“A 6/6 with Trample for six is amazing. The special ability is just gravy.”
We take a break, now, noble readers. I’ve gone fill-tilt on Future Sight, but before we can proceed to talk on about the future, we have to truly understand the past. This is a subject dear to my heart, something that for some reason has struck a chord deep inside me. It’s not about Green fat, per se.
There’s a bit of a curse to this inter-tube world of ours. Everyone thinks they know better than you. Everyone. Even those people who, for some reason, are reading my articles for advice, are doing it mainly so they can say they know better. There’s a joke on the Wizards boards:
Q. How many Magic players does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Two. One to do it, and the other to point out three better ways he could have done it.
Today, we’re going to talk about Fatties. We’re going to look over historically good fatties, a hall of fame of real king-hitters, those heavyweights and the few rare super-heavyweights. To qualify for this discussion, it’s not enough to be played. A card gets extra points for being heavily played, and a card gets more points for being costed well beyond what people would deem "reasonable." Once upon a time, Zvi said a spell that cost n mana or more, "had better win me the game right there." Anecdote sets the value of n, but I believe it was five. This quote is trotted out many, many times by better players than you or I, and these players are almost universally wrong to mention it.
When Zvi wrote that phrase, it was the voice of man who stood in the shadow of Dream Halls, of Turboland, of Cursed Scrolls, and Fireblasts. When Zvi spoke of the Mystical Five, that five had to be something that would win you the game, because everyone – even the bad Green decks – could lock the game up in some way or another by four. Those times were environmentally defined. Red had its Ball Lightnings and Blue had two or three hard counters. White had Armageddon. Hell, get into Extended and people had duals and Force of Will. It was a totally different world, one that more closely resembles Legacy than the supposed Extended it wound up spawning. To take the wisdom of those days and apply it to now? It’s just wrongheaded.
Case in point: When’s the last time you got people applying leeches to cure your asthma?
As cultures progress, the pool of common knowledge, and the knowledge of what is and isn’t currently true changes. Thus is the steady motion towards greater understanding. We abandon certainty in half-truths and myths, and in turn move towards enlightenment. To simply stalwartly parrot Flores and Zvi like it’s still 1998 is a sure way to discover a range of error in our thinking.
To the fatties, this is an era unlike any in the past. Silvos and Wildfire Emissary look at one another in boggled amazement; the former not good enough for his environment, the latter almost too good! What the hell? A four-mana 2/4 versus a six-mana 8/5? Well… what we could say, what we could say. Environment defines the status of a fatty as much as anything else.
Also, I’m not using Wizards of the Coasts’ definition of fatty. Or rather, definitions. Devin Low said "hey, fatties are fine now," and in doing so, explained that Leonin Abunas qualified (and really, he kinda did – lords knows he ground weenies to a halt on the basis of his 5-toughness bottom), and defined any fatty as a creature that had a combined power and toughness of seven at least. He claimed that Time Spiral was a new era of fatties, an era where Green would finally, finally, finally have the best fatty in Constructed!
What Devin didn’t notice, I guess, was that they’d okayed Teferi. That by his definition, in fact, no, Spectral Force wasn’t going to break the top position, because they’d singlehandedly, on a fatty, printed a creature who defined and deformed the environment. He shut down strategies, turned off three mechanics, and brutally, brutally outpowered the spells of opponents, making the game best owned by opponents who had nothing but men to drop, provided you weren’t backing him up with countermagic. Oh wait.
Really, really stupid move there.
Then, "Fatty Week" rolled around. Funnily enough, when they’d mentioned fatties – Green fatties in particular! – a mere month or two beforehand, Wizards employees suddenly moved towards a different definition of fatty. Mark Rosewater qualified 5/3s or more as the meaning of a fatty. Then, everyone else that week voiced the sentiment that, yes, that was in fact the case, Mike Flores even submitting that Mark Rosewater article was where he got his definition from.
Didn’t Mike Flores submit his article a week in advance? Before Rosewater’s article ever went up?
I don’t mean to look for conspiracies where no such creature exists, but this is just too convenient. Now when Devin has to finally pony up and talk to us about his ridiculous statement about "fatties in Time Spiral Block," and how now, finally, Green is going to have the best big creature in a format, even if the best strategy doesn’t involve a big creature, he’s going to be able to draw a curtain over Teferi, because, well, he’s not really a fatty.
He was a fatty when Devin spoke about Fatties the first time. He’s still a fatty, even if Wizards want to shift the goalposts. And he’s still the best fatty in Time Spiral block. He’s singlehandedly the most powerful creature of Time Spiral block, ousting any competition. The mere fact that he has Control players shrugging and going, "Do we need Cancel?" should tell you heaps.
