Modern Constructed Tournaments!

"This way to the prize vault, guys!"

Well, we've been talking about it for long enough.  Finally, those conspicuously missing Constructed Tournaments are hitting the table this weekend at the Wargate!

You can find the format's rules here, including what sets are legal and what cards are banned.  Every draft we've done so far, or event we've hosted has been legal for Modern, including Shards of Alara block.  There are a few banned cards, so double check the list to make sure your deck doesn't include any of those.

Our Modern Constructed Tournaments will be open to whomever wishes to join with no limit to the number of seats.  Matches will be set at thirty minutes, with the corresponding Match Round.  This means like our drafts, each round will begin at a set time and everyone will follow a single clock.  With five rounds (generally, maybe more or less if we have a huge or pitiful turnout) that means we'll fit nicely into the same time slot we've been running our drafts - about three hours, at 3pm on Sunday.

There will be a small fee to join the tournament, but it is meager.  All proceeds will go directly to the club treasury,  where it will languish for a thousand years - or until we buy a some more wargames accouterments with it!  We wouldn't ask you to fork over your hard earned dough unless we were going to make sure you got something back for it, so the winner and runner-up for these Modern Constructed Tournaments will take home decks for their Modern pool.

These aren't trash decks, or peoples throwaways, or even Starters right out of the box.  These have been carefully built and painstakingly put into protectors, and have a lot more uncommons and rares in general than any deck you could get at a store.  Not only that, but they are brimming with playsets that want a home in your card pool!  I'll be giving away more than twenty of these things this year, so fight hard and get your hands on as much loot as possible!

We'll be running Magic tournaments and drafts the first Sunday of every month now!  Check back each month for what the scuttlebutt is and how you can get involved.  April will be Innistrad Draft, and May is Dark Ascension Draft!  In June we'll be back to Modern Constructed, but then we'll have M13 and Avacyn Restored for later this summer and going into Autumn!

Modern Format!

"I told you kids to get off my lawn!! ARRRRRRR!!!"

Howdy!

I've briefly talked about Modern format before, but today I wanted to take a moment and say what a welcome addition this is to the ways we can play the game.  It allows some of our recent favorites to be merged in truly diabolic ways, but without some of the old cliches of Classic or Vintage.  We've adopted it as the "de-facto" format at the Wargate, outside of Block and Limited variants.

I've been playing with a few neat ideas and thought I would share them.  Feel free to drop in your own suggestions and ideas in the comments section!

First, let me just say that Modern can be quite competitive, though I've only encountered an "infinite-loop" once so far in Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind and Curiosity.  Which is a nasty combo I probably shouldn't have said anything about.

As a deckbuilder, I'm pretty mediocre even in Limited.  I basically always build the same deck - an aggro creature beatdown deck.  In Modern, my favorite things to do so far have been revisit Shadowmoor, Ravnica and Alara blocks to get a few of 'kewl' hybrid mana decks going!

Nobilis of War + Boros?  Deus of Calamity + Gruul / Alarans?!  Yes, please.  This is just what occurred to me immediately upon learning of Modern format, but both of these deck concepts are mainly just aggro ramp decks that culminate in a huge critter.  What other neat things can be done with Modern format?

Here are five concepts that could be very viable in Modern, with a jumping off point that I've been pondering - but what are your ideas for the key cards?

• Land Destruction (Stone Rain!  Is there something better than this spell?)
• An Artifact Deck (Mimic Vat + Pierce Strider?)
• Counter Control (Low cost counters & creature control!  What if they don't have creatures?)
• Slivers (Slivers from Time Spiral Block, but which slivers / spells to include?)
• Flipout Ascension (Sigil of the Empty Throne & Luminarch Ascension & Armored Ascension)

Think about how many different spells are available.  Even if you're restricted to a certain block for a set of spells (such as Slivers only being in Modern in Time Spiral) that doesn't mean you have to include the traditional complements.  

I tend to think of decks in terms of armies.  That's why mine are always creature based!  What are some non-army deck ideas for Modern?

If you're coming to the Wargate sometime soon, think about Modern format deckbuilding and put one together.  Someone will be down for a constructed game from a new challenger, that's for certain!  At the next draft, remember you'll be able to use those cards for Modern format as well as the draft - which might lead to some interesting picks!