In the wake of a very crowd-pleasing Banned and Restricted announcement on December 1st (DCI: Seriously, Type 1 players adored it) and much ado about the future of Vintage caused by the wrecking-ball of a combo deck, Burning Desire, I decided to look at the tournament data for late 2003 and break down the results. The one criteria for B&R changes that everyone openly accepts is tournament distortion/dominance, so really, the way to approach the community’s most controversial issue in the least controversial way is obvious. If you want to skip my explanation of why I picked the tournaments I picked for analysis, scroll down to”Murlodont” and resume reading.
One of the challenges in Type 1 analysis is the relative scarcity of data. We have one Grand Prix-like event annually, and otherwise a tournament is considered to have incredible turnout if you can break fifty or so people. Once you get smaller than that, you run into significant risks of not having enough quality players to fill out a top 8, or results that are bafflingly random. This only gets worse in Type 1, because, despite the barriers to entry, sometimes a totally ridiculous-looking metagame deck walks through and owns a tournament. (Check out the mono-Green Land Destruction deck that won a Belgian twenty-plus player tournament)
To fight this risk while preserving an adequate data pool, I ruled out every tournament with less than fifty players. Initially I was going to use seventy-five as the cutoff, but seven tournaments seemed too narrow, especially since four of those were held in Dulmen. That much data from one metagame is enough of a weakness to my analysis as-is. I was also tempted to include the Eindhoven and Castricum tournaments (usually in the twenty to forty player range), as several prominent TheManaDrain-goers regularly compete there, but small tournaments are just too easily distorted. (This also applies to some other dedicated enclaves that don’t have the really big tournies – sorry, guys.)
Unfortunately, at the moment, TheManaDrain.com main forums are inaccessible, so I’m not sure if there are other North American tournaments which meet my fifty-player minimum. If anything, this will under-represent Dragon in the final tallies, due to the work of one Adam Bowers winning three tournaments in a row with it (Waterbury, included here, was among these). Control will in general be less favorably represented with incomplete North American data, since the Europeans have some kind of genetic aversion to it most of the time.
Additionally, some of the Top 8’s on morphling.de do not have a number of players listed. If any of those were over the minimum, I have no way of knowing.
Murlodont.
That said, here’s the ten tournaments I’ll be including in my survey, and some tracking of how often certain notable cards appeared.
Dulmen T8, 97 players, 2003-09-28
1. Dragon
2. Stoopid Madness
3. Reanimator
4. Long
5. GAT
6. TNT
7. Dragon
8. Dragon
20 Bazaar of Baghdad
4 Burning Wish
3 Cunning Wish
4 Dark Ritual
4 Deep Analysis
22 Duress
20 Force of Will
12 Intuition
8 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Mana Drain
4 Mishra’s Workshop
3 Stifle
2 Wasteland
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
11 Basic Land – 47 Dual Lands – 31 Onslaught Fetchlands
Barcelona T8, 59 players, 2003-10-04
1. R/G/W/b Zoo (unPowered)
2. Mono-Blue Control (non-Ophidian, 1 Mox only)
3. Rector-Tendrils
4. Dragon
5. Long
6. Goblin Sligh
7. Venguer Masque
8. Reanimator
4 Academy Rector
4 Burning Wish
3 Cunning Wish
16 Dark Ritual
19 Duress
16 Force of Will
4 Illusionary Mask
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Mana Drain
5 Wasteland
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
42 – 37 – 27
Massa T8, 139 players, 2003-10-12
1. TNT
2. Hulk Smash
3. Lock & Stock (Stax)
4. Rector Trix
5. Rector Tendril
6. Stacker (mono-Brown)
7. Stacker
8. Lock & Stock (Stax)
8 Academy Rector
3 Cunning Wish
8 Dark Ritual
2 Deep Analysis
12 Duress
11 Force of Will
2 Intuition
4 Mana Drain
3 Meditate
20 Mishra’s Workshop
