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Untold Legends – Early Days

Tuesday, November 2nd – Zak Dolan recounts his early days of Magic… and by early, we mean at the very beginning of it all. Enjoy this continuation of our Untold Legends series!


What was play like before Revised?

(copyright Zak Dolan, 1997 & 2010)

I remember the first time that I ever heard of Magic: The Gathering. It was December, 1993, almost four years ago (at the time I wrote this in 1997). I had just walked in to Eclipse Books & Comics in Rolla, Missouri, a small store on Pine Street in the heart of the downtown area. Shirley Moriarity, the storeowner, was sitting behind the desk, working on filling out all the various forms associated with running a small business. She said that there was a hot new game out that I might like.

Paul Holmes, a friend of mine, was standing next to the desk, flipping through some cards. “Zak, you’ve got to try out this new game!” he practically shouted. “It’s awesome!”

I was a little bit leery at first, since I was a graduate student (i.e., “poor”) at the University of Missouri-Rolla (now called Missouri Science & Technology) at the time. Money was hard to come by, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t spend any of mine on something that I wouldn’t enjoy. So I asked him if I could borrow some of his cards, so that I could play him, to see if I would like the game. We split his cards in half and played a game. I was instantly hooked.

He was buying some cards at the time and asked me to pick out some lucky packs for him. I grabbed a few, which he opened. He was pretty happy with the cards he got. Two of them he had never seen before, Sunglasses of Urza and Lord of the Pit. He was particularly happy with the Lord of the Pit, since it was the largest creature that anyone in town had seen before. 7/7, flying, trample, with a mean-looking picture and a harsh drawback (sacrificing a creature every turn!). What more could anyone want?

I asked him how many cards he would recommend buying in order to be able to play. He recommended buying six to eight boosters. He said that he wouldn’t recommend buying any more than that now, since the store was supposed to get some starter decks in sometime soon (the store was sold out at the time, due to high demand and short supply). He said that the starter decks would have a rulebook and a better mix of cards for starting out playing. He turned out to be half-right — it did have a rulebook.

I bought eight boosters and quickly opened them. One of my packs had a Force of Nature. Instantly, I was the center of attention. Nobody had ever seen a creature that large before — 8/8 with trample! Imagine! It was, however, quickly pointed out to me that it required four green mana to cast — enough so that it would be practically impossible to get into play. The people standing around the store all commiserated with me that it was a shame that I’d open such a cool creature that would be virtually impossible to use.

Rob Yotter, another friend of mine from high school, entered the store. Paul, Rob, and I did some trading. I managed to get one of each of the Circles of Protection and a Shatter. I was quite proud of myself. Fortunately, I was only trading away cards that I had duplicates of, so I don’t think that I got ripped off too bad.

Rob had mostly cards with black borders, and he was mostly interested in just them. This was my first encounter with a Magic card “snob.” I asked him what the big deal was — so the cards had black borders, so what? He told me that this meant that they were from the first printing and therefore more collectible. He was halfway right — they were more collectible. Actually, what he had were “Betas,” which were from the second half of the black-bordered print run, arguably the second printing. Alphas, which also have black borders but have more rounded corners than Betas, are the first print run.

Anyway, I made a deck with all the cards that I had at the time and played Paul again. I was really starting to get hooked. I got it into my head that I was going to have to get one of each card. This proved to be quite a task, since the store quickly sold out of the remainder of the single box of boosters that they got in. Eclipse finally got starter decks and some more booster packs. I spent every spare cent that I had to buy more cards, but everyone else was doing the same, so it quickly sold out again.

By this time, I had amassed about 150 to 200 cards. None of my fraternity brothers had cards yet, so we’d play using one stack of all of my cards (yes, all five colors and all the cards that I owned shuffled together) and share the library for big four and five-player free-for-all games. Another thing that we occasionally did was to shuffle my cards and divide them half randomly so that we could play one-on-one. I also occasionally played Paul, who was also playing with a similar 150-200 card stack of cards with all five colors in the deck. Our matches seemed to be about even at the time.

Paul had played most of the people in the area, and he thought that his friend Dave had about the best collection (i.e., the best deck, since people played with all their cards) in the area. I remember looking through Dave’s cards once and finding a card that I’d never seen before that looked insanely powerful — Demonic Hordes. I was a little bit curious about this card, since it looked like once you got it into play, you’d just win easily by destroying all the opponent’s land. Paul pointed out that you had to pay the upkeep, and that if your opponent somehow managed to destroy the land that you were using for upkeep, you could get hosed quickly as well. I knew that I wanted one of those cards, but Dave sure wasn’t going to trade me his.

About that time, I flew to Idaho Falls, Idaho to visit my parents for Christmas. I quickly checked out the stores in the area, hoping to find one that sold Magic cards. I was in luck. “Games, Games, Games,” a game store in one of the malls, not only had Magic cards — but the first expansion set to the game, Arabian Nights. I bought a box of Arabian Nights and quickly opened them. They had a few packs of the regular set (Unlimited printing) but sold out of that rather quickly. I liked Arabians and decided that I wanted to make sure that I got a set, so I bought most of another box. I traded extensively and soon had a complete set.

