Years ago, a player in a Pro Tour tried to name Hunted Wumpus with Meddling Mage. He could not remember the name — the closest he got was this article’s title. Why is that significant? It was because Hunted Wumpus was being played in an Extended format Pro Tour. That would be inconceivable today. The game has changed.
I was thinking about how creatures have evolved over the years. Hunted Wumpus is a 6/6 for 3G with the disadvantage that your opponent can put a creature from his/her hand into play. Once upon a time, that tradeoff was good enough for Constructed play in the Extended format. Today — not a chance. Creatures have evolved. So has the game.
Let’s look at Hunted Wumpus.
The current Oracle wording is:
Hunted Wumpus: 3G Creature — Beast, When Hunted Wumpus enters the battlefield, each other player may put a creature card from his or her hand onto the battlefield.
The reason for playing the card is simple — you assume that the opponent has nothing in hand that might be as big and as dangerous as the Wumpus. After all, back in the day, a 6/6 was huge.
I rarely had anyone play the Wumpus against me in the Extended at the time, since I mainly played Survival decks. With a Survival deck, the question is rarely “does he have something bad in hand?” It is far more often “does he have something bad in his deck?”
Hunted Wumpus was also in Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Edition. I drafted those formats online, now and then. I remember having the Wumpus played against me several times. Once or twice I had nothing — either nothing at all or nothing of relevance. I remember one match where I had Nekrataal. In another I had Tidal Kraken, in both games 1 and 2. That draft my opponent was eliminated before game 3.
Hunted Wumpus was a big gamble in core set drafts — but so was drafting Green. But that’s last year’s news — you cannot draft Tenth Edition or older Core Sets anymore, and Hunted Wumpus is not in M10. In any case, drafting M10 is the stuff of another article.
Back in the day, however, Hunted Wumpus was played, seriously, in Extended. I found this back in my archives on the Extended metagame for the 1999-2000 season. I also have a similar version in the list of decks that the team I was on was testing.
Pro Tour Junk by Adrian Sullivan, Joe Cain and Toby Wachter
4 River Boa
3 Hunted Wumpus
3 Simian Grunts
4 Mox Diamond
4 Tithe
4 Funeral Charm
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Duress
4 Cursed Scroll
2 Land Grant
3 Demonic Consultation
3 Aura of Silence
3 Treetop Village
3 Bayou
4 Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author]
4 Wasteland
4 Savannah
Sideboard:
4 Ebony Charm
3 Powder Keg
3 Spirit Link
3 Choke
1 Aura of Silence
1 Treetop Village
Later in the season, Adrian’s Junk list changed — and one big change was that Hunted Wumpus was replaced by Phyrexian Negator. The Negator is a turn faster, and had trample — and does not let your opponent drop a creature for free. However, back when the above list was being tested, Deadguy Red and Sligh were heavily played archetypes. Phyrexian Negator is not a good choice against a burn deck — and even later in the season, the Junk decks kept the Wumpuses in the sideboard, and swapped out the Negators against decks packing burn.
Here’s one of those burn decks, from one of the old Masters Invitation tournaments.
Kurt Burgner (USA) – Sligh – NY Masters, Sept. 2000
4 Wasteland
3 Rishadan Port
10 Mountain
3 Cursed Scroll
4 Pillage
3 Price of Progress
4 Jackal Pup
4 Mogg Fanatic
2 Ball Lightning
2 Viashino Sandstalker
4 Incinerate
4 Fireblast
2 Shock
2 Seal of Fire
2 Hammer of Bogardan
1 Ghitu Encampment
Sideboard
3 Bottle Gnomes
1 Dwarven Miner
2 Ruination
4 Pyroblast
3 Pyrokinesis
2 Anarchy
It was decks like this that made the Wumpus so good. I play the Wumpus on turn 3 (four Mox Diamonds, remember?) What can the Sligh deck possibly put into play that can compete? Most of their stuff either dies or returns to hand — and this was deliberate. These Sligh decklists were tuned to compete against Maher Oath decks — decks that featured Oath of Druids as creature control. If you kept a creature in play against Oath of Druids decks, they produced monsters for free. Sligh could not kill the Oath, so it played around it. The PT Junk decks could kill the Oath or remove the creatures from the graveyard, so they could play fat creatures.
