One
All artists, all writers, create for a specific, some specific, audience. Michelangelo and Bosch cast people they despised into their great works, depicting them in hellish torments, casting a light on the foundations of the Western canon not unlike a splash page from The National Enquirer. I must admit to do the same, in my small way, in Magic articles, a novel I wrote in the spring of 1994, or even message board posts. Pointing tiny arrows, via throwaway sentences, that can only be comprehended by one or two thorns in my side (Jeroen Remie, who incidentally share’s a first name with the aforementioned Bosch, once accused me of being difficult to read, when in fact he wasn’t intended to be able to understand whatever I happened to publish at the time). In general, though, when I am not full of spite and malice, I write for one specific person.
You may have noticed that somewhere along the way I shifted from objective third person in most of my 1990s and some 2000s writing (especially specifically for Wizards) to a first and second person familiar voice. Today, I sometimes imagine myself in a kind of dialogue with – or against – him. It’s not that I require his approval or anything (though a single nod counterbalances one hundred angry forum posts from people who don’t understand math or Skred). He is, however, an intelligent and opinionated man after my own heart, friend and confidant to the same people I work with (on Magic), albeit from the other side. Imagining myself debating him makes my writing – and my decks, I hope – better.
His bottom-up ideas are peerless among (especially) PTQ and Grand Prix designers, and I will gladly claim them (such as maindeck Fledgling Dragon in Red Deck Wins) as my own. I’d even say he is better than I am, except he only seems to be able to make one kind of deck. Also I am an egomaniac. He’s like a pimp and a heartbreaking prom queen both. After I went on record hating, or at least somewhat disrespecting, Sensei’s Divining Top, and then produced 999 sick Sensei’s Divining Top decks, he didn’t call me a hypocrite. He just suggested I make some decks that didn’t play Sensei’s Divining Top.
I recently imagined myself presenting a PTQ model to him, my G/W Haterator deck, kind of like a PowerPoint presentation to a Marketing Director or CEO. I beamed proudly. It was a Green deck without Sensei’s Divining Top! I haven’t made one of those in I don’t know how long! It qualified before I could actually talk to him. It beat down with creatures. He loves a man in The Red Zone.
Did I mention he breaks hearts like a cheerleader with her knees stapled together, with a bag full of blue balls collected in her pompom drawer?
“People want to see me win with Frenzied Goblin and you with Vicious Hunger,” he said. “Troll and Worship is uninspiring. Anyone could do that.”
Recently, I was in a dispute with Osyp Lebedowicz about playing a deck that I actually designed top-down (well, if you count me and Patrick Chapin as me, I designed it). Osyp had been two-timing me with the man in question, citing that with his input, it was the ultimate version of the archetype. What could I say? He’s the master. I could only assume Osyp was right, meaning that I (now wrong?) was originally right, before, um, switching decks at the last minute… or something.
Like I said, I pretend I’m talking to him when I make decks. Recently this flashed before my eyes and seared itself across my brain: You martinet. You Fiorillo name-dropping bastard. You want Vicious Hunger? I just shipped a blue envelope to a high school kid playing four Indrik Stomphowler. Beat that with a Frenzied Goblin!
Two
To me, Invasion Block is a “new” Block. I am on the fence about Masques Block. Actually, maybe I can’t be because I think of Urza’s Block as pretty new, too. I am old. I have been writing for this site – this run on this site – for longer than anywhere else, and have been friends with this group of friends, doing this, for longer than anything else. I have been married for five years this month. This is the longest epoch of my life, longer than high school, longer than college, longer than I’ve lived in any one place, almost.
Yet today, anything after a certain point in history, is not… That is… I don’t think of those things in any way permanent or foundational. My first (and probably only) stint as The Greatest Deck Designer In The World lasted for less than six months in the spring or summer of 2000. Zvi took the title for serious and held it pretty substantially afterward, trading briefly with Rob Dougherty, then Osyp, for a tournament or two each, for a period of years, until Yellow Hat and then Tsuyoshi decided they were going to make a clear break from the fading master. This is embarrassing to me because I don’t think I got any good at deck design at all until 2004 or so – four years after my only legitimate, and again, brief – tenure, at a point where I couldn’t argue being better than either Nassif or Fujita.
