First off, I am going to say that I don’t think that Crucible of Worlds should be restricted right now. I just want to make sure to get that out of the way nice and early. I also want to level a formal outcry against the top 8 of GenCon. That top 8 was totally illegitimate, as it did not consist of 17 Four-Color Control decks, 9 Fish decks, and 6 GroAtog decks. In all seriousness, I thought that the top 8 was great and couldn’t have asked for a better one. I really hate how most North American top 8’s seem to consist entirely of Blue-based control decks and a random Blue-based aggro control deck or two. Instead, we got a really awesome set of decks that had all five of the overarching deck types and with decks running all sorts of different color combinations. Bravo and congratulations to everyone in the top 8.*
Now, on with the show!
Why should you play Crucible?
1) It protects you from land destruction
2) It allows you to reuse Wastelands
3) It allows you to reuse fetchlands
4) It provides a combo kill with Fastbond and either Zuran Orb or Glacial Chasm
5) It is an artifact, therefore can be played in any deck
6) It has a convenient casting cost, letting you easily cast it on turn 1 with Mishra’s Workshop or turn 2 with a Mox
More or less everyone is familiar with these uses. Furthermore, since most non-combo decks can usually utilize Crucible in a few of the aforementioned ways, it’s an easy fit into most decks. It’s this ubiquity that is part of the major outcry against Crucible.
First, who can’t use Crucible?
Off the top of my head, the only decks that would seem not to benefit from Crucible in any way are combo decks which usually don’t even bother playing more than one or two lands (or in Goblin Charbelcher’s case, don’t even run more than one or two lands,) and Ravager Affinity. Ravager Affinity usually runs plenty of lands (usually some combination of artifact lands, Glimmervoid, and maybe Mishra’s Workshop,) but has a problem in that it doesn’t run fetchlands, doesn’t run Wastelands, and can’t really fit either of them into their manabase because of how it needs to run a very specific manabase in order to facilitate Affinity and its many colors.
Randomly stuffing Crucible in stuff
First, the obvious ones:
Four Color Control
4 Flooded Strand
4 Wasteland
3 City of Brass
3 Underground Sea
2 Tundra
2 Volcanic Island
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Strip Mine
2 Crucible of Worlds
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Jet
1 Sol Ring
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
3 Cunning Wish
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Time Walk
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Fact or Fiction
3 Skeletal Scrying
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Demonic Tutor
3 Exalted Angel
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Balance
1 Fire / Ice
1 Gorilla Shaman
Workshop Prison (Kevin Cron, GenCon top 8)
2 Sundering Titan
4 Goblin Welder
4 Smokestack
4 Tangle Wire
4 Trinisphere
4 Crucible of Worlds
1 Ancestral Recall
3 Meditate
1 Tinker
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Balance
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Grim Monolith
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
1 Lotus Petal
1 Darksteel Ingot
3 Gemstone Mine
4 City of Brass
4 Mishra’s Workshop
1 Strip Mine
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Wasteland
Sideboard
3 Tsabo’s Web
2 Fire / Ice
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Triskelion
1 Mindslaver
3 Red Elemental Blast
2 Blue Elemental Blast
2 Tormod’s Crypt
I just tossed the Four Color Control list together (since there weren’t 4CC decks in the top 8 of GenCon for me to use here-while most people would consider this a bad sign for a deck, you also have to remember that it is forbidden to ever criticize 4CC) and there’s nothing particularly radical about it. As both of these decks already run a full complement of Wastelands and a fair amount of mana acceleration (well, a lot in Workshop’s case,) Crucible is a pretty fit – just the simple cuts of a Gorilla Shaman (replacing one mana denial card with another) and Mind Twist (replacing one late-game card with another) in 4CC and Tangle Wire in Workshop Prison. You can make similar painless cuts to add in Crucible in decks like Food Chain Goblins, Landstill, Workshop aggro, Fish, Madness, and so on.
Over at Meandeck, we tried some more funky approaches to stuffing Crucible in every deck:
Crucible Tog
5 Island
4 Polluted Delta
3 Underground Sea
2 Tropical Island
1 Strip Mine
1 Wasteland
1 Swamp
1 Library of Alexandria
5 Moxes
3 Crucible of Worlds
1 “Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring (because I don’t want to die to my own Crypt in a Crucible war)
3 Psychatog
4 Brainstorm
4 Accumulated Knowledge
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
3 Cunning Wish
3 Intuition
1 Time Walk
1 Ancestral Recall
3 Duress
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Demonic Tutor
The reason I gave this up wasn’t because of some banal**”Tog is dead” sentiments because so many people are playing Fish (which is less of a concern now that people are starting to come to the conclusion that this deck has trouble in fields that aren’t totally warped around Tog and 4CC) or mono-Red Fractured Loyalty decks. Rather, I was forced into going in one of two undesirable directions: if I ran four colors, I would open myself up to Crucible locks, but if I dropped down to three colors, I would have to leave out important sideboard cards like Berserk or Red Elemental Blast.
