I’m currently sitting in the common room of Beebe Hall at Wellesley having been essentially snowed in for two days. I hope to God I make it to MIT for St. Patrick’s Day, because there is no way I am going to linger in this hellish summer-camp-like hole for twenty-four more hours.
Wellesley isn’t bad, mind you. It just doesn’t feel like a real place. I have plenty of experience with all-girls colleges, but – okay, this hall has a “Pirate Theme.” That should tell you something already. But people actually do pirate cheers, and campaign for campus elections with pictures of them all decked out in pirate gear. They have pirate-themed parties, one of which I just attended. I mean.
So I missed the PTQ I traveled up here to attend, again due to said Heaps of Snow. All of my potential rides weren’t willing to venture forth to Milford with three entire inches of visibility, so I’m left without a Q this season. Alex Kim, I suppose, will be left to carry on the Memphis Legacy. Cody Peck basically thinks that Kim’s better than I am now, and I haven’t beaten AKim in a sanctioned match in at least two months, so maybe there’s some truth to that. LOL. I do think that Mono-G deck is actually good, especially with more Swords of Fire and Ice, but no time to dwell on that at this point. Richard and I have a PTQ to prepare for in Little Rock – Limited specialists that we are and everything – so time to leave Extended behind and re-acquaint ourselves with the combat phase.
The season having come to an end, however, I thought it’d be a good time to take a look at what actually makes a good Constructed season. While this particular Extended season hasn’t been my favorite, it’s still been a fun and healthy format by and large. All the different viable decks make a myriad of strategies not only acceptable to play but part of the very nature of the format, influencing how people playtest and what types of threats any “rogue” deck must keep in mind.
I’ll go ahead and say that I don’t know the answer to the question I just posed. I have no idea why some seasons are fun and others seem like trudging through mile after mile of murky bog water, or track after track of a “Hawthorne Heights” CD. Furthermore, “fun” is obviously defined in different ways by different people. I love Extended, for example, and have enjoyed every season I’ve played since the format’s inception. I especially love broken formats, assuming the card pool is still large enough to allow innovation (which is how I made Top 8 at multiple PTQs with pure White Weenie in a field full of turn 3 or 4 Metalworker, Gilded Lotus, KCI-fueled combo kills). Other people hate it, and can’t wait for the season to end. But judging by the formats people play for fun – cube draft, Type 4, Five-Color – I think it’s fair to say that people love doing powerful things in general, so long as they are not so powerful that they make a format monotonous. Those casual formats are dominated by huge creatures and ridiculous mana engines that allow for repeated “big” effects. Good Extended formats tend to have a lot of these. It’s generally possible to do broken things, but it’s also very easy to do something about it. If it wasn’t, TEPS would be the dominant deck in the format.
***ASIDE***
Why is Planar Chaos the first set in forever to have a reasonably powerful card that is capable of producing more than one mana in and of itself? I’m talking about Hunting Wilds. These are the types of cards that allow for “big turns” without being Grim-Monolith powerful. I’d love to see more Thran Dynamos and Worn Powerstones and Explosive Veggies and the like. They are at the core of “investment” strategies that seem like they ought to be viable in a game based largely on resource management. I might be in the minority, but I just felt this was odd.
Also, why aren’t there that many decks anymore that are based around a ridiculous enchantment? When I first started playing, Oath, Pebbles, and Survival were prime Extended strategies defined by a particular card, and a few years later, Fires showed up. Now, there are basically no global enchantments that ever get played ever (except Glare, which is basically a utility spell in Standard, and Opposition in second-tier 1.x decks. No, Worship doesn’t count). That Divining Top deck with Artificer’s Intuition was one of the first examples of such a deck in years, and it hardly ever caught on. Anybody know whether this was a conscious decision by Wizards or not?
**END ASIDE**
On the opposite end of the spectrum are Block formats, which I personally loathe. Every Block deck that winds up being remotely good – except for Ravnica block decks, which I absolutely loved – seems either like a terrible pile of cards, or a preconstructed deck that Wizards built years in advance (back when they did that sort of thing – Odyssey, Onslaught, Mirrodin, etc). Ravnica was amazing, but that format received no support. Aww.
The thing about Block is that there are only a limited number of answers to the questions that might be asked, and pretty much everyone knows what the questions and answers are when the set is released. Furthermore, if you plan on answering the questions properly, you wind up with really awkward lists. Take, for example, this deck (which may or may not be any good at all):
4 Prismatic Lens
4 Weatherseed Totem
4 Hunting Wilds
4 Search for Tomorrow
4 Harmonize
4 Citanul Woodreaders
3 Stonewood Invocation
2 Timbermare
4 Call of the Herd
3 Wurmcalling
4 Desert
1 Pendelhaven (the board)
19 Forest
The board would be largely transformative if there end up being good aggressive decks. But the idea was that I had to be able to beat the Damnation decks, and this was the least awkward way I could figure out how to do that. Get a ton of mana and activate Weatherseed Totem without having a bunch of creatures that would unblank removal spells. It’d be really tight to do that with Stonewood Invocation mana open, and since Totem All-In isn’t always viable, I put in a bunch of cards that weren’t loose against Damnation. Stuffy Doll is a problem against a lot of green decks, so I had to be resistant to that. Everything else is in there to make the mana-ramping productive, and Call of the Herds / Horned Turtles can generally help out against the substandard Block aggro decks.