I thought about buying another box (about $90) as an investment and setting it in the closet, figuring that someday it would be worth $300. But I didn’t, figuring that I could use the $90 for something else and that it would take a long time to get up to $300 in price. As it turned out, the price of the boxes hit $300 in about three months and in three years soared up to their current level (as of 1997 when I wrote this article) of about $4000-5000 per box (it has since gone much, much higher). It would’ve made a great investment. Sigh.

The owner of Games3, Kent, had split a starter deck of cards with one of his friends and had traded cards to get what he wanted for his deck. He had collected all the Scryb Sprites that he could find. About one third of his deck was Scryb Sprites. This was before there was a restriction on the number of copies of a card that you could have in a deck, so there wasn’t any problem with having 25 Scryb Sprites in your deck.

Kent played green as his only color. I had occasionally thought about constructing a deck of just one or two colors before this, but I hadn’t, since I thought that a deck with only a few colors would lack the variety of a five-color deck. However, Kent’s deck seemed to do well consistently, almost always getting a Llanowar Elf or Scryb Sprite on the first turn.

Duels against Kent seemed to follow a pattern. He’d quickly do some damage to me with an early Sprite or two. Just as I was getting rolling, he’d put out a Wall of Brambles or Wall of Ice to stop my ground attacks. His Giant Spiders or his Sprites plus a Giant Growth would stop any flyers that I had. If I attacked with everything I had, he would play Fog and counter-attack. I had this happen to me three times in a row in one game. If I fooled around too long, he’d get out a Thicket Basilisk and cast Lure and/or Regeneration on it. He also had a Craw Wurm or two that he could use to finish me off. He’d use Stream of Life to keep from getting too low on life. And if you couldn’t stop his Scryb Sprites or Shanodin Dryads, you’d get nicked to death.

What was worse was that if you couldn’t find something to stop the Sprites, you’d usually die in only seven or eight turns (compared to the average game length at the time of twenty-five to thirty turns), a very quick kill deck for its day. I remember being really impressed that he had only spent about $5 on cards but could still stomp me game after game. Playing his deck made me rethink my strategy completely — I started experimenting with one- and two-color decks.

I also watched what all the other people in the store were playing. I saw some cards played that I’d never seen before. One group of four players was playing a free-for-all game, and each player had one or more Sol Rings in play. I’d never seen this card before at the time, so I was wondering what was so good about the card that everyone was playing it. At the time, I didn’t see the point of the card (I know it’s a great card now, though). I also saw a player finish off another one rather quickly with a Scryb Sprite, a Giant Growth, and two Berserks. I’d never seen Berserk before, either, and that seemed like a pretty cool card, so I kept an eye out for that as well.

One of the players in the store, Mark, had a collection of over forty “playable” decks, which he kept in a suitcase. I remember a couple of the decks that he played at the time. One was an all-green deck that he played with Thicket Basilisks, Lures, and Regenerations. His idea for the deck was to get out the three-card combo and use it to consistently nuke all of your creatures. I remember seeing a couple of other cards in the deck, Cyclone, Cockatrice, and Force of Nature among them. It seemed to work fairly well, usually beating me about two out of three games.

Another deck that he had was a Plague Rat deck. It had dozens of Plague Rats, just the way that Kent’s deck had dozens of Scryb Sprites. I played against it in a four-player free-for-all game, and fortunately, we managed to keep killing off the Plague Rats as they came out, so that he never got anywhere. I remember thinking that if we hadn’t drawn the right spells at the right times, we would all have been overrun. We also played a lot of two-on-two team games. That was kind of fun, since team rules had not yet been developed. We had to make up the rules for the games as we went.

I taught my younger sister, Meg, how to play. She loved playing Magic, too. Nobody else in my family was interested in games, but Meg and I had a lot of fun playing and trying out new strategies. She tended to be a lot better at playing blue than I was, which frustrated me to no end. In my opinion, her best deck at the time (during Arabian Knights) was a deck of Flying Men and Unstable Mutations. It typically resulted in a 7/7 flying creature attacking on turn 2. That’s not too bad for common cards. She beat up a lot of players in Idaho Falls with the deck, until people got really sick of it and started playing Hurricane & Red Elemental Blast decks.

Another player in the area had a passion for making decks with only four or five different cards in them. This was before the restriction on the number of duplicates of a particular card that you could have in the deck. One of his more memorable decks was a first-turn kill deck using only four different cards — a basic land, two commons, and a rare, all from the original set (can you figure out which cards?). He also had a “Power Leak” theme deck. It had Islands, Psychic Venom, Power Leak, Power Sink, and Unsummon. If you played an enchantment, you were in big trouble. It worked a little bit better before people understood that the controller of the enchantment was the person who owned the card. Prior to that, people thought that if you played Psychic Venom on an opponent’s land, you could then follow that up with Power Leak, and they’d have to pay the upkeep or take the damage.

My favorite color was green, partly because I’d learned so much from playing Kent’s deck and partly because I just liked the cards. I remember building a deck with a lot of Wyluli Wolves and Nafs Asps (both common green cards from Arabian Nights) and having a decent amount of success with it.

We both traded a lot, with each other and with other players in Idaho. I remember that we both really liked the picture on Juzam Djinn but thought that it was a real shame that it wasn’t playable, since it did a point of damage to you every turn. I thought about collecting it anyway, since the picture was really cool, but decided against it. Another mistake, since the card was worth less than $3 then and is now (as of 1997 when I wrote this) worth well over $100.