We are not using Wizards’ standards. There are no hard rules for what qualifies a fatty, but I’ll tell you that I’m looking at creatures of 4/4 or bigger size, or creatures who cost in the four-plus beltrange. There are some exceptions to this rule, of course – as you’ll see, there’s at least one big one who made a hell of a splash – but by and large, the word fatty exists as what started as a pejorative. Go on, call another human being a fatty and see how pleasantly they take it. Fatties were named fatties because they were big, expensive, and ugly. Time changed and big creatures are now something else, but the term has stuck. Like another pejorative term that’s now worn as a badge of pride, there’s a lot of scuffling around how the term’s used.
Fatties are often like porn; I don’t have a definition, but I know it when I see it.
For the rough outline, however, expect 3/4s or more to show up in this list of fat creatures. Sure, they’re on the skinny scale, but we’re not talking about brute force here. This is about what fatties have been good, what fatties have passed through the crucible of the game and emerged unscathed. And then we’re going to talk about what makes them good, what elements go together for a good fatty. Devin Low touched on this, but he gave the subject such a superfluous brush that I felt he obscured a lot of the depth of what he meant.
Remember; this is not about bemoaning what fatties suck. This is about discussing fatties that were good, and what made them good in those environments.
Before the Dawn
Once upon a time, Oscar Tan wrote a piece about why fatties sucked in Vintage. The fatty he used in his example was Shivan Dragon, a creature I don’t think I’ve ever considered good. In that he wrote, in essence, that "any fatty is bad in Vintage, because it will always cost your opponent less to remove it than it costs you to play it." Now, that’s bollocks; I mean, Tinker is probably the fattest creature ever printed, and Mishra’s workshop was powering out Juggernauts even then. If we ignore the corner cases of broken cards and instead look at cards that are after some fashion or another, "fair," it took until Jotun Grunt before Wizards printed a Vintage-playable fatty*.
It was this cornerstone of investment theory that underpinned the period of which Zvi spoke. When Zvi spoke of five-mana-plus creatures, not only were the creatures worse, but the answers were better. The point at which Magic really started to taste the oven-roasted glory of true fatties was the point at which Countermagic took one of its biggest iconic hits. Seventh Edition rotated out, taking with it Counterspell and Mana Short, and bringing in Mana Leak, a slightly more anemic creature by the hard-core No Button of Counterspell. Onslaught Block Constructed tournaments occurred, and Wizards actually rotated Eighth Edition in early, for Worlds. One conspiracy theory was that Wizards did this explicitly to kill Psychatog… but I’m getting distracted.
First, Onslaught Block.
Onslaught
Onslaught Block didn’t actually bring many tournament-level fatties. There were a few honorable mentions: By Devin’s rule, Blistering Firecat counts, and he’s seen a lot of play, but he’s not really what we’re talking about here, being a seven-damage burn spell. Grinning Demon had high hopes to hit the table offensively, but he fell short of the mark of being playable thanks to the Red menace making his drawback just far, far too much.
Ravenous Baloth: We start the tour at a high note. Ravenous Baloth was a keystone in stopping the Red menace in control decks, and has been a mainstay in Tier 2 decks since his printing. He’s broad, he’s tough, and he can close the game nice and fast once he hits the table. The thing is, he wasn’t ever really as good as he looked.
Ravenous Baloth was a good thing used to fight out-of-control aggro, typically Red or artifact. But he wasn’t good enough. When Green finally took the reins away from aggro in that format, it was on the back of Tooth and Nailing up Platinum Angel or Darksteel Collosi. Yet he’s a mainstay, and worth a coin or two on MTGO, because he’s just that cool. Lots of Rock players finger their playsets and idly wonder… maybe this season? There’s something beautifully demoralizing about recurring him, too; the Baloth, combined with Oversold Cemetery or Genesis (if you have seven mana versus aggro) can be such a nightmare. Every turn, another attacker dead and another four life gained.
Gigapede: Gigapede saw play as a sideboard option for U/G Madness decks to milk card quality and sometimes advantage out of Psychatog decks, according to an old comment by Flores. I expected, based on that statement, that Tog decks of the time were less heavy on counterspells, and I also fancy that the rotation of Eighth Edition – and the impending loss of the Madness tools and the Tog threat – put Gigapede back into the trade binders. It’s a shame, because for all that Big Gigs is a glass jaw, there weren’t any played one-power first strikers around. He would generally trade with anything and come back to do it again, two turns later.
