The DCI has done a great job of cleaning the detritus from the restricted list that had accumulated over the years. In the past two years, Berserk, Fork, Braingeyser, Hurkyl’s Recall, and many other cards were unrestricted, reflecting the fact that they are no longer the power cards they were eight years before.
However, the Restricted List has taken years to accumulate and there is still stuff on the list that arguably shouldn’t be. In this article, I’m going to look at the six most questionable cards on the list and examine the pros and cons of unrestriction.
Stroke Of Genius
Stroke of Genius is perhaps the most obvious card to unrestrict. Braingeyser and Stroke were essentially in the same boat. The only play they saw in the last two years was as singletons in multicolor control decks. The advent of GroAtog and multiple Misdirections in various Type One decks in early 2003 wiped Braingeyser and Stroke off the face of the format.
Why It Should be Unrestricted
The first and most compelling reason it shouldn’t be restricted is because it will not see play. Skeletal Scrying has taken over the function of the “draw X cards” card drawing engine. Skeletal Scrying is cheaper than both Braingeyser and Stroke of Genius, and is an instant as well. Stroke of Genius used to see play back in the Tolarian Academy days as a win condition…. But with cards like Tendrils of Agony and Brain Freeze in the format, Stroke of Genius will never see play as a win condition in T1 combo again. In my opinion, people will play Hunting Pack before they pick up Stroke with Candelabra of Tawnos, Capsize, and Tolarian Academy (or Grim Monolith and Power Artifact) again.
Why It Should Stay Restricted
I’ve got to be honest; it’s very hard to muster up a good argument here. I suppose there is a remote chance that someday, somehow, someone might come up with a deck that could use multiple Stroke of Genius. Probably the most realistic answer is that there is so much mana production in the format that Stroke could be really broken in combination with Metalworker and Krark-Clan Ironworks. Probably not, though.
Mind Over Matter (a.k.a. MOM)
Mind Over Matter costs 2UUUU. It was once used with Academy as follows:
- Tap Academy for 10+ blue mana.
- Play Mind Over Matter.
- Discard a card to untap Tolarian Academy.
- Do this a few times, and then play Braingeyser or Stroke of Genius to make your opponent draw their deck and then die.
Why It Should be Unrestricted
This card is worse than Twiddle. Seriously. Twiddle has synergy with the Storm mechanic while this card costs a blatantly unreasonable UUUU plus two colorless.
The fundamental problem with MOM is that Tolarian Academy is past its day. Most Type One combo decks don’t actually need Academy anymore to win; why would you need Academy in a format with Yawgmoth’s Will? Yawgmoth’s Will generates far more mana, and much quicker than one can with Tolarian Academy. I’d rather just replay my Dark Rituals and Black Lotus and Lion’s-Eye Diamond then tap Academy, which will usually give you no more than four or five mana at most.
It’s not like MOM would be good with Replenish or Academy Rector, either. Academy Rector combo finds Yawgmoth’s Bargain. There are few cards that say “I win now” like Yawgmoth’s Bargain. And Replenish decks would prefer just to return a good card into play like Saproling Burst with Pandemonium to win the game.
Why It Should Stay Restricted
MOM produces a powerful effect; untapping Metalworker or Tolarian Academy isn’t something to be laughed at. However, there are much better cards to use for that same effect. Metalworker and Staff of Domination can generate infinite mana pretty quickly. And Animate Dead on Worldgorger Dragon actually generates infinite mana as well.
Voltaic Key
Voltaic Key was used in the day of “four Mana Vaults and four Mana Crypt” Vintage. It helped generate more mana. It was also used in Extended to untap Metalworker – and can be used in Type One for that effect as well.
Why It Should Stay Restricted
If I go “Mishra’s Workshop, Metalworker,” on turn 2, with two Voltaic Keys in hand, I can generate twenty-six mana:
Turn 1:
Workshop, Metalworker (five cards in hand)
Turn 2:
Draw a card. Tap Metalworker (assuming all six cards are artifacts):
Reveal six artifacts for twelve mana. Play Voltaic Key, with eleven mana remaining. Untap Metalworker, with ten mana remaining. Tap Metalworker for ten mana after revealing five artifacts; you now have twenty mana.
