As promised, this week's column is going to be about a lot of different things. I actually like writing columns with this theme, as my own thought processes are pretty random in and of themselves. I begin thinking about what I'll put in my sideboard this weekend, and end up realizing that I need to go promote my Women in Magic Day at the local prerelease (more on that later).

So, in the spirit of true randomness, I'll begin.

Topic One: A Movie Review

Actually, this is more of a recommendation than a review. Go see 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.' Go do it right now. I don't care if you're at work or at school or even if it's 10 a.m. Just go see it. If the theaters in your area don't have it, call them up and complain loudly until they do have it. I would recommend this movie to anyone, even my parents. It has a very thought-provoking plot, an amazingly cool sword, and lots of footage of people fighting, martial-arts style. I can't tell you much more than that without giving away major plot points, but suffice it to say that it's more than worth the $8 for a movie ticket.

Topic Two: Women in Magic

Here's where I'll tell you about the aforementioned Women in Magic Day. Last year (which sounds so long ago, even though it was in October), Lauren Passmore (who I'm sure many of you know, or at least know of) decided that there needed to be more women who played Magic. So she coordinated and hosted a "Women in Magic" day at a local store, which I helped out with. About nine women showed up, and we had a nice afternoon playing cards and teaching people how to play.

Well, we resolved to do it again, but the next two times nobody showed up. So, I decided that we needed to have another Women in Magic day. Basically, the whole point behind a Women in Magic day is to get more women together to play Magic with each other. I think that the Denver area is really unique in this - there are at least five women here who go to tournaments on a regular basis, and many more who play casually. So, having a Women in Magic day here involves lots of people.

Here's how to coordinate a Women in Magic day for your area:

1. Find a woman who's willing to teach other women how to play Magic. This is very important. Many beginning female players may find the idea of playing against male Magic players very threatening. If you just can't find any women, or there aren't any in your area, then just realize that this will be an obstacle.
2. Schedule the Women in Magic day with the owners of your local card store. Make sure that the day when you're planning your event doesn't conflict with anything that they're planning.
3. Promote your Women in Magic day at big events, like PTQs and prereleases.
4. Build some decks that you can give away. Make them mono-colored, and don't put too many tricks in. For the first Women in Magic day, I built five decks, one for each color. Black kill-all-your-dudes-and-attack-you-a-lot, blue bounce-all-your-dudes-and-then-Tim-you-to-death, green summon-lots-of-dudes-and-Rancor-them-up, red burn-you-a-whole-lot, and white defense-and-protection-stuff. Make sure that these decks are playable, and that they are also not full of Grey Ogres. If you give a new player a crappy deck, they probably won't want to keep playing Magic.
5. Show up early on the specified day. Bring donuts, or something else yummy. :)
6. Have fun!

You will probably find that many women who want to learn how to play Magic will be reluctant to have their boyfriends/husbands/significant others teach them how. They need someone outside of that relationship to teach them how to play Magic. Besides, having more women playing Magic isn't a bad thing at all.

Topic Three: Why Doesn't Anyone Play Black In Type II?

Aside from the obvious answer that The Esteemed Ferrett gave me last week (no enchantment removal, to those who don't remember), why doesn't anyone play black in Type II any more?

Isn't Snuff Out still good? I'll gladly pay four life to kill a Blinding Angel. How about Vendetta? One mana to kill things isn't bad. Haunted Crossroads is still kinda cool. Whatever happened to the big evil Snuff-O-Derm archetype from MBC? How about Thrashing Wumpus? He serves for seven, which is a lot.

Aren't these cards still worth playing? Sure, you'd probably have to combine black with other colors to get its maximum effect, but I still think that black isn't being played enough in the current Type 2 environment. Put it together with red to make that particular archetype (I refuse to call it MachineHead). Put it with blue and make NetherGo. Heck, build an entire deck around Twilight's Call. I just think that black needs to see more play, and that playing against just Fires and Rebels is really boring.

Topic Four: Planeshift

I like it when new sets come out. I like going to prereleases and playing casual Magic all day. I love playing with new cards and seeing how they interact. I enjoy talking with people, since there are usually many people who only come to prereleases, and so I get a chance to see some people that I don't usually hang out with at tournaments. Plus, I get to trade for cards that I need with people that I don't normally see.