He was awfully slow, but he was still inexorable, and that was good. Yet he never saw much more than niche play, and now sees a place in Vintage Ichorid decks, as a way to fuel your discarding when your Bazaar of Baghdad’s been blown up. He might have been replaced with Phantasmagorian, though – I’m not entirely sure. Vintage decks outmode tech awfully fast, and the pundits never seem to be able to agree with one another.
Kamahl, Fist of Krosa: Kamahl was a singleton Tooth target in Skullclamp-driven Elf and Nail. He was there to be Wrath Insurance, as if the Clamp didn’t do that well enough. As Tooth and Nail evolved, he left the lists, because Wrath itself became such a rare thing to see in the environment. I mean, seriously, who ever lived to play a four mana spell that wasn’t Green? Still, he basically existed to be a mana-reduced Thelonite Druid, and that’s not exactly very impressive. Kamahl was never really wanted for his actual fattiness – just the activated ability that punished most hosers for a creature swarm. Interesting, that.
Exalted Angel: The elephant in the room. During Odyssey Block / Onslaught Block / Seventh Edition standard, I heard only one tale of an elf deck actually winning a high-level tournament. That was a deck piloted by one Nate Heiss, and it bled mana. The deck could generate stupid amounts of mana, and routinely had something like seven mana on turn 4 consistently. So with all the mana in the world, what did The Heiss choose to play? When you can pay any amount for a creature, and just do not have to care about its cost, when you can say "hang the expense!" … you play a White creature. Oh well. It’s not like there’s anybody not pretending Exalted was probably the best fatty of her period.
Exalted Angel was a morph creature, who was explicitly pushed by development to encourage people to play with some morph creatures in Constructed formats. She also was evasive, and she did Ravenous Baloth’s job better than he did. She synergized well with White’s two strategic options at the time – Astral Slide and Blue/White control – by being both economical to play in the late game, and being able to be cheated into action on turn 4 easily. She was without doubt, a huge, format-defining effect, and probably made Shock far better than it would ever be otherwise. Just the chance to sometimes pants an Exalted Angel on turn 3 was the dream.
Visara The Dreadful: I saw Visara floating around in a lot of Black control lists at the time, but more or less, she was one of the many Rock Decision Tree creatures. I don’t remember any decks that bemoaned the loss of Visara at any time, because there were just other things to do a similar job. Mostly, I suspect she saw use as a Diabolic Tutor target, and just turned up to lock up mid-games against aggro decks when the day had already been won, and as a decent enough beater against control decks who’d just lost their hand to a Mind Sludge.
Visara closed the game fast (four hits), was evasive (flying blockers were actually pretty uncommon back then), and had an ability that made her good on defense as well. She could block one creature, kill another, and steadily whittle down most any offensive force. Key creatures would die at her behest, and there weren’t many creatures she couldn’t kill; White Knight saw very, very little play at this time, because really, Silver Knight was far better. Black had Mutilate, Edict, and Innocent Blood – what did Protection matter?
Rorix Bladewing: Rorix saw a lot of play. He supported Green/Red aggro decks, Mono-Red aggro decks, and even – with the help of Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] – a Mono-Red control deck that didn’t really care about Arc Slogger. Rorix + Pulse was a clean twenty on its own if you knew how to manipulate the stack and mana burn at the right time, and it was a truly beautiful, elegant thing.
But Rorix… Rorix is big and dumb. Rorix is just a six-power creature with haste and flying. That’s it! Two keywords, not a clever mechanic anywhere to be seen. So what does Rorix do that made him good? It wasn’t his creature type; most of the time, nothing gave a damn about that, and I don’t remember "Destroy target non-dragon creature" back then. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why Rorix breaks the rule, but I’m going to hazard a guess. Rorix’s color supports him better. He’s a gigantic man, he’s hard for some colors to kill (Green and Red had some serious problems with the ‘rix at the time), and due to haste, he was able to swing into the face of Black decks that, prior to that point, had a lot of sorcery-speed removal.
The Rorix problem is a big one. It can’t be that simply being "unsolvable" in some fashion is the solution to all fatties. Rorix rates pretty high on the Big And Dumb scale, and he was a tournament staple. Hell, he didn’t even have a power higher than his mana cost!
Symbiotic Wurm: I don’t know if Symbiotic Wurm counts, per se, but he saw play as a one-of in Peer Kroeger’s Reanimator deck to tutor up, Zombify, and then used to either penalize a Wrath of God, or, with Anger and Cabal Therapy in the bin, smash for seven, strip the hand, and cash in for seven blockers. Regardless, he has the rare title of a Green creature that was Reanimated. Mostly, Kroeger’s deck went for more, ah, classical plays of using Anger alongside Phantom Nishoba, Visara the Dreadful, and Arcanis the Omnipotent (really!). Even then, the Wurm was only played as a one-of.