3 Stifle
15 Wasteland
4 Yawgmoth’s Will
13 – 38 – 25
Talavera de la Reina T8, 59 players, 2003-10-12
1. Long
2. Long
3. Rector Trix
4. SuperGro
5. Mono-U Fish (unPowered)
6. U/G/W Oath (unPowered)
7. Monoblue Control (unPowered)
8. U/R/g Zoo
4 Academy Rector
8 Burning Wish
5 Cunning Wish
11 Dark Ritual
11 Duress
24 Force of Will
8 Lion’s Eye Diamond
10 Mana Drain
8 Standstill
3 Stifle
9 Wasteland
3 Yawgmoth’s Will
26 – 28 – 17
Dulmen T8, 84 players, 2003-10-19
1. TPS (Tendrils)
2. Dragon
3. Madness
4. Dark Seed (4-color SuperGro)
5. Butterknives (Mono-Black)
6. Stax
7. Krosan Keeper
8. Long
8 Bazaar of Baghdad
4 Burning Wish
5 Cunning Wish
12 Dark Ritual
2 Deep Analysis
22 Duress
16 Force of Will
4 Intuition
8 Lion’s Eye Diamond
7 Mana Drain
6 Meditate
4 Mishra’s Workshop
1 Stifle
3 Wasteland
5 Yawgmoth’s Will
18 – 46 – 27
Waterbury T8, 110 players, 2003-11-16
1. Dragon
2. Gro-A-Tog
3. Dragon
4. U/R Fish
5. OSE (U/b/r control)
6. Mono-U Fish
7. Gro-A-Tog
8. Dragon
12 Bazaar of Baghdad
3 Chalice of the Void
8 Cunning Wish
4 Deep Analysis
13 Duress
32 Force of Will
9 Intuition
4 Isochron Scepter
2 Lim-Dul’s Vault
8 Mana Drain
8 Standstill
20 Stifle
12 Wasteland
2 Yawgmoth’s Will
17 – 50 – 27
Dulmen T8, 91 players, 2003-11-30
1. Vengeur Masqué U/g/w
2. TNT
3. Workshop IsoControl
4. Dragon
5. IsoKeeper
6. R/G Madness
7. Dragon
8. Nether Void
12 Bazaar of Baghdad
19 Chalice of the Void
4 Cunning Wish
4 Dark Ritual
2 Deep Analysis
12 Duress
20 Force of Will
4 Illusionary Mask
7 Intuition
6 Isochron Scepter
1 Lim-Dul’s Vault
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
8 Mana Drain
8 Mishra’s Workshop
3 Stifle
14 Wasteland
3 Yawgmoth’s Will
28 – 40 – 29
Massa T8, 111 players, 2003-12-14
1. Long
2. TPS
3. Stax
4. TNT
5. TPS
6. Dragon
7. Dragon
8. Dragon
12 Bazaar of Baghdad
4 Burning Wish
7 Chalice of the Void
3 Cunning Wish
15 Dark Ritual
3 Deep Analysis
19 Duress
24 Force of Will
7 Intuition
1 Lim-Dul’s Vault
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
3 Meditate
8 Mishra’s Workshop
9 Stifle
4 Wasteland
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
4 – 41 – 24
Dulmen T8, 109 players, 2003-12-21
1. The Shining (Combo-Keeper)
2. Slavery (non-Workshop)
3. IsoKeeper
4. Goblin Sligh
5. IsoKeeper
6. IsoKeeper
7. Bwg Suicide
8. Stax
12 Chalice of the Void
4 Burning Wish
4 Cunning Wish
4 Dark Ritual
1 Deep Analysis
9 Duress
20 Force of Will
8 Isochron Scepter
20 Mana Drain
4 Mishra’s Workshop
1 Stifle
15 Wasteland
3 Yawgmoth’s Will
26 – 56 – 28
Barcelona T8, 60 players, 2003-12-21
1. IsoKeeper
2. Keeper
3. Rector Trix
4. Goblin Sligh
5. Dragon
6. Rector Tendrils
7. Gro-A-Tog
8. Sligh
8 Academy Rector
4 Bazaar of Baghdad
7 Chalice of the Void
10 Cunning Wish
8 Dark Ritual
12 Duress
24 Force of Will
4 Intuition
2 Isochron Scepter
2 Lim-Dul’s Vault
12 Mana Drain
12 Stifle
7 Wasteland
5 Yawgmoth’s Will
23 – 45 – 36
The cards I counted are
(1) Cards that have been brought up as potential targets for future B&R action.
(2) Cards that have never been brought up for future action that act as comparison examples.
(3) Basic/dual/fetch lands.
Counting the first is obvious. The second provides a sort of”control variable.” The third is just to emphasize to observers how nutty Type 1 mana bases are compared to other formats. Nonbasics are severely more prevalent than basics.
Here’s the compilation of all ten tournies.
10 tournaments with over 50 players (59,59,60,84,91,97,109,110,111,139; average = 91.9 players)
14 Dragon* (1,1,2,3,4,4,5,6,7,7,7,8,8,8)
6 Long (1,1,2,4,5,8)
6 Rector Tendrils/Trix** (3,3,3,4,5,6)
6 Stax (3,3,3,6,8,8) (includes variants)
5 IsoKeeper (1,3,5,5,6)
4 TNT (1,2,4,6)
4 Gro-A-Tog (2,5,7,7)
3 TPS (1,2,5)
3 Madness (2,3,6)
3 Goblin Sligh (4,4,6)
3 Fish (U or UR) (4,5,6)
2 Vengeur Masque (1,7)
2 SuperGro (4,4)
2 Zoo (1,8)
2 Keeper (2,7)
2 Monoblue (2,7)
2 Reanimator (3,8)
2 Suicide Black (5,7) (includes variants)
2 Stacker (6,7)
1 Shining (1)
1 Hulk Smash (2)
1 Slavery (2)
1 OSE (5)
1 Oath (6)
1 Nether Void (8)
1 Sligh (8)
* Includes mono-Black and multicolor versions.
