At the last double lotus tourney in NJ, I saw someone cast Shahrazad and Fork it.  That was tight.

I didn't see the decklist, but it was a sort of iso-burn thing with Orim's Chants.  That deck must have been built just to tick people off.  

Ugh.  I always try to use a die, myself.  At Waterbury I lost a game I should have won by losing 6 consecutive flips.  And it was my own quarter.  At some point I wanted to ask the guy to call tails just once.  I just don't trust coins.

I ended up losing because he welded my crypt back in EOT.  

Eh, well, if you have everyone sign them, I guess that isn't so bad.  But you might want to tell the people you beat that so they don't tear up your precious 1/1 haste first strike for 2 (phear!).  God I hate those things in draft - they turn up all over the place.  At least someone is putting them to use.

Nantuko, it could just be me, but having people you beat signing your goblin tokens might be a little condescending or insulting.  I'm not sure everyone would feel this way, but I'm not surprised someone tore up one token and someone else stole another.  It's not something I would ask anyone to do if I expected pleasentness.

     While this is true, I'd say it's more true for the middle cards than it is for the top and bottom ones.  I think a few chop shuffles between the riffles fixes this nicely.  The first from top and the third from top, say, won't move far from one another (if at all) in 4 riffle shuffles unless you are horrendously meticulous about it.

You still have the problem of "my Lotus is a few cards away from my Yawgmoth's Will - somewhere in there" if you just cut.  I don't think a single cut is sufficient if the person has ONLY riffle shuffled.  You just move that cards that didn't move much relative to one another to somewhere ELSE in the deck.

Well damn everyone who shuffles one way when one thing is true and another when something else is true.  That aspect of Magic is supposed to be RANDOM.  Before every matchup, I riffle shuffle, and between each of these I pull out a chunk of cards from the center and alternate them between the front and the back of the deck.  I repeat this maybe a dozen times.  I think this is the only way to get a nice, random shuffle - through "micro movements" (a riffle shuffle will usually place adjacent cards near one another) as well as "macro movements" (large chop shuffles move cards that sit either at the top or bottom of your deck when you riffle to random spots in your deck).  If I get mana scewed, I shrug and take a mulligan.

     Also, as a point of order, if you take a deck and assign it a random distribution, you will get land clumps.  Statistically speaking, after a large number of shuffles, your lands will NOT become more evenly distributed.  If you have Magic Workstation, feel free to use the easiest example of this by shuffling and viewing your library a few times.

     Land clumps are part of the game.  Get used to it - it's what Brainstorm/Fetch is for.  Only pussies cheat and don't shuffle well.

I sense a disturbance in the Force.  Doom is at hand!  I sense the impending locking and/or moving of this thread!  Be forewarned, young Jedi, and read the stickies before posting.

Well, I could see it getting included in monobrown stax type decks that run the 5 strips and have workshops to power this out on turn 1.  Your workshops don't get wasted (well, they do, but they come back), you can strip over and over, and hey, look, mox diamond just got better, too.  Whether this card will actually let prison decks back into the metagame is questionable, however.

Actually speaking of mox diamond, maybe Foil, Flameshot and Abolish just broke the "playable" threshold.  Foil seems like a good madness outlet, and the U/G is a version that runs fetches+strips already.

God knows, maybe mudhole, up there as one of the all-time worst cards ever to see print, might actually make it to mediocre status.

Or it could be that the guy who T8'ed with Tarpan in the board didn't know what else to put in the slots, so he used Tarpan as a joke and people ran with it.  Duh.

     There's not a window there, really - it is jsut that some choices get made upon the sucessful resolution of the spell.  Like Misdirect.  When you play that, for example, you have to choose the spell that you would like to misdirect upon declaration; however, you don't have to choose the new target until the MisD has sucessfully resolved.  "As ~this~ comes into play" is something associated with the SPELL, not the perm once it has come into play, so it's taken care of during the resolution.

     It could just be me, but I'd rather Stifle the "leaves play" ability of the dragon after he's floated enough mana to burn and emptied his hand from bazaar.
     But yeah that works.

     Just a quick question: what do you name with Mage vs Tog?  The obvious answer seems to be "Psychatog", but I could see merit to naming "Cunning Wish" since it kills berserk plus most of the non-deed answers they have game 1.  I haven't tested the matchup yet, but I planned to soon.

Thanks.

No, I don't use it very aggresively at all; usually I go for less than 8.  Whatever, I might board it in again sometime to fiddle with this.

     I really think Mox Diamond has a place in this deck; every time I've had it, I've gotten it into play and the 5 colors is awesome.  Once I even flushed it with a Wheel and got it back with the Will later.

     Every time I've had Chrome Mox either I don't need the mana, it just makes an ESG stick around (which is irrelevant if I plan to kill before I untap), or I don't want to RFG the card I'd have to in order to ge tthe color I need.