Play Voltaic Key. Now you have nineteen. Tap Key to untap Metalworker. Now you have eighteen. Tap Metalworker and reveal four artifacts for twenty-six mana.
Generating that kind of mana is pretty strong and can certainly be abused. In addition, it will randomly be able to generate you mana off of a Mana Vault or Grim Monolith.
Why It Should Be Unrestricted
Voltaic Key is the least-played card on the Restricted List. It virtually never sees play and a good chunk of people who play Vintage probably don’t even know for sure what it does.
Here is the data on Voltaic Key’s appearance in top 8s for 2004:
Jan. | Feb. | Mar. | Apr. | May. | Jun. | Jul. | Aug. | Sep. |
0.2 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.2 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
In the example given above about generating twenty-six mana, one has to ask: What is the marginal difference between even having a Voltaic Key in hand at all – or between the first and the second? Without the second Voltaic Key, I could still generate twenty mana. And without a Voltaic Key at all, I could generate twelve.
What I’m asking is whether the difference between twelve mana, or twenty, or twenty-six is really that big of a deal. With twelve mana, you can hard-cast Darksteel Colossus. More likely, you’re going to want to drop a bunch of prison parts like Trinisphere, Tangle Wire, and Smokestack. Twelve mana is pretty much as much mana as you are likely to be able to use or likely to want to use. And certainly twenty would give you enough to do whatever you want.
In terms of its use with Grim Monolith or Mana Vault, Voltaic Key becomes stronger over the course of several turns because you can use the Monolith and Vault and then untap it, making the Key into a Sol Ring of sorts and taking away the drawback from those two cards. But in most cases, you don’t really need that much mana and those decks will have enough mana to do what they need to do so long as they have survived to this point.
The Voltaic Key question is a close one – and there is good reason to keep it restricted just because it has the potential to be degenerate. However, that potential has a very low chance of actually being met.
Dream Halls
Now we are in the realm of broken cards. If you’ve ever seen Zvi’s Type Two deck:
Zvi Mowshowitz
TurboZvi
The Dojo test deck, e-mailed April 9, 1998
9 Island
4 Crystal Vein
4 Svyelunite Temple
4 Ancient Tomb
4 Lotus Petal
4 Dream Halls
4 Intuition
4 Meditate
4 Sift
4 Ancestral Memories
4 Mana Severance
4 Memory Lapse
1 Counterspell
1 Impulse
1 Lobotomy
1 Inspiration
3 Gaea’s Blessing
Sideboard:
4 Adarkar Wastes
4 Abeyance
4 Hydroblast
1 Dismiss
1 Inspiration
1 Lobotomy
The idea was to recycle Inspiration to deck your opponent in a single turn after resolving Dream Halls.
Why It Should Stay Restricted
Dream Halls produces an enormously powerful effect. The potential for abuse is definitely there and without a mana constraint holding one back, and with the huge card pool of the format, it is very likely that one should win the turn one resolves Dream Halls.
Why It Should Be Unrestricted
Although Dream Halls may well cause you to win when it resolves, the realities of deck construction are ugly. First of all, if you are using lots of overcosted spells to abuse Dream Halls, like Temporal Cascade, you are going to be holding lots of dead cards until you get it to resolve. Therefore, getting Dream Halls to resolve is the trick.
Unlike Doomsday, which I think was a much more dangerous card to unrestrict than Dream Halls, Dream Halls can’t be cast off a simple Dark Ritual. It needs not only three colorless, but also UU. That’s the problem. 4U would be even easier to cast than 3UU. Getting UU basically means that you need two lands that produce the blue mana, and likely three so that you can use the other to play Dark Ritual.
A Dream Halls deck would undoubtedly have a Storm finisher because that is the most logical win condition – but there are much easier ways to win with Tendrils than having to resolve a five-mana, double-colored spell.
I think another fundamental problem is that Dream Halls combo is so much worse than basically 95% of the combo decks out there. Just as an example, Academy Rector/Cabal Therapy combo isn’t even played anymore because Academy Rector is too expensive. What does that tell you about Dream Halls? Moreover, Dream Halls combo is probably not at all faster than turn three, which makes it slower than Belcher, Dragon, MeanDeath, Doomsday, and even Rector. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?
