The Color Wheel

[Anusien]

Wizards keeps skating incredibly close to making WW a very solid deck, and then pulling away at the last minute.  Sure, part of it was Ghost Husk being so potent during that T2 (and Orzhov Pontiff being a wrecking ball), but I wonder if the elements you're pointing to Matt weren't a little too potent in the FFL and had to be scaled back.

[Matt]

One of these sets they're going to get sick of treating white creatures as second-class citizens. They're always soooo afraid of making a good WW deck but they'll print strong, synergistic weenies for everything else seemingly without heed for power level.

See goblins, arcbounds, slivers, etc. I don't see why they will say "Well we'd rather go too far than not far enough" with regards to everything else but never for a white creature.

[Dr. Sylvan]

The Color Wheel: Wax / Wane

Every once in a while, I just completely lose track of my passion for Magic. This time, it hit me out of nowhere in mid-October that, once again, there wasn't a single Magic format I actually liked. The letdown of Lorwyn dimmed the prospects of a resurgent fascination such as the boost I got when I reentered the game in March and experienced Ravnica and Time Spiral in a whirlwind of awesomeness.

One of the things I've been doing in an attempt to create new and interesting play options is to create draft environments from scratch using my thousands upon thousands of less-than-Constructed-level cards. I have a batch of 3-6 friends (plus me) who have been getting together nearly every weekend to either draft packs (when available) or play one of these artificial drafts.

At first, I created a batch of cards that were pretty much random from the pool of cards I hadn't plucked for my Constructed decks or binders of playable/interesting cards. That created a pretty low power level, so the next time I selected cards that would be high picks in most draft environments, flooding the draft with good combat tricks, fat creatures, evasion, and removal. While interesting, it probably wouldn't be fun repeatedly, so this third and most recent time I tried to insert a Spirit/Arcane sub-theme, which, while it was noticed, was not drafted strongly enough by anyone to shape the environment. (I also tried experimentally upping the packs to 16 cards in an 11/4/1 rarity split, which didn't seem to shatter the world, but people did end up with pretty good decks.)

Sadly, with my predilection for focusing on themes and patterns, Limited constantly makes me feel like I'm playing the same game of creature against creature over and over. I consistently enjoy trying to maximize my draft picks, but playing out the games is usually unexciting. I'm thinking about adding lots of my favorite Constructed cards to the mix---incidentally tripling the rare count or more---so that games have more opportunities to disrupt your opponent than just getting removal for his creatures. My favorite strategies in Magic revolve around trying to box in the opponent, throwing up walls that limit his options and eventually render him unable to stop the erosion of his life. Limited, to me, usually feels like I'm playing exclusively with creatures and cards that affect creatures, which is outrageously boring. (If I wanted to focus on creatures, I'd play Vs.)

This disaffection has also affected my output for this thread. If I were an SCG columnist, I have more than enough article kernels to maintain weekly productivity, but without the peer pressure of a deadline or very large audience, I'd rather wait till I'm "feelin' it". However, I also feed off the excitement of others, and am usually happiest with Magic and in general when I am writing. So I am asking for your feedback: what would you be most interested in seeing me write?

Here is a list of several possibilities from my list of potential articles (I hope it's not ruining the "surprise value" of these possible column topics for anyone):

-Completion of "Flexibility", my comparison of card-drawing's historical power between colors

-Mana Generation = Color Importance (Compare how many sources of each color are in each PT-T8 decklist over time. This is the remaining heavy-hitter I've alluded to on the issue of proving that there is a Blue problem---or at least I suspect it will swing that way.)

-Creature Power Creep (subtitle/thesis: the inelegant solution to Blue strength)

-Letters to Rosewater (what's been in my emails to MaRo)

-Theory of Evasion (compare e.g. Wonder vs. Suntail Hawk; evasion built-in means
you paid for it)

-Practice of Evasion (occurrence of evasion abilities in PT history data)

-Flavorful five-way ability splits (contrasting specifically with abilities only Blue or a single other color gets)

-Verbal disambiguation necessitated by magic jargon (e.g. "blue's
affinity for artifacts" vs. "blue's easy collaboration with
artifacts")

-States/Champs and GP Krakow Standard data

-[Insert Your Suggestion Here]

Let me know via post, PM, carrier pigeon, or whatever suits your fancy.