(If you’re looking for my discussion of the 2010 Hall of Fame, check out the end of this article.)
Ah, it feels good to be working on a major tournament again.
After a few weeks of cracking hard into Extended for no good reason other than, well, Extended is just fun to play (do you need another reason?), the past week has been a swan dive back into Standard. Now that the baseline decks are in line and constantly being reshaped week to week by various National Championships, with less than two weeks left before the opening of U.S. Nationals I have turned my sights toward trying out new ideas.
What I have found is that, as with most formats, there are tons of open possibilities in Standard that people seem to be ignoring.
I don’t want to reopen the debate about the hive mind modern Magic players seem to have, though I think that is where many will take this. However, my goal is just to broaden your mental horizons and cause you to approach deck construction in a new fashion.
Simply put, Magic players are creatures planeswalkers of habit.
We like strategies and cards that are familiar. More often than not, we become familiar with something because we found initial success doing so and fell into a rut surrounding that action. Playing Jund, Mythic, or even Pyromancer’s Ascension now are things with which we all feel familiar. Each of these strategies is established and true. The typical tournament player finds nothing wrong with any of them. They are all decks to be taken seriously and tested against. But it hasn’t always been that way.
Do you remember when these decks first made their debut?
They weren’t taken seriously. Even Jund — Jund! — the same deck people would later complain was too good, luck based, and could play itself, had issues getting off the ground. AJ Sacher called the Sovereigns combo a joke that was too expensive and unnecessary. And Pyromancer’s Ascension? A lot of people were positive that it was gimmicky, and that the new M11 cards wouldn’t push it over the top. “Nope, tested it, not good,” seemed to be the automatic, answering machine response. Now it’s a format staple.
It’s the same way with individual cards. Remember when people were skeptical of Jace, the Mind Sculptor? Not just that one dude (who can’t afford them) that sits in the corner of your game store and claims Jace is overrated, but an entire legion of accomplished players who were fire-selling them at $30.
The opposite can also be true. Remember Fungus Fires? The Sunforger control deck that was supposed to be the deck to beat in early Kamigawa-Ravnica Standard? The deck became so popular so fast that people clutched onto it despite how terrible the deck actually was. It was all people knew in a new format, and they didn’t want to give up on the little they could hold onto. As soon as real decks emerged after States, Fungus Fires began to disappear. But still, for months afterward, some people would still be playing Fungus Fires because they had become so attached to it as a real deck.
This situation has repeated itself over and over. Almost every deck or card has people standing between you and innovation that are screaming “come back when you have played a hundred games.” It quickly becomes a race. The people who get the data the masses want to see have their decks pushed. Everyone else? They’re not so fortunate.
For some reason, people are scared of innovation. Some people will go as far to make up results to prove your idea is bad. I’ve never understood this at all, but skepticism and attacking new ideas has been one constant of Magic. I feel that part of Magic is about exploration and changing the competitive landscape with your own ideas, and it seems like most players are actively hindering that process while simultaneously complaining about losing to Jund when there are alternatives.
What’s the takeaway here? Some intellectual, profound maxim that boils down to “haters gonna hate?”
Maybe on the surface that’s what it might seem like. But there’s way more than that to this discussion.
What do I mean? Well, how about an example.
Let’s talk about Conley Woods.
Conley has been innovating decks for years. Yes, in fact, he has been doing the exact same thing he does now since far before you knew who he was. There’s only one difference. Back when he was crushing everybody with Thousand Year-Elixir, nobody knew who he was and made fun of his decks. Now that he is a player everybody knows and has a reputation for succeeding with unorthodox decks, he’s a genius and his decks are automatically gold. Everyone clamors for his decks, and Conley seems to be one of the few sources where innovation is rewarded, not discouraged.
Yet it’s as if the Sunday stage for Pro Tour Honolulu was a personality-warping portal.
The deck Conley qualified for Honolulu with was not a deck people took seriously. Knight of the Reliquary and Boom/Bust in Extended? Are you serious? Must have been a fluke.
The deck Conley played the weekend before at GP: Seattle? Fewer than half the people I showed the decklist to could get past the first card in the decklist — four Necroskitter — without crumpling up my piece of paper and throwing it back at me. If the same situation was this weekend, I guarantee people would instantly snap up all the cards for the decklist without a second thought and covet the fact they had access to the deck for the event.
What happened?
People are more inclined to trust someone about a deck when that person made Top 8 of a Pro Tour. That makes sense for obvious reasons. Conley clearly knows what he is doing. Regardless, is that seriously what we want to define innovation by? Hard data in the form of tournament results? If you want to be on the cutting edge, if you want to have the deck of the tournament, you are not going to have any results except your own playtesting data. If you require prior evidence of success and are not even willing to wholeheartedly try a deck out — if you immediately dismiss the deck as unplayable — then it is impossible to break the format.
You don’t end up with the ninja-like, format-changing stealth of the Vengevine decks at San Juan by winning multiple Magic Online premier events with it.
