This week Corbin Hosler digs through Magic 2012 and comes back with a list of under-the-radar cards that you need in your trade binder, along with an update of the Prediction Tracker!

A Birthing Pod deck? Can it be so? Yes my friends, and it is as glorious and utility-filled as all of your little dreams had hoped! Twice now my Houston playgroup has had somebody run this list in a PTQ to Top 8 contention, to lose in the last round of Swiss. Here’s the list, with every card explained, that was used!

Joshua takes one last look at the pre-ban format, then focuses on the new Standard, discovering that a surprising card may end up defining the format.

With CawBlade in its recent incarnations gone the metagame is seemingly wide open.  Any number of archetypes can claim to be the new top dog, and the viability of many cards goes up without the fear of a Jace making them irrelevant or a turn three Batterskull attacking too quickly for them to come online.  Until some tournament results come in to fill in the gaps any talk about the new metagame will be little more than an educated guess, but we can still know questions need to be answered.

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.

Gregory teams up with Jay Schneider to bring you an exciting and potentially format-crushing deck at the last minute!