** Counting the Rector archetypes together is not completely fair, but the differences are quite small between them. If any wMUD lists had occurred, it would’ve been a close call whether to list them combined with Stax, but I probably would have separated the two since they run different colors. This is why I listed Long and TPS separately despite the similarity. Listing the two Keeper decks separately could be argued, but oddly enough both ran green.
I have bolded cards which various personalities have brought up for B&R action (or which have already received such action). Just divide by ten to find the average number per tournament.
207 Force of Will (a.k.a.”The Glue”)
151 Duress (a.k.a.”The New FoW”)
112 (28) Yawgmoth’s Will (Restricted, but suggested as a target for Banning.*)
96 (48) Chalice of the Void (only legal in five of the ten tournaments)
86 Wasteland
82 Dark Ritual
77 Mana Drain
68 Bazaar of Baghdad
52 Stifle
48 Cunning Wish
48 Mishra’s Workshop
45 Intuition
36 Lion’s Eye Diamond
28 Burning Wish
24 Academy Rector
20 Isochron Scepter
18 Deep Analysis
16 Standstill
12 Meditate
8 Illusionary Mask
6 Lim-Dul’s Vault (OMGWTF! A fair and balanced tutor!)
208 basic lands
428 dual lands
271 Onslaught fetchlands
* Multiplying by four is somewhat unfair, but reflects the relative presence proportional to the maximum possible presence.
What picture does this portray?
(1) Dragon performs better than Storm combo.
Despite the almost riot-like uproar surrounding Long.dec, its results combined with TPS (a.k.a. Dutch-Tendrils) are nine Top 8s to Dragon’s fourteen. As I said before, the absence of most North American data underestimates Dragon, if anything. Dragon is the only deck besides Long to finish first more than two times, and on the whole it filled 14/80 Top 8 slots, or 17.5%. This doesn’t even approach four-Gush GAT’s 35%+ presence, but it is clearly the most successful deck in Type 1 over the past three months.
Kerzkid11:”Well, Dragon has been winning so much lately…”
iLL_Dawg:”No–I have been winning so much lately.”
Steve Menendian refers to Dragon as an”inherently fair” combo deck, because it can almost never win on the first turn and is vulnerable to various zero- and one-mana solutions. This is certainly true, and many would speculate that one of the reasons for the Dragon deck’s extraordinary success is the devotion of sideboard spaces to attacking Storm-based combo decks instead of Dragon. This will reduce somewhat after January 1st, but as I’ll expand on below, Storm is far from deceased.
In the semi-forgotten pre-GenCon days when Dragon was considered very subpar though, one of the reasons for it receiving little respect was that it was vulnerable to”accidental” hate, or cards that many decks uses whether or not Dragon is there, such as Swords to Plowshares and various graveyard removal cards. In November’s Waterbury tournament, with three T8 Dragon decks, the T8 contained eight Blue Elemental Blast/Hydroblast, one Boomerang, five Coffin Purge, two Naturalize, twenty Stifle, and four Tormod’s Crypt – each of these potentially cripples Dragon (to say nothing of the thirty-two FoW and thirteen Duress), and yet it not only made it to the Top 8, it emerged victorious. Clearly the evolved versions of the Dragon deck are resilient to any”accidental” hate, and can fight through control decks without too much difficulty.
This makes Dragon a deck that should be a top concern in any near-future B&R decisions, but shows no clear support for any restrictions at this time. Wizards has come out publicly against errataing the Worldgorger Dragon or the enchantments that abuse it (Animate Dead, Dance of the Dead, and Necromancy), so we can presume their future responses will involve more conventional tools. And heck, it’s a Black-based combo deck that does not abuse Yawgmoth’s Will and, in mono-Black versions, doesn’t necessarily need Power to succeed. How unlikely is that?
(2) Storm combo will survive the December restrictions.
“Third-turn wins are for 2001.” -Steve Menendian a.k.a. Smmenen
TPS (“The Perfect Storm” a.k.a. Dutch-Tendrils) is essentially the 2004 upgrade of Long.dec (a.k.a. Burning Desire a.k.a. Burning Academy), though it has been in use for some time in Europe. Yet, despite the fact that it is legal after the restrictions come into effect, it has already made three T8 appearances here: half as many as Long itself. The differences between the two are significant, but at heart they are operating in the same way.