As far as the cards go, they look to be fun. I won't be able to analyze them fully until I actually see the cards in front of me, so I'm not even going to bore you with that. All I have to say is, I can't wait to play with Terminate, and Doomsday Specters, and other such cool things. That said, I'm very anxious for it to be Saturday. :)

Topic Five: Another Fun Magic Format

This other fun Magic format is none other than Mental Magic, which I remember playing a while ago in NYC. The basic premise of Mental Magic is this: every card is any other card with the same casting cost. So, you can play Camel as a Healing Salve, Scryb Sprites as a Berserk, and turn Phyrexian Portal into a Ring of Gix.

When you build a deck for Mental Magic, ideally, you put in more cards with common casting costs, and fewer cards with insanely large casting costs (such as 3BBB).

The rules for Mental Magic are pretty simple. First, any one card can be any other card with the same casting cost, but not the card as it's printed. I haven't yet figured out how kicker works, but I'll just assume that you can pay kicker costs as well as regular costs for a spell. I'm just going off of the casting cost that is printed on the card. The second major rule of Mental Magic is that you cannot play any card more than once during the game. The game could last for six hours or more, but you still only get one Ancestral Recall. One Library of Alexandria. And one Juzam Djinn. The third rule is, any card is a basic land of that card's color. Blue cards turn into Islands, for example. You can play any card in your hand face-up on the table as a land, but unless you find a way to return it to your hand, it's going to stay as a land. Very important: non-basic lands can be played as any other non-basic land. The fourth major rule; everyone plays off of the same deck, since Mental Magic decks tend to be over 100 cards apiece.

Those are about the only standard rules for Mental Magic. However, there are some house rules that my friends and I like to play by. The first is that Fastbond is banned. Playing all the cards in your hand on your first turn feels too much like cheating. Second, we've also banned any form of graveyard manipulation and most forms of card drawing. Graveyard manipulation feels too much like cheating - and besides, what do you do with a full graveyard when someone casts Living Death? It's too much of a headache, so we just don't want to deal with it.

The card-drawing thing is kind of a personal preference. We tend to believe that if you're just going to blindly draw cards without looking at them first, then it's okay. But, Brainstorm is cheating, since you can set up your next two opponent's draw phases. Impulse is okay, since you choose from those cards and then put them back on the bottom of the deck, where no one gets to see them for a while. Braingeyser is okay (but what else costs XUU?). Prosperity gets you lots of friends.

Also, 'removed from game' doesn't exist. If a card leaves play for any reason, it goes to the graveyard. Plus, nobody dies when the library runs out - someone shuffles the graveyard, and it becomes the new library. Since things can only be cast once, there are very few problems with this setup.

Here's the configuration of my current Mental Magic deck. This is pretty well calibrated, with fewer cards that have really weird casting costs.

ARTIFACTS (15)

2 0 casting cost (cc henceforth, because I don't feel like typing out 'casting cost' every single time I refer to it)
2 1cc
3 2cc
3 3cc
4 4cc
1 5cc

LANDS

7 non-basic lands

BLACK

3 B cc
4 1B cc
4 BB cc
3 2B cc
3 1BB cc
1 BBB cc (Doomsday! :)
3 3B cc
2 2BB cc
1 3BB cc
1 3BBB cc

BLUE

3 U cc
4 1U cc
3 UU cc
3 2U cc
3 1UU cc
3 3U cc
3 2UU cc
1 4U cc
2 3UU cc
1 4UU cc
2 XU cc

GREEN

4 G cc
4 1G cc
2 GG cc
3 2G cc
3 1GG cc
2 3G cc
2 2GG cc
1 3GG cc (Moss Monster makes a good Deranged Hermit)
1 4GG cc

RED

4 R cc
4 1R cc
1 RR cc (is this ever anything other than Fork?)
3 2R cc
2 1RR cc
2 3R cc
2 2RR cc
2 4R cc
2 3RR cc
2 XR cc

WHITE

4 W cc
5 1W cc
4 WW cc
2 2W cc
2 1WW cc
2 3W cc
3 2WW cc
1 3WW cc

This configuration represents a pretty good mix of all the different casting costs for cards. Of course, I don't have any gold cards, and I don't think that they're necessary. Besides, Shivan Zombie can't be Terminate yet. Soon, just not yet.

Mental Magic is lots of fun. Build a deck and take it to play in between rounds of your next PTQ. Beat your friends down with a Camel that claims it's a Savannah Lion. Draw a million cards with an Elixir of Vitality that thinks it's a Jayemdae Tome. Be the first in your game to cast Ancestral Recall from a Flash Flood.

Besides, when are you ever going to play with Sorrow's Path? It's much better as a Maze of Ith.

- Mary Van Tyne
Charm School Livonya Silone
The Collective

"Meat is the best vegetable." - Chris Holick