I was still trying to collect one of each card. Not an easy task at the time, since you couldn’t just go out and buy more cards in order to complete a set like you can now. The only way to do it was to trade. Additionally, there were no lists of all the cards anywhere — this meant that you had to constantly keep an eye out for cards that you hadn’t seen before and make a mental note of the cards that were still necessary to build your set.

I remember one of the players at Games3 complaining about being stuck with three Word of Command cards. Apparently, he had opened them as rares in one of his packs, and nobody wanted to trade him for them. I’d never seen the card before, so I asked about it. He showed me the card — a pair of eyes staring at you from a black background. I tried to trade for the card, but the guy didn’t want anything that I had available for trade, since I was only trading off cards that I had duplicates of. If he’s still got the cards, I bet he’s not complaining about it today, since it’s worth (as of 1997) about $50 now.

The store, Games3, also had a small league going where everyone in the league had a deck that they would play other people in the league with, sort of a round-robin tournament. One of the players showed me his deck, which had multiple Earth Elementals and Fire Elementals in it. I was fairly impressed that he had managed to accumulate such a large collection of big creatures, since I hadn’t seen very many of either card at the time. He said that he was doing fairly well in the league, too.

After Christmas vacation was over, I returned to Rolla, Missouri. I was very anxious to show everyone there what I’d learned about deck construction while in Idaho. I decided that I might as well profit from my knowledge, so I challenged Paul to play me for ante — that is, we’d each cut the other person’s deck, remove the top card, and that would be what we were playing for. We agreed to play the best three out of five games (which I had a feeling would be three games). Since Paul knew that we were pretty evenly matched the last time we had played, and since he knew that I had cards that he wanted, he readily agreed to play for ante. I remember him remarking on how small my deck was and asking if I was sure that I wouldn’t run out of cards. I quickly won three games in a row, never going below seventeen lives in any of the games, and took three of Paul’s cards. Included in the haul was a Veteran Bodyguard, the only one in the Rolla area. I was nice and traded it back to him for a few other cards of his that I wanted. After he saw what a focused deck could do, he said, “You’ve got to play Dave for ante!”

Since Dave was about the best player in the area at the time and had all the best rares, I was only too anxious to play him. Paul called him up, and Dave came over with his stack of 150 cards of all five colors. I challenged Dave to play the best two out of three sets, with each set being the best three out of five games, with one card for ante each game. He was a little bit suspicious that I wanted to play him for ante, since everyone knew that he was the best in town (he’d traded for all the best cards, after all), but he agreed to the terms anyway, since he knew he was the best. He was in for a surprise. He was a little bit shocked to see me pull out a deck with barely forty cards in it — less than one-third the size of his deck. He said that he wondered what I was up to.

I quickly won six games from him, and although I didn’t get anything as good as a Veteran Bodyguard, the triumph was still a lot of fun. In one of the games, he got me down to sixteen life, which particularly impressed Paul. After that, the two of them (Paul and Dave) each made focused decks and went and played the rest of the people in town, quickly recouping the ante that they had lost to me. As a result of showing them the tuned deck style that I’d learned in Idaho, deck construction experienced a Renaissance period in Rolla, MO. Everyone started making more focused “constructed” decks, instead of just playing with their whole collection.

About this time, people started to realize that there weren’t any more cards in the stores. If you wanted a particular card, you had to trade for it. I remember what I had to trade to get one of the only two “Lord of the Pit” cards in the area. Ten good cards (some uncommon, some rare). We didn’t have lists of the rarity of cards back then, so we didn’t know which cards were rare, which ones were common, and which ones were uncommon. This gave people who had seen more of the cards an advantage in trading, since we had a better idea as to which cards were rare.

Since I still wanted one of each card, I figured out pretty quickly that in order to acquire one of each of them I would need to get one of each of the dual lands. I did the math and realized that there must be ten different dual lands, since there were ten possible combinations of two of the five colors. So even though I had only seen about four different dual lands, I reasoned that there must be more that I still hadn’t come across. Since most of the people that had dual lands only wanted to trade them for other dual lands, I decided that I would trade for as many as I could, figuring that I could then trade my duplicates for ones that I didn’t have. As a result, I ended up with a lot of Bayous.

Since I had three Bayous, I decided to build a B/G deck. I also continued to trade for Bayous, eventually getting six of them. This became my first real deck. I put in a lot of cool combinations and a wide variety of cards. The deck was something like this:

Sol Ring (2)
Juggernaut
Cockatrice
Wall of Brambles
Regrowth
Regeneration
Hypnotic Specter
Will ‘O the Wisp (or Frozen Shade)
Mind Twist
Icy Manipulator (2) (sometimes The Hive instead of Icy #2)
Bayou (6)
Force of Nature
Thicket Basilisk
Instill Energy
Tranquility
Lord of the Pit (or Khabal Ghoul)
Royal Assassin
Demonic Tutor (2) (or Unholy Strength, or Contract from Below)
Howl from Beyond
Gaea’s Liege
Ley Druid
Berserk
Lure
Demonic Hordes
Nettling Imp
Animate Dead
Dark Ritual

Swamp (5)
Forest (5)

As you can see, I tried a lot of variations for this deck. I still have the notes that I took from this deck. My notes show that in early 1994, I added a Sengir Vampire, a Black Lotus, and Birds of Paradise. They show that I removed the duplicate Sol Ring, the Hive, the Juggernaut, the Force of Nature, the Cockatrice, the Berserk, the Lord of the Pit, and the Howl from Beyond. This was probably due to the creation of a restricted list, which at the time consisted solely of the restriction that players play with “no more than five artifacts and no duplicate artifacts”.

