You’ve heard about “the danger of cool plays” in Magic. Jules shares with us the danger of un-cool plays, and how to amp your entire Commander troupe’s fun up to 11!

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.

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!

With the exception of Splinter-Twin, however, the new metagame is very similar to the metagame before rotation.  Edgar Flores won the first SCG Open with NPH legal with a UW CawBlade list that looked very similar to the pre-rotation lists. In this metagame there are a number of cards that are being underplayed, in my opinion, and here are the top 5.

What’s resilient to hate, eats multiplayer tables alive, and locks down the game on a dime? A five-color, Child of Alara led land deck of course!

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.

Building decks in Commander can be daunting. Carlos, our newest Commander writer, shows you how to handle it with ease! Decklists ahead!

Neale takes a reader’s Rafiq deck from common to commanding for head’s up play, and challenges you to do it better. Think you can handle the firepower?

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?

In a singleton format, why does everyone’s deck look the same? This HAS to be fixed.