Four Color Control has the same problem that this deck has. It’s just chosen to hedge its bets with four colors and hope that its Crucibles will be enough to survive. In fact, 4CC probably has a bigger problem here, as this deck is almost entirely Blue-based and doesn’t need to juggle awkward casting costs like 2WW and XB along with UU. But hey, they’re not”awkward casting costs” or a”weakness to Crucible.” They’re”an immunity to Red Elemental Blast,” since of course, you can’t admit that these are problems with 4CC, because there are never ever any problems with 4CC.
Joking at the zealotry of the 4CC faithful aside-4CC is still a strong, very non-dead deck-it’s still foolish to discount 4CC’s (a polychromatic Blue-based control deck) vulnerability to Crucible which is at the same time considered a serious problem to Tog and Landstill (which are also polychromatic, Blue-based control decks.)
Breaking the Symmetry
One of the most common arguments that I’ve heard regarding why Crucible should not be restricted is that it isn’t a particularly hard card to counteract. There are plenty of artifact removal spells that only cost one to three mana and many of these are commonly played in Type 1 (Oxidize, Naturalize, Disenchant, Artifact Mutation, Rack and Ruin, blah blah blah.) Even if your opponent has Crucible/Wasteland or Crucible/Strip Mine going, you’ve still got the ability to break the lock with one of these. But since opposing Crucibles effectively counteract each other as well as counteracting any future Crucibles (unlike a removal spell,) often the best way to deal with Crucible is probably just to run your own.
So with everybody playing Crucible, it takes creativity to break the symmetry. Running maindeck artifact removal along with your Crucibles isn’t a particularly bad idea right now anyway. The GenCon top 8 did feature 24 Goblin Welders after all, so Crucible or not, you’ll still have plenty of targets. Fetchlands and lots of basics are another possibility. The first thing that I will say is that your single basic Island that you have to cast Cunning Wish against Blood Moon isn’t going to cut it here. Unlike Blood Moon, you won’t have any lands to tap, period. Instead, you’ll probably be able to run at most three colors, since you’ll need about five basic lands in your deck. Provided you have enough basics, you can start trying to fight Crucible/Wasteland by being able to actually accumulate enough lands to be able to make your deck function.
Creative Methods
The new Crucible Turboland decks that have been cropping up have a big advantage in the Crucible wars because of Exploration and Fastbond. Fastbond is obviously brutal, letting you dismantle your opponent’s entire board at once or allowing you to fetch out all of your lands. Exploration, while obviously less powerful, still completely breaks up the symmetry that opposing Crucibles have. Now, you can Wasteland one of your opponent’s lands while also replaying one of your own, allowing you to lock them while stopping their lock. You could also Wasteland twice, which also helps to remove the slow, grinding nature of the Crucible/Wasteland lock.
Root Maze, while not much of an answer to a Crucible stalemate, is a useful card for tightening the noose with Crucible. The two important effects here are the ability to stop Mox-fueled surges of mana and the ability to delay fetchlands. A crafty opponent could, for instance, keep a fetchland and a pair of Moxes in hand while he waits to draw his Rack and Ruin and then unload the four cards on you all at once. Your Root Maze would give you the opportunity to Wasteland his fetchland and say, Gorilla Shaman his Moxes before he could ever use them.
You can also shoot for more effective or efficient Crucibles than your opponent. Intuition is a standout here. You can find your Crucibles with Intuition, and if you draw one after you draw a Crucible, you can use your Intuition to set up Crucible by fetching out cards like Wasteland or fetchlands. Also, with Fastbond and Crucible in play (meaning primarily for Turboland decks,) Intuition for Wasteland, Barbarian Ring, and Glacial Chasm is a kill. You play out the Wasteland, sacrifice it to put Glacial Chasm into play, play your Barbarian Ring, tap it for R, and then replay your Wasteland to kill your tapped Barbarian Ring. After netting enough Red mana like this, you can kill your opponent with Barbarian Ring. That’s almost certainly impractical outside of Turboland, but it’s actually the best kill mechanism there because unlike the Zuran Orb kill, you can win going right through a Null Rod.