Obviously, this deck was still in the primitive stages of strategic deck building. At the time, there was no such thing as a “sideboard,” so the deck didn’t include one, although I occasionally played Gloom straight in the deck, since white tended to do nasty things to black.

There was a group of about twenty people that used to play Magic in Thomas Jefferson Residence Hall at the University of Missouri-Rolla (TJ Hall at UMR). We used to stay up most of the night playing Magic. This worked out well for me since, at the time, I only had class from 8:05am to 9:20am Monday through Thursday. This meant that I could play cards all night, go to class, and then sleep all day. This gave me a lot of practice playing Magic — over forty hours a week, typically — the kind of practice that it takes to get really good.

One of our favorite past times was to play multi-player free-for-all (or team) games. Usually, six to eight players would pull two tables together and play for an hour or two. Generally, the best players would get ganged up on early. I used to try to decoy people from ganging up on me by pointing out that Jeremy was playing blue, and if we killed off Jeremy, we wouldn’t have to worry about having our spells countered. Sometimes this worked.

He was rather annoying to play against since he played a lot of Prodigal Sorcerers and Counterspells. Once he got a Prodigal Sorcerer or two on the board, any small creature that you brought out was dog meat. He also used to seem to always have a Counterspell when you really didn’t want him to have one. His counters foiled some of my best-laid plans.

Eventually, they (Duelist Convocation & WOTC) also said that you couldn’t play more than five of any one card, so I had to reduce the number of Bayous to five. Later, that limit was further reduced to four of any card. Additionally, I used to play only forty-two cards in this deck, when the minimum deck size was only forty cards, before they instituted the sixty-card minimum.

One version of this deck, played in early 1994, had four Demonic Tutors in it — which really helped me to find what I needed in a hurry. The conventional wisdom at that point in time was to use the tutor to get the Icy Manipulator. I remember asking Jeremy if I should get the Icy in one of my games. His reply, “You want to win, don’t you?” made the choice pretty clear to me.

About this time, the collector’s set came out. This was a big deal for us, since we had never seen some of the cards in the set. I remember that the two cards none of us had ever seen were the Pirate Ship and the Verduran Enchantress. From this set, I was able to make a list of the cards that I still needed in order to get a set of one of each.

The continuing card scarcity made some interesting things possible. I managed to corner the market on dual lands in the Rolla area by trading for all of the ones in the town. I ended up with close to forty of them. Dual lands hit $20 each prior to the release of the Revised edition. Sadly, the price went back down again after they were reprinted, but then they took them out of Fourth Edition, and the prices went back up again.

Because of the scarcity of cards, I was able to conspire with the other players at TJ Hall to prevent Clint from getting a “Time Walk” spell. We reasoned that his deck was annoying and strong enough without this spell, and therefore, he didn’t need it. For several months, I had a standing offer to the other players that anything Clint gave them for a Time Walk, I would match or beat. If someone wouldn’t trade me a Time Walk at any price, I made him or her promise not to trade it to Clint.

When the Revised edition came out, Clint was happy, figuring that he could just buy more cards until he got a Time Walk. Then he found out that it wasn’t in Revised. Boy, was he upset! I eventually stockpiled seven Time Walks before Clint got his first one — by driving 100 miles to St. Louis — to trade with people that weren’t in on the boycott!

Paul played against my deck a lot, and one day made the suggestion that I add a third color to the deck, blue, since I was one of the few players in the area that had enough dual lands to do so. That way, he reasoned, I could Clone or Dopplegang the best creature on the board. I revised my deck to add a third color and then the deck looked something like this:

Black Lotus
Jayemdae Tome
Bayou (5)
Will-‘O’-the-Wisp
Royal Assassin
Dark Ritual
Mind Twist
Wall of Brambles
Stream of Life
Regrowth
Wall of Air
Ancestral Recall
Sol Ring
Icy Manipulator
Tropical Island (5)
Nettling Imp
Sengir Vampire
Animate Dead
Birds of Paradise
Thicket Basilisk
Lure
Instill Energy
Vesuvan Doppelganger
Time Walk
Forcefield
Underground Sea (5)
Desert
Hypnotic Specter
Demonic Hordes
Demonic Tutor
Ley Druid
Gaea’s Liege
Tranquility
Regeneration
Clone
Counterspell

I also had some other cards that I would occasionally add to the deck to make it up to sixty cards, in case I was playing against someone who insisted on a sixty card minimum (WOTC’s recommendation, but at that time not a requirement). These were the Bayou, Library of Alexandria, two Deserts, Black Knight, Khabal Ghoul, Unholy Strength, Howl from Beyond, Fungusaur, Berserk, Pirate Ship, and Old Man of the Sea.