Yet when I think of my foundations of deck design, I don’t think of the influence of my States 2004 Apprentice system that produced the Mono-Blue deck, the Green-Black deck, Kuroda-style Red, and Critical Mass; nor the countless hours over the desks at the end of Psylum’s lease, between Park and Madison, in the spring of 2000; nor working with Josh and Paul when they were younger and got along better, poring over AIM windows with Ravitz, Jordan, Aten, Little Mizer, Christopher Robin Senhouse, PatrickJ, or Becker… I think of my time in college, not with the amazing altran or Tunahwa even (during the Team Discovery Channel days), but my other team, Cabal Rogue.
I couldn’t help but compare myself to the other Cabal Rogue guys in one way or another. Shuler was and is my best friend on the team, but I was, in Magical demeanor, closest to Macey. Bill was the one who wanted to win with these terribly suboptimal aggressive decks. Bill and I were beatdown players who never really meant it. If you don’t understand – or actively hate – some small thing in a deck you otherwise could see yourself playing: a maindeck Scrabbling Claws (or four), a vastly overpriced “beatdown” creature, a basic Forest… Blame. Bill.
Say Masticore is the default best creature of a format and you wanted to play a 4/4 in your deck. What would you play for your, you know, 4/4? Phyrexian Plaguelord, of course! It kills Masticore and they can’t regenerate. How many? Four of them! Obv.
Bill qualified in one try with the four Deranged Hermit, four Plaguelord, four Wild Dogs deck by the way. Obv.
Bill showed me you can win in the Rock / Trick (not Trix!) / Tinker metagame applying Armadillo Cloak to Soltari Priest… and unlike the whippersnappers today, he didn’t have Kird Ape and Lighting Helix, or any kind of Mountain, to lean on. If he were still playing seriously, I’d like to think Bill would qualify in one with some kind of Boreal Druid carrying two equipments.
My first ever online flame war was with Eric Taylor.
I wish I had anything in common with Andy Wolf, clearly the best of the Cabal.
Philosophically, the most important Cabal Rogue influences to me were Shuler, who taught me to hate my fellow man; and Kowal, who taught me how to make non-interactive decks lose to terrible cards.
Yet…
Yet, to just look at my decks today and compare designs, the Cabal Rogue alum I look most like is Jamie Wakefield. Jamie has mellowed as he’s gotten older (and he’s even older than I am), no longer adhering strictly to 26 lands, though he has remained inflexible about certain other elements of deck design that could make even his narrow top-down designs more powerful.
At the same time, something strange and inexplicable happened to me, demolishing any notion I may have had of mana curve. Once upon a time, my curves were 16-20 one-drops, the balance two-drops, and three five-drops, or perhaps 38 one- and two-drops, and two X-spells. By 2003, I was hard-casting Akroma, Angel of Wrath with no reanimation or “Tinker” capability, in a deck that sideboarded multiple eleven-drops. A year later the default Red Deck was one- and two-drops, some Seething Songs… and my deck was 2/2 creatures for four mana and the same high-end five-drop… only with no Seething Songs. I decided a couple of months later that the optimal way to fight the best array of one- and two-drop creatures, backed up by the best burn since Fireblast rotated out of competitive formats, was to tap five or even six mana and cross my fingers. Really! It really was that awful, all of it. I was becoming a Timmy (none of that, of course, prevented consecutive U.S. Nationals Top 8 finishes, complete short run tournament domination, etc.). But I was still playing fatties… like Jamie.
Look at our most recent published designs, both of ours. Both Jamie and I have posted decks that produce 4/4 conditional card advantage Beasts for five mana, in Extended. This is obviously awful in the abstract. What happened? How? Maybe more importantly… When?
I noticed something at Pro Tour: Charleston that I didn’t understand at the time, but Billy Moreno explained to me over playtesting three weeks ago. At Charleston, if I got Castigated, I’d shrug and demolish my opponent. If I Castigated someone, especially twice, he’d have no chance to win. My only card drawing, if you can call it that, was Orzhov Basilica. I was playing decks with significant mana control, Compulsive Research, even Invoke the Firemind. This didn’t make any sense.
Billy realized something regarding my design approach to the game. I don’t play cards, for the most part, that play unique roles. In the case that I do (Trinisphere, Chalice of the Void, Ancient Grudge), it doesn’t matter at what point I draw my cards because they are almost always as good or useless as they should be at most (if not “any”) other point, so long as I’m not dead yet. Few other designers play like this. If you take a specific component from the opponent’s hand, that probably caused a chain reaction blanking multiple other cards (think of how taking away Seething Song at least temporarily blanks Arc-Slogger).
