SOM Booster Box pulls: Six more packs

No major pulls in these packs except a foil Grand Architect. Still, I am well on my way to completion with 41.9 percent of all of the cards excluding the basic lands, and 34 of the 88 (for 38.6 percent) of all the artifacts. I also came across three of the five cards explaining some of the abilities in this block.

Pack 1

Pack 2

Pack 3

Pack 4

Pack 5

Pack 6

Here is the artifact list with the additional pulls in blue box highlight.

Five Nicol Bolas online standard decks and an online game lost to this deck

These decks are exquisitely constructed. Not dominant now, most likely not ever given that the deck revolves around dropping a "fatty."

Here are the five decks from the sample of 509 decks I drew out from Wizards early August 2012. I am surprised to see how much variety there is in these five decks. Wurmcoil Engine and Solemn Simulacrum seem to be in almost every standard deck in the current format, yet two of these decks used neither.

All decks "threw the dual lands book" at the problem of dropping a fatty three-color planeswalker.

Here again in the "other spells" section we find a lot of variety. Clearly if you want to drop a fatty you need some serious heavy hitters guaranteeing that your game will survive many turns.

And in the end all you need is one Nicol Bolas, but four of the five decks went with two. The lone Sever the Bloodline is good against white token and Goblin token decks.

The sideboards show many ways to protect against the various aggro and fast decks and the need to cover the mana base for three colors.

I played a mono black deck against one of these decks. I lost 1-2, and only in the third game, shown here, did my opponent get to play Nicol Bolas.

I fought hard: here I send a Solemn Simulacrum to the graveyard.

And I exile a Curse of Death's Hold with Appetite for Brains.

My opponent uses Mimic Vat to mimic one of my Fume Spitter.

...the power cards just kept coming. I got to 23-9.

I even exiled my opponent's graveyard.

But the combination of two Wurmcoil Engine (one via Phyrexian Metamorph) and Nicol Bolas against me running out of creatures was just too much.

This is what Nicol Bolas can do: "7 to target player. That player discards 7 cards, then sacrifices 7 permanents." It is definitely "GAME OVER."

Magic History: Creatures at W (one white mana cost)

With 75 sets released to date, Magic has a depth in design that rivals in complexity many other established forms of design. I looked in Gatherer at all the cards that have been issued to date that are white creature cards with CMC = 1, or a single white mana cost to cast.

Of the 136 cards in this group, 90, or 66 percent are of type Human, and 107, or 78.7 percent are (1,1) creatures (Power/Toughness).

Here is a foil Champion of the Parish.

Besides the (1,1) creatures, there have been creatures issued at other (P,T): walls, defender, and aggro cards.

These creatures don't have any special abilities.

These creatures have banding, an ability I find very complicated: "Banding (Any creatures with banding, and up to one without, can attack in a band. Bands are blocked as a group. If any creatures with banding you control are blocking or being blocked by a creature, you divide that creature's combat damage, not its controller, among any of the creatures it's being blocked by or is blocking.)"

These creatures have an array of abilities in older sets that I have not encountered in Standard.

Here is the rest of the range. I have grouped these by ability, although some abilities combine multiple abilities.

Adding P/T is a common ability in these cards.

Here in some cases damage can be prevented.

Here are the Defender creatures.

Some of these creatures require discarding a card.

There are also cases when there is a reward for discarding, or when the creature has double strike.

There is also a way to gain life when a specific type of card enters the battlefield.

And when it comes to deciding which cards are best in a cube, there is a very wide range to pick from for every type of card. Just for W creatures here you have at least 100 creatures with abilities that fit with other creatures. (Maybe not banding or some of the older abilities that have not been brought back in recent sets.)