Desert used to be a really big deal — multiple deserts in almost every competitive deck. People used to play with Desert Nomads and (of all things) Camels to try to avoid their creatures getting killed by them. It was not uncommon for people to play four Deserts in a tournament deck. I remember a big argument at a tournament as to whether four Deserts should be allowed to kill an attacking Serra Angel. Some people thought that you couldn’t hit the creature with more than one Desert, some people thought the effects of multiple Deserts could be combined. Eventually, the Desert owners won and they allowed multiple Deserts to hit the same creature. Of course, now (1997 and later) you almost never see a Desert in play.

One time, I used a Dark Ritual to get a really quick Sengir Vampire out against Clint Couse. His reply was to immediately cast Control Magic on it and pummel me with my own Vampire until I died. After that, I quickly revised my deck to include Control Magic. I began to realize that cards that allowed me to take control of my opponent’s cards were good, since we would both have used a card, but I would end up with the only benefit. This was my first thinking about “card advantage”, a strategy later popularized by Brian Weissman in the mid ’90’s with his “The Deck” full of counterspells and card denial.

The last version of the deck that I played before scrapping the deck looked something like this:

Forest
Bayou (4)
Library of Alexandria (4)
Mox Sapphire
Icy Manipulator
Hypnotic Specter
Demonic Hordes
Black Knight
Dark Ritual
Terror
Thicket Basilisk
Regrowth
Lure
Clone
Ancestral Recall
Control Magic
Island
Tropical Island (4)
Diamond Valley
Mox Jet
Black Lotus
Royal Assassin
Sorceress Queen
Khabal Ghoul
Demonic Tutor
Ley Druid
Gaea’s Liege
Tranquility
Regeneration
Prodigal Sorcerer
Counterspell
Time Walk
Swamp
Underground Sea (4)
Mox Emerald
Sol Ring
Nettling Imp
Sengir Vampire (2)
Will-‘O-the-Wisp
Unholy Strength
Mind Twist
Wall of Brambles
Birds of Paradise
Instill Energy
Vesuvan Doppelganger
Old Man of the Sea
Timetwister

Paul traded a Stasis to me, then later traded a lot of good cards to get it back. Later, he decided that he wanted to get out of Magic, so he sold me his collection. At that point, I asked him why he traded so much to get the Stasis (the only one in the town). He pointed out that he was planning on building a deck with Serra Angels, Clones, and Doppelgangers and then using the Stasis to win the game. I liked his idea, so I decided to build a Stasis deck, modeling it off of my three-color black/green/blue deck, but making it white/blue/green. About that time, I learned about the news groups on the Internet and found a list of killer combos. I wrote it down, and I’ve still got the list today. It was something like this:

Twiddle / Icy Manipulator / Royal Assassin

COP: Red / Orcish Artillery

Howling Mine / Icy Manipulator

Invisibility / Juggernaut

Firebreathing / Fear

Simulacrum / Regeneration

Wrath of God / Soul Net

Winter Orb / Sol Ring / Ley Druid / Birds of Paradise / Llanowar Elves / Wild Growth / Mox Emerald

Stasis / Serra Angel / Meekstone

Meekstone / Firebreathing / Black Knight / White Knight

Pestilence / COP: Black

Drain Power / Channel / Fireball / Fork

Howling Mine / Black Vise

Thicket Basilisk / Lure / Regeneration

Siren’s Call / Meekstone / Fog

Stasis / Icy Manipulator

Living Lands / Keldon Warlord

I also added some notes of my own to the margin of the paper, thinking of other things that might go well with the Winter Orb combo above:

Animate Artifact / Mana Short / Paralyze / Unsummon / Power Leak / Power Sink / Drain Power / Ankh of Mishra / Siren’s Call / Meekstone / Fog / Instill Energy / Icy Manipulator.

Obviously, most of these are pretty weak combos by today’s standards, but at the time, they were considered “killer.”

I decided that I wanted to have as many different killer combinations in my white/blue/green deck as possible, and that was where I got the idea for the tournament deck that I ended up using to win the 1994 World Championships.

Early versions of the deck contained four Instill Energy cards. I quickly found out that this didn’t work too well, since whatever I put the Instill Energy on ended up getting hit with Terror. Additionally, if I didn’t have a creature in play, the Instill Energy sat uselessly in my hand. I don’t have any records of the first few versions of this deck, since I didn’t bother to write it down until I had a deck that I liked, but one version was:

Black Lotus
Mox Pearl
Sol Ring
Tropical Island (4)
Library of Alexandria
Armageddon
Swords to Plowshares
Birds of Paradise (2)
Stasis
Vesuvan Doppelganger
Black Vise
Regrowth
Black Ward
Wyluli Wolf
Disenchant
Lure
Mox Ruby
Mox Jet
Mana Vault
Savannah (4)
Strip Mine
Tranquility
Ancestral Recall
Ley Druid
Serra Angel (3)
Clone (2)
Ivory Tower
Floral Spuzzem
Circle of Protection: Black
Prodigal Sorcerer
Abu Jafar
Mox Emerald
Mox Sapphire
Tundra (4)
City of Brass
Diamond Valley
Control Magic
Time Walk
Siren’s Call
Braingeyser
Old Man of the Sea (2)
Time Twister
White Knight
Karma
Instill Energy
Thicket Basilisk

I remember writing down a list of goals for the deck — the things that I wanted the deck to accomplish. I’ve still got that, too. It was something like this:

1.     Quick mana

2.     Flexible land (multiple colors)

3.     Destroy all of opponent’s mana

4.     Destroy all of opponent’s creatures

5.     Multiple sources of mana

6.     Multiple sources of damage

7.     Destroy opponent’s artifacts & enchantments

8.     Remove opponent’s creatures from play permanently

9.     Be flexible on offense and defense

10. Make opponent take damage for being incompetent

11. Draw more cards than opponent

12. Sacrifice opponent’s creatures and benefit from it

13. Kill their color

14. Recycle cards

15. Play speedy cards

This list of goals helped me stay focused on what I wanted to do with the deck. I later modified the goals to make them more focused, but this was a pretty good start.

