Tectonic plates are moving in the Type One community. The fault lines run deep, and a series of quakes – culminating in the debates over Mirrodin – have exposed them.
The Conflict
In the early days of Magic, there was an overwhelming sense that the whole thing was a fad. Sure we had fun, but there was no history to the game, and it was widely believed that like most other fads, it would eventually collapse. With this perception, when Type Two was created to become the primary tournament format, it was completely understandable that Type One might be left to rot…. And rot it did.
But Magic grew. The internet, the usenet, the Dojo, and the like, along with books and magazines facilitated theoretical understanding and decklist dissemination and analysis to the point where it is now its own industry. But when the people had begun to examine Magic at a deeper level, the innovation was long gone from Type One.
But since 2001, the popularity of Type One has grown. What it boils down to, is that armed with years of theoretical knowledge and experience built outside the format and bolstered by a growing tournament scene, for the first time ever, Type One is emerging from its infancy. And what we have is a nice, steady, stream of innovation – work that should have been done in the intervening years of 1996-2002, but wasn’t. Not only are new decks popping out at alarming speed, analysis of each new set for the format is integrated with astonishing speed. Mind’s Desire lists were built and ready to go within a week that the card was leaked. Mirrodin lists were in testing before the pre-release. We are also seeing a stable, connected, and coherent metagame with predictable and understandable trends from Canada to the Netherlands.
This has all culminated into a vigorous debate about what the nature of the format should be. People are angry, hostile, contentious, bored, and everything in between. To understand why this has caused so much debate, you have to understand the people who played Type One during the drought. For years, the most vocal Type One players were a small a cadre of loyal control players. The remainder of the people who regularly played Type One were mostly semi-casual players who enjoyed breaking out older cards on a weekly basis. Most of the innovation in the format came by importing a deck from Extended, or in finding that one new tech card to use in the mirror match, replacing an old standard bearer. Many of these people didn’t play other formats and played Type One more as a hobby than a sport. Many of these people just wanted to play with their expensive cards. Whatever their reasons, I consider this school of thought:
The Old-School Vision Of Type One
Here is one extreme from this school of thought (from Hengewolf on The ManaDrain):
People in Vintage have a notion that they’ve paid their dues, often with thousands, and as such are entitled to have fun with the cards. The current format is making this hard for some people. I often think about selling my cards – but the fact is, I just like them too much. Who knows? I could find the perfect playgroup tomorrow, or next year, or whenever. I’m still going to make every attempt to create new avenues of play for these cards.
I’m perfectly happy to let the tournament players do their thing. However, I also want to see”powered casual.” The old, old, old days in which you could play fully powered, still have a normal game of Magic (with creatures!), and only had to laugh when you or your opponent drew a God-hand, need to return.
I would also like to see a slightly slower, more old-school tournament format that would bring back the old flavor of Vintage. At the moment, Vintage might be too small to split it that way without some nasty fallout, but it’s an idea that I think will come in time. [I’m interested in ] a competitive format that ran more like old-school Vintage – namely, much less hard combo and quite a few turns before the win.
When you’re dealing with the oldest and best cards in the game, there’s going to be a lot of sentimentality involved.
I think Oscar Tan comments fairly represent what I consider another perspective within this school (I’m not picking on Oscar or saying he isn’t competitive – we happen to be teammates – I just find his comments on point, whether they fairly characterize him or not):
For me, it’s not so much change that is good, but the resulting broad and relatively stable format. Reminiscing, maybe the best Type I period in years was after Fact or Fiction was restricted but before Growing ‘Tog became an issue. In retrospect, I actually enjoyed less-than-intelligent”Is Zoo really dead, Oscar Tan?!” comments thrown at me, and I loved the simultaneous discussion of over twenty different archetypes in all four categories. Type I in the last year has seen more change than it has in the past decade, arguably. That’s good, but I also dislike it in the sense that all these upheavals make it feel a bit too much like Type II and its rapid rotations…
Again, my ideal Type I is a broad and relatively stable field where you can expect to play and play against a variety of decks in a tournament and where you can introduce innovation and new decks without shaking up the entire format. And again, I’m thinking about restrictions aimed at bringing down the power level a bit possibly because I’m wondering if Type I is evolving or imploding.
