider maindecking the Enlightened Tutor or put it in the board at the very least.  It can also doubt as removal by fetching you Pernicious Deed.

The Orloves raised themselves a good kid.

Now if he would only stop playing those damned card games.

A+ for awesomenicity above and beyond the call of duty.

The .tk suffix is for the small Pacific island nation of Tokelau.  You can register there and create your own .tk website.  Then you can fill the website with trash and garbage forums, just like our good friend, Sean Tyson.

www.mtgoasis.tk sullies the good name and honor of the proud Tokelauans.

The summoning sickness would have worn off by this point.

Opponent's Turn 1: Mox, Land, Duress
NastyNate's Turn 1: Ruby, Workshop, Welder, Crucible
Opponent's Turn 2: Bazaar, Animate, mills NastyNate's deck.
NastyNate's Turn 2: During upkeep, weld mox into Platinum Angel.  Live during draw step.

Perhaps you sould clarify on the interaction between Sindering Titan and Naked Singularity, because I think you are mistaken or I am missing something.  Naked Singularity doesn't change the type of the land, merely what color mana it produces.

You have no reliable way to cast Mana Drain second turn, unless you drop 2 straight Islands.  This is quite counter-intuitive to the plan of first turn Land Tax.  Maybe you should break down and include some Tundras and Flooded Strands.

EDIT: Also, I noticed the lack of Black Lotus.  It goes in deck.

You could use a Call of the Herd and an Earthcraft.  Perhaps you could go for a Fyndhorn Elves.

The artifacts could possibly use a Tangle Wire and definately Mana Crypt and AEther "#1" Spellbomb.

This seems like a real fun casual format.

The thread name got my hopes up.  I was expecting more Atogatogs, especially in the casual forum.

The legend rule shouldn't apply until the second Mindslaver has resolved.  

The Legend Rule said:


The second Mindslaver would have been a spell, and not a permanent, until it resolved.  At that point, if there are two legendary permanents in play with the name Mindslaver, they both go to their owners' graveyards as a state based effect.

Congratulation on your success with Salvagers.  I'm curious, why do you opt to run with 3 Pyrite Spellbombs?  I have running a single Pyrite Spellbomb and having the rest as AEther Spellbombs to be beneficial.  It doesn't seem that you have many means of producing red mana to take advantage of the ability of Pyrite Spellbomb.

Again, excellent work.