Another Extended season is wrapping up. This is my ninth so far. I wondered which season was best / my favorite / most broken — and how decks from various years stack up against one another. What is the “best” Extended deck ever? Let’s find out. I’m proposing a tournament: all the great decks, in a single (or maybe double) elimination shootout.
I came to this idea in a round-about manner. Originally, I was going to write about rebuilding Counterslivers. Way, way back, Counterslivers was a very competitive deck. Christen Lures finished first after the Swiss rounds at PT: Chicago, in 1999, playing Counterslivers. Ingrid played Counterslivers, and did quite well with it. Since I was her primary playtest partner, I also know Counterslivers quite well.
Here’s Ingrid’s list, from the middle of the 1999-2000 Extended Season. It is slightly different from Christian Luhrs list — it has cut three Acidic Slivers for the maindeck Duresses, and tweaked the sideboard a bit. The main reason is that Trix, and other combo decks like Pandeburst, were unknown going into the PT, but very real afterward.
Counterslivers
PTQ Qualifiers, January 2000.
4 City of Brass
4 Flood Plain
2 Gemstone Mine
2 Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author]
1 Tropical Island
3 Tundra
4 Underground Sea
2 Undiscovered Paradise
1 Volcanic Island
4 Crystalline Sliver
4 Hibernation Sliver
4 Muscle Sliver
4 Winged Sliver
1 Acidic Sliver
4 Counterspell
3 Demonic Consultation
3 Duress
2 Disenchant
4 Force of Will
2 Misdirection
2 Swords to Plowshares
Sideboard
2 Disenchant
2 Honor the Fallen
3 Honorable Passage
3 Pyroblast
3 Perish
2 Swords to Plowshares
I’ll try to rebuild it using the current Extended cardpool, starting with the manabase. Extended nowadays has a much, much better manabase available. True, the new duals cost two life if you want them to come into play untapped, but the new fetchlands more than make up for that disadvantage: The Mirage duals, like Flood Plain, came into play tapped — a critical problem that really limited the number of fetchlands the deck could play. That, plus the need to pay for a lot of turn 1 plays, like Duress, Swords to Plowshares and (in some builds) Brainstorm, required Cities of Brass, Gemstone Mines and the like. Today, – well, let’s just say that Counterslivers players would kill for the ability to play Polluted Delta into Watery Grave.
Next up: the slivers. Original Counterslivers ran three primary slivers. Muscle Silver is the most easily replaced. Sinew Sliver is a color-shifted reprint of Muscle Sliver. It is actually better than Muscle — the original Counterslivers deck ran Green solely for Muscle Sliver. Sinew Sliver means it can drop that color.
After Sinew; however, things go downhill fast. Crystalline Sliver was the heart and sole of the sliver deck. It stopped targeted removal from destroying your army, leaving the countermagic to stop board sweepers like Wrath. Opaline Sliver, the closest replacement, does not prevent slivers from dying to targeted removal, it merely gives you a card back. It also costs 50% more than the Crystalline. The other slivers also fall into the pay-more-for-less category. Cautery Sliver deals half the damage Acidic did. Shadow Sliver is, like Winged, a 1/1 that provides evasion. On the down side, Shadow Sliver costs one more than Winged, and shadow is tougher to stop, but shadow means you cannot leave a sliver back to block. Finally, there is just no replacement for Hibernation Sliver.
Overall, the new two-mana Slivers are a disappointment. Yes, there are some better slivers at higher mana costs, but Counterslivers never maindecked any sliver that cost more than two. Even Sliver Queen, which was a 7/7 with a great ability for five mana, only occasionally appeared in sideboards.
The spells are even worse. Counterspell is still around, but Force of Will allowed the deck to tap out for sliver beats and still protect itself. Without that, it is far weaker — especially in an environment with Wrath and Damnation floating around. Pongify and / or Condemn cannot replace Swords to Plowshares, and nothing replaces the alternative casting cost of Misdirection. Most importantly, Counterslivers absolutely relied on the cheap, instant speed tutoring power of Demonic Consultation. The closest thing you have is Gifts, or maybe Mystical Tutor. Both are so slow, so limited — in short, they will not get it done.
So, the short answer is that you cannot rebuild Counterslivers with the current Extended card pool. At least, you cannot build anything that would be competitive in the current meta.
