Flooded Shoreline has appeared before in SCG Daily. About a fortnight ago, Abe Sargent made it the focus of his, um, Bad Rare Challenge. But while Flooded Shoreline might now be no more than an old, bad rare, there was a time when it was part of the world’s best deck.
For many years, English Magic players have had a justified reputation as fine deck-builders, even if not quite as good players. At the time of the first Pro Tour in Paris, however, where the format was Mirage-Visions Constructed, this was most certainly not the case. All of the finest players in England, who dominated the local tournaments, boarded the Eurostar to go to the Pro Tour, and were playing White/Green creature decks featuring no fewer than 4 copies of Scalebane’s Elite. These players watched as the day before the Pro Tour players from countries where Magic technology was much further advanced, such as the USA, Sweden, France and Germany, practiced their Cadaverous Bloom–Squandered Resources decks, which cast Drain Life for 20+ life points round about the time when the English players were casting their 4/4 creature for five mana.
Coming back to England after the tournament, the English players were delighted, despite their heavy defeats. With this new, secret combo deck, they would be able to crush all their local rivals over and over again. One of these players decided to let me in on the secret tech, and tried to demonstrate the Bloom-Drain combo (which involves casting Squandered Resources, then Natural Balance to generate lots of mana, then Cadaverous Bloom, then Prosperity and Infernal Contract to draw lots of cards and finally Drain Life), and managed to mess up the combo on about half a dozen separate tries. I have to confess that I didn’t find this overwhelmingly impressive, though it is a sign of how slowly tech spread to England that someone could actually believe that they could conceal the deck which had won the last Pro Tour from most players.
A couple of months later, it was time for the Regionals qualifiers for the National Championship. At one of the early qualifiers, I managed to qualify with a White Weenie deck which splashed Blue for 4 Ray of Commands (yes, I know, very shameful). Then as now there was no dominant deck in Standard, with Green-based beatdown decks and Blue-based control decks being the main contenders, with Red decks, White decks and Black decks present but in smaller numbers. Faced with this opposition, Tony Dobson managed to design the first great English Magic deck:
The Miserable Orb deck
4 Flooded Shoreline
4 Winter Orb
4 Man O’War
4 Suq’Ata Firewalker
4 Cloud Elemental
4 Force of Will
4 Counterspell
4 Impulse
4 Disrupt
4 Sky Diamond
I know it looks very dodgy, but it dominated the Regionals, qualifying more people for Nationals than any other deck. And, uniquely amongst decks designed by English players, it beat the “net decks” which the better prepared could find on newsgroups or the Magic Dojo.
By the time Nationals rolled round, everyone in our playtest group wanted to play this deck. Some modifications were made, Dancing Scimitar was added to counteract the fact that all the Green decks had added Karoo Meerkat and sometimes even Windreaper Falcon to their main decks, but it was clearly the best deck, and Ollie Schneider took the first of his national championships playing it.
The one person who didn’t benefit from it, though, was its designer, Tony Dobson. He hadn’t brought all the cards for the deck, and by the time he tried to assemble the deck at about midnight before the Constructed day of Nationals, he couldn’t find enough cards, and neither, as it happened, could I. So we sat up, as you do, and designed a new deck. At 4am, we finalized the following:
4 Black Knight
4 Fallen Askari
4 Incinerate
4 Man O’War
4 Winter Orb
4 Nekrataal
4 Knights of Stromgald
4 Choking Sands
4 Contagion
3 Undiscovered Paradise
3 City of Brass
4 Gemstone Mine
2 Sulfurous Springs
2 Underground River
10 Swamp
As tends to happen when you make decks at 4am, our performance in the tournament was not optimal – I went 3-5 and Tony (I think) went 4-4. So imagine our surprise a couple of months later when Jakub Slemr won the World Championships with the following:
4 Black Knight
4 Choking Sands
4 Contagion
4 Fallen Askari
4 Knight of Stromgald
1 Necratog
4 Nekrataal
2 Shadow Guildmage
4 Man-o-War
2 Uktabi Orangutan
2 Earthquake
4 Incinerate
3 City of Brass
3 Gemstone Mine
2 Sulfurous Springs
10 Swamp
1 Underground River
3 Undiscovered Paradise
2 Disenchant
1 Exile
1 Honorable Passage
3 Pyroblast
2 Dystopia
2 Ebony Charm
2 Forsaken Wastes
2 Hydroblast
So not only had Tony managed to design the deck which won the National Championships, but also to get right the first draft of the deck which won Worlds as well. He went on to become a Pro Tour regular and top deck designer, though he rarely plays these days, which is a big shame.
Is there anything that we can learn today from the story of the Miserable Orb deck?
There are basically two sorts of Constructed formats, those dominated by particular mechanics or cards, such as Affinity or Necropotence, and those which are not. It is actually quite rare to have a Constructed environment like the present one where decks which are based on age-old strategies such as White Weenie, Blue control and Green fat creatures (which is basically what Tooth and Nail is) rather than being dominated by Affinity and anti-Affinity decks. Now it might be that when we all do a bit of testing it turns out that there is obvious a best deck which hasn’t been mentioned yet, but let’s maintain a bit of optimism and assume that this doesn’t happen.
If the current situation, where there are a number of good decks but no dominant one, continues, then the opportunity is there to find a junk rare which can be added to one of the decks or to create an altogether new deck to create a new dominant deck. If you should be the person who manages to find this deck, just promise me two things:
1. That it is a Red card, not a Blue one.
2. That if it becomes the dominant deck which you use to qualify for the National Championships, that you play it, rather than leaving it too late to find the cards you need and have to sit up and design another deck.
Take care
Dan xxx