The first of two articles today in anticipation of Monday’s Banning announcement. Will Jace, the Mind Sculptor stay legal? What about Stoneforge Mystic? Brook Gardner-Durbin explores what options will be available to you if either or both of the above get the axe!

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

Consistent, powerful decks are obviously appealing. Carlos takes a recent Standard standout, Valakut, and transforms it into a pinnacle of efficiency in Commander! See how he does it inside!

Since I last wrote of Pauper, much has changed on MTGO! Included here are a full MTGO field archetype breakdown, multiple new decklists, and reader questions from Twitter.

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.

We get back to the Hunt with a all new GR aggro list developed by Kellen’s new mtg team. Fast kills are the name of the game in this deck feature.

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.

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).