Look again at our five-mana 4/4 two-for-ones. Mine kills something that doesn’t belong to me. Jamie’s makes a 4/4 trickily… and then maybe another. Jamie loves his cards, his fatties, so much that he wants another. I am indifferent, but hate my opponent and want to eradicate anything he has made or touched.
My deviation from theme is Trinisphere. Jamie’s is Overrun. Again, Jamie loves a fatty. He wants Llanowar Elves to be fat, so fat, and angry, and… And fat! Rah! I don’t want my opponent to be able to play Magic: The Gathering. I studied under Shuler. I hate everyone. I want my opponent’s lightning quick deck to be plodding through mud, like me and my stupid 4/4 for five. I want to play Indrik Stomphowler, beat someone with Indrik Stomphowler, and expect my opponent to quit playing Magic: The Gathering. You just lost to Indrik Stomphowler! That is what I want to say. I studied under Shuler. I hate everyone.
Functionally, the cards try to do very similar things. Jamie’s deck and my deck are both slow on the fundamentals. Neither one is going to win any land speed records in a field with TEPS, NO Stick, and other decks that have their games in play before, you know, turn 5. Jamie, who loves his fatties, wants his fatties to be fast enough to win. He wants to cut a turn off of his true fundamental turn. He wants to be like the asshole combo decks, fast like the asshole combo decks. I want my opponent to be miserable. I want him to be slower than my deck, which moves like the glass of an ancient windowpane. Instead of making my deck faster, I want to make my opponent’s deck slower, but I don’t have to.
Think about being Duressed by TEPS in a sideboarded game. Fighting Jamie, TEPS has the liberty to wait almost until he is going off to spend the Duress. He steals Overrun and wins by a turn. Against my deck, the Duress is a liability. It has to be drawn in a particular order. It has to be played before I play Trinisphere, or it is no longer any good. Say it takes Trinisphere. That isn’t necessarily good enough. The act of playing a Duress adds a turn to TEPS. That is a card that, again assuming Duress trades for Trinisphere successfully, that cannot increase the Storm count of Mind’s Desire. The opponent adds a turn. He does not affect my fundamental turn whatsoever. My concession was not designed to change my fundamental turn, but his. It did.
I think that a lot of the criticism of Haterator and Bests that I have seen in both forums and articles doesn’t understand the nature of the format-hostile cards. I’ve seen really smart people, as well as really stupid people, saying things that miss the point of how the hostile cards work in these decks. I don’t expect to win because I played a Trinisphere, on the Trinisphere. Say that the opponent is NO Stick. Trinisphere is not a lock there, but it is good enough. All a good Green deck wants against a Blue deck is to be able to resolve its threats. When Spell Snare and Lightning Helix and Counterspell are all three mana – Stick or (heh) no Stick – a Green deck that is good enough on the fundamentals wins. You have to know how to attack, you have to read properly. Your opponent can’t have the stone nuts (you’d lose anyway, by the way). When you’re playing fair, and he’s playing fair, and he can only play one spell a turn, and his “lands” include a now-three mana Chrome Mox, and his two ways to win lose to two essentially uncounterable components of your manabase – Blinkmoth Well and Contested Cliffs in this case – I don’t think he has much of an edge, no… But you still have to play right.
By the same token you don’t beat TEPS just on Trinisphere (though I kicked butt “just” on Gilded Light almost all the time… don’t even get me started on Orim’s Chant). The only realistic thought process is that the opponent, with his powerful deck and sideboard manipulation, will be able to answer it. The goal is to beat him before he finds an answer, uses the answer, and kills you. Remember, every card spent in an effort to stop your Chalice of the Void, or Trinisphere, or Blastminer, or Gilded Light, or Rule of Law is not a card (hopefully) that is jacking the Storm count.
Three
Earlier this year I was considering playing in a Vintage tournament in Stratford, CT. Patrick Chapin had made his B/R/W Hide / Seek hate deck and I looked at it and was pretty sure I could easily win the said Vintage tournament with it, top-down strategically. Then Patrick gave it away to Steve Menendian’s team, and I no longer had any interest in playing. Patrick said something that I shrugged off at the time (though I think I was right), but I didn’t realize I was – and am – guilty of the exact same damn thing. It was clear to me that I would have a serious strategic rogue deck advantage playing Patrick’s design; it would have been like Napster at Regionals 2000 or Tinker at the following Worlds. What a motherloving beatdown! Menendian himself went to Michigan to test against Patrick and, even though he could win some Game 1s, was batting bagel in any sideboarded games. Now some arrogant Vintage pundit-guru hybrids look at Patrick’s deck and hee-haw about how they can win, or hee-haw similarities Patrick’s deck may have had to low-tier (if known) Vintage strategies, but they discount the fact that that isn’t how it works in the real world. If you get to look at your opponent’s deck list, and you are a powerful strategic thinker, sure you can out-strategize him, think him into a trap where he can’t possibly escape; this is more true in the lightning-charged, fastest, and least skill-intensive arena of Vintage than any other format. Preparation is 99% of Vintage, where it is only 80-90% of Standard. In a Connecticut PTQ for PT: Charleston (the one where I punted in the finals) I had to read and re-read Andy Probasco deck list when they gave it to me before the finals (why do they do that?). Was it really possible there was a 0% chance he could win Game 1 if I drew a House Guard? I guess I could be manascrewed. Really? Is it possible… That. He. Had. No. Mortify?
