First of all, I would like to apologize because this article will be a bit sentimental and/or dark in tone. For those of you who just want to see the card, Scroll down to see the Preview Card without any fuzz!

Why do we try to build our own decks?

Because I want to win. Because I want to play with this card(s) I like. To be acknowledged by my fellow players… I’m sure there’s nearly as many reasons as there are players making their own decks.

In short I think we can kind of summarize them all as a desire for change, to experience something new.

Personally, I’ve always had a desire to interact with the larger community, to be verified by others and find that is my reason for being a part of it all. Put bluntly, I want to be acknowledged.

Then there’s Magic, a game which allows us to express ourselves and sometimes even stand out, to be acknowledged, to interact, to be a part of something greater. Part of a community.

However, the world is a large place and doing something unique, or even better than most people can feel like it is a near insurmountable task.

We find ourselves living in such an unchanging landscape, where we often find ourselves having little impact on our surroundings. We find ourselves living in such a small box. Faced with harsh realities, we tend to give up.

There’s no real need to build your own deck.

The world doesn’t change. In the current age of Magic, information spreads like a wildfire, the moment a decklist is put up on the web it gets copied, disseminated & improved upon at a mind-boggling pace. Until it finally falls into the hands of usually a pro player, who takes it to a Top 8 finish, reaping all the rewards & glory.

The spoils and glory go to who?

All spoils go to the victor. Without a shadow of a doubt, it does not go to the deckbuilder. The deckbuilder does at least get to feel the satisfaction of having created a good playable deck. But I also think it would be a lie if we didn’t wish that we had personally managed such a magnificent feat with the deck. At the very least that’s how I feel.

When a deck I made finally found mainstream success, nothing really changed and I was still just an unknown player trudging along.

So was there actually any meaning in continuing to make all these types of decks? I don’t really know if there was, but I kept at it!

I continued to play magic, while trying to find interesting new decks to build and write some articles that hopefully people would find interesting. What I can say with certainty is that all those small experiments the ups and downs have shaped who I am today.

I do however wonder that if in 20 or maybe 30 years or so, will I not look back on the amount of time spent making (mostly) unsuccessful decks, with some sliver of regret? I’m not sure but I do at the very least enjoy making them right now.

Thanks to keeping at it, I felt like if anything I was getting closer to my goal of impacting my surroundings in a positive way, and perhaps even enough to be acknowledged.

I was gonna continue to create interesting decks and try to impact the community I was a part of, I was certain decks I made will bring fun & excitement to the players who happened to stumble upon one of my creations somewhere, sometime.

Enter a small karmic miracle.

So, let me introduce to you all my Preview Card for the soon to be released Modern Masters 2017! 《Death's Shadow》! A card I believe will continue to have a presence in Modern for a long time to come.

Also, I would like to express my gratitude to WotC for actually giving me this preview card to which I have such a strong connection.

The very reason this card is getting reprinted is, while it might be a bit presumptuous of me to take credit, it might just be because I managed to once create the base archetype for the “Super Crazy Zoo” deck.

Putting my arrogance aside, I’m certain even if I had not made the deck it would have gotten made eventually, because every Modern player knows the importance of 1 cmc cards.

I felt like this might just be the acknowledgment of all my hard work trying to create interesting decks. That it actually had the purpose to help players find that sweet deck they wanted to play for whatever reason that might have been, making it a target for reprinting now.

On the other hand, the 《Death's Shadow》 deck of today has changed quite a bit back from when I designed the Super Crazy Zoo deck, but it makes me happy that Death’s Shadow is still happily swinging for lethal in Modern. With a reprint of 《Death's Shadow》 in Modern Masters 2017, now might be a good time to try out the new iterations of the deck.

No matter how great a deckbuilder you are, you can’t succeed every time. Most of us do want to be special, or to achieve some great feat but to be fair, Magic is a game where you are supposed to have fun, so long as I can do that I will continue to create & play with all my weird decks.

Thank you all for reading and remember that even if a deck didn’t work out immediately, someday that very deck with the addition of a new card or just a small change could possibly be what takes down a GP so keep on brewing!

Modern Masters 2017 goes on sale March 17th 2017, I hope everyone will take this opportunity to make that sweet new deck you have been thinking of.