Standard MTG

Just a quick heads up to point you to some early US Regionals 2009 results. The Seattle Regionals Top 8 broke down like this:

3 BW Tokens
2 GW Overrun Tokens
1 Bant Finest Hour
1 Jund Blightning/Pulse/Leech (with Sygg for draw!) Aggro
1 5-Color Control

Check out the Top 8 decklists at:

http://www.thestarkingtonpost.com/fo...58&t=230#p1239

It's rare that I see a deck I think is truly innovative, but this article on the WotC website briefly touched on one of the most unusual decklists I've seen in Standard in a long time. While it is based on an older established deck type, the card choices that go against conventional wisdom seem very innovative to me:

Koji Takanashi's Turbo-Fog, 1st Place, Tokyo Regionals
Lands: (14) 7 Island 5 Plains 2 Reliquary Tower	Borderposts: (8) 4 Fieldmist Borderpost 4 Mistvein Borderpost

...

One card from Alara Reborn that has everybody talking is Anathemancer. Popular opinion is predicting it will change the face of Standard. I tend to disagree. Here's my take on the life cycle of Anathemancer:

Phase One: Anathemancer gains popularity in decks where it doesn't belong. As a result, those decks and their pilots lose more.

Phase Two: Widespread disappointment sets in over the failure of Anathemancer to be a panacea for Standard's multi-color plague. ...

Wow! The blogs have really slowed down, haven't they? Real life must be intruding on our little cardboard world.

What say I dig up a wacky 61-card Portuguese deck for you to stare at in slack-jawed amazement?

Violent Ramp by Daniel Neves, 6th place, National Qualifier 2009 - Moita, Portugal
Land: (23) 3 Fire-Lit Thicket 8 Forest 3 Mountain 3 Reflecting Pool 3 Swamp 3 Twilight Mire	Creatures: (14) 4 Birds of Paradise 3 Deus of Calamity 3 Elvish Visionary

...

I just signed up for an MDV tournament with a new and fairly unexplored format. The tournament is to be a variant of Peasant magic, but using only the Standard card set and a total of 10 Uncommons allowed, the rest being Commons. I find that building for this format, which I will henceforth refer to as P10, is interesting and new, because it is basically a format nobody else plays. A couple closely related formats are:

PDC - Pauper Deck Challenge. There is an MTGO contingent that ...