     Frantic Search has also been awesome in my testing - I really like it more and more.  It fixes color screw and makes the push into the first draw 7 totally possible when you can get out your Academy.

     I'm curious about Tainted Pact; I screwed around with Mystical and Consultation and dislike both.

     And I definately play with 3 win conditions.  I, personally, have flushed both win conditions with Returns a couple of times, or lost one while I had the other under a Jar.

Call me a heretic, but I ditched necro.  I have a lot of trouble managing the triple black cost unless it's first turn and I *happen* to have the DR in hand.  If I draw it later, I never play it because I'm already trying to go off, and setting up for nex tturn isn't what I want to do.  Also, I don't like how it makes Wheel and Windfall less desirable because I can't later Timetwister or Diminish what is in my hand (say a Tendrils) later.  But I see why it's in the decklist.
     Mana is always tight for me when I try to go off, and more often than not, I find I'm short on blue, even though I try only to get a single black (for DRs) in the pool and dump the rest into blue.  A lot of times I'm just like "damn, I wish I could either play a 5 color land (if I haven't seen fastbond)" or I was forced to tap an Academy early for 3 or something because there was no other way to get double blue for Returns.  So I'm testing out Frantic Search, and I like it a lot.  There's always crap I don't need (usually land, when I'm already going off), and I get to untap my Academy (which I see a godawful lot of games) or some other random 5-color land to get the green I need for fastbond/rotation, that red for the pesky Burning Wish or the black I just couldn't float to get off the DR I just drew.  Even untapping 2 lands is worth it for me.
     I haven't been a huge fan of brainstorm in this deck; I never seem to be able to shuffle away the crap and at least 50% of the time get crap I don't need.  I don't know what to do about it; I am reluctant to run Impulse or Lim-Dul's Vault.  I tried Meditate and that seems to suck.
     I also feel Time Walk only serves the role of letting you burn for 5 or 6 after fizzling and give you another shot to go again.  Myeh.

Ray had mulled down to 6.  He played a land and brainstormed, so his hand was at 4;  he FoWs the Duress, so by the time he cast ancestral, he had only one other card in hand.  After the MisD, Ultima went up to 6 cards (to Ray's 1), and he had two mana sources to Ray's 1.  My guess is that Ray was holding another land or something; I mean it's not a foregone conclusion or anything.  But the beatdown deck has the full grip when the control deck has no gas.  Yeah, I maybe I woulda been stubborn and lost the old fashioned take-me-to-zero way, though.

I really think it sucks.  It was my baby, my favorite deck, and I finished second to last at the Gamemaster tourney.  Roughly, I might miss a few cards, here it is:

3 Volrath's Shifter
2 Phage
4 Survival
4 Duress
1 Demonic T
1 Vamp T
1 Demonic Consultation
1 Squee
3 Unearth
4 Birds of P
2 Elvish SG
1 Irridescent Angel
1 Phyrexian Dreadnought
1 Quirion Ranger
1 Akroma
1 Hypnox
1 Palinchron
2 Xantid Swarm
4 brainstorm
1 viridian zealot
Mox Em, Saph, Jet
Lotus
4 tropical
4 windswept heath
2 city of brass
1 polluted delta
1 forest
4 bayou

sb:
1 psychatog
3 xantid swarm
3 ground seal
3 tormod's crypt
1 reiver demon
1 viridian zealot
2 uktabi orangutan
1 viridian shaman

     It rolled over to wasteland, trinisphere, blood moon, chalice, trikeskillion (byebye birds), nether void, withered wretch, meddling mage...  need I go on?  Play it against a goldfish, keep it at home if they play any disruption.

Yeah, you got a point about the gilded drake.  Guess I didn't read the whole damn thing.  Bummer.

But man, welders in the sideboard sounds a bit extreme.

Two more random ideas.  Viridian Shaman for Moon (you like to beat down; of course for GG he's pretty uncastible under it) and Gilded Drake for Welder + Fat.  Stealing a Welder can wreck their board position.  If you try stealing his Pentivus and it fizzles, you get a 2 cost 3/3 flier to answer his 5 1/1 fliers.  Plus it's blue and it pumps Dryad.

Damping matrix might hurt your togs but your deck is mostly dryad beatdown.  It shuts down a lot of their stuff - slaver, trike, welder, pentivus.  If you don't like cutting off your Tog (which is a liability anyway if they slave you without recursion), maybe null rod is worth it - they have more artifact mana than you do.

I played the winning GM tourney slavery deck, and it was an awful matchup for me too (essentially Hyperion's Madness build); the second game I almost pulled out due to first turn Tormod's Crypt, Ground Seal.  Ground Seal is sick against Dragon, too.

Be aware annul lives in the sideboard of slavery to combat hate.