Wurm gave a deck that needed a specific tool the tool it wanted. That deck had the means to pick that tool up, and bring it to bear. A match made in heaven, really; argue all you want about reanimation being a "bad thing," and whoring out Green, but the fact is, the card Symbiotic Wurm is very Green, and a deck was able to put it to use.
Legions
Another set with some near-misses; Gempalm Polluter and Bane of the Living both qualified on a technical level, but I just couldn’t find many decks of the day that really played Bane of the Living, and fewer still that actually put into play the Polluter. His body was totally incidental to his effect (a recurring life-siphon), and he could just as readily have been a 1/1 for BB.
Goblin Goon: More of the Big and Dumb… and yet Goon saw plenty of play. In his case, we can point at the "Goblin" creature type, and suddenly people roll their eyes and assume that explains it. Well, why?
Goblin means:
+2/+0 to any Piledrivers attacking alongside
It costs 2R and has Haste if there’s a Warchief around
It can be a 9/6 if a Pyromancer Alpha Strike is necessary.
That’s all. It’s a pretty compelling set of reasons, but it’s not quite the be-all and end-all that it felt like initially. Now, it was enough to make Goblin Goon a tier 1 tournament card. It said a lot about the scope of Goblins that sometimes, the Goon didn’t show up – indeed, Wolfgang Eder eschewed them at Worlds that year, and the Goon hasn’t shown much of his face in Extended.
Kilnmouth Dragon: Ohhhhh yeah, baby, this is what I’m talkin’ about! Darwin Kastle brought The Claw to the big screen, and showed that, in a world where counterspells didn’t exist, you could put all your eggs in one basket. If you were going to do that… well, you might as well make sure it was the biggest, nastiest, and most able-to-take-care-of-itself basket ever. Kilnmouth Dragon, alongside Rorix and Imperial Hellkite, was the Explosive Vegetation effect of choice, a colossal, 8+ power demolition machine that could hold back on defense, deal 3-6 to the face a turn if he had to, or, of course, go for the throat and belt your opponent for eleven damage.
A glorious creature. And yet it didn’t protect itself, have haste, or was really "unsolvable." Yet if you untapped with it in play, chances are you’d win. Hell, that he came into play the turn before Rorix probably said a lot – that’s a cool fourteen to the jaw, and worse, you get to see it coming. Yet, removal wasn’t very good back then, Wrath of God cost six, and counterspells were just not a present force. Plus, there weren’t any decks to put pressure on your opponent – goblins lacked that crucial piece, and were therefore simply Not Fast Enough.
Akroma, Angel of Wrath: Sigh. Of course.
Akroma is the benchmark for ridiculous. Seriously, she’s gets to be all kinds of stupid for all of the wrong reasons, she gets to be stupidly dressed for the same reasons, and then, the fawning masses of twits decide she’s so awesome we need to see her again. Blah. Oh well. Does anyone need an object lesson on why she’s good? I didn’t really think so.
Scourge
Scourge, the set all about fat, brought a lot of creatures that were expensive, but to my surprise and embarrassment looking it over, it brought few that were really all that huge. The record-holding creature of the block was in the previous set, and Scourge’s creatures took after Cloudscraper in the Dumb and Ugly stakes, but kind of neglected the "big." I’m still stunned at Woodcloaker. I mean, really? There are two unlisted cards here – Dragon Tyrant and Dragon Mage. I’ve seen both Reanimated, Oath’d or Sneak Attacked out, but generally speaking, they were both outmoded over time by hasty six-power ladies in that regard.
Siege Gang Commander: This one might earn me some sideways looks. On the card, he’s a 2/2, but we know that’s not really the case. Siege-Gang Commander is a 5/5 for five in disguise. Think about that. Wizards don’t want to print a 5/5 trampler for five in Green, but they’re okay with printing it in Red, and giving it extra stuff. The goblin creature type, the ability to be a force multiplier for tribal effects, and the ability, almost tacked on, to turn any goblin (starting with his hapless comrades, of course) into the defining burn spell of the format.
But a 5/5 trampler for five would be bad.
Honestly, I wonder if Wizards ever listen to their own rhetoric sometimes.
Anyway. Siege-Gang Commander is good, and he’s fat. He just doesn’t look like it when you first see him.
