Recently, there have been a few different decks to catch my attention, trying to pass themselves off as new archetypes despite being just slightly different from already existing or well-known decks. So today, I’m going to pull a JP Meyer and tell everyone that they’re wrong, and I’m right. (JP quotes sprinkled in to make sure you at least”heh” a couple of times.)
This issue first came up for me a while ago, when I was first making a table of the average percent of Top 8 decks that each archetype made up. I realized that some of my labeling (in accordance with what people were calling the decks elsewhere) was making things too complicated. Food Chain Goblins and Seething Gobvantage, for instance, shouldn’t be listed separately. One has an extra color, but it’s a minor splash, and the Food Chains are the same function as the Seething Songs.
JP Meyer:””But but but but what if everyone is running 4 maindeck Chill and and and” Shut The Hell Up.”
IsoControl was another example of a deck that didn’t need to be listed separately. Initially, there was much hullabaloo about how you needed to redesign your control deck with more instants to be”Scepter-friendly.” Horse hockey. The card differences weren’t amazing; most were even cards that were otherwise seen as okay choices for a non-Scepter deck. Of course it played differently, but it was still just 4C Control (the deck formerly known as”Keeper”) with some sticks in it.
For an example of how I’m not just forcing every deck playing the same colors onto the same line of my tables, I list Goblin Sligh and Sligh separately. They usually have a significant overlap, but the tribal focus instead of the burn focus makes me call them different things.
Workshops seem to bring out the craziest of this type of behavior by far. Here’s some example names which I have been trying to winnow down to manageable size:
Ducktape
Stax
Trinistax
Workshop Slavery
MUD
Welder MUD
Donkey Staxx
Stacker
Stacker 2
Stacker 3
Tools ‘n Tubbies
Teletubbies
The Man Show
7/10 Split
Big Fat Deck
See that? I’ll bet most of the veteran Type One players even had to think about”Donkey Staxx” (Trinistax with Sundering Titan), because as part of my crusade against frivolous overnaming, I just called it”Trinistax” in my June listing of the Kalamazoo tournament – its original name preserved in carbonite only on one post on TMD. (Where by carbonite I mean”only a dozen or so people could arbitrarily edit it at will”.)
Ducktape was a Stax ancestor, and I don’t even know what made it different because it was before my time. Stax and Trinistax are the same thing, except Trinistax is more descriptive (when Trinisphere is used) so I list that. MUD and Welder MUD get put on the same line for obvious reasons (though as with FCG / Gobvantage, I’ll mention both, just with a slash in between). Version numbers are bad in Magic, so all Stackers are the same. Now we’re down to:
Workshop Slavery
Tools ‘n Tubbies
Teletubbies
The Man Show
7/10 Split
Big Fat Deck
How many of these decks are different? Teletubbies is a recognized TnT forerunner without the Survival of the Fittest. Does that make it a different deck?
Hilariously (at least for TMD insiders), I will now link to a Rakso article with a Teletubbies decklist I couldn’t find anywhere else in almost ten whole seconds on Google. Initially I didn’t think I would say this, but looking at the list, it’s obvious to me that using Force of Will/Mana Drain and the Juggernaut/Su-Chi dynamic duo in the same deck deserves its own name. Fine – that deck hasn’t been relevant for years anyway, precisely because the combination of Mana Drain and Workshop has never been a really”Hot Hot Hot” move.
TnT is dramatically different from pretty much everything, thanks to the Survival of the Fittest engine, so I won’t explain why that stays separate. Workshop Slavery gets name distinction from Control Slavery since, despite the huge overlap, they have totally different mana bases and engine cards that change the goals of the deck.
JP Meyer:”Oh no! A new card came out!”
The last couple are the most interesting examples of what I mean when I refer to overnaming. Big Fat Deck actually predates 7/10 Split, and here’s a listing of the parts that overlap and don’t overlap. (BFD list from here, 7/10 list from the SCG Decks to Beat. Yes, I know they’re not perfectly up to date, but hush, I’m making a point.)
Both
4 Goblin Welder
2 Triskelion
3 Sundering Titan
4 Chalice of the Void
1 Tinker
4 Thirst of Knowledge
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Memory Jar
8 SoLoMoxCrypt
1 Mana Vault
4 Mishra’s Workshop
2 Ancient Tomb
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Shivan Reef
BFD
2 Triskelion
4 Serum Powder
4 Trinisphere
1 Time Walk
4 Wasteland
1 Strip Mine
4 Volcanic Island
4 Brainstorm
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Shattering Pulse
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Timetwister
1 Wheel of Fortune
4 Gilded Lotus
1 Gemstone Mine
2 Glimmervoid
2 City of Brass
At first glance, a twenty-card difference makes me look like a madman to say that they’re the same. What’s important is which twenty cards are different, as opposed to the forty core cards which overlap. I put the non-overlap cards in a specific order such that you can see their counterparts from the other deck. Memnarch + Duplicant is not significantly different from two Triskelions. Brainstorm and Serum Powder serve the same draw-smoothing purpose, though people will quibble for pages of posts about how one or the other is better.