Like I said, probably the worst. But the deck certainly feels like something I’d make at around five years of age, which is why I generally hate block formats. Standard always seems even worse, for some reason, but that’s probably because I want every Standard season to be like Urza’s-Masques or Masques-Invasion, which were basically ideal formats. They had a ton of diversity and a ton of power, but were quickly eclipsed by the dark ages of Odyssey, Onslaught, and Affinity, and I don’t think Standard has fully recovered even now.
Okay, so. A good Constructed format allows for powerful effects that can be disrupted with the correct answers, without those answers being so overwhelming that the powerful strategies become bad again. At the same time, the format needs to be deep enough that all the powerful strategies aren’t doing the exact same thing. That was one of the issues with Extended last season: three separate decks were abusing Life from the Loam with cycling lands as their primary card-drawing engine. In Post-Mirrodin Extended, everyone was using broken artifacts to produce broken amounts of mana, and it doesn’t really matter what they were doing with it. I know I cited my White Weenie example earlier as a format I loved, but that doesn’t mean a format is good; maindecking four Serenities shouldn’t ever really be a viable strategy.
Along the same lines, the format needs to be such that you can’t disrupt all the big strategies by doing the same thing. Of course, people have to adapt, but that’s one of the problems about the current Standard: Dralnu.dec can just counter everything. Psychatog decks had to evolve last Extended season because the Life from the Loam engine made it such that it was impossible to have enough counterspells every turn. Eventually Ichorid and Tooth and Nail came along and made counterspelling an obsolete strategy entirely, but the point is that each of these decks does something completely different. Similarly, Withered Wretch was so annoying last season because it was good against every deck, which meant that all of these underpowered Rock decks still managed to pick up wins against unprepared players on the strength of one card.
In the Wretch’s case, it’s not a big problem because it’s relatively easy to adapt to beat Wretch. But cards like Winter Orb (and I’d argue Chalice of the Void two Extended seasons ago, and Trinisphere in Vintage after the unrestriction of Workshop) make it so that it’s impossible to deal with being disrupted no matter what strategy you choose to employ.
Now, ideally you want some overlap, because otherwise metagaming just becomes a tedious rock-paper-scissors exercise where you pack the graveyard hate only to go up against the, I don’t know, Ritual deck and lose two matches straight. But you don’t want the format to be such that bad decks can throw in four of a certain hoser card and have matches be predicated on whether they draw that card or not.
Finally, and this was the biggest problem with this past Extended format, you want a lot of diversity, but not so much diversity that it becomes impossible to playtest a format. I am a playtest fanatic, and am probably one of the very view people that actively enjoys the process. But it’s impossible to build thirteen completely different decks and know how matchups are supposed to go against every one. I’d say having seven or eight Tier 1 decks (full of Tier 2 cards, as per present Wizards design ideology) with at least two overlapping strategies would be ideal, assuming the card pool was deep enough to support some degree of innovation within those confines.
With that in mind, how was this past Extended season?
Well, it’s pretty hard to argue that it wasn’t powerful. We had several decks that could completely lock down the game as early as turn 2, and several decks that could potentially combo kill as early as that as well (and almost always by turn 4). We had ridiculous card-drawing, cheap deck manipulation, and more than one game-defining engine. Furthermore, most of the decks were doing these broken things in completely different ways – from recycling lands to casting Fact or Fictions and Gifts Ungivens to abusing the ridiculous power of Divining Top to attacking for 14 on turn 3 to etc etc etc.
At the same time, there were a diversity of solutions. TEPS, the “most powerful deck Raphael Levy has ever played,” was hardly a contender by the end of the season due to the ubiquitous presence of Duress, Therapy, Orim’s Chant, and nonbasic land hate. Aggro Loam survived in a large part due to the fact that even through Tormod’s Crypt it could still blow up the world and cast Demonic Tutors. Incidentally, this progression also reflects another fact about a healthy format: it evolves over time as people find better solutions and metagames ebb and flow between particular preferences.
So there’s the diversity issue. How many decks could have been considered Tier 1 at some point in the season?
Boros
TEPS
TrinketAngel
Flow Rock
Affinity
Flow Deck Wins
Balancing Tings
Aggro-Loam
TrinketTog
U/W Tron
Tenacious Tron
Levy.dec
Haterator
That’s to say nothing of Opposition, Goblins, or even the Artificer’s Intuition deck that took home a blue envelope! [And we had an Enduring Ideal deck take a slot in a 100+ player PTQ in jolly old England… madness! – Craig.]
Now, even if you accept Tenacious Tron and U/W Tron as a single entity, and likewise with the Flow decks, that’s still eleven completely different decks that a player is responsible for playtesting against. That’s simply not realistic! Even discarding any desire to innovate a new deck within a format, the given player who wanted to understand a generic netdeck well enough to play it on a given weekend would need to play 220 games of Magic – ten pre- and post-sideboard against all the major matchups. That’s to achieve a bare minimum of competence, and that assumes you can find a person or combination of persons who are willing to play against the same deck all… day… long.
Of course, I have no idea how to solve this problem. I would never have the audacity to become productive; I just like to b*tch about things and hope they get taken care of. Hopefully, though, somebody does, and anyway I’d like to know what y’all think of my analysis of the format. How do you define a good format, and what types of things do you enjoy about playing Constructed? Let me know.
Coming soon: a thorough analysis of the “Are IDs somehow immoral?” debate.
Zac
a.k.a. Chats