Twisted Abomination: A control card, Twisted Abomination gave Black the option of running land search alongside the win condition, and it could hold the ground admirably against most non-evasive threats if you were able to Infest out the early game and last. The problem was, eventually, that he (and his brother, Undead Gladiator) were ousted from control decks by Astral Slide, who brought Stabilizer into the fore. So the Abomination gets a partial credit mark.
He’s been reprinted, he’s done nothing. So I’m not sure that really there’s anything to recommend him in the long run. So he doesn’t merit quite the same analysis, because he’s not that remarkable.
Eternal Dragon: It stands to reason that when they introduce a mechanic about searching land from your library, the single best color at it would be White, and the second would be Black. Bitey wit aside, Eternal Dragon let White control decks guarantee land drops in the early game (they wanted that WW for Wrath so badly), and was an undying threat when you had lots of mana (a.k.a. the late game). It hit four times, it won. That’s all it had to do, and it did it well.
Ultimately, Eternal Dragon is a fine example of utility. He did something well, he could do it repeatedly, and the only x factor was mana. Provide enough mana and he’d win you the game, and he’d even give you a hand getting the mana he asked you for. A start-up loan, as it were.
Mirrodin
Mirrodin block, the beginning of the end. There are some honorable mentions here; Broodstar was one, a powerful fellow when he had affinity backing him up, but he fell out of favor fast and early, much like Molder Slug (who I mention anyway… Hmm). There was also Bosh, who saw play in a Tinker deck, and thereafter faded into obscurity when Wizards pointed out that um, Tinker was totally stupid and they can’t believe they let it go for that long. Geeze.
Molder Slug: Here’s one for you: Would Molder Slug have been good if Plow Under hadn’t been legal? Yes, he was a beating versus the non-Ravager affinity moulds of the day, but against every other deck, he was just six toughness, and therefore mandated three cards to kill rather than merely two. I’m not entirely sure; Molder Slug saw play in Angrrrry Slug, a Flores-driven deck that he called "the best in Standard." Yeah, how many times do we hear that a week?
Molder Slug was a 4/6 for five against most decks, and he wasn’t evasive, either.
Arc-Slogger: This block’s elephant. An enormous threat, Sloggers would sometimes hit once, then burn out three times for a whopping ten damage on one turn. That kind of thing was pretty regular. Arc-Slogger nestled in the curve alongside Seething Song, didn’t need much to take care of himself, and thanks to his toughness of five, was a capable blocker. There weren’t many creatures that bothered him to swing past (Silver Knight was about it), and he came out blisteringly early. In addition, Red had other tools; the Slith, the best use of Chrome Mox until Richard Feldman came up with one, the land destruction spells, even card-advantage burn like Barbed Lightning, all were in the same block as the Arc Slogger.
I think Slogger, for all that he gave you an additional expendable resource (the cards in your library), was another Rorix. His color supported what he wanted to do, and he gave back in turn. He offered the Red cards a reasonably costed body with an interesting ability, and they offered him the ability to burn down the barn while he was stealing the horses. Disrupt your opponent enough and any dork can get in for the twenty (look at Avarax, a 3/3 for five – ick). Arc-Slogger gave the Red decks (and the Red/Blue decks of the day, of course) everything they were looking for.
Platinum Angel: This kind of effect was just asking to be utilized, and still, Plats didn’t see much play, even as a flying four-power Worship, until people started talking about not paying her mana cost. Tinker and Tooth and Nail were the two flavors of doing that, and now, Tron is doing a reasonable facsimile of the Tinker effect.
Platinum Angel still makes my gut clench. Why isn’t she White? Why didn’t they Planeshift her in Planar Chaos? Throw White a bone, already! If an artifact creature is worse than a colored version of that creature, fine, give us Platinum Angel at 3WW. I don’t think people will complain about that. She’ll even compare interestingly to Serra: Vigilance versus keeping you alive regardless of the details. That’s totally a fair swap, I’m sure you’ll notice.
Darksteel
As we enter Darksteel, we start to see the kind of big creatures that can hit the table when countermagic suffers. Right now, Blue was still a powerful tournament force, but its main representatives were Affinity builds. A slow, Sarnia Affinity control deck basically just laid Ancient Tombs until it could cast its artifacts without tapping any mana, and using its 16 counterspells simply plodded along to a win. It was frustrating to play, boring as hell, and associated with Geordie Tait, which is probably some kind of trifecta of Dooooooom. With the printing of Ravager, Broodstar suffered; and the Clamp Canker flared up. Following swift, brutal action from the DCI that only took something like six months and two major tournaments, we were able to sift through the other cards of Darksteel.