A lot of people question the inclusion of Siren’s Call in the deck. At the time that I first added it to the deck, it made quite a lot of sense. Most people were playing creatures that had to tap to use their special ability. Things like Prodigal Sorcerer (“Tim”), Old Man of the Sea, Nettling Imp, Royal Assassin (“Vinny”), and eventually, Time Elemental. This made it so that if my opponent got out the first Old Man, Tim, or Vinny, then I could play Siren’s Call to kill theirs (for one mana!) and then bring out mine, locking out their creature.

Siren’s Call also stopped decks that relied heavily on creature mana — Llanowar Elves, Birds of Paradise, Ley Druid, and so on. In a creature-heavy environment, this card could kill a lot of creatures. If I used it in conjunction with Stasis, Meekstone, or Moat, I had a decent chance to kill ALL their creatures. If nothing else, I could force a small creature to run into my Serra Angel and die.

I went to a gaming convention in Springfield, Missouri, and met a guy named Todd there. I traded him out of all of his good cards and beat the heck out of him in games, but we became friends anyway. One of the memorable games at the convention was a four-way free-for-all where one of the players had a deck with over one thousand cards. He had to have several people help him shuffle. It was rather comedic, but it actually did fairly well in one of the two games we played.

I finally found the last card that I needed for my collection at that convention — a Mox Ruby. I had to trade my extra Black Lotus to Mike, a guy from the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign, for it. I suspected that I was getting ripped off, but I made up for it by playing him for ante. I made him change his deck by playing no more than five artifacts and no duplicate artifacts, so that his deck conformed to the current restricted list. This really bummed him out, since he had loaded his deck with all the Moxes that he could find. I won a few cool cards from him in ante until he realized that he was playing against a Plague Rat deck and would only win cheap cards — which he did — a Plague Rat, a Swamp, and an Evil Presence. Meanwhile, I won cool cards from him. Then, he wanted to play against my best deck, so I did, on condition that we play the best two out of three for the ante. That way, I wouldn’t lose my favorite cards by chance. I ended up winning the first and third games, saving my ante.

I began to realize that Clint Couse tended to beat me a little more than I thought that he should, so we compared decks and he mentioned that he had more creature-kill cards than I did. After that, I increased the number of Swords to Plowshares that I played. I also decided that I didn’t like playing with the anti-black cards in the main deck, so I quickly relegated those to the sideboard, now that sideboards had been invented by WOTC.

At the time, the conventional wisdom was that Swords to Plowshares was a bad card, since it gave your opponent life. I was probably the first player in the area to play four of them in my deck. Now (in 1997) that card and strategy is almost a given for any player using white.

About this time, I entered my first tournament. We had a sealed deck tournament at CogCon, a gaming convention in Rolla, MO. Everyone was looking forward to playing me in the tournament, since they thought that I would no longer be able to beat up on them with cards that they didn’t own and couldn’t get. We each got 120 cards, and we had to play with 100 of them. If time ran out, the game was decided by “first blood”. That is, the first person to do a point of damage to the opponent would win the game. I won one match because our first game took such a long time that I was able to get first blood for games two and three, in order to win, even though my opponent had a better deck. A very different format from today’s sealed deck tournaments where you can use fewer than 100 cards.

My mistake for the tournament was not removing a color. This made me lose, ending up with only third place. The two people in first place had each removed a color, leaving them with only a four color deck, a large advantage since you were much more likely to draw spells and lands of the same color than when playing with a five color deck.

However, I did manage to win the constructed deck tournament, starting a personal record of defeating thirty-four straight opponents in best two-out-of-three (type I) tournament play, winning four tournaments in a row, including the 1994 World Championships. I became the first “Arch Mage of Cog Con”. Clint won the second year and third years (I had moved out of state) and for quite a while, the two of us were the only ones that could claim that title.

I revised my deck and kept fine-tuning it as the months went on. I played in a tournament at MichCon, which I barely won. I had quite a bit of difficulty with an all-red deck playing Power Surge and Ali from Cairo. I kept cloning Ali, but sadly, my Clones kept getting bolted (hit with Lightning Bolt). My two Serra Angels had to watch helplessly as I was Fireballed to death. After that tournament, I changed my sideboard to include two Circles of Protection: Red, instead of just one.

The original idea to play the Library of Alexandria in the deck was that it would be helpful on the off chance that you drew it in your opening hand or happened to have seven cards when you drew it (i.e., after a Timetwister, perhaps). Conventional wisdom at the time said that the card was relatively useless, since any good deck would play out cards rapidly and therefore be quickly below the seven cards required to use Library of Alexandria.