It wasn’t just the Sligh decks, though, that had few fatties that could compete with the Wumpus. Even the beatdown decks ran few monster-sized monsters. Here’s a Stompy deck from that period. About the scariest thing the Stompy decks could drop was River Boa, and that was only scary because it could block and regenerate.
Nicolai Herzog – Stompy – NY Masters, Sept. 2000
2 Pouncing Jaguar
4 Wild Dogs
4 Skyshroud Elite
4 Ghazban Ogre
3 Rogue Elephant
4 River Boa
4 Vine Dryad
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
4 Rancor
4 Giant Growth
2 Wild Might
4 Land Grant
13 Forest
4 Wasteland
Sideboard
4 Rushwood Legate
2 Cursed Totem
2 Lumbering Satyr
4 Emerald Charm
2 Winter Orb
1 Uktabi Orangutan
Note that the Wumpus was all good against decks like Free Spell Necro or Trix, which had no creatures.
On the flip side, the only decks from back in the day that could drop creatures that were better than the Wumpus were the few Reanimator decks, Secret Force (if it had one of the two Verdant Forces in hand), and some Survival decks. (Really bad times for the PT Junk decks — the opponent drops Tradewind Rider and has additional creatures in play.)
The reason PT Junk could run Hunted Wumpus successfully was that no other decks ran creatures good enough to make the disadvantage to playing Wumpus severe. That is certainly not the situation today. Imagine dropping Hunted Wumpus — assuming you could legally play it — against any deck in standard today. Your opponent could drop anything from Broodmate Dragon to Sower of Temptation to Bogardan Hellkite to Mulldrifter. Even Kithkin has Cloudgoat Ranger.
Worst case scenario — you drop Hunted Wumpus. You opponent drops Baneslayer Angel. You are not going to win that race.
A funny — I was working on this article when I clicked on StarCityGames.com to check some decklists. I saw Adrian’s new article with his Ivan Drago decklist. 16 creatures that trump the Wumpus, plus Kitchen Finks. Cool.
So, the question is, why was Hunted Wumpus playable back then, but not today? What is different about the game?
One idea is that big, good, powerful creatures simply were not printed back then. I’ve heard this said. I’ve even thought this — momentarily. Sure, we all remember creatures from back in the day like these:
Island Fish Jasconius, 4UUU, Creature – Fish, 6/8
Island Fish Jasconius can’t attack unless defending player controls an Island. Island Fish Jasconius doesn’t untap during your untap step. At the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay BlueBlueBlue. If you do, untap Island Fish Jasconius.
When you control no Islands, sacrifice Island Fish Jasconius.
Gargantuan Gorilla, 4GGG, Creature — Ape, 7/7
At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice Gargantuan Gorilla unless you sacrifice a Forest. If you sacrifice Gargantuan Gorilla this way, it deals 7 damage to you. If you sacrifice a snow Forest this way, Gargantuan Gorilla gains trample until end of turn.
Tap: Gargantuan Gorilla deals damage equal to its power to target creature. That creature deals damage equal to its power to Gargantuan Gorilla.
Lord of the Pit, 4BBB, Creature — Demon, 7/7
Flying, trample. At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice a creature other than Lord of the Pit. If you can’t, Lord of the Pit deals 7 damage to you.
But not everything from back in those days were bad creatures. In the same block as Hunted Wumpus, we had Avatar of Might, which saw sideboard play last month. Avatar of Woe was playable, as were creatures like Lumbering Satyr.
The problem was not that the creatures were not playable. The problem was that the creatures could not be played. You simply could not play creatures, or any spells, for that matter, that did not pass the Zvi test (named after the StarCityGames.com writer and Hall of Famer Zvi Mowshowitz): “if it costs five mana, it has to win you the game.”
Morphling was the creature that defined that rule.
A look at what’s changed in a moment, but for now.
Digression #1 — Learn to Write, you Idiots!
I am in the middle of reviewing proposals for the broadband mapping program for our state. The State of Wisconsin received 14 proposals to do the mapping. Each proposal is somewhere between 50 and 150 pages, and I have to read and score them all. Then the panel — me and two others — debates these and chooses a winner. Cost data is — well, let me just say that the contract is worth something in the million dollar range.
