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So Many Insane Plays – Magical Mixed Bag

Read Stephen Menendian every week... at StarCityGames.com!
Monday, June 8th – In today’s article, Stephen takes a look at a fun Rotisserie draft format that is of interest to Eternal players, speculates on the implications of a potential major rules change, tries to break a Hidden Gem, and shares personal insights into what it means to play Magic…

The poll results in my article two weeks ago were fascinating. For the first poll, the scenario was game three of the match, and I Duressed my opponent on turn 1 and saw this hand:

Polluted Delta
Mox Emerald
Mana Crypt
Thirst For Knowledge
Tezzeret the Seeker
Time Walk

I asked you what you all what you would take. 37% of you said you’d take Thirst For Knowledge! Those of you who voted for Thirst have some large cahones.

As soon as you pass the turn, your opponent can drop a land, a Mox, cast Time Walk, and if they draw a land either on their first turn or their Time Walk turn, they can cast Tezzeret before you get a second turn! They’ll have Time Vault and Tezzeret on the board, giving you the bird. You have one turn to do something about it. Good freaking luck.

I can’t fathom how you could take Thirst, yet it was by far the biggest vote getter. Tezzeret was the second biggest vote getter. Taking Mana Crypt or Tezzeret is at least reasonable. Picking Mana Crypt will slow the entrance of Tezzeret, but it won’t stop them from drawing a bunch of cards.
It’s not an easy choice, but I stand by my choice of Time Walk. Apparently, only 15% of you would have made the same decision I did. I don’t know whether that means, whether I’m a donk or you all are just ballsy. I think it shows that, frankly, there is a tremendous diversity of opinion as to what the correct plays are in Vintage. This isn’t even that complicated of a decision, by Vintage standards.

The second poll scenario was also a turn 1 Duress, on the play, in game 3 of a match. I Duressed my foe to see:

Mishra’s Workshop
City of Brass
Sol Ring
Chalice of the Void
Chalice of the Void
Trinisphere
Sphere of Resistance

While most of you voted for Trinisphere, as I predicted, a surprising number of you voted for my choice, Sol Ring, the runner-up. I was surprised, especially after the first poll, that so many of you came to the same conclusion, since it appears to be so counter-intuitive.

I wish I had discovered the poll function years ago. Seeing the aggregate poll results of so many StarCityGames.com readers helps me get a sense of perspective on what other people think and I will continue to use the poll feature in the future.

Drafting Collector’s Edition

Speaking of polls, a few months ago I wrote an article arguing that Vintage tournament organizers should permit CE cards in their Vintage tournaments as a way of increasing the supply of power, helping to reduce the reliance on high proxy limits but simultaneously fostering attachment to actual magic cards. I ran a trial tournament with CE cards and it was a success.

As helpful as I think CE cards are for Vintage, there is perhaps an even more entertaining use for CE cards. The idea of rotisserie drafting CE was brought to my attention and got my wheels spinning. CE is essentially a more beautiful Beta (since the cards are more pristine). A rotisserie draft is similar to a Rochester draft with one major exception. Instead of drafting a pack face up, you draft an entire set.

If you are Rotisserie drafting Collector Edition (i.e. BETA), what is the first overall pick?

Now, if Contract From Below were legal – that is, if we were playing the format under the original rules of Ante (which could work perfectly fine, so long as you require that each time a person loses a card for Ante that they replace it with another card they’ve drafted or a land), then Contract would likely be the overall number one pick. Contract From Below is just too broken, even though it sets you into Black early. Also, I’m assuming that Chaos Orb isn’t legal, although there is no reason it couldn’t be. It’s not like this is a sanctioned format or something. Hell, I think this would be an amazing format for a future Magic Invitational, with two pods of eight.

My team quickly came to the consensus that, so long as you are playing with a reasonable number of players (i.e. not more than 8), Sol Ring is very likely the number one overall pick. Sol Ring accelerates you faster and more consistently than anything else. The format is full of large, but expensive creatures, like Shivan Dragon, Serra Angel, Mahamoti Djinn, Fire Elemental, Rock Hydra, Air Elemental, Craw Wurm etc. Sol Ring helps you accelerate into those threats almost as fast as Black Lotus, but it allows you to do more instead.