Instead of subscribing to Oscar’s implication that the format is imploding, I believe we are seeing a nice evolution. What Oscar is articulating is a view I hear with surprising frequency.
The basic divide comes down simply into – do we want Type One to truly be a competitive format, or do we want it to keep its more marginalized status? Or are these changes for the good? Perhaps more disturbing, some of the best players in the format have expressed the view that they don’t want this competition. At the core of much of this sentiment is a desire to keep Type One confined, to keep it”their” format, and for it to retain the casual sweater that they felt comfortable in. My entire”GenCon post-mortem” article was an effort on my part to advertise teams for type one. I believe that teams are an engine of not only creativity, but tuning and exploiting the card pool to maximize idea effectiveness. I believe that it is in the best interests of Type One as a format to mirror the growing reality and adopt the view that Type One is back, and its here to stay as a thriving tournament format.
Why? Why should I disturb the people who want to keep their format insular, but dead to the wider Magic community? Does bringing real competition to Type One ruin it? Without Pro Tour money behind type one, is trying to make Type One competitive worthwhile? The reason this divide has caused so much trouble is because of the implications for the banned and restricted list, and Type One policy making in general.
The New School Of Type One
I am convinced that increased competition is the most important driving force for advancing Type One. There are five extremely compelling reasons for this view – and I’ll go through each. A competitive Type One leads to more innovation, greater popularity, more tournaments, more useful DCI oversight, and more respect for the format as a whole.
As the popularity for the format grows, driven by competition and innovation, it becomes impossible for Wizards to ignore. The Type One Championship dwarfed the other DCI events at GenCon, reflecting a pent-up desire for Type One Magic. Oscar Tan and others have ridden high on the wave of popularity that Type One has experienced, but they are suddenly finding themselves incontrovertibly and squarely facing a dreaded question: is this too much? Is this what I wanted to play? We have a format that is changing regularly, and the popularity has gone hand in hand with that.
In sharp contrast to the vision of a relatively stable format where Brian Weissman can play The Deck for ten years, my vision of Type One is as a very dynamic format. If the same deck is in the top tier from year to year something is wrong. The focus of Type One should be the format, NOT the decks. JP Meyer quoted Chris Pikula as saying that the only reason Keeper was good was because there was no innovation in Type One. While I obviously think that is exaggerated, the central sentiment certainly rings true.
Consider TnT, Stax, Masknaught, Welder Mud, Rector Trix, Long.dec, Bazaar Dragon, and GroAtog. All these decks had no rough equivalent, but were born of a desire to innovate in Type One. For this, we have the strongest normative argument for a competitive Type One yet: Strong competition is a powerful incentive. If something goes wrong, the DCI may step in and correct it. And as a result of greater understanding it will be able to better identify necessary changes both in terms of policy and new cards.
One of the biggest complaints, illustrated by Benjamin Rott – ironically enough, the creator of TnT – was quoted in Oscar’s article:
I do not think that there are so few playable decks because of the cards in these decks are way too powerful, but because of bad players.
With sites like TheManaDrain.com, StarCityGames.com or Morphling.de, T1-players have the chance to copy successful decklists. Without the need to think about their own decks. I think this is the main reason, that there are so few Tier 1 decks. The Golden Age of T1 (like 2000 and before) when we had lots of different decks are long gone. Our beloved format has the same problem like T2 or Extended: Netdecking.
I think it started in 2000 when everyone and his pal were playing DrawGo, it continued with TnT, and had climaxed with Growing Tog.
If more people would design their own decks or just alter the netdecks (by adding maindecked artifact removal, for example) a bit, we’d have more diversity.
So long,
Benjamin Rott
Germany
Netdecking isn’t so bad. Playing proven decks that have succeeded in other environments makes Type One more uniform. While sometimes a player can pick up a deck they are unfamiliar with and do very well with it, you’re still unlikely to make it to the top unless you know your stuff. A great example of this was Ryan Austin from GenCon, who played my Stax deck and made third place, but lost in the semifinals (and nearly in the quarterfinals) due to numerous play errors.
But even if a player who netdecks rides the deck all the way based upon the power of the deck, I see no real problem with this. In the first place, this happens in other formats as well. Secondly, the result is a more predictable and coherent metagame. When that happens, innovation becomes more likely, metagaming becomes viable, and all the competitive forces drive the success of the format.
While it sounds contradictory to say that netdecking leads to innovation, there is little motivation to innovate in a stagnant metagame. You can just take the same deck week after week with minor tweaks to fight anticipated hate. Only by posing threats that need to be responded to – metagame interaction – does innovation take place. And only when the same threats are being posed across a wide variety of metagames will much of the innovation be generally applicable.
One concern expressed about Type One is that if it gets truly competitive, there will only be a handful of viable decks, or even a single deck. If one deck dominates, the solution is obvious and easy: restrict a key card. I’d say that former is true of almost every format – from Type Two to Extended, there are generally only a handful of”tier one” decks. But that doesn’t mean other decks aren’t worth playing or that the format is dumb. Tier Two decks can, and do, win tournaments in other formats as well. It’s often worse in a format like Type Two, because it doesn’t have the extensive card pool to exploit metagame opportunities. With Type One, there is such an incredible range of options that mining them is difficult.
I am convinced that far more people have been turned onto Type One by the innovation and competition in the format than turned off by it. If there are tournaments, decent prizes, and a flowing, understandable metagame for Type One, then Type One gets respect. It would no longer be a dead format, but a glowing beacon of Magic’s history with increasing opportunities for tournament play.
Why Does It Matter?
One problem with the old school/new school divide is the restriction policy. Under the old rules of type one, the DCI might have to step in to stop a card that was simply too good because metagames were too decentralized to adapt, and it would too adversely harm these localized elements. But there are always going to be growing pains in a process like this. There are many very small centers of Type One players in the United States who offer a random assortment of decks – many with little to no power, and the ones with power may not be very good.
The problem now comes in that restricting cards for these environments heavily harms the more competitive metagames by thinning the field of the most competitive decks. I don’t think we can restrict cards like this any longer.
While there are ugly sides to competition – cheating, inequalities, and the like – we try our best to make sure there is a level playing field. The incentives that strong competition provides not only make the game worth playing, they make it exciting, dynamic, and interesting… But most of all, they expand opportunities for Type One players everywhere. Moreover, the restriction policy I articulated here, of the metagame dominance/distortion policy, is more realistic in terms of being tied to tournament play. After all, that is what the DCI is for. The DCI governs actual sanctioned play. Some people claim that this is unfair.
From Hengewolf again:
What needs to happen: The DCI should move to create a”Type 0″ casual format. The big issue that’s creating the”Tournament Vintage, or Nothing” problem is that way too many players are slaves to the DCI. You can’t tell someone not to play with this card, or that card, without them quoting rulings and ban announcements. I actually met a guy a few weeks ago who insisted on continuing to play frantic search-desire because the ban didn’t take effect for a few more days.
I think this misconstrues what the DCI is for and illustrates why this kind of view can be so incredibly harmful for tournament Type One. My answer to him is, why ask some outside source to create the format you want to play, when you can do that for yourself? When I want to play a different format with different themes, I invent it and make my own rules. Pat Chapin was notorious for this kind of creative tinkering.
The Fundamental Turn
One of the biggest effects of the innovation has been an acceleration of the format’s speed. What used to be a format with a fundamental turn of 3, is now a format with a more appropriate turn 2 fundamental turn. What I mean, generally speaking, by a fundamental turn is that a) combo is designed to be in a position to”go off” by turn 2, or else it is probably going to lose, b) control either has to have a foothold on the game by turn 2, or else the game is probably lost, and c) aggro needs to have sufficient pressure on the board by turn 2 that it seems likely it can finish the job. That does not mean that that all these decks win on turn 2; in essence, you have a format where decks are actively attempting to set themselves up by turn 2. I am referring to the most important turn for defining the game and in terms of deck design.
- Academy Rector decks generally would prefer to have a Rector either in play by turn 2, or on the way out via Cabal Therapy in order to get their Yawgmoth’s Bargain.
- Masknaught generally wants an Illusionary Mask and a Phyrexian Dreadnought in play by turn 2, with a turn or two to finish the job.
- Tools ‘n Tubbies prefers to play a turn 1 Juggernaut/Su-Chi and then plop Survival and find Squee, Goblin Nabob/Anger on turn 2 to accelerate out some turn 3 brokenness by which it will ensure that it has enough card advantage and pressure to finish the job.
