Play Magic With Tom LaPille

This is Takayuki Koike’s deck from the top eight of Pro Tour Valencia.

1 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Godless Shrine
1 Mountain
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Steam Vents
1 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
4 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills

4 Dark Confidant
4 Grim Lavamancer
3 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
4 Kird Ape
3 Mogg Fanatic
4 Tarmogoyf

4 Firebolt
4 Lightning Helix
4 Tribal Flames
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Vindicate

Sideboard:
2 Cabal Therapy
3 Duress
3 Engineered Plague
3 Kataki, War’s Wage
4 Leyline of the Void

I think that the maindeck is absolutely beautiful and may be card-for-card perfect. However, I think that the sideboard is absolutely terrible. I propose this instead:

4 Molten Rain
3 Armadillo Cloak
4 Ancient Grudge
4 Leyline of the Void

These cards address the same matchups that the previous sideboard did. Why might this sideboard be better?

So I’m really busy with graduate school applications, the end of the quarter, and my new gig at Star City.  It’s not likely that I’ll be doing much extra strategy writing here for a few weeks.  I may be talking about cube though if the muse strikes me.  Just thought I should let you all know.

Also, from now on I’ll be giving my card bonus pictures alternate text captions.  I will do my best to make these amusing.

Have a good one.

My first column on Star City is up- Three Ways to Think Faster.

The majority of the time you spend while you play Magic is spent thinking. Tournament Magic is played on a clock, so a serious player has a strong incentive to learn how to think efficiently. This may mean that he can think about the same amount of things in less time so that he can avoid unintentionally drawing; it may also mean that he spends the same amount of time but gets to think about more things. Magic is overwhelmingly complex, and any given game can challenge you in ways you don’t expect. When you encounter a strange situation, you may need to spend some time to figure out how to handle it correctly. Thinking quickly will allow you to play quickly in situations that aren’t strange, which gives you the time that you will need to handle really tricky situations….

Enjoy!