But, the more interesting question is, what’s the top pick after Sol Ring? Let’s say you are the second pick in the pod of 6 players, and the first person took Sol Ring.

I am eager to find out what this poll reveals. My teammates expressed a surprising diversity of opinion on this question before tacitly agreeing that the decision is probably contextually dependent. A good number of my teammates said that they’d pick Fireball, being the best of CE’s four “X” damage spells (with Disintegrate, Earthquake, and Hurricane) (not counting Drain Life or Howl from Beyond). Another teammate started singing the praises of Pestilence, which I agree is an amazing pick, although it’s fairly conditional. Balance is of course a top vote getter, but how much better is Balance than Nev’s Disk or Wrath of God? Or Fireball? How asymmetrical can you make Balance, really? Does it depend on how many good artifacts you can draft (like Jade Statue)?

This leads to one more question.

Another interesting point that emerged from the discussion is the power of banding creatures. Banding is really an interesting mechanic, one that is confusing to new players, but one that I really like, simply because it increases the complexity and decision-making of combat. Benalish Hero can trade with Craw Wurm.

I would love to get my hands on a CE set just to play this format. If not, I’ll just have to find a way to play this format anyway. It sounds like too much fun! FYI, here is a full spoiler for Beta.

Could Helm of Chatzuk be a reasonable pick? Is it possible to get the insane Time Vault + Instill Energy + Animate Artifact combo? You can avoid decking by pairing Timetwister and Regrowth as part of a recursive loop. I hope to try the format to find out.

Mana Burn B-Gone?

As you know by now, M10 heralds major changes to the game of Magic, perhaps the most significant since the 6th Edition rules changes that created ‘the stack.’ At first blush, many of these changes appear to be thematic templating changes. For example, the ‘in play zone’ is being renamed the ‘battlefield.’ The Removed From Game Zone is getting a name as well, perhaps “Exile.” However, this is minor compared to a potentially much more groundbreaking, and fundamental, rules change. This rules change has been rumored for several months now. Started elsewhere, Evan Erwin also repeated the rumor that Mana Burn might be going the way of the dodo in a Magic Show a couple of months ago. Well, there appears to be more evidence to substantiate this wild claim.

In his article last Monday, Mark Rosewater, wrote that he will be talking about Mana Burn in a column a few weeks from now, which would put it just on schedule for the rules updates, announcements and other previews that precede the release of M10.

This might seem like an innocuous comment, but when you put it in the context of a few other critical clues, I think we have all the evidence we need to suspect that Mana Burn is likely on the way out.

First, in an Ask Wizards column in 2006, Mark Rosewater laid out the case against Mana Burn. It’s clear that he is not a fan of it.

Second, it’s clear that part of the goal in M10 is to continue to streamline, simplify, and make Magic more attractive to new players. This is how Aaron Forsythe described the set, announcing many of the changes being brought by M10. Mana Burn fits well with the idea of simplifying Magic.

Third, they are removing painlands from the core set. This could be for a simple reason, in fact, the second reason that Mark Rosewater cited for the problem with Mana Burn: it limits design space. Wizards may be intending to design some cards where ‘life totals’ matter. It’s simple to imagine such a card, where it gains a boost (such a +3/+3) or can only be played above or below a certain life total threshold. Such design space is limited by mana burn, since players can more easily manipulate life totals. If they are removing painlands, they might be doing so for the same reason.

When you put all of the evidence together, it’s overwhelming to suggest that Mana Burn is on its way out.

