First three letters of Abzan are a,b, then z. Then a again. Like a life cycle. You’re born, you grow, you die, then you get resurrected by one of Abzan’s many graveyard tricks.

Bant is like “banter”, like friends do. It’s the friendly colours of white, blue, and green. It helps that my group hug and pillow fort decks are both bant to help me glue that association together.

Sultai starts with an “S”, hissing like a snake. Vraska has snake hair and she’s green/black, but sultai also follows the S with a U to remind you blue is in there.

I think generally it’s hard to “fake” being behind because your board state is your board state. Unless you have something giving all your stuff flash or something, in most cases it doesn’t really matter if you have an Ulamog in hand and castable if on board you only have a vanilla 2/2 and the green player has an army of 12/12 tramplers. If you have lands in hand, for instance, you’re generally better off playing them than holding back to hope that “oh, I’m so mana screwed” gets you further later.

On the other hand, there’s also playing smart. If you know there’s a boardwipe coming you probably want to hold on to your creatures. I try not to play turn 1 sol ring, even if I draw it, because that makes all eyes turn to you and any big thing that you might drop as a result of that will be coming out when everyone else is most likely to have some kind of removal, and often when there’s nothing better to spend mana on. If a player is sitting on two untapped blue mana what are the odds that he’s sitting on a counterspell? Can you bait out the counterspell with a threat now so you’re able to do what you really want later? Or hold off casting in the hopes that it gets dropped elsewhere?

I’m terrified to respond. Every time I find an artist I like it seems like they turn out to be a completely garbage person. Therese Nielsen, Seb McKinnon, Noah Bradley…

Jeremy Wilson, Magali Villeneuve, and Johannes Voss are probably my highest ranking active artists right now, but now I’m looking forward to finding out one is an actual cannibal or something.

For clarity you’re asking for some 2d image to use with an ink or laserjet printer and not for 3d printing, right?

Not only are the precons more competitive, but they’re also astonishingly complex, so much so that even LoadingReadyRun were getting overwhelmed in their EDSC playthrough. The Doctor Who “Timey Wimey” deck, unmodified, is one that I’ll only play as the first deck of the night because there’s so much to keep track of that I don’t think I could do it after a few games. And I’ve been playing since the 90s, so I’m hardly new to the game. I’d hate to imagine the experience most people who’ve tried picking up Magic from some of this UB stuff have had.

For commander I use EDHrec and Scryfall. I also do searches of builds among Moxfield’s decks to see what other people are doing with it.

A second for Moxfield here. I started in Tappedout, but found it too ugly, switched to Archidekt but got frustrated by errors like duplicate cards appearing, and finally ended up at Moxfield. Functionally it’s very similar to Archidekt but I haven’t noticed any bugs.

Here’s a fun fact - I still play Magic with friends that I played magic with back in 2002. 21 years and going strong, baby!

Most of the decks I have I was able to slip it into the bottom of the deck box without even needing it to be visible, which is nice. The UG Boulders are just a bit too tight for that and won’t close properly so I glued it on the outside.

Just double checked the cardfetcher bot post, looks like calling by set isn’t implemented yet.

It’s an alternate art in relation to its first printing and not a showcase or anything, but the MID printing of Abrade is amazing. If we’re limiting it strictly to variant printings, I think Embereth Shieldbreaker

I, for one, appreciate Wizards’ efforts to make sure I keep my money in my wallet…

The only one whose art even slightly interests me is the Ralph Bakshi one, and the cards there are so pathetically worthless, both for cash value and usability in any of my decks that is a really easy pass. Last one was the same. Feels like they went hard early in the SL runs with good, interesting lairs to get people on board, and they’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel.