“Attacking is the nut low. The strategy simply is not viable.” –Gadiel Szleifer
Besides Robert Hahn, Eric “edt” Taylor is the most influential Magic strategist to have come out of the first years of Internet theory. I know that I my work, and even my writing style, has been greatly affected by Eric take on the game in the mid-to-late 1990s.
One piece (by Eric) that has been quite helpful in my deck design process actually started out as a criticism of Jamie Wakefield slavish adherence to 26/62 deck design. After he finished attacking the King of the Fatties’s math, Eric changed gears and attacked the best player on the planet… a dangerous quarry indeed. That I remember this post nearly ten years later – and that it was essentially correct – says a lot about the strength of his argument.
“Just so you don’t feel singled out, let me also criticize Finkel. Finkel’s makes (or used to make) terrible mono-Blue constructed decks. That he even went 4-2 at nationals with his ‘Forbidian’ was entirely due to his playing skills, not his deck construction skills. The most serious problem in the way he constructs his Blue decks is that he tends to leave gaping holes in them. If you play a Beatdown deck it is no sin to be unable to handle a particular archetype, because your plan is usually to just win before you have to handle any particular problem. But a control deck must be able to handle every deck because its winning plan is based on the late game. Thus you can’t leave holes in your defense. His Blue control deck at Pro Tour LA showed considerable weaknesses, too.
“Notice however, that at worlds Finkel played a mono-Red deck, giving up on his Blue decks, which I’m sure he was fond of. It’s that kind of flexibility you need in order to win.”
To give you an idea of the context by which Eric made these arguments, here are Jon’s Top 8 decks from Nationals 1998 and Worlds 1998, respectively:
Creatures (12)
Lands (21)
Spells (27)
- 4 Counterspell
- 4 Whispers of the Muse
- 2 Mana Leak
- 4 Impulse
- 3 Forbid
- 2 Capsize
- 4 Sapphire Medallion
- 4 Legacy's Allure
Sideboard
Creatures (19)
Lands (22)
Spells (19)
Sideboard
Looking at Jon’s US Nationals deck, it may be difficult to see exactly what gaping hole(s) Eric is attacking. Via Sapphire Medallion, Jon had a tremendous tempo engine. He could roll out third turn Ophidian with what Kibler used to call “the combo” – a Mana Leak in hand with an Island open. He had a reasonable number of counters, the full-on Forbidian engine that gave the deck – and archetype – its name, and tons of board control in the form of six bounce spells and four Control Magics. Finkel’s card drawing was second-to-none, with not only Impulse (then called the best card in Magic), not only its signature Ophidian, but a full boat of Whispers of the Muse as well. With his Sapphire Medallions, Jon’s buyback engine was also superb: he could field a lock deck Prison-style on top of a control deck that had inevitability in nearly every matchup.
What was the problem again?
Both Bryce Currence and Ryan Kelly (not to mention “screwed on breakers” eventual World Champion Brian Selden) fielded Seth Burn Mono-Green control deck. This deck sideboarded three copies of the much-maligned Scragnoth. Yes, Scragnoth, an inefficient 3/4 dork for five mana pwned Jonny Magic’s Forbidian deck. While a regular Draw-Go deck could just put a Golem in front of it, or blow it and all its little friends up with Nevinyrral’s Disk, Forbidian had to get more… creative.
Basically, Jonny could either Legacy’s Allure a creature big enough to block a Scragnoth or race it… and that was about it. Was the hole glaring? You can make the argument that the Seth Burn Stupid Green deck was few and far between, but the problem is that at the highest levels of Constructed metagaming, different rules apply. It’s the same thing that Zvi Mowshowitz once said in an interview when commenting about the relative quality of some of his playtest partners’ test decks (in addition to his famous work with Seth Burn and Scott Johns, Zvi would Baxterize his own decks and test against randoms with various pseudonyms to get a feel for everyone else’s conception of the metagame)… “I’m not interested in being able to beat the best decks… I just want to beat whatever shows up.” In Jon’s case, the deck that showed up in his bracket included a card that he couldn’t beat long game (easily), combined with Survival of the Fittest to increase consistency. Glaring.
