At GenCon, reported conversations with R&D’s Randy Buehler concerning future Banned and Restricted list changes swiftly circulated through the Type One community. Here is the substance of one of these dialogues, as reported by a member of the Mana Drain:
I was talking to Buehler and Tinsman (I think) around 11:00 at night on Saturday in the card hall in front of some dealers who were trying to trade. I clearly recognized Buehler, but I wasn’t quite sure if the other guy was Tinsman or someone else in R&D. I asked them (this is all approximate and not word-for-word, mind you):
Me:”Guys, what do you think about Type One right now?”
Them:”It’s very healthy.”
Me:”Yeah, I count fifteen or so viable decks right now.”
Them:”Yeah, very nice turnout at the World Championships.”
Me:”I played in a Type One event on Friday that started at 10:00. We had seventy players. The Standard event that started at about the same time had twenty-two players. It is a healthy format. The Storm Mechanic almost busted the format wide open, though!”
Guy who I think was Tinsman:”Hey, that was my baby!”
Me:”It is generally considered that Force of Will and Duress are the glue that hold the format together and the Storm Mechanic gets around Force nicely.”
Them:”Yeah.”
Me:”Yeah, but your restriction of Mind’s Desire fixed it, I guess. I still think Tendrils of Agony should cost one more mana or at least be three black to cast.”
Them:”You’re probably right.”
Then I asked them what they thought about Stacks, Hulk. They didn’t know what the decks were until I explained them.”Oh yeah – good deck,” they would say. They asked me what won the Vintage World Championships; I told them Hulk.
Them:”There isn’t nearly enough innovation in Vintage, though.”
Me:”I agree. TnT and Stacks should have been invented a couple of years ago.”
Them:”Yeah; Mishra’s Workshop has been unrestricted for a while now.”
Me:”Do you think Workshop should be re-restricted?”
Them:”No; there is nothing wrong with it.”
Me:”What about Academy Rector?”
Keep in mind, there had been talk starting around the third or fourth round of the T1 World championships that Rector was going to be restricted.
There was silence as they looked down, not saying anything.”Well, Rector is a creature, but it’s a Tutor too…..”
I could tell they had given this some thought. It seems to me that they had come to a conclusion already and clearly didn’t want to share it.
And so you have it: The Academy Rector Dilemma.
This issue touches a raw nerve. Depending on how it is decided, Wizards may be ruling on a wider issue than whether Rector is distorting the environment
Over the course of the last few years, Wizards, the DCI, and other responsible parties have done a great job under difficult conditions. It has been speculated that Wizards lacks critical information necessary to help manage the banned and restricted list. If this is the case – as I suspect, to a certain degree, it is – it is perfectly understandable: Wizards must devote the majority of its resources to the formats which generate cash flows for the company and for which it devotes Pro Tour money, particularly Draft, Block, and Standard. On the other hand, the Type 1 community is so vocal that it tends to monitor itself and relay pertinent information to Wizards. Without testing, the most Wizards can do is use common sense, collective experience, tournament data, and information from Type One players. I imagine some Wizards employees open up their email box each week and find a couple of emails – some unintelligible, some articulate – about policy making in Type One. The articulate letters probably convey a greater quality and quantity of information to Wizards than they could ever generate alone at the same cost effectiveness.
The vast majority of changes to the banned and restricted list have been made in accord with a broad consensus on the part of the Type One community. The first shining example that springs to mind was the restriction of Fact or Fiction. The mono blue deck that abused this card dominated the”metagame” at the time. In retrospect, this was probably caused, in no small part, by the lack of innovation in Type One in the United States at the time. Most of the top American Type One players were fervent adherents to Keeper. There was little incentive to change and most Keeper player essentially took the myopic view that it”Is the best deck, and the best deck that will ever be.” That kind of attitude was, on the other hand, the perfect breeding ground for a Mono Blue deck which could out-control Keeper and destroy practically every other deck except for a well-built Suicide Black. In such an environment, Fact or Fiction had to be restricted. If it were unrestricted today – which I am not advocating, by the way – I think we would find it more balanced than we did at the time. While TnT was being developed, no one had noticed it Stateside at the time, and Masknaught wasn’t quite finished. Although it may appear otherwise, I strongly believe that Wizards’ swift restriction of Fact or Fiction was an excellent decision. You had a classic case of metagame domination, not just distortion.