Then, Clint Couse came up with the idea that it would be good to play four of them to insure that you drew one right away. He stared playing four of them standard and used it as a card-drawing machine. After playing against him with that many Libraries, I quickly revised my deck to include four as well. Amazingly enough, Library of Alexandria wasn’t restricted at the time.

When I played my deck in a 128-person tournament sponsored by Rider’s Hobby Shop in Michigan, my deck looked like this:

Mox Emerald
Mox Jet
Sol Ring
Savannah (4)
Strip Mine (2)
Stasis
Ancestral Recall
Counterspell
Swords to Plowshares (4)
Instill Energy
Winter Orb
Serra Angel (3)
Wall of Swords
Meekstone
Ley Druid
Abu Jafar
Singing Tree
Mox Sapphire
Mox Ruby
Mana Vault
Tundra (4)
Diamond Valley
Time Walk
Braingeyser
Island Sanctuary
Regrowth
Ivory Tower
Howling Mine
Vesuvan Doppelganger
White Knight
Feldon’s Cane
Birds of Paradise
Prodigal Sorcerer
Mox Pearl
Black Lotus
Tropical Island (4)
Library of Alexandria (4)
Control Magic
Timetwister
Siren’s Call
Disenchant (2)
Lure
Black Vise
Icy Manipulator
Clone (2)
Old Man of the Sea (2)
Library of Leng
Thicket Basilisk
Wyluli Wolf

Sideboard:
Balance
Magical Hack
Blue Elemental Blast
COP: Black
Tranquility
Wrath of God
Ring of Maruf
Sleight of Mind
Karma
Lifeforce
Armageddon
Transmute Artifact
Lifetap
COP: Red
Island of Wak-Wak

Conventional wisdom, at the time, said that cards that destroyed a bunch of everything were bad, since they would destroy your own cards. My original idea behind the Wrath of God, Armageddon, and Balance in the sideboard was that I would put them in out of spite if I found myself playing someone who was better than me. My thinking was, if I was going to lose anyway, I would blow up everything, just to annoy my opponent. As it worked out, I ended up playing the cards a lot. Not because everyone was better than me, but because once I tried out the cards, I found out that they worked rather well!

I remember that they had a very unusual restricted list at the time. Antiquities had just come out, and Colossus of Sardia was on the restricted list. We had a good laugh about that. What a piece of junk!!

Ring of Maruf was a very powerful card at the time, since you could use it to get ANY card that you owned. Balance, Fireball, whatever you needed at the time. Nowadays, you can only use it to get cards out of your sideboard. Ring of Maruf was a lot of fun in the multi-player games, since there would inevitably be quite a lot of opinions on what card you could get. This resulted in a lot of amusing kibitzing. The only thing we all agreed upon was that it had to be a card that you owned — you couldn’t borrow a card from another player.

In the semi-finals of the Rider’s tournament, I beat someone who had employed a similar strategy to mine — four Library of Alexandria’s, four Ivory Towers, and a Copy Artifact. It’s strange that Copy Artifact was the one card restricted of the three, when it’s now widely believed that both of the other cards are stronger. Most of the people he played got to watch him rocket up to over a hundred life before he beat them. He managed to win only two out of five games against me, though, since in the other three games, I brutally out-sped him, killing him before he had time to do much of anything. Unfortunately, the player that I was supposed to play in the finals had to leave the tournament early, so I won by default.

In order to prepare for the World Championships, I played everyone that I could think of and asked for their opinions on my deck. Which cards did they fear? Which cards made them suffer? Which cards didn’t seem to do anything? This way, I had a lot of people contributing ideas to make my deck better.

One of the key games in improving my deck before the championship came in Ann Arbor, Michigan at my fraternity house, Pi Kappa Phi, where I was staying for the summer while studying Japanese. One of the guests that we had invited over to play Magic with us decided that he wanted his own version of my deck after he played against it in a four-player free-for-all that rapidly turned into three players against me. He was particularly impressed with the way that I beat all of the other players, so he decided to add in multiples of the cards that beat him and try playing it in practice for the Rider’s Hobby Shop tournament. He was playing a four Armageddon deck and he also put in four Mana Drains, a card that I hadn’t seen used much at the time. When we played later, he used the Mana Drains at the beginning of the game to steal mana from me and cast an early Serra Angel. I thought that was great, so I added a Mana Drain to my deck. He was also playing four Serra Angels and I occasionally got stuck with a Clone or Doppleganger with nothing to imitate (which occasionally happened to me), so I increased the number of Serras that I had in the deck to four.

Creatures seemed to be the cards that were easiest for my opponent to eliminate, so I reduced the total number of creatures in my deck. I decided that the Lure strategy wasn’t really working, so I dropped Abu Jafar, Lure, and Thicket Basilisk. I also decided that the Instill Energy wasn’t working too well, since it was a creature enchantment and my creatures kept getting killed. Worse, without a creature in play, the Enchant Creature card just sits in your hand, so I dropped it, along with the 1/1 creatures that made combinations with Instill Energy but which were far too easy to kill (the Prodigal Sorcerer and the Wyluli Wolf). My White Knight wasn’t doing enough for me and he required two white mana, so I dropped him. The Wall of Swords couldn’t attack, so I dropped it. Singing Tree was an experiment that just wasn’t working, so I dropped it as well. It’s important to try out new cards occasionally, but if a card doesn’t work, don’t forget to change it to something else later.