Time Spiral
Now I know we will be getting into the controversial cards – as if Dream Halls wasn’t controversial enough!
Why It Should Be Unrestricted
Time Spiral is not very good in a combo that that is attempting to win as quickly as possible. For a combo deck that wants to win on turn one or two, running Time Spiral over the unrestricted Diminishing Returns is nothing less than foolish.
I designed a deck called “Draw7” to abuse Diminishing Returns. Take a look:
4 Gemstone Mine
4 City of Brass
2 Glimmervoid
1 Tolarian Academy
Acceleration:
1 Fastbond
1 Crop Rotation
4 Dark Ritual
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
1 Lotus Petal
1 Chrome Mox
1 Mox Diamond
1 Black Lotus
1 Lion’s-Eye Diamond
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
Setting up/Protecting the Combo:
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will (they are Awseom111!!one)
1 Ancestral
Draw 7s Extraordinaire:
4 Diminishing Returns
1 Tinker
1 Memory Jar
1 Windfall
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Timetwister
Borken!!!Pwned!!!
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Necropotence
1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
Tutors:
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
(no Mystical Tutor or Demonic Consultation)
Finishers:
2 Tendrils of Agony
This deck would often have a hand like this:
Elvish Spirit Guide, Mox Pearl, City of Brass, Glimmervoid, Diminishing Returns, Brainstorm, Force of Will.
Do you see the problem with Time Spiral? It is slllloooww. In order to maximize the effect of Time Spiral, it basically assumes one of two things:
a) you have Tolarian Academy in play
b) you have three lands in play.
If you have Tolarian Academy in play, lucky you. It’s good, but you can win without it.
If you have three lands in play, that means its likely turn three. That’s too slow for a combo deck unless you are running both Duress and Force of Will and a lot of basic lands.
The problem is that six is really just too much to pay for that effect – especially with UU in the casting cost. There will be lots of times when you just can’t find that six mana in a combo deck. That’s why the other six casting cost spells in the deck are Mind’s Desire and Yawgmoth’s Bargain – both of them broken enough that you should never lose after resolving them.
You might ask: “Isn’t Time Spiral free?” Time Spiral is rarely ever free. Even with Academy, you are likely going to have to pay two more colorless to play it.
Why It Should Stay Restricted
Even though Time Spiral may be objectively worse than Diminishing Returns, there are a few combo decks in the environment that are not purely speed decks. The Perfect Storm, or TPS, is designed to win around turn three of four and is particularly effective against Control.
TPS (The Perfect Storm)
David Beduzzi
5th place, 2004-07-02 GenCon Barcelona
2 Island
2 Swamp
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Underground Sea
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mox Pearl
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mana Vault
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain
1 Lotus Petal
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Chain of Vapor
4 Duress
4 Dark Ritual
1 Mystical Tutor
2 Tendrils of Agony
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
1 Cunning Wish
1 Rebuild
1 Time Walk
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Necropotence
1 Timetwister
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Windfall
1 Time Spiral
I could see this deck running two or even maybe three Time Spirals. I guess one of the important questions we need to ask is: is that a problem? This deck isn’t winning very quickly – and if it is using Time Spiral on turn 3 or 4, maybe that is fair.
The same thing goes for anyone who would dare to bring back High Tide combo. Ladies and Gentlemen, High Tide combo isn’t going to be very fast. But it might be fun.
Mind Twist
I know what you are thinking: “He’s crazy!” “Are you nuts? You can’t unrestrict Mind Twist – that card is ridiculous!”
Now that you have that off your chest, are you ready to address this issue rationally for the moment?
(Editor’s Note: Stephen wasn’t completely sure if anyone was ready to discuss it rationally – or at least that the Mind Twist issue wouldn’t overshadow the rest of the article. I convinced him to leave this section in, so if you have a beef with it or think he should have gone into more detail, blame me – The Ferrett)
Why It Should Stay Restricted
Mind Twist was so powerful, it was banned – not restricted – for five years. Mind Twist is one of those cards that can randomly end games if drawn and played with acceleration on turn 1. It also has great synergy with Mana Drain and can be Drained into to empty your opponent’s hand. Mind Twist also adds slightly to the randomness of the format. If a deck that would normally run 1 decides to run 2, then that slightly increases the chances for just a random acceleration draw that ends with turn one Mind Twist.