Early this year, Aaron Forsythe threw down the gauntlet: He challenged the community to write in concerning the restricted list – and Wizards listened. Recall was an obvious choice, but necessary. Berserk was not so obvious, but an excellent decision to unrestrict after all. Finally, Hurkyl’s Recall turned out to be an excellent choice as well (unless Mind’s Desire had not been restricted). Most Type One players take issue with the fact that Entomb and Earthcraft were restricted, but are civil enough to keep quiet, realizing the practical realities that dictated their restriction: namely, Type 1.5.
Late April to Mid-May of 2003, there was a massive outcry over Gro-A-Tog and a call to restrict Gush. While that outcry diminished slightly over time as the metagame began to shift and Gro-A-Tog was hated out of certain environments, most reasonable people recognize this as the correct decision and are thankful for it. Again, Wizards made the right call.
Finally, within a week of the Scourge spoiler, Mind’s Desire decks were being cooked up in various deck laboratories. By the end of the month, before the Prerelease had even come, some amazingly powerful Desire decks were already running rampant in testing circles. Wizards took a step that broke with tradition: They restricted a card based upon obvious objective criteria that the card was too strong before it actually had a chance to abuse the metagame first. However, Wizards had two good reasons to do this: First of all, Mind’s Desire decks would have been a real blight on the GenCon Championship, something which we all wanted to be proud of – and second, the card was already recognized as metagame-distortive.
If Wizards restricts Academy Rector, they will be moving away from the previous precedent of restriction cards based on metagame distortion, and will be relying, primarily, on the function of the card: Namely, that is a Tutor, and strong Tutors deserve restriction; or that it is an easy way to get Bargain, a ridiculously broken card which says”I win.”
If Wizards doesn’t restrict Academy Rector, it will be adhering to the stricter rule that it must first demonstrably distort the metagame. Perhaps Wizards just doesn’t want that kind of combo, getting Bargain with such ease to be available, or even prevalent. That could stem from a distaste for combo or that the combo, if not overly distorting or dominating the metagame, is too”objectively” broken. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t be sad, as an act in itself, to see Rector go. But my point is, does it need to be done? And if it doesn’t need to be done, but it is too objectively broken, what are the consequences of restricting it anyway?
First, take a look at the two primary Rector decks:
Rector Trix
By Max Joseph, a.k.a. Westredale:
Disruption
4 Force of Will
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Duress
Search/Broken:
1 Time Walk
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
4 Brainstorm
Combo Pieces:
3 Illusions of Grandeur
2 Donate
1 Rushing River
1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain
1 Necropotence
4 Academy Rector
Mana:
2 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
3 Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author]
4 Underground Sea
2 Gemstone Mine
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Vault
3 Dark Ritual
SB: 1 Aura Fracture
SB: 2 Seal of Cleansing
SB: 2 Abeyance
SB: 2 Hurkyl’s Recall
SB: 1 Mind Twist
SB: 1 Island
SB: 1 Balance
SB: 1 Timetwister
SB: 1 The Abyss
SB: 1 Illusions of Grandeur
SB: 2 Blue Elemental Blast
Rectal Agony
Eric Fortin, Max Joseph, and Brad Granberry
// Mana
2 Flooded Strand
2 Gemstone Mine
3 Polluted Delta
3 Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author]
3 Underground Sea
1 Tolarian Academy
// Creatures
4 Academy Rector
// Enchantments
1 Future Sight
1 Necropotence
1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain
// Spells
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
1 Frantic Search
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
4 Dark Ritual
4 Cabal Therapy
1 Demonic Tutor
3 Duress
2 Tendrils of Agony
1 Time Walk
1 Timetwister
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
// Artifacts
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Diamond
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mana Vault
// Sideboard
SB: 1 Balance
SB: 1 Seal of Cleansing
SB: 1 Words of Worship
SB: 2 Blue Elemental Blast
SB: 2 Hurkyl’s Recall
SB: 2 Coffin Purge
SB: 3 Phyrexian Negator
SB: 1 The Abyss
SB: 1 Form of the Dragon
SB: 1 Island
Both of these decks are fascinating for a number of reasons: A number of people have been working on these decks for some time. In the first case, Max Joseph and Eric Wilkenson piloted the Rector Trix breakout deck in early 2003. Eric posted the list on the Paragons listing, and then revealed he had performed very well with it. I later learned that Max had had a significant hand in its development. He built an excellent sideboard and sideboard strategy (as you can see in Matt Smith’s article). Within the month, either having seen Max’s list first or having developed the idea independently, the deck quickly caught on in Europe, beginning in April 2003. It was quickly recognized that this deck was a potential competitor to Gro-A-Tog. Where Gro-A-Tog remained the static, it got pushed out by the Workshop Prison and Rector decks. Gro-A-Tog, in the case of the Dulmen, adapted and remained the top deck.
