Iona is already listed in the top cards by the guys at MTGSalvation. That's the link I provide at the beginning and I mentioned I wouldn't cover that stuff. In addition Painters Servant is now banned. Sorry.

I always wanted to try the format, and was sad no mention of Iona, Shield of Emeria and Painter's Servant lock down getting no mention.

I understand everyones issues with going up against jank in the TP room and I certainly am not defending sore loosers. I'm just remembering my first foray into that room during Rav era Standard. I took a token based deck using Teysa that had been tearing up the casual room and wanted to see what it needed to play with the big boys. The attitudes of the players there were discouraging to say the least. After dealing with immediate concessions and name calling for "wasting my time" with my deck I quickly gave up. And I haven't really been back since. So that's where I was coming from.

For my next article I'll be play-testing the following deck

59x Mountain
1x Fireball

No pop culture references, no pictures, no funny anecdotes... Just 1000+ words on the success of that deck. There will be videos. I'm going to rock face!

Hmm I'm not sure what would cause that, I just use the "print screen" button. I'm on a laptop if that makes any difference. But yeah, comparing my cropped cards to yours in your latest article, Ryan, my cards are quite a bit fuzzier and harder to read (comparing the same size of course). However, I think I can find a happy medium if I just don't stretch the images too wide (width of 700 seems solid)

Completely agree 100%. I think the "Tournament" "Practice" room should be used to "Practice" for "Tournaments" and the aforementioned examples are just a waste of time for both parties. Also true is what you said about Classic decks losing to Standard decks. Decks are tuned to their format, and there's nothing more obnoxious than some kid gloating about beat some ZOMG classic deck with his "crappy" Standard deck.

And lol at your rant, that's annoying as well. I don't enter any match in the TP room without expecting to see at least 5 copies of every card I can't afford XD

I said it before and I'll say it again: The TP room is the MTGO equivalent of WoW's Trade Chat. Really, make a trial account and stand in a major city for a few minutes. It'll all make sense.

How perfectly odd. You would expect people in the tourney practice room to a) have skillz, b) be smarter than average, c) expect the worst from their ops decks, d) have a thicker skin since losing bites but you are bound to lose if your deck isn't top notch when facing tier 1-2 decks.

This bit about "rich boy" is very odd indeed. Seems like a casual player mistakenly entered the wrong room and then was seriously and severely frustrated by what he encountered.

Weird! FWIW, I don't do anything special, I click on MTGO, Alt-PrintScreen (Alt = capture the active window only), and paste it into Live Writer. I have done nothing to change the resolution of the images captured by the "print screen" button, and have never even heard of someone getting anything other than a WYSIWYG, pixel-by-pixel copy of the screen.

Are you not using print screen? How are you grabbing your screen shots?

hooray, i was glad you said u would write an article about your forray.

I would just like to point out again, that classic is very narrow with what is winning events, this is the perfect time for people to brew and bring it. As long as you know how your opponent is going to kill u, and how the format works in term of card symetry, and speed, you will be able to brew up nearly anything and compete. I thought flippers showed this progression from good casual deck to competent event deck perfectly.

Flippers final deck is at an acceptable level for eventing, if i didnt have the collection that i do have i would gladly play something very simmilar to it.

Classic is fun and its awesmoe to do busted things, or just as awesmoe to deny your opponent the option of busted things. wont you all come out and bust something, skulls or dreams?

@leviathan, while i agrre with what you say, there is no reason not to be critical with opponents who bring teir 1 std decks to a classic match. they know full well that their deck is not classic, but their either board or just want to see how the deck fairs with the "1st turn kill format". Normally this would not be so bad, accept for when your trying to test, it serves no purpose for either player in terms of results, and the classic deck will normally lose if its something new, as its built to play and beat a completely different game then std decks are.

-----start rant, Also while im on the topic, if you are in the TOURNAMENT PRACTISE room and lose to a TOURNAMENT deck this does not give you liscense to offend the other player in any way. Stupid people join my match and lose then call me rich boy or net decker, so rediculos.---end rant

@unspeakable: Yeah I didn't mean to extrapolate too much from that game, it was meant to be a point on my opinion on aggro decks in general, but I definitely didn't make that clear enough. What I meant is: aggro decks are certainly as viable as control decks in general, but I personally am not a huge fan of aggro because of situations where I feel helpless. The last game was such a situation, in which a control deck might have had a few more tools at its disposal to deal with my opponent's threats.

@Godot: "Crop": For some reason the screen shots my computer takes are quite low resolution, so whenever I crop them down and enlarge the quality becomes terrible and it ends up looking even worse.
"Link To": I thought you meant the card pic images! Again the problem stems from the resolution, since linking to a larger pic does increase the size but the pixelation becomes a big problem.
Thanks again for the advice and help, I'll make sure that the pics in my next article are both cropped and linked properly, I'll just have to do a little research first on how to increase the resolution and clarity of my screen shots.

Hey Dylan,

I'm assuming that, per our last convo on mtgo, you are still using Windows Live Writer to compose your articles. Reiterating some tips to take them from good to great in terms of presentation:

1. Use the crop tool!

Quick, simple image cropping is one of *the* benefits of composing on WLW for me. When you paste in an image, under the "advanced" tab, there is a "Crop" option that gives you a window you can move around, expand, contract, etc. In ten seconds, you can take a "would you mull this" screen and crop it down to just the hand. When you are showing your final deck, you can crop out all the noise around the crucial parts: the main deck, and the board. Same with game states.

There is just no reason to show people a gigantic, empty battlefield to present a mulligan decision, or show deck-editor frames, empty 6, 7, 8, and 9+ drop slots and a Lava Axe in the card window of your final deck. The more you crop, the bigger the relevant info appears to readers.

2. Tune your default "Link to" settings.

Right now, if you click on an image in your articles, it takes you to...a smaller version of that image. :/ That's pretty useless, and you should either turn off the link functionality entirely, or link to an original-sized, or large-sized image.

To do this, in the same image dialog, under the "Picture" tab, there is a "Link to" drop down, with an "Options" button below it. Click the Options button, and change the size in the drop-down menu to "Original" or at the very least "Large." I go with "Original" because if you pick "Large," sometimes images will be blown up bigger than actual size, which isn't useful. Of course, in this case, you ought to just switch the "Link to" drop down from "Source Picture" to "None," as people don't need image links when the image in the article itself is already full-sized. I do this for things like mulligan hands or anything else that can be cropped to perfectly-good in-article legibility.

When you have made the change to the "Link to" settings, click the "Save settings as default" link at the bottom of the "Picture" tab, and it will auto-link your images to a full-size version automatically.

Now I'll read/enjoy the rest of the article, but I may start boycotting you if you don't take advantage of the simple, great image composition tools at your fingertips. :)

I liked this article, in that it did a couple of things. First, it let people know that the tourney practice room is not a place to be feared. And in fact success there is not the best indicator of tournament viability.

You also did a good job of showing the steps you made in trying to make a more competitive deck. In addition a good playtesting buddy is very helpful when coming up with ideas.

I understand you were probably frustrated to be going up against modified "standard" decks later on in your playtesting, but I'm wondering how many of your opponents may have thought the same thing when going up against your first deck list. Until you beat them at least. I'm just saying that you shouldn't be too critical of these players as for many of them this foray into the tourney practice room is likely their first many steps into tournament play.

Good article.