Allied Strategies Magic the Gathering Podcast

Special guest Pro Tour 25th Anniversary Champion Allen Wu joins us this week to talk about his victory and the legacy deck he played at the tournament. Learn about the technology he likes in the deck, his thoughts on Legacy in general, and his delightful teammates. Next week will be our mailbag episode – send […]

It’s a strategy as old as, um, 2007 according to Google Trends, and thanks to the controversial printing of an instant speed time walk at super duper rare, it’s back in Standard: Turbofog! The goal of this strategy is to draw multiple cards each turn, then mitigate any number of opposing threats with one fog […]

Neal’s playing a rogue deck this Pro Tour – join us this week to hear about his testing process and how he ended up transforming one of this Standard format’s fringe combo decks into an aggro deck! Next week we’ll be back to regularly scheduled content for episode 149, and then we’ll have episode 150 […]

All three of your podcast hosts have picked up some Professional REL Drafting experience with the new set at GP Sacramento and this week we’re sharing it with you! Learn about our opinions of each two-color combination, their relative power levels, and key commons/uncommons that you may have overlooked but that perform better in this […]

This episode is an in-depth guide to another great Modern deck powered by Mox Opal and Ancient Stirrings! Hardened Scales is an enchantment that combines with every creature in the deck to generate ridiculous bursts of value that are often immediately lethal through surprising board states and life totals. We went over every card in […]

With Limited Grands Prix fast approaching, we decided to use this week to talk about our initial thoughts of the M19 Sealed format now that we’ve played some combination of physical and online Prerelease events. We’ve also got a Mailbag episode coming up for Episode #150 (so 5 episodes from now) – if you have […]

The last three core sets have each featured dramatically different limited formats. Magic Origins was a fast-paced format where being on the play was a big deal and missing your 2-drop was often fatal, whereas M14 was the polar opposite: a format where Divination was a first-pickable card, Opportunity was a bomb, and cards like […]

Nicol Bolas, the Ravager has 4 qualities that make him potentially very powerful in standard. He’s cheap, he’s reasonably sized, he does something immediately when played, and he can take over games. Our wonderful Patrons therefore decided that this episode would involve us building an M19 Standard deck featuring Bolas. A normal edition of Allied […]

Last week’s formula worked so great that we decided to run it back – we’ve picked even more M19 cards that are even equally as exciting as last week and we broke down how they might fit into standard. Don’t worry, we didn’t forget to account for the 1-toughness tax! Next week, on this feed, […]

The 2019 Core Set is fast approaching, and in classic Allied Strategies fashion, we’ve picked out a few cards each to talk about in terms of constructed (almost entirely Standard). We also spent a bit of time talking about Grand Prix Vegas, which was the first GP in half a year that all three of […]

Nailing down a specific 75 card configuration for any event is a complicated process. It’s the kind of subject that takes much more theory than we can cover in one episode if we wanted to create a general guide, but this week we were able to go deep on a specific example with Ben’s constructed […]

This week is an in-depth analysis of a single draft from the recent Pro Tour – we went over every single pick of the draft, an episode archetype that we have really liked doing at least once after each Pro Tour. In the history of the podcast, however, we have never disagreed with each other […]

Ben joins us from the past this week for a special timeshifted episode to discuss the decks that he tested for Pro Tour Dominaria. This Pro Tour was notably different than most due to the longer time gap between the set’s release and the event – how did this affect testing? This set also brought […]

Dive deep into Magic theory with us this week, as we cover the concept of Mana Efficiency. This week, we not only define and explain Mana Efficiency for the beginning or intermediate players, we also cover a number of extrapolations and corollaries that should be interesting for even the most grizzled veteran. What does Mana […]

This week we return to Dominaria limited to examine the draft format now that we’ve gotten the chance to get a few dozen matches under our belts. What is the general texture of the format? How are our predictions about specific cards holding up? What archetypes are consistently viable draft strategies and what signals should […]