At essence, they are Bargain decks. Part of the power of these decks is the natural synergy between Cabal Therapy and resolving the important spells. Secondly, these decks are rounded out with powerful spells like Timetwister and other brokenness. The result is that this deck may not even need to cast Rector to combo out (with either Tendrils or Illusions/Donate).
The deck was not without flaws. In the first instance, building an optimal deck was difficult to do. There were many cards to fit into a sixty-card deck – and in the end, despite Tom Van De Logt’s skill with the deck, I believe that Max’s build proved optimal based upon my personal testing with the deck. I don’t know whether there is an underlying theoretical basis for these things, but sometimes if you take an optimal build and you play a few games with it, you’ll quickly realize how good it is. But if you change just a few cards – changes that should be almost irrelevant – you get draws and play problems that should be completely unrelated to the changes you made. It’s as if your deck is saying,”Stupid, don’t change me! I was perfect the way I was!”
Eric Fortin and Max Joseph started working, independently, on a Rector Trix variant that cut out the Trix for Tendrils of Agony. The development of this deck is relatively new; however, it has proved to be more broken than Rector Trix in many respects, but has compensated that brokenness with new weaknesses. In particular, the deck has more difficulty running Force of Will, and the result is an incredible weakness to Workshop Prison decks, which Rector Trix doesn’t have. There are a few other problems, but if you don’t expect Workshop decks, then Tendrils is almost always the better choice.
The Statistics
Here is all the top 8 data I can find beginning with April, the month before Rector Trix showed up in European Top 8s. If you don’t care to look through the raw data, just scroll down past these lists.
Milan, April 2003
1. Keeper (slow Keeper with Tome)
2. 5c Trix
3. Berserked Madness
4. Super Gro
5. Nether Void
6. 5c Trix
7. ?
8. Super Gro
Dulmen, April 2003
1. Gro-A-Tog
2. GroMask
3. Gro-A-Tog
4. ?
5. Stax
6. Vengeur Masque
7. ?
8. ?
Castricum, April 2003
1. ?
2. MUD
3. ?
4. RECTOR TRIX – this is the first tournament where we see it.
5. Gro-A-Tog
6. Gro-A-Tog
7. ?
8. Jank
Eindhoven, April 2003
1. MUD
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. Fish
4. TnT
5. Nether Void
6. Gro-A-Tog
7. Gro-A-Tog
8. Gro-A-Tog
Eindhoven was near the end of the month, so they had had time to assimilate data – but no Rector deck had made the top 8 as of yet.
Heidelburg, May 2003
1. Gro-A-Tog
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. Reanimator
4. Gro-A-Tog
5. Stacker
6. Gro-A-Tog
7. Ankh Sligh
8. Turboland
Castricum, May 2003
1. Gro-A-Tog
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. Pandeburst
4. TnT
5. Rector Trix
6. Keeper
7. Butterknives
8. Academy
Dülmen, May 2003
1. Gro-A-Tog
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. Combo Keeper
4. Gro-A-Tog
5. Keeper
6. U/R Tubbies
7. Gro-A-Tog
8. Combo Keeper
Eindhoven, May 2003
1. Rector Trix, played by Tom Van De Logt (Magic World Champion)
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. MUD
4. Keeper
5. Gro-A-Tog
6. Sligh
7. MUD
8. Fish
Dulmen, June 2003
1. Gro-A-Tog
2. Miracle Gro
3. Gro-A-Tog
4. Gro-A-Tog
5. Nether Void
6. Gro-A-Tog
7. Gro-A-Tog
8. Goblin Sligh
Århus, June 2003
1. U/R MUD/Stax
2. Fish
3. Gro-A-Tog
4. U/B Mask
5. Gro-A-Tog
6. Gro-A-Tog
7. Gro-A-Tog
8. Gro-A-Tog
Heidelberg, June 2003
1. Gro-A-Tog
2. Psychatog
3. GroMask
4. Hulk + Mask
5. Stacker
6. Stacker
7. 5 Trix
8. Gro-A-Tog
Castricum, June 2003
1. Gro-A-Tog
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. Pandeburst
4. Tangle TnT
5. RECTOR TRIX
6. Rector Keeper
7. MUD
8. Academy
Eindhoven, June 2003
1. Ankh Sligh
2. Rector Trix – Tom Van De Logt
3. Stax
4. Reap
5. MUD
6. Stax
7. Rector Trix
8. Rector Trix
This is the largest number of Rector Trix decks in a top 8 on record – and there were three Workshop decks, Two Stax and one MUD, which all placed higher on the whole. Gro-A-Tog was severely hated out.