What does this mean for the Eternal player? The implications are significant. First of all, Mana Drain’s ‘drawback’ (such as it ever was), will be no longer. Mana Drain will soon be strictly superior to Counterspell. It also means that people won’t lose for forgetting that they had Mana Drain mana floating. Second, other Vintage staples like Dark Ritual and Mishra’s Workshop won’t ping you if you fail to use the mana. Workshop players have long suffered minor damage on account of the mana burn rule. Similarly, I wouldn’t have lost a game like the final one in this tournament report. Third, players playing under cards like Tangle Wire will now have no reason not to tap for mana if they are going to be tapped down any way in case they draw an instant they might be able to use in the draw step. But that’s just the beginning….

As you know, this will change the functionality of cards such as Eladamri’s Vineyard and Braid of Fire and similar cards. Braid of Fire can be a reliable turn 1 play in Vintage. The question is whether you can slow the game down long enough to take advantage of it. It’s a slower play in Legacy, but potentially more advantageous.

A Golden Lotus

I normally don’t like to speculate regarding unprinted and unverified rumors, but this one is too interesting to ignore.

Here is the rumored card:

Golden Lotus
Legendary Land (Mythic Rare)
Shroud
Golden Lotus enters the battlefield tapped.
When Golden Lotus enters the battlefield, sacrifice three lands, or sacrifice Golden Lotus.
{T}, Sacrifice Golden Lotus: Add nine mana in any combination of colors to your mana pool.

Thus far, by my count, there are three ways they could template this. One would be a trigger, as this rumor currently is, like Phyrexian Dreadnaught. The second would be to word it similar to the current templating on Mox Diamond, for which it would read “If this would come into play, sacrifice three lands. If you do, Golden Lotus comes into play. If you don’t, put it in its owner’s graveyard.” A third possibility is how Meddling Mage and the shocklands are worded: “As this comes into play…”

Only the first possibility would allow you to Stifle the sacrifice, since the other two wordings are not triggers at all. If you have a CIP trigger, this card is Eternal playable because of its interaction with Stifle, Trickbind, etc. Stifle + Phyrexian Dreadnaught already sees play in Legacy and has seen marginal use in Vintage. If you can Stifle the CIP trigger, you can untap and use this on turn 3 for its full, muscular effect.

As a threshold matter, 7 mana is what it takes to win the game in Vintage. That’s the price of Grim Tutor + Yawgmoth’s Will and mana needed to play Rituals out of the graveyard to play Grim Tutor + Tendrils of Agony. That’s the cost of Goblin Charbelcher and its activation. That’s the price of Illusions + Donate (which sees no play in Eternal formats). But the point is that seven mana is generally the mana cost required to “win the game.” This gives you more than enough. While I won’t speculate as the best way to win with this, there are plenty. Turn 3 is fast enough to see play in Vintage, and certainly fast enough for Legacy. Ironically, Shroud is what makes this card playable, as it protects it from cards like Wasteland. But it is Shroud that prevents most shenanigans, such as Twiddle. Note, though, that Cloud of Faeries will untap this. This card generates more than enough mana to win the game. Whether it will produce a deck that is resilient and powerful enough to win through the sorts of disruption common in Eternal formats is a separate question, though.

Waterbury Results

I have posted all 113 decklists from the March Waterbury on the Mana Drain. The first 74 lists are on this page (scroll down to see them). The rest are on the next page of that thread. I also did a deck breakdown to see how every deck fared in the field as a whole. One of the more interesting features was the general way in which the various decks tended to cluster throughout the field.

I counted:

• 42 Mana Drain decks in the field (defined as decks with 3 or more Mana Drains maindeck) for 37.5% of the field, and 43.75% of the top 16 (37.5% of the Top 8, although it was a cut to top 16).
• 24 Mishra’s Workshop decks (21.42% of the field), with 1 in the Top 16 (6.25%)
• 11 Dark Ritual decks (9.8% of the field), with 1 in the Top 16 (6.25%)
• 10 non-Workshop Bazaar of Baghdad decks (8.9% of the field), and 1 in the Top 16 (6.25%).

Mana Drains were the best performing engine, far and away, in the field. However, I did count 14 non-Workshop Null Rod decks (12.5% of the field), and two of those placed in the Top 16 (12.5%). They performed about as well as the Drain decks.