The closest things to structural differences are that BFD is much more into disruption (Trinisphere + Wasteland is pretty obvious synergy, I think) while 7/10 Split has more explosiveness built in – it was in fact designed as a fix of Meandeck’s Workshop Slavery by Team Short Bus. But look again at the forty-card overlap. The two decks have the same draw engine and the same focal creatures (Titan and Welder), in addition to the same boatload of accelerants. They have the same gameplan, with the slight differences forced by their non-overlapping cards pushing BFD to be more controlling and 7/10 to end the game nownownow. In Standard W/u Control, just because you run March of the Machines / Mycosynth Lattice doesn’t mean you’re all sexy and have a new archetype; it means you’re playing a variant.
So I treat them as the same archetype, and list them as 7/10 because that was the first deck to hit the Top 8s, as well as being less annoying (subjective) and more descriptive (there’s sooooo many decks that have fat creatures in them; the BFD name is meaningless).
The last case I’m really getting into in this article is The Man Show. To me, it is more appropriately labeled”Golden Stacker” – a variant. Let’s do the run down.
Both
4 Mishra’s Workshop
4 Wasteland
1 Strip Mine
8 SoLoMoxCrypt
4 Juggernaut
3 Su-Chi
1 Triskelion
2 Goblin Welder
3 Trinisphere
1 Time Walk
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Tinker
Stacker (from June Castricum)
4 Volcanic Island
4 Shivan Reef
4 Metalworker
1 Masticore
1 Su-Chi
2 Goblin Welder
2 Lightning Greaves
4 Thirst for Knowledge
1 Timetwister
1 Wheel of fortune
1 Memory Jar
3 Tangle Wire
Man Show
4 City of Brass
4 Gemstone Mine
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Grim Monolith
1 Razormane Masticore
1 Darksteel Colossus
1 Duplicant
1 Karn, Silver Golem
1 Triskelion
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Burning Wish
1 Trinisphere
3 Crucible of Worlds
3 Chains of Mephistopheles
1 Swords of Plowshares
Now this is a twenty-eight-card difference, even crazier than the last comparison. Stick with me. The key focus of both decks is quick deployment of four-to-six-mana artifact creatures that will win quickly. Man Show has considerable refinements over older versions of Stacker, because Eric Miller figured out that he can in fact support several colors, and that Metalworker is superfluous. In the past, I’ve seen Stacker in flavors of Monobrown, U/Brown, and U/R/Brown. The main difference here is in what cards are selected for the disruption base because more colors are available, not in the parts of the deck that make it identifiable as a certain archetype.
JP Meyer: (in the”What color should be added to make Suicide Black better?” thread)”I’m not sure what I’d add, but I’d definitely cut Black.”
My comparison above broke the differences down as mana, men/helpers, draw/search, and disruption. Man Show shifts a little from drawing to disrupting, primarily to create more synergy with Chains of Mephistopheles (a card that was waiting for a deck, and may have found a mate here). Crucible takes Tangle Wire’s spots (and arguably belongs in the Castricum Stacker list, except that it wasn’t legal yet at the time). Most of the non-overlap, in other words, is solely due to adding colors rather than changing the goals of the deck.
jpmeyer: oh man you are so reverting to the bd days
jpmeyer: HOLY SH**
jpmeyer: 1 NEW CARD IN A DECK
jpmeyer: OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
Smmenen: w/e
Smmenen: the deck is functionally different
Smmenen: with brainstorm
Smmenen: it is terrible without it
Smmenen: absolute garbage
Smmenen: so it is a huge advancement
Smmenen: and its all ME
I’ll close with the disclaimer that this article isn’t about diminishing any particular innovation, it’s about crediting them the most appropriate way. Rather than insisting on a new archetype name every time a new card comes out or a different color is added, instead we should just call it what it is: a variant. I think the root of this is that people want to create”new deck” or”play something rogue”. I, as an impartial bystander (read: jerk) am bursting the bubble. Enjoy the clarity of consistent naming.
jpmeyer: the germans are insane. i build a deck, they make it b0rken
jpmeyer: they’re like basf
jpmeyer: we don’t make the tings, we make them savager
jpmeyer: we don’t make the mise, we make it gassier
jpmeyer: we don’t make the beats, we make them sicker
jpmeyer: at basf we don’t make a lot of the things you use
jpmeyer: we make a lot of the things you use better
Philip Stanton
prstanto at uiuc.edu
Moderator on TheManaDrain.com