Barcelona, June 2003
1. Stax
2. Keeper
3. Rector Trix
4. Mono Blue
5. Gro-A-Tog
6. Gro-A-Tog
7. Madness
8. Gro-A-Tog
Origins, June 2003
Thursday, 4PM
1. Gro-A-Tog (Me)
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. R/G Madness
4. Stax
5. ?
6. ?
7. ?
8. ?
Friday, 1 PM
1. Gro-A-Tog
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. ?
4. Gro-A-Tog
5. ?
6. ?
7. ?
8. ?
Saturday, 11 AM
1. Keeper
2. Suicide Black
3. G/R Madness
4. Gro-A-Tog (Me)
5. Super Gro
6. Urphid
7. NetherVoid
8. MaskNaught
Sunday
1. Reanimator
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. G/R Madness
4. Gro-A-Tog
5. Stax
6. Jank
7. Suicide Black
8. Sligh
Barcelona, July 2003 (93 Players)
1. Super Gro
2. Keeper
3. High Tide
4. Full English Breakfast
5. Goblin Sligh
6. Aluren
7. Sphere TnT
8. Fish
All I have to say is that the bizarre decks came out of the woodwork after the restriction of Gush. People were experimenting.
Antwerp, July 2003
1. MUD
2. Stax (Matthieu Durand – my co-writer for the Stax article).
3. Rector Trix
4. TnT
5. Goblin Sligh
6. Rector Trix
7. TnT
8. Rectal Agony
9. Hulk Smash (Me playing without Coffin Purges because I couldn’t find them in Europe!)
This is tied for the most Rector decks in a top 8. There wasn’t enough control to keep these decks in check. I lost to Rectal Agony because I was using Tormod’s Crypt instead of Purges. I beat another Rector Trix round one.
Dülmen, July 2003
1. The Shining
2. Long.dec (Burning Academy)
3. UR Phid
4. The Shining
5. UBw Control
6. UBwr Control
7. Vengeur Masqué
8. Goblin Sligh
Combo was hated out in this metagame – people expected it, and so control came out in force, which is the opposite of the Antwerp metagame, where aggro got hosed by combo, and so the Workshop prison decks dominated.
GenCon T1 Championship, August 2003
1. Hulk Smash
2. Venguer Masque
3. Stax
4. Dragon
5. Stax
6. Rector Trix
7. Goblin Sligh
8. Masknaught
Berlin (Worlds) August, 2003
1 Keeper
2 Super-Gro
3 Long.dec (Burning Academy)
4 Bazaar Madness
5 Hulk Smash
6 Stax
7 Dragon
8 WB-Control
Dülmen, August 2003:
1. Hulk Smash
2. Techy Suicide Black
3. Stax
4. Tangle/Sphere TnT
5. Long.dec with Rectors
6. Vengeur Masque
7. 5c Trix – Tom Van De Logt
8. ??
And so finally, Hulk makes the rounds at the German Dülmen. Stax also performed very well.