- Mishra’s Workshop prison decks such as Stax or Welder Mud really need to have started to lock down the game in a significant way, although there still may be some wiggle room. If they haven’t then they are probably in trouble.
- Generally, Long.dec wins on this turn, only because it takes so little time to set itself up. It does most of its work on this turn, and if it doesn’t win on turn 2, it is likely trying to apply sufficient pressure that a win will eventually be forthcoming.
- Dragon, using Bazaar of Baghdad to drop the Worldgorger Dragon into the graveyard, and having then seen 9-10 cards by turn 1, prefers to drop Mox, Land, Animate Dead/Dance of the Dead on turn 2 using the Bazaar, which is phasing in and out of play, to dig out Ambassador Laquatus while it generates infinite mana, and then switches the Animate to the Ambassador to deck the opponent. Against control, it may be content to sit back, Intuition for Squees and use card advantage to overpower the control player – but that doesn’t change the fact that it is has a fundamental turn of turn 2.
- Unlike control decks of the past, Type One Tog generally uses a Mana Drain on this turn to accelerate into a massive draw via Accumulated Knowledges on turn 3, by which it sets its sights on a turn 4-5 win.
- The now illegal Gro-A-Tog used its second turn to either lay a Psychatog or make its Quirion Dryad enormous with draw/search with intent of using Gushes and Berserk to seal the deal and protect its men on the following two turns.
Some people are very upset with this. They want the format to be slowed down a notch. They claim a lack of interaction and too many decks winning on turn 2. The first response to this is that a fundamental turn 2, as I have said before, is not equal to a turn 2 loss. Please remind people of this when they claim that games are over by turn 2. They are missing the point.
The second response to a recognition that much of the anger that is now fermenting has come to a head because of distaste with decks like Long.dec, which win on turn 2 rather consistently. Couple that with the massive scare over Chalice of the Void (and other Mirrodin cards), and you have overlapping events, which leads to a louder outcry. I admit that decks like Long.dec should not be around. But most of these decks don’t actually win on turn 2. And even if they do, it isn’t consistent – they just want to be in a position, by turn 2, where it is possible to stop the other deck, or can foresee eventually winning.
Related to this is the argument that Type One is now just coin flips. Once Long.dec is dead, much of that criticism will lose validity. What remains of it is answered by the fact that luck plays a role in all Magic formats, it just appears to be relatively more influential than it really is in Type One because of the power level of the cards.
The third reason that this criticism fails is that I don’t believe it’s possible to slow down the format. Even if you restrict Lion’s Eye Diamond, Mishra’s Workshop, and Dark Ritual, you still have MaskNaught, Academy Rector (which is only marginally slowed down), and Dragon. Even if you restrict Mask, Rector, and Bazaar, it wouldn’t really change the fundamental turn. The first reason is that there is too much innovation in Type One. The card pool is just too large and there is too much energy in the format. I am convinced that new decks would pop up that have the same fundamental turn. The second reason is that you have a critical mass of restricted cards that can still be used if restricted, so that restricting another card isn’t really going to slow much of anything down.
The final response to a desire to speed down the format is that it isn’t really possible without ceding too much power to blue-based control. In the Ten Principles of Type One article, one of the principles of Type One is that spells that cost more than three that aren’t blue or artifact are generally unplayable. While there are some notable exceptions, one of the big reasons for this is the very existence of Mana Drain. Expensive spells are pushed out by the fact that a two-mana Counterspell answers a spell with a much higher mana investment, and leaves the blue mage with mana to spare. This problem is made worse by the fact that the bigger the spell countered, the bigger the swing, and the more fun the control player will have with it. The basic idea is that in order to compete with control, other decks need a fundamental turn of two. Efficiency and speed are of the necessity.
The problem now comes with Chalice of the Void. Chalice punishes efficiency. The result is that most decks are in a double bind. If the vast majority of viable spells cost zero, one, two or three, then you know have a situation where the best spells cost two or three. They have to be fast enough to get some threats out before Mana Drain, but not tragically stuck at a hosable mana curve. All this puts Control in a very favorable position. Slowing down the format any further by restricting cards like Mishra’s Workshop or Dark Ritual are only likely to increase the power of blue based control. Acceleration is one of the key ways in which decks can now get by Mana Drain and it forces blue decks to actually have answers to spells which slip past.