Reading these is — let’s just say that that’s why they call it work. We got these Friday afternoon, and I have been reading, on and off, all weekend and all day Monday from about 6am to late at night. I’m writing this as a way of taking breaks, so sorry if it seems choppy. I am going to be reading and scoring proposals all day Tuesday, and the panel will probably spend all day Wednesday and Thursday on this as well.
At this point, I am looking for humor wherever I can find it. Fortunately — I won’t embarrass the applicants by naming them. I just have one question — if you were writing a proposal that could get you gobs of cash, would you write this?
1) End of cover letter: “I am extremely excited about the opportunity to work with the State of Georgia on this program…” (Note: we spell it W I S C O N S I N.)
2) Abbreviated version: “While we have never worked on this type of project before, I hate to fail.” (Sorry, you just did.)
3) “
4) “The real world changes and we are engineered to work within that reality.” (You are engineered? Are you intelligent design proponents, or are you clones? In any case, to quote Adam Savage “I reject your reality…”)
5) “The technology is built around an idea that it is imperative that there is a transparency of data and the sourcing of that data.” (First, there is a thing called passive tense. It is to be avoided. However, even if you parse that abomination of a sentence down to its essential parts, it still makes no sense / can be interpreted in several ways. The rest of that paragraph does not make it any clearer, much less transparent.)
I could go on and on — just one of the proposals has 79 pages of narrative, with narrow margins and a 10 or 11 point font, and all of it stinks. People, you are asking for — best Dr. Evil voice — one million dollars. You can afford to put verbs in all your sentences, and to use some basic grammar.
End of digression — which means I have to go back to reading proposals.
Gah — one more I have to share: “The aggregation and conflation process produces a fully rich map database containing data layers of highly accurate contents data containing the following features and attributes:” That’s “database”, “data” (twice), as well as “containing” (twice) and “contents” — all in one sentence.
Okay, back to Magic.
Nope — one more. This one is amazing. First of all, half the paragraphs are bulleted, and may have been in blue text, or something, on the computer. However, the copies supplied to the agency are in black and white — meaning that all those paragraphs are just a faint grey — and very hard to read. The entire application is a study in how not to write proposals, but let me select just one part:
“…There will also be demographic data applied to the root cause of no broadband. We will not use any form of mapping currently being done by most states because of its problems and unreliability. We also will analyze and map data collected from…”
I cannot find any explanation of that middle sentence anywhere in the proposal. I also cannot find any detailed description of what form of mapping the applicant will use. Man, this whole application sounds like a forum post — something like “Other decks say they beat Faeries, but they don’t. Only me, with my tech, can beat Faeries 90-10.” Suggestion, people: some proposals sound like this. “I am a professional. My company, and I, do this for a living. We have spent a lot of time and effort in crafting a proposal that can work. Here’s why.” Others sound like “Yo, listen, we is the dudez wt the skillz and we got tech for this b*tch. Word.” One of those approaches may work for impressing your friends and, maybe, getting a date for Friday night. The other works for convincing serious people what you know what you are talking about. Don’t confuse the two, even in the forums.
I can see the forum posts now — “yo dude u got no clue what ur talkin about.”
Word.
Back to Magic. Finally.
Back in the day, creatures costing more than three or four mana were not playable, with the exception of Morphling. Morphling had some advantages: it flew, it could protect itself, and it could be pumped.
The problem was not the creatures. The problem was what you had to invest in the creatures. Playing a creature was an investment. Your opponent also invested in their game plan — in their own creatures, or in methods of negating your investment.
In Magic, investments are paid for in two ways — in mana, and in cards. Playing a creature usually involved paying mana and a card. (Yes — exceptions exist. Ornithopter costs no mana, and Lab Rats with kicker does not cost a card, but the general rule applies.)
The reason investment was so important was that, back in those days, control decks could spend their extra mana at the end of your turn getting new cards. This was because instant speed card drawing was common — Impulse, Fact or Fiction, Gifts Ungiven, even monsters like Opportunity all let the control player refill EoT. The other reason was that counter magic cost two or less. Back then, we had Force Spike, Counterspell, Mana Leak, Memory Lapse, and Disrupt. Targeted removal was also cheap — starting with Swords to Plowshares, and up through Diabolic Edict, Terror and so forth. Mass removal, of course, started with Wrath of God.