I used to make the argument that Dred Panda Roberts – Adrian Sullivan Necro Pandemonium deck from Pro Tour Rome – was one of the best important decks of all time, notably as a predecessor of Trix. Over one Ruth’s Cris dinner in Las Vegas, Randy Buehler dismissed the deck and its contribution. The problem with saying Dred Panda Roberts was an awesome deck was that in context… there were just too many decks that showed up at the Pro Tour that were better. Adrian definitely showed Jonny Magic and his non-combo Survival deck the front and back of his hand, but at the Pro Tour defined by the most powerful combo decks, Roberts was just out-gunned. Was it better than Hacker’s Top 16 Scepter deck? No. Was it better than any of the dozen or so CMU Academy decks with their defining Vampiric Tutor engine? Certainly not. How about High Tide? Could the deck be that great if there were definitely eight decks better and it had to get in line?
When you are talking about deck performances, and specifically what problems they have to solve in order to succeed in high level tournaments, you have to bias against the decks that show up. More than that, when you are fighting through multiple day events, it isn’t good enough to beat just the sub-optimal piles that show up on Day 1. Eric contention was that Jon had an expectation to make Top 8; that meant that he had to deal with, yes, the Scragnoth deck. Adrian could race seven out of ten Jank decks effortlessly… but when it came down to playing for Top 8, he would have to go shoulder to shoulder with Hacker, then Heiss, then Humphreys, and all their disparate combo decks (and maybe even non-H players like Forsythe) before even talking about Dato, Hovi, or Lauer himself for Top 8 contention.
Was Adrian’s deck innovative? I think so. But while it had a slight edge over bad Academy decks or good players having made terrible decisions pre-tournament (Finkel), Dred Panda Roberts was not a match for the best of the best at that Pro Tour, and was therefore in the same camp as, say, the CMU Squee deck from Kai’s Donate Extended. Zombie Infestation graveyard combos were exciting on Day 1, but on Day 2 when more prepared decks like Benzo or powerhouse opponents with their Intuition engines were at the top of the standings, Death Spark looked a little less exciting.
To return to Eric message, the problem of anticipating different opponents and the threats they present, is fundamental to the Control player. His argument seems to be that Forbidian – and here you can read Control decks in general – was a slow clock permission deck. It was all about winning the long game, with everything under control until it locked the board with Tradewind Rider and Capsize, or acquired enough mana to tap for Big Sexy with protection. It is no surprise that a deck with this plan could – and would consistently – fold to Scraggy. He seems to say that via increased awareness, Jon’s switchover to Deadguy Red is one that removes the “holes in my plan” obstacle of which Forbidian was a victim.
This is a not unconvincing argument. After all, Deadguy Red was not only capable of a fast kill – combo quick at maybe four turns realistically – meaning that the opponent would have less time to find an answer, a hole in the beatdown deck’s theory. It is interesting nevertheless that Jon played Torture Chamber to kill Soltari Priest and his ilk, and leaned heavily on panacea Cursed Scroll. Cursed Scroll was his answer to Circle of Protection: Red, his source of card advantage, and a Priest killer as well. Along with a slightly higher mana count than Forbidian played – and quite surprisingly – the Deadguy Red Beatdown deck seemed to be ushering in a different era, a paradigm shift that actually turns edt’s baseline argument on its head.
Attacking is the Nut Low… don’t forget what Gadiel said. The big difference as time has gone by – or perhaps as a fundamental inefficiency that has only become apparent in more recent years as players have designed more and more streamlined decks – is that it is the Beatdown decks that have had to tune ferociously to overcome challenging bundles of card interaction in their strategies. Where once a Mono-Blue deck could be pointed at, jeered at, criticized for an oblique weakness against a narrowly played – if relevantly played – sideboard card, it is the beatdown decks that today have to prepare for one hundred and one different sorts of attrition war. This has proved an increasing problem for deck designers, who especially currently have to make compromises where they might prefer to play single-minded offensive cards.
It is important in any field to keep abreast of the kinds of threats and answers that the current block presents. I try to build decks in conceptual blocks of 80/20, concentrating on what 80% of my opponents will do, knowing that defeating that last 20% would actually require 80% of my playtest resources. As such, the best crutch I’ve found is to paint a block in wide strokes, short list the important cards and deck, keeping those in the forefront of playtesting, ultimately designing around the key cards and strategies that I anticipate in order to bypass the earliest stages of playtesting and trial (i.e. “I wonder what happens if…”).
For fun, this is how I look at the last ten years of Magic: The Gathering (at least to my best recollection):
Ice Age
This block will always have a warm and fuzzy place in my heart. The first Pro Tour Qualifier I ever won was an Ice Age/Alliances Constructed tournament. Today’s version of the block (which has probably never seen sanctioned play) actually has a very different banned and restricted (remember restricted?) list, and includes Homelands, which would have completely invalidated the deck I ended up using to win.
Key archetypes and interactions:
Ivory Gargoyle/Jokulhaups
Deadly Insect/Stormbind
U/W Control
Key Cards:
Thawing Glaciers
Zuran Orb
Kjeldoran Outpost
Certainly there were other cards of note: Helm of something-or-other, Jester’s something-or-other, Soldevi something-or-other, and various other somethings-or-other that were not core contributors to the fundamentals of the format. For some reason, at the point I qualified, there were almost no Necropotence decks. I guess they were all frightened of the Deadly Insect decks and busy lamenting their inability to pierce Circle of Protection: Black or remove Stormbind from play – or the inability to remove their own Necropotences for some reason – to realize what an advantage could be had.
Where some others saw hurdles, I saw inefficiencies that were actually embarrassingly easy to exploit. Let’s start with the dominant deck of the format (at the beginning at least): Ivory Gargoyle and Jokulhaups, eh? Do you know what Dark Ritual and Dystopia do to that deck? My opponents sure found out (go ahead and click those card links). I actually don’t understand how this deck graduated to the PTQs. Sean Fleischman lost the Pro Tour by successfully executing on his plan, only to be locked out of ever drawing another card by Olle Rade’s brilliant follow-up of Forest, Llanowar Fyndhorn Elves. NICE. DECK.
Deadly Insect seemed like more of a problem, but had some weaknesses of its own. First of all, it was terrible in combat… everything killed it (even if everything usually traded with it). I decided to try playing first strike, and that was pretty good. Another card I played was Withering Wisps, which was especially strong against one-toughness creatures of all sorts, like Outpost tokens or opposing Knights.
U/W control had so few outs against a Knight of Stromgald it was actually embarrassing.
Now the really cool part about biasing against the format came when I realized that the key cards were mostly lands. I played four Icequake and four Pillage (I know, I know), not to mention some Stone Rains in my Necrodeck. I don’t think I played a single game when all my land destruction was actually in my deck in a Game 2 or Game 3 situation, but my heart – or head actually – was in the right place. Dark Ritual into Icequake was insanely spicy, especially when aimed at the opponent’s Thawing Glaciers, or as a Kjeldoran Outpost two-for-one.
I mean honestly, I was the one with Necropotence.
By the time I played another Necropotence deck – like I said we were few and far between – it was in the finals against Lauer. He crushed me but it didn’t matter at that point.
Was attacking the nut low? Not if your creatures were Black. If they were some other color, I’m pretty sure it was the nut low. People’s decks were so bad at this point (Ivory Gargoyle are you kidding me?) that it didn’t really matter. Shotgun Blue Envelope!
Mirage
Key archetypes and interactions:
Abeyance/Aether Flash
Ophidian
B/U Beatdown
Sandsipoise Combo
Key Cards:
Ophidian
Man-o’-War
Nekrataal
Fireblast
I started off in this format playing B/U tempo. The only cards with toughness greater than two in my deck were sideboard Sand Golems. I got to side them in for both of the losses I took at the first PTQ, because I was completely unprepared for the Abeyance/Aether Flash deck (R/W no discard, natch). Back then Abeyance was a true Time Walk. You couldn’t cast anything. The R/W deck didn’t take off despite great opening performance because they “fixed” Abeyance and the eventually dominant Mono-Blue deck had toughness three-plus, plus all its clunky Wildfire Emissaries or whatever were terrible against Memory Lapse.
So the next time I had Mono-Blue. Worth, Tony, and Dave told me to play Ophidian. I played Fog Elemental. Somehow Dave lost to Turian and his Striped Bears. Both grew up to be Pro Tour Champions.
Then I had the metagame figured out! Screw these Blue decks! I was going for pure tempo and beatdown with Suq’Ata Lancers, Fireblasts… and Nekrataals, Fallen Askari… and Man-o’-War (gotta play Man-o’-War). Randy took me out with his Sandsipoise deck; he eventually qualified.
The fact that I paid no attention whatsoever to the metagame or its shifts, and instead played weird tempo-oriented decks should… I don’t know. I try not to think of that season.
Was attacking the nut low? Ophidian was pretty good at attacking. Everyone else… Not so much. I think Randy had one Steel Golem in his deck that he only played after the opponent was completely locked. It got to the point that Lauer was winning with thirty-two mana decks with Snake Basket/Necrosavant engine (yes… “engine”).
Tempest
Key archetypes and interactions:
Deadguy Red
Survival of the Fittest
Awakening
George
Key Cards:
Survival of the Fittest
Wall of Blossoms
Tradewind Rider
Living Death
Shard Phoenix
This was the current format when edt made his comment about Jonathan, so it demands particular notice. Deadguy Red won the Pro Tour, but with no more Cursed Scroll, the deck fell to the point that only Mike Long could win with it via Raging Goblins or some such nonsense. Part of the reason was that the best control card in years had been printed: Wall of Blossoms. Good luck getting through that one with no burn spells, team one drop.
Eventually the format bent to the point that Curiosity/Manta Riders was actually the best deck. I was friends with Mike Donais at the time, so I managed to come this close to a Blue Envelope (man, I was up a game too) one week before Gary Krakower’s George win in Texas.
In hindsight I find edt’s comments somewhat odd given the context of the format, because beatdown decks were just horrendous, and the ones in Block at least could never have fulfilled his quick win conditions for paucity of answer cards. I didn’t even list cards like Spike Weaver or Spike Feeder, because the other anti-beatdown cards were even more backbreaking. Shard Phoenix? I think Mogg Fanatic ended more attack dreams than it fed. Beatdown decks were so bad that if you were playing a rules lawyer, he could annihilate you with your own cards. In one famous match, Trey Van Cleave kept trying to call Bob Maher on every little procedural quip in a game. Bob warned Trey that if he didn’t stop, Bob was going to “destroy” him on rules. Trey kept on going, and when it came time for Trey’s own Cataclysm… let’s just say that Bob’s interpretation of timing had Trey fail to pick any permanents. Don’t mess with the Great One.
Success in this format was all about anticipating the control cards and getting around them. I flew over Worth’s Wall of Blossoms with Mana Riders, and pitched cards to Thalakos Drifters to keep the Curiosity engine going while drawing into counters. Clunky control cards like Tradewind Rider and Living Death were not a problem for Mana Leak in its debut, or certainly the full-on Forbid engine.
Was attacking the nut low? It was actually at its low point, despite Jackal Pup and company (Curiosity decks notwithstanding).
Urza’s Block
Key archetypes and interactions:
Sneak Attack
Tinker
Squirrel Prison
PatrickJ.dec
Replenish
Key Cards:
Grim Monolith
Wildfire
Morphling
Rancor
Yavimaya Elder
For the Pro Tour, we were all preparing for StOmPy. By the Grand Prix season, I think I was the only person stupid enough to actually try playing it. I made Day 2 of a Grand Prix after dropping my opening two matches… The last match of Day 1 I had to fight through essentially the mirror, but he had White for Worship and other cards that were better than, say, Pouncing Jaguar… like Mother of Runes. The only way I could win was by bending my poor beatdown deck to accommodate main-deck Hush and Lull! It was awful! Do you know how pathetic an Albino Troll is when the turn you are paying your Echo cost, the opponent is playing his Morphling? The worst was playing against other Mono-Green opponents who had cards like Masticore, Deranged Hermit, and worst of all, Yavimaya Elder to block.
Was attacking the nut low? Yes! Only Morphling, and to a lesser extent Masticore, were good attackers. Everything else got shot to death by Masticore or blocked by Morphling, even though Morphling had just cracked for five.
Masques
Key archetypes and interactions:
White Skyes
Aggro Waters
Priest.dec
Inferior Rebel and Blue beatdown decks
Key Cards:
Mageta the Lion
Rising Waters
Parallax Wave
Hickory Woodlot
Masques was the most interesting Block format of all time, in my opinion. Clearly Rebels was the best, and White Skyes specifically was dominating from the outset. So the interesting thing about the format was figuring out how to beat Rebels while being Rebels yourself. In my first Top 8 I was just a low chain Rebel deck with main-deck Informer and two-main-two-sideboard Lions. By my second Top 8 I had figured out to main-deck all the Lions and up the mana count. By the very late format, we were playing complete transformational sideboard strategies with all enchantments and enchantment kill. I think the format would have been better served with the new Legend Rule. I worked very hard on breaking Mageta parity, but sometimes the other player would just play his first or draw all four Parallax Waves and there was nothing to be done.
Parallel in development was Aggro Waters, which Seth tuned to a monster. It was a powerful deck most reminiscent of Deadguy Red with Fireblast (Gush and Thwart ended games in the same way)… Skies did not smell like a Blue deck. To this day I think that White beat Blue and Seth says the opposite. He has no answer for “what do you do about my Story Circle and the fact that I have three times the Disenchants necessary to remove your Rising Waters than you have Waters and ways to protect it” but then again we have never actually shuffled up and tested, it being six years irrelevant at this point.
Was attacking the nut low? Sort of. The best decks had aggressive elements but were ultimately tempo- or board-oriented control decks, possibly with permission. Certainly the Blastoderm attack decks were not the best, and the Saproling Burst decks just got Dazed and Orbed out of contention.
Invasion
Key archetypes and interactions:
Angel
Domain
other, terrible, decks
Key Cards:
Gerrard’s Verdict
Fact or Fiction
Allied Strategies
Dromar’s Charm or Evasive Action
At the beginning of the format you could win with The Solution, G/R, or even B/R, but by the time players had adopted the Orzhov-reminiscent third set cards, forget that noise. It got so thin for creatures that Flametongue Kavu was sidelined with nothing to kill, and was played only in Pat Chapin’s BUR tempo deck in a format that was once defined by the best Bears in the game up until Wild Mongrel.
By the time Angel had actually taken its rightful place, there were only Angel and anti-Angel strategies. Usually you would think that the answer to a format of highly erratic mana bases and key cards that cost four or five mana would be an aggressive beatdown deck, but the G/R and B/R decks were so demolished by Gerrard’s Verdict, so humiliated by Blue’s trifecta of three mana board control instants, and had so few ways to punch through a Spectral Lynx it was actually embarrassing. Even Brian Hegstad’s Grand Prix Top 8 deck ran a Blue splash for “the gift that keeps on giving” where a pre-Apocalypse build would have just had Ghitu Fire or the FTK.
Was attacking the nut low? Not if you were attacking with either a Desolation Angel with no other permanents in play, or perhaps a Dodecapod.
Odyssey
Key archetypes and interactions:
U/G Madness
U/G Threshold
U/G Flashback
Good decks
Key Cards:
Mirari’s Wake
Nantuko Shade
Wild Mongrel
Braids, Cabal Minion
Odyssey was an odd bird. Despite Osyp’s Top 8 with Psychatog at the Pro Tour, the best creature of all time did not perform at the PTQ or GP level in any great numbers. U/G was a popular deck, but by the end of the season, the full on Wake deck, not to mention the dominating Black decks, were just better. Black Control had no problems with any of the U/G decks, and Pirates! proved a superlative beatdown deck. [Ha! That’ll be me, then — Craig] The U/G decks essentially had strong cards, but were facing down decks with much more card advantage and persistent creature kill.
Was attacking the nut low? More or less. Early Threshold players did well, but the mature format favored Wake, Confinement, and Braids-oriented board control with lots of two-for-ones in all of them.
Onslaught
Key archetypes and interactions:
Slide
Goblins
Terrible decks
Key Cards:
Lightning Rift
Goblin Warchief
What was once a fatty heaven, a haven for Beasts and a graveyard for Bidding became a two-deck format by the end. Paskins will tell you that Goblins was the best deck, and even though I liked me some Goblins, my version was all about main-deck Rorix and siding out Piledrivers, so with my twenty-six mana main or whatever I had, I certainly can’t be considered a paragon of the beatdown. In fact, I think Goblins wasn’t the best deck, and had even my strongest draws cracked by other PT-level players when they were Slide (I lost a Top 8 position to Tiago Chan at an ancillary PT Boston PTQ; he won).
The best Slide decks had life gain and tons of removal and unending card drawing, which meant that the beatdown decks had to win early or they would always lose unless they found a critical mass of Shocks or something. This isn’t to say Goblins wasn’t one-half of the viable decks in block, just that it wasn’t the best half.
Was attacking the nut low? No. But it also wasn’t the best.
Mirrodin
Key archetypes and interactions:
Affinity
Anti-Affinity (Tooth and Nail and other decks playing Eternal Witness)
Key Cards:
Aether Vial
Cranial Plating
Arcbound Ravager
Disciple of the Vault
Mirrodin Block was the first one in quite a while where attacking was not only not the nut low, but straight up the best strategy. The problems for Affinity as an aggressive deck were mainly draw dependent. Beyond the basics (the opposing moron didn’t know Aether Vial was good), the matchup often hinged on who drew the most Disciples and/or who connected with Cranial Plating once. This led to an interesting dance and rewarding if inconsistent opportunity for deck templating. For instance, was it better to play a Green overload sideboard or run Electrostatic Bolt and Relic Barrier? What about falling back to Seething Song or Pentad Prism into Furnace Dragon? How would you approach anti-Affinity decks without having to play too many, you know, colored cards with actual mana costs?
Despite the dominance of Affinity in this format, the beatdown had a lot of challenges. Not only did it have to out-draw the opponent’s Disciples in the mirror, even the best Affinity players had to weather decks with continual strings of two-for-ones… Eternal Witness, Viridian Shaman, and Vedalken Shackles were hard to beat when all holding hands. The problem with beating opponents with their Trish cards was that the main vehicle by which threats could be answered was siding into Terrors, Shrapnel Blasts, and other non-artifact cards that damaged the Affinity and not only cost mana themselves, but made everything else more expensive.
Was attacking the nut low? Obviously not; it was the nut high. Because of that, Mirrodin was distinguished by more “all in” comments at the PTQ level than any other format with attack deck committing everything.
Kamigawa
Key archetypes and interactions:
Gifts Ungiven
White Weenie/Jitte
Black Hand/Jitte
Other Tribe Elder or Jitte decks
Key Cards:
Umezawa’s Jitte
Gifts Ungiven
Hokori, Dust Drinker
This brings us to essentially the present day. I am going to leave off Ravnica for a moment and try to synthesize everything I’ve learned from the evolution of blocks over the past couple of years into last year’s Block format. What I have tried to show in the ceaseless examples above is just how difficult it is for beatdown decks to get percentage when the field is mature.
In Kamigawa, including the current Kamigawa-informed Standard, it was and is the worst ever.
On the one hand, Umezawa’s Jitte is the only reason beatdown decks were viable in the Block format at all. Without the Jitte, how could they have dealt with the relentless control elements of Gifts Ungiven? By the same token, the existence of the Jitte meant that the beatdown players had to bend their agendas single-mindedly to win Jitte wars, not just take advantage of the Jitte, but keep the other player from drowning them with his own Jitte. As with blocks like Masques before it, this led to the opportunity to gain percentage by pragmatic deck building.
Obviously it would be wrong to play fewer than four Jittes… but it was also bad to devote space to reactive cards like Terashi’s Grasp and Wear Away. Quite a dilemma! Some decks went the Manriki-Gusari route, playing a card that could allow a White Weenie deck to win the Jitte war… but open itself up to greater vulnerability in the Kirin war. Kamigawa was a difficult land in which to find the balance.
Most of my friends and I think the absolute most consistent way to win the Jitte war was Tsuyoshi Fujita’s solution from the Pro Tour.
Creatures (20)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 4 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 3 Jugan, the Rising Star
- 1 Orochi Sustainer
- 4 Keiga, the Tide Star
- 4 Godo, Bandit Warlord
Lands (23)
Spells (17)
- 2 Sensei's Divining Top
- 1 Tatsumasa, the Dragon's Fang
- 4 Umezawa's Jitte
- 1 Konda's Banner
- 1 Reweave
- 4 Kodama's Reach
- 4 Honor-Worn Shaku
Sideboard
Godo playing Uktabi Orangutan gave the deck both a greater opportunity to find its first Jitte and a greater advantage in the Jitte war Game One. What is really interesting about Fujita’s deck is that he addressed the control matchups in such an interesting way on top. His Mindblaze sideboard was unexpected, and fiercely effective in the counter poor Philadelphia metagame. I asked him about playing only two Tops, and the reigning Resident Genius smiled saying “this is a Beatdown deck.”
Was attacking the nut low? I think it was pretty good, if challenging, in this block. Gadiel is sure to disagree with me, and he probably has a point, considering his resume specifically in Kamigawa Block.
When translating across multiple blocks, maintaining percentage in a format like Extended is extremely difficult. Part of the reason that I didn’t play a creature deck in LA this year, despite quite liking them and devoting my time to Lightning Angels and Kavu Titans for weeks, is that it was difficult to make a deck that could win a Flametongue war and a Jitte war and not lose to Ravenous Baloth every time. There was actually a point that I was sideboarding Thornscape Battlemages because I thought it was one of the best ways to win a Flametongue war. No, Thornscape.dec was not going to win against Psychotogs or Stinkweed Imp engine decks.
This all adds up to the paradigm shift I intimated all those paragraphs ago. Thought provoking and insightful at the time he coined it, Eric comment about the requirements for Control decks going long seems like the opposite of what is true today. I think that beatdown decks have a really rough time of it right now. Not only do they have to win against card advantage and life gain and fast response cards, beatdown decks have to worry about all kinds of intramural challenges… winning Jitte wars, dancing around bigger creatures, good lord that Loxodon Hierarch guy. When building a beatdown deck, it is insanely important to hold the kinds of elements that I described across the various blocks close to the deck design. Recently I did a series of design articles for MagicTheGathering.com and some of the more casual players on that site criticized my universal inclusion of Umezawa’s sidearm. Of course Jitte was included in all the creature decks! Missing it would be like playing an Ivory Gargoyle deck in a room full of Dystopias and library manipulation, just not a good bet.
Jamie has written several times that the top Pros are all “control” players and lists the decks where he identifies them that way. I don’t think that is true because they particularly like control and hate beatdown; I think they are pragmatists. Kai Budde and Steve O’Mahoney-Shwartz dislike creatures… because they die. When Dave Price was the best at beatdown, it was because he didn’t think people would play the available Freewind Falcons (they didn’t). Today they are smart enough to play the Freewind Falcons. The economical thing to do is to play a deck that looks at Freewind Falcon and says “Nice 1/1 for two; nice deck,” and then locks the other guy up with counters or legends or Greater Good. It’s not that playing control is preferable… I think it’s that building control decks is just not as difficult such that players who don’t devote their time to solving the riddle of beatdown just have more resources and brain power that they can devote to playing optimally… Just a theory.
LOVE
MIKE
PS All of this just makes winning with beatdown decks, especially the kind designed to win Jitte wars, more rewarding.