TMD Northeast Championship
1. Gro-A-Tog with One Gush
2. B/G Junk
3. Hulk Smash
4. Ankh Sligh
5. 3c Phid
6. Keeper
7. Masque
8. B/G Junk
The most relevant data is the GenCon, Dülmen for July and August, and the Mana Drain Invitational results. At GenCon, only one of ten Rector decks made it to the top 8. Zero Rector decks survived the massive Togfest of the Mana Drain Invitational, whose top 8 was so skewed due to the sheer number of Psychatog decks (a reaction from the previous weekend’s GenCon Tournament) that a one-Gush Gro-A-Tog actually won the tournament. At the Dulmen the same weekend, Hulk won the tournament with Stax getting third by none other than Sebastian Kaul. (As an interesting side note, he was a major part of the inspiration for our article, and he recorded his deck as $t4ks – the irony is the cross-pollination. He inspired us, but we inspired him!). The only Rector deck was a hybrid of Long’s Burning Academy and Rector Tendrils, which got 5th place. Tom Van De Logt chose not even to play Rector Trix this time, in favor of Kai Budde Trix from the 2000 Invitational!
If a former World Champion chooses the older build over the Rector Build, then that is reflective of the archetype.
But it wasn’t just that Rector got hated out – combo was hated out. People were naturally playing cards that are antithetical to the success of Rector. Graveyard hate has long been a staple in Type One sideboards, and it has now found new targets because of decks like Tog (which relies on Accumulated Knowledge), TnT (which relies on the Squee, Goblin Nabob engine), Dragon (whose combo is played out of the graveyard), and others. For a while, Keeper was running a Wish target such as Ebony Charm to nail TnT’s graveyard recursion. While people have certainly increased the graveyard hate, it isn’t directly or singularly caused by Rector. For those who are puzzled, you can Coffin Purge the Rector before it can fetch Bargain. Moreover, Duresses are naturally becoming more central, replacing Misdirection because combo decks are so prevalent. So while people are adding Duresses to their main decks, Rector isn’t the only reason.
Examining the tournaments, beginning from the tournament that Rector first showed up in, it got a total of thirteen top 8s out of twenty-five tournaments and two hundred slots. That’s a mere 6.5% of the total in the top 8s. Before the restriction of Gush, it was featured at slightly over 5% in the top 8s. After the restriction of Gush, it has jumped slightly to 8.9%. However, this comes with a caveat: I only have data for seven tournaments since July 1st.
Moreover, out of all this tournament data, Rector decks only got first place once. Finally, it only placed in the top 4 five times out of twenty-five tournaments. If that is dominating, or even distorting, then we need a new definition of those words. By contrast, for the tournaments when four Gushes were legal, Gro variants showed up fifty times in seventeen top 8s, or 36.7% of the top 8s. Now that is not only distorting, it’s dominating as well. When a deck is nearly 40% of the top 8s, then you know something is horribly amiss. Fortunately, Wizards corrected the problem.
Most Vintage players – but not all – admit that we have a rather balanced metagame, although it is one of the most broken balanced metagames. If combo constitutes, consistently, more than 30% of top 8s, then that is a sign that the format is unhealthy. The current metagame has about 25% combo in the top 8s. But when you consider that the divide is pretty even between control (25%), combo (25%), Workshop decks (18.5%), and aggro-control (16.6%) then it can be seen as part of a wider balance. At the very least, if they don’t believe things are balanced, they might be willing to admit that there is no best deck right now. The information flow is steady right now, but too many of the major, new powerful decks are untuned and unknown as to how they fit into the wide metagame. There is always a lag time in Type One as things sort themselves out – and there is a lot to chew on right now. My advice is to wait and see what happens.
Community Opinion
I have conducted many polls on these issues and I pay close attention to the community’s feelings on the matter. Here are the results of a poll I undertook the last week of July concerning Academy Rector. The question was phrased simply: Should Academy Rector be restricted?
165 Votes.
33 Voted Yes (20.00%)
132 Voted No (80.00%)
That is a resounding No.
One major point remains: What about the people who think,”So what, who cares if Rector is still too broken?” Once you start down the path of restricting cards because they are objectively broken, rather than metagame-dominant or -distortive, then you have gone down a slippery slope that leads to many more restrictions. Where does that end, and who is qualified to make those sorts of decisions? It is a dangerous path.
The answers are not cut-and-dried. But one thing is clear, and this is something Wizard should come to terms with: if they restrict Academy Rector they will be doing it for reasons other than that it is dominating or even distorting the format.