Darksteel Colossus: At first, one might assume this man was the capstone. Surely this was the height of ridiculous? Well, not really. People didn’t play Colossus much. He got Toothed up a lot, but generally speaking, Colossus was actually a bit of a marginal creature by the time he rotated – the tool of Vintage players instead of Standard players. Instead, Colossus was sidelined over Sundering Titan.
What’s good about Colossus? Everything except the price. He gets in for damage almost regardless of what happens, and even a stupendous 12/12 isn’t going to kill him. He can bounce off that all day. There were ways to kill him – indeed, for a time there, the format warped around finding ways to bring those tools to bear – but generally speaking, the Colossus was just a winner on the big, dumb and ugly scale. He didn’t realize he was supposed to be killable, and so he wasn’t. Though he finally stepped down, not because he wasn’t good enough at what he did, but because the format was no longer about answering aggressive ground troops who used targeted removal to get past you, and was more about answering multicolor color-control decks.
Sundering Titan: And here he is. The real king of fatties from Darksteel. When he was played in Green, it was alongside a Red creature who let you abuse his comes-into-play ability, his leaves-play ability, oh, and the fact that he’s a 7/10. What a ridiculous creature. There’s no flavor justification for why he hits all five colors. There’s no explanation for it. There’s just him, blowing up four to ten lands, and then him going away again. He was an amazing bit of design that flavor completely ignored, and his play is a testament to the fact that Spike doesn’t give a crap about Rei Nakazawa.
Sundering Titan was fat, disruptive, and he punished you for killing him. He was costed very aggressively for his body and his effect, and he fit into the Tron Curve better than Darksteel Colossus did when you had to go without the Tooth and Nail itself. He wasn’t unkillable, like Darksteel Colossus – but he was so bad for your opponent to kill that he might as well have been.
Furnace Dragon: The only mass artifact removal spell in the format that wasn’t awful, and a fat creature besides, and they decided to print it in Red. That made some sense once you put on Affinity; this card had to blow up your own artifacts as well, or at least, it would if you were going to be playing him early enough to matter. That tension – that left you with a 5/5 flier unless your opponent was decent – was a nice bit of design.
There’s no real surprise that Furnace Dragon saw play. He was Wrath of God, Armageddon, and Purify, on 5/5 legs. He was basically doomed to be played by Affinity the second that he rolled out of development, and there should be no real surprise there. You can’t put this powerful an effect on a permanent that you can cheat into play, then be surprised when it sees play. If they printed this in Ravnica, sure, he’d not be the same, but there would still be that crucial tipping point – as long as there were artifacts to play, he was going to be there to eat them. His effect was drastic and immediate, too – making it immensely better than Molder Slug, who would always only ever take out the worst artifact your opponent had – and Affinity packed plenty of bad artifacts.
Memnarch: Tron made this man good, but once it did, he was pretty heavily played. Not in Tooth and Nail – who tutors up their legends? Oh, everyone these days? Nevermind. Anyway, Memnarch could deform the board pretty handily, had a big enough butt to survive many removal options, and was in the color that could protect it. He could probably have had no abilities and he’d still have been considered for some play, before people went on to play Triskelion instead.
Ultimately, grading Blue fatties is kinda moot. They almost all have a way of getting through blockers (in Memnarch’s case, stealing them), and the color itself is built around keeping opponents from doing things. Blue fatties with self-protection (like Arcanis) are actually kinda inessential, because, well, you were going to try and stop them from doing stuff anyway most of the time if you’re playing a fatty-based deck. The best Blue fatties are those that clear out blockers somehow (evading them works fine) and do something regardless of their death – Meloku and Keiga should showcase that effect.
Fifth Dawn
With a cycle like the Bringers, you might think that Fifth Dawn brought a huge slab of writing work to the table. It didn’t. Of the Bringers, two were unplayed, one was unplayable, and the other two saw play in very specific decks as randomly good 5/5s. Once you step past that short list of nine-mana creatures, you suddenly have a wide open expanse of crap. Mephidross Vampire was part of a combo with Triskelion, Razormane Masticore saw little to no standard play (but plenty in Vintage and now, Extended), and Etched Oracle is a Prismatic Card that saw a little bit of Standard play alongside the Bringers.
By and large, Fifth Dawn was a set that was mostly about its cute trick. Its cute trick wasn’t that cute – and it didn’t bring much fat to the table. After the buffet of Onslaught Block, Fifth Dawn’s main contribution to an already-sick standard was to proffer chicken soup and empty platitudes, an embarrassing little affair.