So, will Crucible of Worlds be restricted? Some day, probably yes because it has great potential for warping the metagame. It can either warp it by forcing out decks with more than two colors or it can warp it by virtue of an overwhelming portion of the decks beginning”4 Crucible of Worlds.” We’re not at either point yet, but I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t eventually get there. Actually, there is a potential third situation: combo rules the format, making the ability to lock the opponent’s land irrelevant.
That sounds even less inviting.
Pseudo-Crucibles
Steve Menendian’s deck from the top 8 of GenCon is probably the best example of this type of deck. For reference:
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
4 Mana Leak
2 Counterspell
1 Misdirection
4 Ophidian
4 Impulse
3 Powder Keg
2 Morphling
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
4 Back to Basics
4 Wasteland
1 Strip Mine
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Ruby
1 Sol Ring
1 Black Lotus
8 Island
2 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
Sideboard
1 Counterspell
4 Energy Flux
4 Propaganda
3 Blue Elemental Blast
3 Control Magic
This deck has fetchlands, Wastelands, and plenty of acceleration. It grinds out late-game wins. Yet it doesn’t play Crucible of Worlds, but in a way, it does play with Crucible of Worlds. First off, all of its colored mana-producing lands are basic Islands, making them immune to Wasteland. Thus, this deck has the ability to fight off an opposing Crucible in a Wasteland-lock situation built-in. Also, while the deck does run Wastelands, it has something better than Crucible here: Back to Basics. Almost every non-combo deck in Type 1 has serious problems with Back to Basics. It’s a Crucible/Wasteland lock in one card that works immediately.
While mono-Red could play Blood Moon, I can’t think of good enough mono-Red deck to play (other than Turbo Guerilla Tactics, of course.) Mono-Green is a different story, and in fact with the large amount of artifact decks in the environment, Oshawa Stompy-type decks are actually a fairly good metagame choice. Here’s a possible list off the top of my head:
12 Forest
4 Wasteland
4 Bazaar of Baghdad
1 Strip Mine
1 Sol Ring
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
4 Root Maze
4 Survival of the Fittest
4 Oxidize
4 Squee, Goblin Nabob
4 Basking Rootwalla
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Eternal Witness
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
2 Arrogant Wurm
1 Tracker
1 Genesis
Your Crucible/Waste here is Eternal Witness. Survival of the Fittest lets you search up Eternal Witness (and eventually, Genesis if necessary) with which you can recur your spent Wastelands (or Oxidize) with. You could also potentially run Land Grant, which would let Eternal Witness simulate Crucible/fetchland.
I set decks like these aside because they gave me hope compared to the situation in Standard with Skullclamp. In that format, a lot of the outcry focused on the insane power that Skullclamp gave Ravager Affinity, with the boost that it gave to Goblins being a minor, but not unimportant consideration as well. At the very least, banning Skullclamp would look like a good decision simply to reign in those two decks. But in my opinion, the straw that broke the camel’s back was really Elf and Nail. I don’t mean this because of any power level concerns, since while Elf and Nail won Nationals, almost all of the top decks in the Standard portion were still Affinity decks. The real reason was that prior to Skullclamp, Tooth and Nail decks weren’t exactly tearing it up in Standard, but after gutting the deck and removing the control/combo elements and sticking in Skullclamp and about sixteen one-toughness creatures in their place, you ended up with a tier 1 deck.
These pseudo-Crucible decks, while they do still run cards that are in a way somewhat comparable to Crucible of Worlds, at the very least show that not in all circumstances is it better to start off all your decklists with”4 Crucible of Worlds.”
–JP Meyer
jpmeyer at gmail dot com
PS: the following person is not me. I wasn’t at GenCon. This is just some guy cosplaying me:
* And my heartfelt condolences to Control Slaver***, which now will put under the unfair scrutiny once only given to Tog if it fails to win every other tournament ever until the end of time
** The American Heritage Dictionary states that the pronunciation of”banal” isn’t firmly established, so don’t get mad if someone pronounce it so that it rhymes with”anal” or”canal” or”panel.”
*** I know that back in the day, I said that I thought it should be called”Drain Slaver” because of the binary between”Control Slaver” and”Workshop Slaver,” which caused people thus think that”Workshop Slaver” would have to be”Combo Slaver.” But now that”Workshop Slaver” never gets played any more, the binary now seems to be between”Control Slaver” and”Control Titan,” and here it does help to set the two decks apart.****
**** Although not that I personally think that there is any difference between the two decks that you need to set them apart.