Burning Wish
In the reported GenCon conversations, it was rumored that Burning Wish, Cunning Wish, and a few other cards might be put on the chopping block. For those of you who are not familiar, Burning Wish is almost exclusively used in two Type One decks:
The Shining
By Carsten Kötter
Maindeck:
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
2 City of Brass
3 Flooded Strand
1 Library of Alexandria
2 Polluted Delta
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Tropical Island
2 Tundra
3 Underground Sea
3 Volcanic Island
1 Zuran Orb
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Diabolic Edict
2 Duress
1 Vampiric Tutor
4 Accumulated Knowledge
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
2 Future Sight
1 Gush
1 Intuition
4 Mana Drain
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Time Walk
1 Fastbond
4 Burning Wish
Sideboard:
1 Aura Fracture
1 Balance
1 Call of the Herd
1 Circle of Protection: Red
1 Deep Analysis
2 Duress
1 Innocent Blood
1 Mind Twist
1 Primitive Justice
2 Pyroblast
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Vindicate
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
Mike Long’s Burning Desire
By Gerhard-Swen Weinhold-Markus – 3rd Place at Worlds 2003 in Berlin
Type One Main Event
1 Black Lotus
2 Chromatic Sphere
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Memory Jar
1 Mox Diamond
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
4 Dark Ritual
1 Demonic Tutor
2 Duress
1 Necropotence
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
1 Future Sight
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Time Walk
1 Timetwister
1 Windfall
1 Hunting Pack
3 Xantid Swarm
4 Burning Wish
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Balance
4 Gemstone Mine
3 Polluted Delta
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Tropical Island
1 Underground Sea
1 Volcanic Island
Sideboard:
2 Duress
2 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Innocent Blood
2 Ray of Revelation
1 Replenish
1 Reverent Silence
1 Shatterstorm
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Tinker
1 Vindicate
1 Xantid Swarm
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
In Carsten’s deck, Burning Wish is used as the tail end of a long combo to fetch out Tendrils. It can also be used in a pinch to get Vindicate to stop a threat, but but generally it is most powerfully used as the finisher.
In Long’s deck, it is used almost immediately to fetch out Yawgmoth’s Will. The key element of playing this deck is knowing when to sac Lion’s Eye Diamond; generally, it’s right after you cast a draw-seven or a Burning Wish. You only need a little bit of juice in your graveyard before you Burning Wish for Yawgmoth’s Will – something you want to do rather quickly. Once you have done that, you can recur all the artifact mana like the LEDs, break them before you start playing more spells, and you basically can just win. If you aren’t quite at the win and Yawgmoth’s Will won’t get you enough, you Wish for Mind’s Desire (if you have it in the sideboard) and use that to get to the win, as long as you have cast four or more spells – which means hold the Moxen. If it can’t do that, then it uses Brainstorm to set a broken spell on top of the library and then breaks the Lion’s Eye Diamond and Chromatic Sphere, drawing the busted card and then playing it off of the Lion’s Eye Diamond mana. The deck uses only four Duresses (not even Force of Will) to protect itself, not to mention the deck is stacked to high heaven with mana sources: Thirty-five in total, with a mere seventeen actual critical spells excluding tutors and Brainstorms (although the speed of the deck often means that each individual spell is more potent).
For all intents and purposes, this deck is the inheritor of the Academy title: The most broken cards Type One has to offer in a monstrous combo deck. The only difference is that Tendrils provides a far more natural win condition than Stroke of Genius, as every combo deck attempts to play at least nine spells a turn anyway – so the clunky Power Artifact or Candelabra of Tawnos/Capsize/Academy combo takes up more slots than it needs to compared to Tendrils, which has more synergy with the deck and is a one card combo. The only reason this deck isn’t more reliant upon Academy than previous Academy decks is because the Lion’s Eye Diamond’s and other broken mana sources generate more mana with greater speed than Tolarian Academy could.
Admittedly, Burning Wishing out Yawgmoth’s Will is quite degenerate because it means having access to multiple Wills – arguably the most broken card in the game right now. But I think that would be the wrong target. If Wizards is really worried about this deck, the first place to look isn’t Burning Wish but Lion’s Eye Diamond, without which the deck would slow down considerably. If you restrict Burning Wish, then the deck loses early Yawgmoth’s Wills, but it can still use Lion’s Eye Diamond after tutors, draw-sevens, and Brainstorms.
