MTG Salvation

When your playing control, playing something to stall aggro one turn earlier is huge. Being able to play it turn 3 with spell peirce mana open is huge. Being able to play it turn 4 with Mana leak mana open is huge. You can't forget these things. This is what's important.

Tec Edge really is not an answer to them. Not in that sense anyways. If your opponent has Valakuts out, it means he probably has two from a Primeval Titan. Unless you hit two Tec edges and a removal spell, you won't recover, and even then, it's hard if he has, say, an uncracked fetch, or a Khalni Heart Expedition.

Tec edges are effective when you try to blow up there non basic Green sources, and sea's there green lands.

Okay. When you theorize a deck. Ask yourself this question. Can this deck beat Valakut? Try it. Test it. If it can't, make it beat Valakut. If that doesn't work, drop the deck. If it can be made to beat Valakut, next, ask your self, can this beat CawBlade? If your deck can't handle these decks, it's pointless. But more so Valakut. You will face it. The deck has a clock. By turn 5, expect to lose unless you've disrupted him.

Wasteland? I mean, you want to destroy lands, right?

Mindlock Orb?

If your using dragonshields, the good old kind, you should be fine with just your 75. Unless you plan on playing a big 8+ round tourney. Dragonshields rarely break, and on the very off chance they do, just steal a sleeve from your SB.

I keep anything worth more than a buck for an uncommon/common in my binder. As for rares, I usually got 2+ unless it's a really jank rare with a bad price.

If you do get 2 hawks in the opening hand, you can mulligan with virtually no loss, so that if your opener wasn't that great, try again. Boros is mull heavy to begin with, so I usually do when my hand isn't impressive and it's got two hawks.

Quote from Shammypants

My problem with relegating RDW to a single thread is that a number of decks (Kuldotha, Goblins, Koth variants and traditional) are now forced to interweave a number of topics together in a less meaningful way.

Or writing UW as UW and not CawGo/CawBlade. Expect a bunch of bad lists involving Venser.

Quote from KaristaDispel

To answer your question: with a stick, while it sleeps. But in sleeves and properly shuffled, Valakut is unbeatable.

Bonus points for the movie reference.

But really, Tectonic Edges and shove Flashfreeze down their throats. Paper cuts on their tongue inc?

I am disgusted with myself that within the first few words, I caught that reference. Now I'm going to go watch that.

As for the issue at hand, Quest and Vamps both have decent matches against Valakut. Mull Aggresivly for those Quests/Demons, and kill the walls, and aggro aggro aggro.

Get in to a habit of asking how many cards they have in hand. If you know it's one of these players, ask how many before they ponder/preordain, and ask again after resolution, and make sure you see them "count". You can also ask them to set there hand aside, and if they need to look at it to decide on the ponder, ask them to put the ponder cards down, look, than switch back. If he refuses, ask for a judge to watch the game because you suspect him of cheating based on a previous experience and shady preordain hand holding.

Really, it's not even necessary to try and shoehorn yourself into their group. Just show up, be ready to play, and play. Don't purposefully try and socialize, but talk to the people you play, offer to trade, and within a couple FNM's you'll know enough of them to feel comfortable casually socializing. Just bring your Ipod or something so you can play games between games for the first few weeks if your Opp's gone.

All sounds fine to me. But I think your worrying to much.

They printed a plethora of Giant Growth variants in the last few sets, and I feel as if one of these will try and replace Giant Growth.

Because they have Jace The Mindsclupter with various ways to shuffle their library(Fetches, Mystic, Hawk) and preordain. With these cards, it's not unlikely to see your entire deck in a game.