I hear people proclaiming Chalice as a way to make people innovate or think about Type One in new ways, but is there really sufficient room to innovate? Perhaps. But the bounds have never been more limited.
One reason put forward for why the format needs to slow down is that people hate losing to combo and prison – but don’t mind if Control is too good, because at the least there is interaction. The first response is that if you are playing against Long.dec, you have good reason to be angry… But that isn’t at issue.
The second response is that this is straw-manning of these decks for the reason that it isn’t that they win too much, but that they are just undesirable to play against. That is not an argument for restriction… Especially when you consider that the DCI restricts for tournament play. If the deck isn’t winning too much, then if you are losing to it, you need to play a deck that has a chance, or at least make some metagame decisions. That isn’t asking too much. People do the same in Type Two and Extended all the time.
Type One is becoming more and more in its dynamics like Type Two, and some Type One players don’t like it. Finally, restricting based on non-tournament relevant criteria thins the growing tournament scene and hurts deck variety. This in turn harms future innovation by diminishing competition, and possibly kills other decks that were reliant on restricted cards, but weren’t a problem. It also only puts control in a stronger and stronger position – making the tournament scene potentially worse given that Chalice has eliminated many of the weaknesses control once had.
What it really boils down to is that a good many players have invested in a format they thought was casual – and although they built good, competitive decks, tested them and tuned them, even went to GenCon to play it out, what they now have come to realize, is that Type One has finally arrived, and it wasn’t what they bargained for. Or they are conflating the problem of Long.dec with a format-wide flaw.
Mishra’s Workshop
Some people claim, erroneously, that this card should be restricted. They are upset about the speed of the format and the fact that the deck is a prison deck which either gets or fails to get a lock into place by turn 2-4. What they fail to understand is that prison wouldn’t survive if it didn’t do just that. Around the time I began my Stax article, around a dozen Type One players worldwide actually played Workshop prison. The fact is that Workshop is not dominant; it doesn’t consistently win and distort the metagame any more than any other Tier One deck. Take a look at the GenCon top 8, for instance.
Moreover, mana acceleration by itself isn’t enough to warrant restriction. Usually such acceleration is restricted because it produces a deck that is too dominant – and usually that’s because it’s a silly combo deck.
The very inherent restriction of needing to be an artifact is what makes Mishra’s Workshop unlike any other card. You can’t just look at a card and see that it is a mana accelerant and then decide it deserves restriction. Also, unlike Combo, Workshop Prison decks don’t actually have the game completely locked up by turn x… Whereas with combo, a real threat if it consistently wins quickly, the game is just over. And there are plenty of hosers to answer any prison deck attempting to get its lock. Hosers are much harder to use against combo, because it doesn’t want to give you time to use them. There are also only two restricted artifacts that do something besides produce mana. The point is that Workshop is one of the few mana accelerants which does not interact with other restricted cards. In that respect, both Dark Ritual and Lion’s Eye Diamond present more abuse.
If Chalice hadn’t come in, Long.dec would have necessitated the restriction of Lion’s Eye Diamond for sure. And although it may still, Workshop isn’t used in a combo deck. It is used in an inconsistent (relative to other good decks) prison deck that doesn’t even use Duress or Force of Will. The fact is that it has some good components like Goblin Welder to help it evade Control. Prison would not work if it wasn’t as fast as Mana Drain – otherwise, Mana Drain would make it unviable. Some people will misconstrue my argument and say that things are bad when decks are faster than Mana Drain. Keep in mind I said as fast, not faster.
Diceman nicely summarized all these issues:
Despite the possibility of horrible broken starts, [Workshop decks] suffer from a lack of consistency. It has no search, sketchy card drawing, and utilizes lock components that are not game-winning on their own except perhaps the Smokestack. I have been playing this deck for over half a year, long before its popularization on The Mana Drain, and can attest to the inconsistencies. Yes, the deck will just get some devastating hands from time to time, as it should theoretically do, but let me say that there is plenty of player interaction and exciting slugfests ensue when wMUD takes on decks like control, Goblin Sligh, Dragon, Fish, Standstill, etc. Again, there are no decks built to foil the MUD deck; instead, decks that are very competitive in T1 are finding enough tools at their disposal to have a chance.