And frankly, Type One decks such as this have essentially hit a critical mass. There are sufficient broken draw-sevens and other restricted cards that the effect of restricting any particular card has only minimal effect. Specifically, the effect of restricting Burning Wish would be to move a Tendrils, Mind’s Desire, and Yawgmoth’s Will to the maindeck, slowing down this deck only slightly, if at all. The deck is so stacked with brokenness that it can almost reliably cast a Brainstorm and sacrifice Lion’s Eye Diamond drawing into a broken spell to use the mana on. If these decks get out of hand, crafting a solution will require careful examination of the deck and its matchups… But restricting Burning Wish would be premature at this point in time.
Cunning Wish
When Mystical Tutor was unrestricted, Weissman played with three immediately. Weissman is rather incrementalist when it comes to adding new cards and he added one Cunning Wish to his most recent”The Deck” list. This is a solid utility card, not a broken Tutor. One of the biggest debates in Keeper threads has been whether Cunning Wish leads to the mutation of sideboards in order to facilitate the maximized usefulness of the Wish. I have made clear that there is a threshold of colors needed to really make the Wish great – and in Mono Blue, it just doesn’t cut it. Once you add Red or White to Blue, then it makes it worth it unless you are playing aggro control or otherwise want access to Berserk.
The deck that would be hurt the most would have to be Hulk Smash. Hulk would be damaged by the loss of two Wishes. In the first place, Hulk prefers to Wish up Berserk as a finisher. Secondly, its matchups against the Workshop decks would become more difficult because it would be much more difficult to cast Artifact Mutation, Hurkyl’s Recall, or Fire / Ice on Goblin Welders. With Wishes, Hulk can then afford to keep the spells in the sideboard, save sideboard space, and can get the spell it most needs in any particular game state. Coffin Purge is a real threat to the Rector decks. Being able to Wish out Purge is a real key to preventing the Rector from fetching out Bargain. Purge is strong because it’s naturally discard-proof with its flashback ability. Hulk then would almost lose access to Purge game one. And after sideboarding in two Purges and leaving one in the sideboard, with three Cunning Wishes, it has a simulated five Purges maindeck.
The fact that Hulk uses these cards this way is a good thing; it means that Hulk can metagame against decks which might prove too strong. It isn’t like Hulk is using Cunning Wish like Long’s Burning Academy uses Burning Wish to proactively abuse Yawgmoth’s Will or Mind’s Desire; Hulk is using the Wish reactively to solve threatening matchups, and this is a healthy thing for a control deck to do. The fact that Hulk Wishes out Berserk is not sufficient reason to restrict Wish because most decks have ample opportunity to respond or affect the game state before Berserk is cast. You see, the Berserk is fetched when Hulk is about to win – it’s the final blow. If you can stop it, Hulk is desperate and is trying to take the game while it thinks it can. Or it has the whole game sealed up and it just walking through the formalities, in which case the game was over anyway.
Fork
This was one of the original three cards that I argued should be unrestricted in my letter to Forsythe at the beginning of the year, along with Berserk and Recall. There is nothing that makes this card broken. No one cares if Sligh has four Forks. Against blue, are they going to use them over Red Elemental Blast? Hell no.
The only concern anyone could show over the use of Fork is how it might be abused in combo. Have no fear; it won’t be. It is far too conditional for most combo decks, not doing anything by itself, and copying any card that a combo deck would play is generally superfluous or too costly given the RR casting cost. The best it can do is fork a Wheel or other draw-seven – or even an Ancestral or Time Walk. For RR, that isn’t very good, particularly since the Wheel or Draw-seven resolves immediately after the other. Finally, you could Fork a Wish – but at a cost of RR as compared to Burning’s or Cunning’s cost, who cares? As I have said before, the real cost of restricting this card is those sad souls who apply the Type One rules in earnest to their casual games to provides some stability and limits on what people can play… And it is made worse by the fact that Fork is one of the more inexpensive restricted cards that might have a lot of potential in a more casual style of the format.
I welcome decks trying to abuse it, because I think that there is an even simpler reason why it can’t be broken: If there is some combo of cards that really, really abuses Fork – when you Fork this spell, you will almost certainly win – the problem with that is that any card that powerful means you are going to win with or without Fork anyway. Fork is, then, almost always a win-more card. Its reasons for restriction have fallen away. Unrestrict it, and the casual players will thank you for it.