Now, before people think I’m dismissing the block decks that ran the Bringer pair (White and Black), remember that this block format was basically run over by three decks; Tooth and Nail (we’ve covered it), Affinity (Spit), and Big Red (whose fatty we’ve covered). Fifth Dawn made a big change to Standard (and other formats as well), but it didn’t really introduce any new ground-shaking fat creatures who made deck designers consider their options more carefully.
Champions of Kamigawa
Let’s get this particular embarrassment over with quickly. Champions of Kamigawa’s fat is an anemic display overshadowed by Development’s single biggest cycle of mistakes since Mirrodin block (wait, that was just then? Oh.). If new blood is the solution to R&D’s problem (Randy Buehler developed Invasion), then R&D need to hire some new people. Again.
Ironically, Meloku doesn’t qualify for this list, in that his combined power and toughness are six, and he doesn’t automatically make a token. I thought that was novel – I left him off the list, because writing has been done (and recently) about just how bonkers Meloku is. He was able to hang with Tog as a backup plan, for god’s sake, that should give you an idea of the sheer ridiculousness we’re talking about here.
Myojin of Night’s Reach: It saw play in Heartbeat decks, and Gifts decks, and in any of the sludge of decks that were around. It was big, it made you discard your hand, then it traded with a 2-drop. The Myojin of Night’s Reach was good for opposing enemy control decks, and its effect was obvious, just like the Furnace Dragon. Simplistic and boring, it gave you a big effect, and the format was slow enough to allow for it.
Four out of five Dragons: *spit*
Kodama of the North Tree: Apparently, when this guy was a 6/6, he never died. That’s pretty interesting, and I think it’d have been a majorly odd factor to watch a format defining itself by dealing with a Green creature for once. As a 6/4, he saw play, but he couldn’t keep pace with the equipped fellows of his day, and would more often than not be passed over for better creatures. In Blue. It still turns my stomach to say that.
Seshiro: This guy got to be good almost two years after his printing because Wizards finally put enough snakes in the environment to make him good. What was the catalyst? Oh, they just had to print a bunch of good snakes in the Blue/Green guild. Because when I think serpents, I think Blue.
Seshiro got to be good because Wizards gave his deck the ability to splash Blue for Meloku, and then actually made it fruitful to not splash for Meloku and instead use, well, Seshiro.
Betrayers of Kamigawa
One thing that surprised me as I researched this list is that honestly, there were lots of big creatures in Kamigawa. Lots of expensive ones, too – the real thing that blew my mind is just how few of the big creatures were tournament playable. There were plenty of tournament staples throughout each block, and while the set wasn’t screamingly obvious about what to play, there was good stuff in there, and yet, the dross was so obviously dross. It’s not like Time Spiral Block, where you look at Jaya and go ‘Hmm… is she bad or not?’, it’s sh*** like Hisoka. Norin the Wary has an avowed fanbase who love him – who cares about Hisoka?
Patron of the Kitsune: Nick Eisel said, at one point, that this was the eel’s instep. Yet, it seemed to do nothing beyond one deck he talked about (while drumming up his "I’m obv good at Constructed" cred), which went on to do not much of anything. Quirky stuff, huh?
Ink-Eyes: I swear, this woman must have a summer home in Vitu-Ghazi. The number of Saproling tokens I’ve seen transform into a 5/4 mid-combat is pretty startling, and I fancy it was probably part of her charm.
Ink-Eyes let you dodge countermagic (necessary at the time), she gave you a blocker when you got her through unblocked (giving her a kind of vigilance), she regenerated, and she usually got her first hit in for free. It’s very, very hard to see her as a bad card, and I’m sad to say I never got to play with her, despite owning a prerelease foil of her. I traded it off Mournglash. She was hard to control, and she was good defensively even while she was going offensive. That’s a pretty solid list of credentials.
Higure: A tribal lord, hard to stop, and was able to protect himself by fetching you extra copies of himself. Attacking with Higure was an affair in annoying your opponent, because after that first hit, you had another Higure in hand – and would get another. An opponent had to exhaust every copy of Higure to really dispose of him, and that was just not a fair fight when Higure was backed up by Ninja of the Deep Hours and Erayo. Oh, and the Jitte, can’t forget the Jitte.
Iwamori of the Open Fist: A card that’s grown in popularity as he’s left Standard, Iwamori was bad in block, better in Standard, and now, I hear, in Extended, very good. A drawbackless 5/5 trampler for four, however, is not enough to propel himself to the top tables constantly, instead being outed by better creatures. But that 5/5 trampler for five would be overpowered.
The 5/5 for four trampler isn’t good enough, but a 5/5 for five can’t be printed.