Like clockwork I demolished him while my teammates, uncharacteristically, lost. Like I said, I punted the match where I should have won Game 2 and Game 3 and cost us the plane tickets (Paul came back in a manascrew / mulligan Game 3 when his opponent punted with the protected two turn clock already on the board). The thing is I had a massive Game 1 cushion from knowing Andy’s deck list. If I hadn’t seen it, I probably would have tossed it like I did Games 2 and 3 on account of “he’s just a Vintage player, how could I possibly…” or at least wasted Cranial Extraction on Mortify (his only real way to win versus my maindeck Ivory Mask). I felt that when Patrick shared his deck list that I lost that big, contrapositive-like, cushion against probably the best players in an otherwise largely oblivious field. With Patrick’s deck you have any number of two-card combinations that make it impossible for the opponent to win, while you grind out the victory yourself with some Mogg Fanatic beatdown; however, the deck is severely under-powered, which is anything but a good thing when any realistic opponent can assemble a massive margin kill inside the first four turns. It’s almost like I made the deck myself! When the opponent is informed, he can out-tune or out-sideboard you. Post-Regionals 2000 Napster was the stone lock against Replenish, but by Nationals 2000, Zvi, Don Lim, and Sayan (the most important Replenish thinkers collectively, or even singularly, in the world) were playing Ring of Gix. Ring of Gix – one card – can completely invalidate any and all of Napster’s anti-Replenish plans. Napster can only realistically present 1-2 threats at a time, and they all cost three. Ring of Gix costs three. Ring of Gix can tap Stromgald Cabal to resolve Replenish or Parallax Wave. In order to get rid of the evil Ring of Gix, Napster can only hope that Powder Keg can sit around long enough to accumulate three counters. Did I mention that the relevant threats tend to cost three? Yes, it’s a mess. One card. Even with Replenish’s arsenal of manipulation, Don Lim’s deck could not hope to compare with the selection of even the crappiest broken Vintage decks.
So I of course elected not to play in my first Vintage tournament of the modern era. What Patrick said – he was disappointed, to say the least – was that he’d be on another deck. There would be another deck. Decks, maybe even good decks, come out of Patrick like microorganisms hurtling out of a sneezing toddler’s disgusting little nose, all over you. I didn’t believe. I had no reason to believe. I know how this works, probably better than anyone. A deck like Patrick’s comes once a year to a designer, if not once in a career. Of course Patrick would produce another “good” deck… But a deck like the Chapin Hate deck, a deck that could unconditionally dominate a tournament, striking from the shadows? I didn’t have the time or inclination to prepare for Vintage under any other circumstances.
Patrick and I are basically the same. Julian Levin points out that the other guys on my local squad don’t get to practice as much as they should because they don’t get deck assignments until the Thursday before a PTQ. We built BK’s Angels / This Girl at lunch the day before Champs! I’m like the new sea of Tier 2. In 2000 I played basically one deck and made Top 8 every time. Four PTQ Top 8s! I cut, emphasized, de-emphasized, re-emphasized week after week until my Rebel deck was one color, transformative, not a Rebel deck at all. Every time I switched to, say, B/G… no Top 8. Paul Jordan says this is the better model, learning a deck, consistently making Top 8 by the end of the season. At this point I’m more concerned with making more new and fun decks than anything else. Here’s my latest one:
Creatures (14)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 2 Bringer of the Blue Dawn
- 2 Bringer of the Black Dawn
- 4 Etched Oracle
- 2 Loxodon Hierarch
Lands (23)
Spells (23)
How about winning with Bringer of the Blue Dawn, friend Number One (you martinet, you bastard, &co.)?
Firestarter
You know what to do.
Might I suggest…
LOVE
MIKE