My Criteria for Restriction
Type One has important symbolic value to the game of Magic. It represents the strength of Magic over time, and is a symbol of its history. As the game grows older, Wizards must come to appreciate that a strong following for Type One bolsters its integrity among the secondary markets, and enhances the image of Magic as a game which will be here for some time to come.
The aim of any restricted list is to do what is best for the format it affects – and by extension, the game. That can mean a lot of things. But what is best for the format? Is the goal of Magic to have fun, or is it to have a competitive, dynamic environment? The driving force behind the consumption of packs and tournament participation – the primary revenue stream for Wizards – probably encompasses both goals. However, the very reason that Wizards has (correctly) paid less attention to Type One than it has to other formats suggests that the goals of Type One policy making could be different from other formats. In other words, since tournament play and not pack consumption is basically the primary source of revenue from players when they play Type One, then the goals that drive the policy making of the format are allowed to be different. The important point is that the reasons which support policy decisions in other formats often fall away when it comes to Type One… And so the format should not have the same, or possibly even similar, policy-making criteria.
However, one thing is clear: Type One policy making is, in part, driven by the management of 1.5 – an alien criteria. As long as Wizards plans on supporting 1.5, I think most Type One players can muscle up the strength to keep their traps shut and accept the reasons which underlie its coupling to Type One as long as it doesn’t seriously harm Type One. No one was up in arms about Entomb or Earthcraft.
I propose a weighted multi-factor test that I believe should be adopted by Wizards:
To begin, the first criteria for whether a card should be restricted is whether it is the key element of a deck that is excessively tournament dominant in diverse geographical areas for a period of at least one month. This is the most important criteria. Usually, this card will be a mana accelerant or a card advantage generator. Common sense application of the rule should be the norm. The card should be chosen so that it affects as few decks as possible. Sometimes, more than one card might need to be restricted because the restriction of one key element may not stop the deck from being dominant.
The second criteria is whether a card is the key element of a deck that is excessively metagame distorting in diverse geographical areas for a period of at least one month.
The phrasing of the second criteria is broad enough to encompass cards like Strip Mine and Black Vise, whose unrestriction may not lead to a single degenerate deck, but would be sufficiently metagame-distorting to warrant restriction. Generally, you won’t need multiple restrictions for cards for decks that have cards that meet this criterion.
In the final months of Gush’s existence there was an issue of whether Gro-A-Tog was truly dominant. In the Netherlands, there were decks that were running rampant which claimed that they never lost to Gro-A-Tog. A glance at the June Eindhoven is a great example of this. In America, similar claims were made as well… And they might have been true. But this simple situation raises two issues: Those issues are whether a deck need be unbeatable, and whether the card/deck need prove its dominance everywhere (or mostly everywhere).
Addressing the first issue, it should be obvious that deck need not be unbeatable in order for an element of it to be restricted. In the first place, most decks always have a flaw. To say that deck must be unbeatable ignores the point that it can still be distorting. In the case of mono blue, the answer was Suicide Black. Those who played against Mono Blue had to run Suicide Black in order to have a good shot against it. If they were unlucky enough to have to face another deck first, say some Neo-Academy build, then they were out of luck, and Mono Blue would go all the way to the top. That is a distorted environment.
The third criterion asks whether the card is sufficiently objectively over-powered without reference to specific card interaction. This criterion should be given much less weight than the first, and there is a heavy burden on the part of the card to show that it is sufficiently objectively broken. This criterion excludes the question of whether a card is objectively over powered in combination with some other card, but asks if it is objectively overpowered in light of known principles and general knowledge. The perfect example of this type of card is Mind’s Desire. The storm mechanic is particularly abusive in a format with zero-casting-cost mana accelerants. This criterion is generally in place so that a card may be restricted before it enters the environment and makes things unpleasant for the next three months.
The fourth criteria asks whether there is a card that either distorts or dominants the Type 1.5 environment, and whose restriction would not significantly affecting Type One. Presumably, this follows the pattern of Entomb and Earthcraft.
Some people might propose other criteria such as that the card is too powerful in multiples. I would argue that the four criteria are sufficiently broad that any other criteria that may be imagined fit within this framework.
Stephen Menendian
I can be reached at [email protected]
I have quite a bit of Origins video I’d like to get on the web. If you are interesting and kind enough to want to host the video, please let me know.