My Favorite Decks from Pro Tour Battle for Zendikar

First, I’m not a big fan of the “four-color cards I like” decks. I like more streamlined themes and decks, where not-so-obvious cards shine. What we mostly got here was mostly just good stuff. Sure, there’s synergies, but those come after you have cards you would still play in many decks without them.

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My Experiences on the Battle for Zendikar Prerelease

I just came home from my second prerelease event; this time it was Battle for Zendikar and at the first time I was at Magic: Origins prerelease. I had fun though I am suffering from a never-ending flu. As I only have experience on these two sanctioned events I cannot help but to compare the two. I might add that I have nowhere near as much experience on Magic: the Gathering as Aki has and I take the whole game anyway pretty differently.

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Battle for Zendikar Brews, pt. 11 – The Brand New Atarka Red

I played against someone at GP Prague who was playing a slightly different version of Atarka Red. It had [scryfall]Self-Inflicted Wound[/scryfall] in the sideboard to fight all the Abzan Aggros (or Hangarback Abzans in WotC coverage nomenclature). Seemed like (and he admitted it too) he was streching his manabase just a little too much by having the one Swamp in the sideboard with a set of [scryfall]Bloodstained Mire[/scryfall]s and [scryfall]Mana Confluence[/scryfall]s in the main.

However, in the world of Battle Lands (or Tango Lands or whatever), this isn’t such a bad idea. Couple of [scryfall]Smoldering Marsh[/scryfall]es that doesn’t even have to be in the sideboard can do the same since you want to play all the fetches that can get you mountains anyhow.

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Battle for Zendikar Brews, pt. 10 – Colorless

This is strictly a thought experiment. I was looking at Todd Anderson’s and Brian Braun-Duin’s video on SCG yesterday. Anderson was playing a version of Esper Dragons (and winning), while BBD was playing a monogreen deck. That latter deck had plenty of “spell lands”, such as [scryfall]Foundry of the Consuls[/scryfall], [scryfall]Sanctum of Ugin[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Spawning Bed[/scryfall]. It had total of ten such lands.

I thought to myself, “well, the mana is very good in the format, but the format also has plenty of good colorless lands, maybe we could do a colorless deck?”. Can we? Probably not, because colorless creatures are always much higher on the curve than similar creatures with colors (with the expection of [scryfall]Wurmcoil Engine[/scryfall]). It will be a slow deck, but I wouldn’t completely discount it. Just mostly.

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