In short, the point I am driving at is this: the only reason why Conley’s decks weren’t taken more seriously before his string of success is that people felt the urge to immediately disregard them because — wait for it — the deck wasn’t entirely normal.
Some of this no doubt can be blamed on today’s world. Compare the old school of Magic to the new school. Pre-Internet you would listen to anybody. There were no weird decks! Everybody had their own deck, and maybe you heard rumors from the town over about some Balance or Necro deck, or eventually saw a magazine article detailing some event a month or two later, but nobody was running the same 75 cards.
Enter the internet Magic revolution.
There is just so much media out there between forums, articles, Twitter, mailing lists, and message boards that you have to filter it somehow. As someone who worked in the world of Magic forums for a long time before quitting, there is just a ridiculous amount of information out there. You become so numb to the idea of innovation after the sixtieth thread about some new strategy involving Necrotic Plague that you want to shut yourself off. This is perhaps why so many people who hang around forums seem to become jaded and demand results while condemning innovation.
The difference, though, that can save you from becoming jaded and skeptical is to not filter out, but to filter through.
The tuned Magic player’s mind is like a dreamcatcher. Everything enters and passes through, and you grab the choicest bits and save them on the extensive shelves of your mental archive for later. Obviously you can’t try out and evolve everything. There are time constraints on the deck building process. But if there is something that looks interesting, you can snag that bit and save it.
In fact, that’s often how successful decks are built: several different moving pieces come together because of unique synergies and positioning. You can see it pretty clearly with some decks. For example, the “Guess Who?” deck Conley and I played had a lot of different moving pieces coming together and performing synergistically. When building that deck last minute, we both pulled on different things we had seen, remembered, heard, or thought of to create something which ultimately worked well together.
Every set brings a wealth of new cards to the deckbuilder’s table, and it’s impossible to try all of them together plus put them in combination with the thousands of already existent cards, But just because a card isn’t being played doesn’t mean it’s unplayable. If a card serves a role for you — no matter how janky it may seem — it is fine as long as you are confident it accomplishes that goal.
The card pools are often so deep that people don’t stretch their resources. They find the traditional answers and move on. But sometimes you have to dig to find the best solution. How else would we end up with Paralyzing Grasp in the sideboard of our undefeated San Juan deck? Even in formats as broad as old Extended, you never know when you’re going to need a Hide/Seek. You can’t let any stigma attached to anything fend you off from playing it. If it’s right to play a deck, or card, or some strategy, don’t let anything stop you.
One last thing to think about. You know how it’s said that infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters given infinite time could eventually produce the works of Shakespeare? Consider this. Every day, all over the world, there are thousands and thousands of Magic players working on new decks.
Now, that’s not infinite, but it’s still a lot. Decks that could completely revolutionize a format are built and taken apart every single day. Only a small percentage of these decks will ever make it outside personal testing. Even fewer will ever make it to a tournament. Maybe preliminary results aren’t good enough. Maybe the deck has a weakness that its creator doesn’t like. Who knows? But know this: if you want to make something work, you can make it work. Where there is an idea, there is a way to make it playable if given enough effort.
If you are one of these people, building decks and then tearing them down every two hours, try to beat the bad matchup before throwing your deck away. If not, at least salvage its best pieces and what you liked. If we all put more effort into our decks than just, “couldn’t beat Jund in the five games I played, this deck should not be tested any further,” then I think we would have a lot more decks out there. Standard, Extended, and Legacy are really diverse right now — but they each have the potential to be even more diverse. It’s just a matter of us making the decks to further diversify those formats.
Finally, a bit on the Hall of Fame.
This year, I was bestowed the incredible honor of a ballot for the Hall of Fame. It is an amazing, if difficult, gift given to only a fortunate few. I feel like this is my way to give back to the professional community for everything it has done. I can honestly say that this voting process has prompted some of the hardest decisions of my life. Ever since I was told I would have the opportunity to vote, I have been considering my options. The candidates are real people I both know (in some capacity) and care about as a student of the game, and it is clear to me that each of the five votes I have been given matter dearly and have the potential to change the entire outcome of who is inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Though I had originally planned to discuss my ballot today, I decided to give it another week. As said above, the gravity of the decisions made for the Hall is not to be taken lightly, and I wanted to take the time necessary to pick the best candidates possible. Furthermore, I want to ensure any players who have statements they wanted to make, as has been the case in past years, have the opportunity to do so. However, tune in next week and I will detail how I reached my ballot and why I think others should vote similarly. I look forward to seeing you then!
Until next week, feel free to post in the forums or e-mail me at gavintriesagain at gmail dot com. Otherwise, I’ll see you then when I’ll be talking about my — likely controversial — Hall of Fame ballot. If you want to hear some of my thoughts on the Hall of Fame as the week progresses and get a bit of a preview, follow me on Twitter — I have already involved myself in several thought-provoking conversations about the Hall on there, and that’s sure to continue throughout the week as I finalize my ballot.
See you next week!
Gavin Verhey
Rabon on Magic Online, GavinVerhey on Twitter, Lesurgo everywhere else