Oh well. Iwamori’s power is pretty obvious as well; he’s kind of like Rorix, just not as good. He’s allowed to play in Extended because he’s cheap and his drawback’s not too noticeable (though I imagine the occasional Meloku pantsing is embarrassing), he hits hard, and he can put the game away quickly provided he doesn’t meet with a counterspell, removal spell, or bigger blocker (which is, it seems, pretty common in Extended these days). He needs disruption to back him up – there’s no Mono-Green list in Extended – but the power of Destructive Flow lets him get into the red zone against an opponent who’s already on the backstep. In this way, he’s kinda like Arc-Slogger, but with less ability to warp the game around him and put the opponent on the backstep himself.
Saviors of Kamigawa
Saviors had a lot of variably-power creatures, but it also had a lot of fat creatures with interesting abilities. Sekki, Season’s Guide, for example, is very interesting (even if he looks a hell of a lot like Krosan Colossus). They were just costed so very high that their abilities were superfluous text on a card too expensive to ever see play even if it let you win the game the second it hit play. There’s at least one big omission from the Saviors list, and that is Arashi. I feel that a card that primarily saw play as an instant-speed Hurricane, and a vanilla 5/5 the rest of the time is not a creature that is actually designed to be played heavily as a creature, and Arashi’s creature status, while interesting (and I love channel and think they should have done more with the mechanic, a la cycling) was ultimately secondary to his actual effect, which was attempting to contain a world of Dragons.
Kagemaro, First To Suffer: Kagemaro gave you card advantage, and rewarded you for that card advantage. He was, in every way, a self-feeding effect. By keeping him large, you could kill more creatures, and killing more creatures meant you could save cards in hand for other effects, and therefore, keep him large. He could be recurred in the already-recursion happy block, and that he wasn’t evasive was pretty secondary considering he could blow up the world so easily. With a clear board, evasion is immaterial. With a Wrath’d board, well, it’s pretty silly to complain that your walking Wrath didn’t have trample, isn’t it?
This isn’t just a creature who killed a creature. This is no Nekrataal. This is a tactical nuke.
Adamaro: A three drop with four or five power, in an era where Red wanted offensive options. Was he really fat? Not all the time. Sometimes he was just a Trained Armodon. Red decks the world over would tell you, however, that that’s good enough. Really, Adamaro was too variable to really consider a fatty, but he’s the second-least embarrassing example from Saviors.
The Summary
I’m not touching on Ravnica onwards yet. The block still has a few months to go, and we’ll see the truth of what is and isn’t good in it – really – at the end of the day. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll see that Gleancrawler and Djinn Illuminatus are tournament forces, perhaps Tenth Edition will print some utterly unreasonable thing that will synergize so very well with the existing fatties we have. I don’t want to be making these statements without some kind of basis to work from.
What this tells us, however, is that Devin Low is kinda right about what constitutes a good fatty. Sometimes, they’re good for control decks, like Kagemaro, Visara, or Arc-Slogger. Sometimes they’re good for aggro decks, like Adamaro, Siege-Gang Commander, or Arc-Slogger. The thing is, within the scope of the fatties we’ve covered today, most – if not all – have had something other than mere size to recommend them, and those that have size – such as Iwamori – have some really unreasonable power/toughness ratios. Very few of these guys don’t evade, and the best on the scale of Big, Dumb and Ugly – Rorix and the Darksteel Colossus – don’t fart around with card advantage. Rorix – through haste – and the Darksteel Colossus – through indestructability – get their licks in even against opponents who would protect themselves from creature onslaughts not by blocking, but by killing things.
So there, Devin. There’s a little more thought on the matter; you want to make Green fatties better? It’s not just about making Spectral Force and Quagnoth. It’s about creatures that deform the board by their presence. It’s about a creature that dodges removal, blockers, and gets through to the face two or three times. They can do it by exhaustion (Eternal Dragon, Higure, Ink-Eyes), or they can do it by slapping on keywords like nobody’s business (Akroma). If you want to improve fatties in general, you have to take the whole package. You know what makes a good fat creature, you’re just so rampantly terrified of printing them in Green.
Now, nobody enjoys anything quite as much as a good list; there’s a whole torrent of creatures, a history of cards and decks. The forums will invariably alight with people mentioning (say) Stampeding Serow, or other creatures that were, in fact, Pretty Good. I don’t think I’ve missed overmuch here; if there are any glaring exceptions, I’d like to hear them. Let’s reminisce, shall we?
Hugs and Kisses
Talen Lee
talen at dodo dot com dot au
* Vintage players, feel free to correct. Was there something before this?