With Library of Alexandria restricted, the Island Sanctuary didn’t make sense any more. Also, Library of Leng and Feldon’s Cane just didn’t do enough to affect my opponent’s cards in play, so they were dropped. With fewer creatures, the Diamond Valley was too dangerous. I was worried about drawing the Diamond Valley as my only land and getting hosed, so it got relegated to the sideboard. The idea was that against a weenie deck, I would put it into the deck from the sideboard and then use my Old Men of the Sea to steal and sacrifice their creatures to the Diamond Valley. I also had to add another Stasis, since I decided that I wanted this to be a major theme of the deck and I wasn’t drawing it enough with just one in the deck.

At one point, I tried adding black to the deck for Demonic Tutor and Mind Twist, but found out that with my low percentage of land, I just wasn’t getting the right color of land when I needed it. Four colors was one color too many for me. I also tried dropping the green altogether and replacing it with black, but found that I really liked Regrowth and the flexible mana that the green creatures could provide. I also tried out Fastbond and found that, although it was helpful if I got a lucky first draw or played a Timetwister, with the percentage of land that I was using (25%), it just didn’t work well enough. I thought briefly about adding red, since I liked Wheel of Fortune (or maybe a Fireball), but for the most part I thought that I would rather have a Mind Twist, so I never really tried out red for very long. I generally disliked red at the time, since I saw it as just mindless destruction — not my preference. I preferred to torture my opponents and make them feel helpless over a long period of time, rather than just killing them quickly like a red player would.

I could have increased the land percentage, but I found that when I did so, it didn’t really help the deck. I ended up drawing only a land late in the game when I really needed a spell. Most of the spells in the deck worked well with relatively little land, and I had a lot of cards to mess up lands. Because many of the anti-land cards I played were global, as a result, adding more just reduced the power of the deck rather than increasing it.


Author’s Afterward (written 2010):

Although I stopped playing competitively when I sold my cards to a dealer in 1998, I kept an eye on the new cards until 2005, checking if any cards would be ones that I would want to put into my deck. I’m not up to date on cards after 2005, so nothing after Urza’s Cycle is included. The final version of my 1994 Gen-Con deck is as follows, in case you would like to try it out some time:

 

Savannah x4
Strip Mine
Mox Pearl
Mox Emerald
Sol Ring
Howling Mine
Zuran Orb
Meekstone x2
Disenchant x2
Armageddon
Time Elemental
Time Walk
Mana Drain
Sylvan Library
Tropical Island x4
Tolarian Academy
Mox Jet
Mox Ruby
Ivory Tower
Icy Manipulator
Candelabra of Tawnos
Serra Angel x4
Balance
Kismet
Ancestral Recall
Land Equilibrium
Recall
Regrowth
Tundra x4
Library of Alexandria
Mox Sapphire
Black Lotus
Black Vise
Winter Orb
Jester’s Cap
Swords to Plowshares x4
Wrath of God
Moat
Timetwister
Stasis x2
Siren’s Call
Birds of Paradise

 

I would recommend doing the above deck rather than the one I actually used in 1994 — deck design improved a lot since then. This one should give the average deck a run for it’s money, when played properly. As with any deck, there are some decks that give it a lot of trouble. But not very many.

Other cards that I sometimes swap into the deck, depending on the play environment, are:

Braingeyser, Mana Vault, Wastelands (I used to run two Strip Mine, but that got restricted, so Wastelands substitutes for the second one), Copy Artifact, Control Magic, Tormod’s Crypt, Feldon’s Cane, Zur’s Weirding, Island Sanctuary, Old Man of the Sea, Mind Twist, Demonic Tutor, City of Brass (for the black cards).

Feel free to put something else in to the deck in place of the siren’s call if you never play against decks with creatures that tap. Perhaps Braingeyser to take advantage of the mana from Tolarian Academy.

I’ve also played around with adding a couple basic lands to counter the anti-dual land cards and reducing the number of green dual lands as a result — Islands and Plains and sometimes Land Tax.

As for the sideboard I sometimes run one Hurkyl’s Recall as a counter to artifact heavy decks. That way, if they do a Wheel of Fortune or a Timetwister, I Hurkyl’s their artifacts back into their hand and they lose them all. I run the other two Disenchant (for a total of four) in the sideboard in case the opponent is playing a deck heavy in artifact or enchantment. Two Circle of Protection: Red are always in the sideboard, because some red decks just kill you too quickly without them. Sometimes I play Consecrate Land in the sideboard to help slow down land destruction decks. Kind of a silly card, I know, but my first tournament loss with this deck was to a land destruction deck. Once bitten, twice shy. Jayemdae Tome could be used against discard heavy decks, potentially. Tormod’s crypt against recursion decks. The sideboard really depends on what types of decks you expect to play against.

 

 


*SOLUTION

to earlier riddle: Swamp, Dark Ritual, Drain Life, Contract from Below. A 40-card deck with multiples of Dark Ritual and Contract from Below and some Swamps and a couple Drain Life can win quite easily and consistently on the first turn. If you don’t draw a Swamp, take a no-land mulligan (mulligan rules were different at the time — no land or all land and you could redraw for free). Swamp, multiple Dark Rituals, Contract, repeat until you have 22+ mana and a Drain Life. Win.