But there is another reason why people are so vocal at the moment. People are calling for its restriction, now – and not because combined with Chalice, there is a perception that it will make Workshop too strong. Quite the contrary, they are using the public hysteria over Chalice and Long.dec, to incite the public to restrict a card that these people have disliked from the start. It would be a huge mistake.
Oscar suggests that Workshop leads to boredom:
Simply, nothing is more boring than trying to amuse yourself by keeping track of who’s lost more permanents to Smokestack, regardless of whether the field can deal with it or not. At least combo decks got it over with quickly, even if players let the fundamental turn drag out to brag a bit.
This is not an argument for restricting a card in tournament play (besides the fact that I don’t think anyone has ever actually counted up sacrificed cards). But Oscar has, on the same basis, argued for the restriction of other cards such as Back to Basics.
Look. I have no hidden motives here. From the very start, all my articles, the very reason I write, all my efforts have been directed towards two goals: 1) the advancement of this format and 2) my own success at it. If you read what I have said in the past – in my dissertation on how cards should be restricted, which is, I believe the most rational way to do it, you would realize that I actually have the format’s interest in mind.
Please don’t misread me. I’m not anti-fun either. Johnny and Timmy are welcome. For me, Type One is an open table – no one is excluded. If anything, Johnny and Timmy Strategies are more plausible in this format than almost any other format. Just look at the top 8 of GenCon. What other format has a trampling 12/12 swinging at you with what has to be one of the most bizarre cards ever printed: Illusionary Mask? Johnny has made a huge impact on Type One. People like Diceman and Shockwave (Richard Mattiuzzo) have created, in one of the strangest looking decks, an incredibly broken Dragon combo deck. Both decks are incredibly viable.
Playing competitive Magic is extremely engaging and thrilling in the same way people like competitive sports. But I think that people who have no intention of playing in sanctioned tournaments, but are angry about a certain card shouldn’t be. There is no reason why you can’t make your own rules for casual Magic – as the Type One rules are designed and implemented for tournament Magic. I also think that the more casual Type One elements can continue to exist, I just ask that they not influence policy to the detriment of the larger issues.
If – and this is a conditional if -Workshop proves too dominant, too good, and too distorting, then restrict the hell out of it. But at the very least wait until the metagame plays out. That is all I ask.
My Theory About The Future Of The Game:
Magic is in its early years, just reaching its stride. As time goes on, the game will continue to evolve, not only in terms of format, but presentation and content. We are seeing little glimpses of the future now – new card face, the popularity of Magic Online, and I imagine some thirty years from now Magic will not only exist, it will be so radically different from what it is now, that it would seem superficially unrecognizable, in much the same way that 8th Edition seems so foreign to Alpha. Unlike some of the great strategy games of antiquity such as Chess or Go, the strength, and a lot of the appeal of Magic comes from the change inherent in the game: New sets, new decks, new abilities, new mechanics, even new rules, and most of all new metagames.
If not a single new set was ever printed again, Magic would probably wither – something you break out once in a while to play with your friends – but esoteric, like Contra on the Nintendo. As Magic grows older, its roots will become more sacred, more important. While change lies at the very appeal of the game, the foundation must be kept up. While Type Two, Limited, and Extended may be the money centers, Type One is the heart of Magic. It represents a spark of something original, the genius of human creativity. In spite of its gargantuan design flaws, perpetual imbalances, and powerful nature, it also demonstrates that chaos can be tamed. That the very nature of the game allows enough flexibility that nothing in Magic is so badly damaged it can’t be addressed.
The Vision
As Magic grows older, the format’s importance as a link to the games roots will only tend to increase – kinda like we respect baseball. Sure, it’s old, but it’s relevant and fun. There won’t be any Type One Pro Tours or Grand Prixs, but I foresee more tournaments with attractive prize offerings. Secure in is future, Magic will hold tightly to its past.
Don’t you agree?
Sincerely,
Stephen Menendian
[email protected]
2nd Year Law Student, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University
Moderator, TheManaDrain.com
Featured Writer, Starcitygames
Member, Team Paragon
Member, Team Mean Deck