But perhaps more interesting than the relative proportions of each engine in the field to the single elimination cut-off rounds was the way in which these engines clustered throughout the field. The pattern is too pronounced to be random. I’ve broken the field down into 1st-16th place, 17th-32nd, and so on into groups of 16. Here’s how each engine was distributed throughout the field:

Mana Drain

As you can see, Mana Drain decks, although there were only 42 in the field, were very unevenly distributed throughout the field. There were only three Mana Drain decks between 81st and 96th place, and four between 97th place and 113th. Yet there were twelve Mana Drain decks from 17th to 32nd place, making up a whopping 60% of the Top 32 decklists. For some reason, Mana Drain decks clustered in the top 32, and were super-duper represented in the second half of the top 32.

Compare that to the performance of Workshops:

Workshops

Keeping in mind that there were only 24 Workshop decks in the field (a little more than half as many as there were Drains), we can still see a very clear pattern. Where Drain decks peaked in the Top 32, and in particular between 17th and 32nd place, Workshops clustered in the very middle of the field. A full third of the Workshop decks in the field fell between 29th and 64th place!

Dark Ritual

Dark Rituals also have a peak… but at the opposite end of where you want to peak. Over a third of the Ritual decks fell between 81st and 96th place, where they had only one win to a win and a couple of draws. The Dark Ritual players didn’t make it very far in this field. So much for Dark Rituals being a predator of the Mana Drain field?

Bazaars

The Bazaar decks also were poor performers, and they twin peaked right around the areas where the Dark Rituals peaked. Virtually a third of the Bazaar decks fell between 65th place and 80th, with another third falling the final group.

Now take a look at a graph that shows everything all together:

Together

What does this mean? Well, I think it shows you, even being the proportion of the decks in the field, just how these various engines tended to cluster. Mana Drain decks weren’t just the best performing engine in terms of their proportion of the field to Top 8, they clustered near the top while most of the other engines didn’t. In fact, this graph would suggest that Workshops, as between the other three engines, were your second best performer.

Hidden Gem: Tenpulse

A few years ago I went on a design binge. I quit Magic in late 1996 and returned in 2000, so by 2005, I had a four-year card knowledge gap. I opened up Magic Workstation and started doing searches through the entire magic database. I read every card in Magic that cost 0, 1, or 2 mana, and the result was Meandeck Tendrils, although the effort left me with a pile of rejected or abandoned cards that piqued my fancy. Among them were absurd mana accelerants like Culling the Weak, draw spells like Skulltap and Infernal Contract (which no Vintage player played with in 2005, it was an obscure gem at the time), and tutors like Diabolic Intent. I brain dumped a lot of this discarded research onto the Mana Drain here.

Another card that I had come across, but never mentioned, was Ancestral Knowledge. I tried Ancestral Knowledge in decks like this to see if I was able to assemble a turn two combo off of turn 1 AK. It never worked out well, and was often worse than Infernal Contract.

Cards that can be played off a Mox and land are very important for Vintage. The two casting cost spot takes particular importance in design since the zero and one slot are mostly developmental cards, whereas the 2 mana cost spot is often a key tactic (two mana being defined here as one mana of a color and one colorless). It is a likely turn 1 play, can be played easily on turn 2, and can be paired with other spells on turn 3. The restriction of Merchant Scroll left a gap in that spot. Time is proving that Dark Confidant is becoming a far more important card for Vintage in a Drain era where Merchant Scroll is gone. When Portal was released, I made sure to get hold of cards I thought might be playable in Vintage some day. One of those cards was Strategic Planning, and it went into my box of Vintage playables, emerging at just the right moment last year for me to suggest it to my teammates to play in their Slaver lists.

A few months ago, I was brainstorming additional two-mana spells that can be played off a land and a Mox in Vintage, and it led me to try Grow again, although my initial idea of pairing Strategic Planning with Tarmogoyf proved poor in practice. In the process, I remembered Ancestral Knowledge.

