Chad looks into the volatile world of standard and explains why lands are your safest bet to building a better binder.

Once you’ve prepared to survive rotation, set your self up for success for next year.

Mike Lanigan discusses the impact of the cards of New Phyrexia on Standard’s Vampire archetype.

We’ve had 2 weeks of Opens to see the impact New Phyrexia has had on the Standard and Legacy tournament scenes. I’m going to focus on Standard, since the Grand Prix this weekend is Legacy, and will almost certainly have more players than the SCG Open series gets. Waiting on that will give us a bit of a better view on the format. However, for Standard, there’s no reason to wait, especially since the format hasn’t really undergone much of a change.

Neale brings you one vision, one goal, one overriding, dominating objective: blue mages must die.

With a new format becoming available for the first time Friday, it’s time to take a quick look at what’s available. For the most part, these will be aggro or combo decks, since control decks need to be built towards the metagame. As it stands, Caw-Blade is the premiere control deck in the format, and it can be played as-is with the mere addition of Batterskull.

Seeing the results from the National Qualifiers and thinking back on the article I wrote on Vampires, I was led back to that deck. I really love this Vampire deck and what it is capable of, I play it well, and I have had more success with it than any other deck this season. With all those things being true, how could I not play it again?

PPL is back! Gregory brings you a brand new Black / Red deck you can use to teach those Caw Blade players a lesson.

The next few short weeks, this CawBlade deck continued to dominate tournaments from local FNM’s to large Star City Games hosted events everywhere. The young mage, Mike Lanigan, read articles, built decks, and tried his best to build a comparable strategy that could take down this “Jund-like” beast (or “Faerie-like” if you prefer).