Why Mind Twist Should be Unrestricted
98% of the time, Duress is a superior card. According to Phil Stanton’s statistics, here is the occurrence of Mind Twist and Duress in top 8 tournament data:
Jan. | Feb. | Mar. | Apr. | May. | Jun. | Jul. | Aug. | Sep. |
1.4 | 1.4 | 1.8 | 1.8 | 2.0 | 2.1 | 1.7 | 0.8 | 1.4 |
So for all of 2003 and for most of this year, there have been about one or two copies of Mind Twist in top 8s. If you multiply that by four for the purposes of comparing it with Duress, then that is four or eight copies. Of course, you wouldn’t multiply it by four – because the marginal utility of addition Mind Twists drops dramatically. Mind Twist isn’t a card that gets better with each additional copy – like, say, Doomsday or Necropotence does.
Now look at Duress:
3.8 | 7.0 | 7.2 | 6.4 | 7.0 | 10.0 | 7.3 | 9.2 | 10.6 |
Whoa! That’s right; Duress is one of the most-played cards in the format. Every time you are building a control deck and you want Mind Twist, you are going to have to ask yourself whether you’d rather have Mind Twist or Duress in that slot. If you are fanning open your opening hand, you are very likely to be happy to see Duress.
Mind Twist is a late-game bomb in Control mirrors – played when you want to seal the deal, and only when you have control. Remember, it can backfire if they have Misdirections.
Mind Twist is occasionally played on turn 1 for a few cards, but such hands are rare occurrence and risky. If you go, Mox, Sol Ring, Black Lotus, Land and play Mind Twist you’ll likely have only one or two cards left in your hand and be unable to recover if they have Force of Will.
Mind Twist has become an increasingly risky play. Against a deck like Dragon, you put your life in your hands by making them discard a Worldgorger Dragon. Against Goblin Welder decks (which are proliferating the format), you put your life in your own hands when you play Mind Twist. Making them discard Mindslaver may be doing them a favor.
Mind Twist isn’t even showing up as much in the one deck that it had found permanent residence with: Four-Color Control. Zherbus and other Four Color Control players have cut Mind Twist to make room for other cards they feel are more important in the metagame.
Combo will likely never play Mind Twist. For the same amount of mana, you can get far more card advantage with something like Wheel of Fortune or Necropotence. Duress will continue to be played far more frequently with Mind Twist.
Moreover, Mind Twist is no longer the card it once was for two more important reasons. First of all, Type One is a lot faster. Decks can recover far more quickly because they are so efficiently designed to win topdeck wars. Secondly, and most importantly, almost no one played with Brainstorm before 2003. The printing of Fetchlands has made Brainstorm a far more powerful card and the result is that decks are more prepared to beat discard strategies.
Discard strategies are never used in Type One anymore, because they’re just too risky. The graveyard is such a powerful place to have cards with cards like Goblin Welder and Yawgmoth’s Will so heavily played. Moreover, discard strategies just aren’t that successful with cards like Misdirection around as well. It’s much safer to play with Duress or Unmask to take the best card in their hand, or Cabal Therapy to combo with Academy Rector.
However, the whole discussion about why Mind Twist could be unrestricted hinges on the assumption that no new “Mind Twist” deck will emerge to specifically break Mind Twist and be a strong contender. If such a deck could be built, and there is a real risk that it could, then Mind Twist should arguably stay where it is.
Final Thoughts
As a disclaimer, I’m not saying that any of these cards should definitively be unrestricted. The idea is to stimulate discussion on the issue – an issue that is of concern to most Type One players.
I have just tried to present the case for why these cards should be unrestricted or why they shouldn’t. These cards are the cards that I believe are the arguable cases. They are the cards on the restricted list which aren’t quite as powerful or distorting as the cards that definitely deserve status.
Stephen Menendian
Steve dot menendian at gmail dot com