Ancestral Knowledge produces an insane effect. There is nothing unrestricted at that casting cost (or at 1+any color of mana) that lets you see so many cards. Not only does it let you see ten cards, it allows you to chuck as many of those cards as you want from game. It’s almost a Tenpulse. The question, of course, is whether you can take enough advantage of the fact that it allows you to stack the top 10 cards of your library to offset the card disadvantage. Merchant Scroll only allows you to get one card. If seeing more than one card and stacking them on top of your deck could truly matter, then this card could be quite good as well.

And what about the cumulative upkeep?

The surprise breakout card of the last couple of months has been Mystic Remora, which has become another key “U” casting cost format staple. I have always dismissed that card in the past, but Vintage is so tempo centric that Mystic Remora is actually good enough to see play and the cumulative upkeep has not proven to be a significant obstacle to its usage. This made me want to try Ancestral Knowledge even more.

My immediate impulse was to use Ancestral Knowledge as a blue way to assemble the Time Vault combo quickly. Here’s what I came up with:


This decklist was designed to assemble and protect the Key/Vault combo quickly. It uses the most efficient disruption in the format to accomplish that. Also, I paired with Ancestral Knowledge cards designed to minimize the drawback and take advantage of the stacking property, such as Top and Dark Confidant. With Dark Confidant in play, you can stack the cumulative upkeep trigger, get your card, and fail to pay to shuffle your deck for a fresh, but random, draw in your draw step. Also, Top can trade with something better.

When I was testing this deck online, I would chuck upwards of 4-6 cards every time I played Ancestral Knowledge. The problem was that I often didn’t know how to stack the top of my deck. If I had a Time Vault in hand, I knew that Voltaic Key would be a good card to put on top, but I had difficulty figuring out whether to put mana, disruption, or business on top, and if so, in which order.

The more I played this decklist, the more I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was misplaying every time I ran it. It felt like Doomsday, a card in which putting together optimal piles in the proper sequence was mindnumbingly difficult.

This deck wasn’t bad at all, it just didn’t have the ‘oomph’ I was trying to achieve.

So I tried Ancestral Knowledge next in a TPS shell, which I won’t post, and it was a non-starter there.

Finally, my teammates suggested putting Ancestral Knowledge in a Dragon shell. Dragon actually makes the most sense since a) it’s full of four-ofs, b) it uses Bazaar of Baghdad, which is naturally awesome with Ancestral Knowledge, and can help you achieve your combo right there by drawing the remaining cards, c) you can naturally find and stack all of your 4-of combo parts. Someone asked about Lim-Dul’s Vault. As I pointed out to my team, Lim-Dul’s Vault is virtually a full turn slower than AK. LDV is like a turn 2.3 card, whereas AK is a turn 1.3 card. Maybe someday, once it’s better developed, I’ll share ‘Meandeck Dragon’ for your viewing pleasure.

Ultimately, I am disappointed that despite several months of attempts, the card didn’t break, even though I imagined it would take some work. The fundamental problem is that it is card disadvantageous, even if the tempo and power of the card is enormous. Even with that problem in sight, the trade off is real. Getting to see so many cards, with the additional feature of being able to remove them from the game, is a powerful effect at a cheap cost. Ancestral Knowledge is a candidate for abuse, but maybe there is something that I’ve overlooked?

The Beauty or the Geek

Magic gets a bad rap. Why don’t we get any respect?

After many years of dating, I recently took my girlfriend to a Magic tournament for the first time on the 17th of May (this is me and her on May 23). I was more than a little bit hesitant to show her what the tournament scene was all about for reasons like the one posted above. She knows some of my Magic buddies; she’s known Paul Mastriano for four years, but I’ve never taken her to an actual tournament before. She knows I play cards, and that I write for this website, but she really has no clue what it’s all about. This was going to be the first time bringing her into this side of my life, and I was very nervous about it. I harbored all sorts of silly thoughts: would she think less of me? How could I get her to understand that this is a strategy game like Poker?