Back then, mana could be cheaply converted into cards, and cards could cheaply remove most creatures. The result was that you could not afford to invest much mana into a creature, no matter how good, because the opponent would spend much less on negating that threat, and be able to use the remaining mana to accrue even more cards.
That’s a fairly simple version of the theory. I can, and have, written thousands of words about it (look here for the first such article written a long time ago.)
The theory says that, so long as you can quickly turn mana into cards EoT, then you cannot invest in larger creatures. Conversely, then, if you cannot get cards easily EoT, then the list of playable creatures should get bigger. Looking back, Kamigawa block was the first block where the standard, common card drawing spell — Counsel of the Soratami — was a Sorcery. It was also the first block where people seriously played dragons. Today, instant speed card drawing is pretty rare, and even bigger creatures are in play. Hunted Wumpus, on the other hand, is not.
There are other reasons for the change, but I think the biggest may be the lack of cheap counters and sorcery speed card drawing.
Personally, I like this better. I like creatures, and complex board positions, much more than I like baiting counterspells and playing around Capsize with buyback.
Digression #2: Changing Judge Philosophy
I mentioned that, at the Pro Tour, a player could not remember the name of the card “Hunted Wumpus.” He floundered around, then named “Humpus Wumpus.” The judge ruled that he had not named a real Magic card, so that Meddling Mage did not stop Hunted Wumpus from being played. At least, that’s how I remember it — and I don’t have time to hunt through the archives.
That was the correct call, at the time. Back then, judges were supposed to be enforcing technically correct play. If you messed up, you got penalized. Players were responsible for understanding how the game worked, and knowing the rules and the cards. They were not there to give advice, or answer questions about cards.
It’s a bit different now. Judges are still there to prevent cheating and to penalize infractions, but the entire philosophy of those penalties has changed. So has the information judges are allowed to give out.
Today, judges area ready and able to provide current Oracle wording on cards, at player request. That said, this is not a given — it depends a lot on whether the staff has the resources, and the situation. For example, if the only judge at a local store does not have the oracle on his/her cell phone, and does not have Internet access, odds are you won’t get current wording. Likewise, if you are drafting Italian Legends at Gencon, I am not going to give you translations during the draft — and I will not spend a lot of my time translating all of your cards — but that is a special case. (Note on Italian Legends at GenCon: I don’t know if that will be offered, but I may be running it. I’ll be there — this time next week. Once the reviews are done.)
Today, if a player wants to name a card for Meddling Mage, the criteria is whether the player uniquely identified a Magic card. Something like “that 6/6 that lets me put a card into play” would be sufficient — there is only one such card. Even at high-level tournaments like Worlds, the complete name is not required. I had one call where a player was casting Cabal Therapy as said he wanted to name “the burn spell for two mana, does three damage, with the picture of burning skeletons.” Now look at the Ice Age version of Incinerate and tell me that he had not uniquely identified the card.
The alternative — requiring a player to name the card correctly — leads you down all kinds of slippery slopes. Supposed the players are both French speakers, playing French cards, and they name Bâtard Sauvage (that’s, if I remember correctly, French for Wild Mongrel. I think I’m right — it is fairly memorable.) Anyway, is Bâtard Sauvage incorrect? They understand. Or suppose someone names “Bob” when trying to identify Dark Confidant? Almost every serious Magic player in the world, playing at that time, would understand that reference.
Assuming you require the correct name, where do you stop? I hear people on podcasts calling Necropotence [neh-crop-i-tens]. The correct pronunciation is [nek–ruh–poht-ns]. Necropotence comes from combining the words necromancy [nek–ruh-man-see] and potence [poht-ns]. The combination is pronounced — well, you know.
The point is that, if you insist on technically correct naming standard, you could argue that the mispronounced version isn’t correct. And after that, what’s next? Do you correct accents? “Hey, Boston — that’s ‘a,’ not ‘ah.’ Let’s try that again.”
Ridiculous.
The current philosophy (okay, “current, and has been for a few years” philosophy) is better. It’s not exactly how you say it, it’s whether you identified the card. “Whatever fattie he has” is not sufficient. “The fattie he killed me with last game” might be — as a judge, I’d just ask the opponent for the name of the creature dealt lethal damage, and ask the player if that’s what he meant.
It’s just that now, that creature will almost certainly not be Humpus Wumpus.
PRJ
“one million words” on MTGO