Long uses Burning Wish, Chromatic Sphere, and Lion’s Eye Diamond while TPS makes room for Force of Will, often one or two more lands (up to a staggering thirteen), and maindecks a few cards like Yawgmoth’s Will in the absence of the Wish. Some TPS lists use one Burning Wish as an extra win condition or to reuse Will if the first one failed after resolving (the occasional freak Abeyance/Orim’s Chant, or a Stifle on the Tendrils of Agony Storm trigger, etc.). TPS also sometimes uses Meditate, and most builds make some use of Hurkyl’s Recall or Rebuild, but never as more than a two-of from lists I’ve seen.
The unfortunate thing about TPS is that it’s capable of about half as many first-turn wins as Long, and the vast majority of the rest are second-turn. Thanks to Duress, Force of Will, and Brainstorm, the combo deck uses control’s weapons to defend itself, and runs so many one-ofs that any future attempts to neuter the deck are forced to look at Dark Ritual first (or, for some individuals, a controversial potential Banning of Yawgmoth’s Will). Once again, though, the deck has not displayed dominating results by any stretch of the imagination. There is little outcry for killing the deck – much as I wish there were. I hate the entire Storm mechanic with a passion. For now, we should stamp a caution label on it and watch the top tables.
(3) Mishra’s Workshop is not a problem.
“Just thinking about Stasis makes me miss Gush so much.” -Darren di Battista a.k.a. Azhrei
The results are in. Workshop decks have made just twelve total T8 appearances, and half of those were Workshop-based aggro decks, which are quite tame in their abuses of Magic’s rules and limits (by Type 1 standards anyway). The other half were variants of the Prison deck Stax, with a surprising zero appearances from the Blueless, highly-hyped Welder-MUD Prison deck. Despite the introduction of Chalice of the Void, these decks have not destroyed the presence of conventional aggro such as Sligh, Goblin Sligh, and even Zoo.
Artifacts are apparently just too easy to hate (nearly every Blue-based control deck now considers 1 Rack and Ruin a sideboard staple). In the future, some attention will need to be paid to whether Mindslaver is abusing Workshop decks’ fast mana, but until that shows some hard evidence, we should note that the only Slavery appearance so far was in a non-artifact-based control deck.
Hopefully Darksteel and Fifth Dawn won’t render the above paragraph into so much hot air.
(4) No individual card is oppressing the metagame.
By far the most-used cards surveyed are Force of Will and Duress – cards that prevent other cards from dominating. YawgWin and Chalice are runner-ups, but note that some extrapolation has to be done to put them there. The high presence of Wasteland is yet another influence preventing other cards from stepping out of line. In Type 1, this is the way it should be: powerful control cards hold combo decks from the brink of domination.
(5) The overall metagame is quite diverse.
Here’s how I would break down the 80 slots into archetypes (naturally this is somewhat debatable, but roughly accurate):
30 Combo (14 Dragon, 6 Long, 6 Rector, 3 TPS, 1 Shining)
19 Aggro (4 TNT, 3 Madness, 3 Goblin Sligh, 2 Vengeur Masque, 2 Zoo, 2 Reanimator, 2 Stacker, 1 Sligh)
13 Control (5 IsoKeeper, 2 Keeper, 2 Monoblue, 1 Hulk Smash, 1 OSE, 1 Oath, 1 Nether Void)
11 Aggro-control (4 GAT, 3 Fish, 2 SuperGro, 2 Suicide Black)
7 Prison (6 Stax, 1 Slavery)
Some would create categories like”aggro-combo” for Vengeur Masque and/or Reanimator and”control-combo” for The Shining, but that’s largely semantics, since almost everything in Type 1 is a combo of some kind. Regardless of how you slice it, Type 1 is combo-infested – and yet has a strong aggro presence from diverse archetypes. The absence of some North American data probably exaggerate the numbers of aggro and combo while underemphasizing the power of control and aggro-control, but not egregiously so. If anything, this is counter-intuitive: the Europeans play a lot of combo, so aggro should be completely hated out, but instead it does well, and the lone Waterbury T8 has three combo decks, four aggro-control decks, and one control deck.
I’m sure someone could write a psychology paper about Americans being obsessed with controlling others based on that observation, but I’m not the man to do it.
*** Now talking in #TheManaDrain
*** Topic is ‘Screw you Smmenen for making Type 1 not fun’
*** Set by [email protected] on Wed Nov 26 03:12:10
———
*** Zherbus changes topic to ‘Screw you, Type 1 community, for being upset that your format isn’t stagnant anymore.’
In short, there’s no clear sign of any problem with the metagame now that Long’s dangerous power is defunct. Cards to keep a particularly close eye on are Dark Ritual, Bazaar of Baghdad, and Yawgmoth’s Will. The next couple of months should be very interesting.
Philip Stanton
Email: prstanto at uiuc.edu
“Dr. Sylvan” on themanadrain.com