She was recovering from a strep infection (which she kindly shared), and I probably should have let her stay at home. But she agreeably came to the tournament site to spend the day with me. She met some of my friends and I don’t think she thought much of it. But when the tournament began, she started asking me questions about the game. She wanted to know if this was like Dungeons and Dragons…. But, a few minutes later, she seemed to find her magazine more interesting, and I felt silly, a) for asking her to come to a Magic tournament, and b) for being so apprehensive about it in the first place. We travel to Thurman’s, a highly regarded restaurant in the city, after each local tournament, and I wanted to share that experience with her as well.

Why is it that so many of us feel so embarrassed about our game? Is it possible to be a gamer and not feel silly about it? I’ve always enjoyed watching Chapin talk about the game so comfortably, so at ease sharing what the game is about. He’s got his spiel ready to go whenever anyone asks: travel the world with your friends in a complicated intellectual sport, or something along those lines. For a long time, I’ve felt so secretive about this hobby… yet that’s exactly what it is.

My uncle’s enjoy golf. Why can’t I enjoy Magic without any reservations for the same reasons? I wonder if others share my experience. How do you as a Magic player integrate your self-identity as a Magic player into the person that you are?

Am I a geek for playing Magic? Well, for all the fellow geeks out there, I have a funny story to share that, I hope, illustrates how silly such stereotypes are, and how, maybe, it’s just our own self-perception that creates that guilt.

I was at the dance club/lounge a few weeks ago, the one around the corner from my house. It’s a pretty swank place. There are four separate bars in the club, two dance floors, plenty of pool tables, a sweet open air smoking area with a baller blue granite dolphin fountain in the middle of the club, and a VIP area. It’s not a downtown club, but people travel from all over the city to go there. That means less 22 year olds, more 28 year olds (either way, I’m fine).

I like to go there because it’s a short drive, a nice place, and plenty of people. Over the course of the last year or so I’ve been dropping in, I like to flirt with one of the door girls who takes the cover money at one of the rear entrances. Usually we exchange small talk. Sometimes she’ll complement me on my shirt or adjust my collar or roll my sleeves (and I’ll complement her, etc). One time she asked me to be the bouncer for her. I’m not sure how I pulled that off. Even at 175lbs (after three years of lifting weights – my natural body weight is about 145 lbs, and as a law student I was only about 125lbs), I don’t look like a bouncer. Still, I checked IDs for about 20 minutes with no one was the wiser (although one of the guys we let in the door said he needed to go to the ATM to get the cover, but he never came back even though we had his ID).

For the most part, whenever I see this chick we chit chat for a while, and go back to business as usual. This last time I saw her, we had a much longer conversation. Since she liked to roll up my sleeves, I asked her about her work experience, since it’s obvious she’s dressed mannequins before. She told me that she works at a daycare during the day, but she used to work retail. She asked me what I did and I told her that I couldn’t tell her that. It was a secret.

So, I started to press her about her background. I asked her how old she was (23), and about her life. We got to talking and somehow it came out that she had been on television. I asked her if it was a reality show, and she said that it had been. It turns out that this little doorgirl had been on Beauty and the Geek!

For those of you who had never seen the television show before, it’s a show where they pair socially awkward young men with beautiful young women in a competition to teach the geek (and the beauty) more about the world. Skeptical, I pressed her how she got onto the show, what it was like, etc. She told me about the audition, how she met Ashton Kutcher (the producer), and, most shockingly, how she won $100,000 on the show! Of course, I started to ask her what she did with $100,000, and why she was working as a door girl at the local club! (A pricey bed and an expensive apartment were part of the answers).

Then she turned the conversation back on me. She asked me — in shocking earnestness — if I was a model. I write for a strategy website about an obscure format for a niche trading card game. I’m the King of the Geeks. Yet here I was, with the suggestion that I could be a model by someone who won $100,000 for being a Beauty on ‘Beauty and the Geek.”

I’ll enjoy the irony of that conversation for a long time to come…

Until next time…

Stephen Menendian