Sure would be nice, though.
Counterslivers verses modern decks:
Thinking about Counterslivers got me thinking about the battles between Counterslivers and my beloved G/B Survival deck — and the strategies both of those decks used against combo decks of that era, like Trix or Pandeburst. That got me thinking about how much Magic has changed, and how weak the current decks are, compared to the bomb decks from years past. At least, I think they are a lot weaker.
This made me curious. I fired up Magic Workstation and entered Counterslivers, and banged it up against Boros, then U/W Tron. This was before GP: Dallas, and before Planar Chaos became legal, and I was just goofing off, so those decks may not be Tier 1, but they were close.
Counterslivers totally demolished Boros, provided it could find the Crystalline Sliver, or stall with Hibernations. Counterslivers’ creatures are better — eventually — than anything Boros has, and Counterslivers has a lot of counters and the Misdirections. It also has Demonic Consultation — so it can find the Slivers, counters, and Misdirection.
Against U/W Tron, the counterspells and fast beats were nearly unstoppable. U/W Tron does not have a lot of spells that actually do anything, so Counterslivers just has to counter the Wraths, Engineered Explosives, and Mindslaver. It can outrun all the rest.
So, was that a fluke? Are the decks from the days of Necro Trix really the most powerful Extended decks ever? What about the decks from the Black Summer, when Necro powered beatdown ruled the roost? What about Pro Tour winning decks like ProsBloom or Maher Oath? Or what about the broken monstrosities from Pro Tour Tinker? I’d like to find out.
The Ultimate Extended Tournament
What is the most powerful deck ever played in Extended? I’m going to try to find out. I’m going to run a tournament. I’ll take a bunch of the best decks in Extended history, and run them through a single elimination tournament. That won’t necessarily “prove” which deck is best, but it should be fun. It’s nostalgia, and all that.
I’m proposing playing best-of-five-game matches, with the first two games played unsideboarded, and the rest with sideboard. I will also use the “playtest mulligan” rule: meaning that a deck can mulligan to five, if necessary, but if the deck requires any additional mulligans, it keeps drawing five cards. Five-game matches should limit the number of matches decided by mana screw or bad draws. Obviously, playing a bunch of Swiss rounds would be better, but there is a limit to how much time I can out into this project. (Question: single or double elimination? Start with 16 decks, or 32? Make your opinion heard.)
I also want some help from all of you. This week I’ll list the decks that I think could / should be in the tournament. (It’s nostalgia time!) If I missed one, I want to hear about it. If something does not belong, I want to hear about that, too.
I’ll start listing the decks, oldest first. If anyone wants a memory jogger, I wrote a history of Extended, year by year, a while ago. The articles are here:
The Past as Prologue: Extended 1999-2000
The Past as Prologue: Extended 2000-2001
The Past as Prologue: Extended 2001-2002
The Past as Prologue: Extended 2002-2003
The Past as Prologue: Extended 2003-2004
I didn’t write about Extended before the big rotation in 1999. Prior to that, Extended included Legends, Fallen Empires and Fourth Edition, so cards like Lightning Bolt and Hymn to Tourach were legal. I don’t have a lot of familiarity with the decks of that era — I was still playing Magic as a beer and pretzels game, and my deck was all the cards I owned at the time — but I have read about it.
Back then, the good decks seemed to revolve around two card advantage engines. The first was Land Tax and Scroll Rack — the second was Necropotence. It would be nice to include both types in the tournament: we’ll see.
I have decklists from two very different Tax / Rack decks. Eric Lauer, one of the best deck designers of his era, built a controlling Tax / Rack deck that — apparently — won by decking the opponent. I don’t like that variant — later decks have access to cards like Academy Ruins and Gaea’s Blessing that negate that win condition. Another option would be some variant on the Gun decks, which had small (usually White) beaters, Lightning Bolt, and the Tax / Rack engine to keep the threats coming. Philosophically, it is like the Boros decks that splash Black for Dark Confidants. I think a Tax / Rack Gun deck belongs, if we can find room.
The Necro decks are a definite inclusion. Necro Summer was all about Aggro decks powered by Necropotence, and Necro kept powering decks for years. I see a couple of possible inclusions. Randy Buehler won Pro Tour: Chicago (the 1997 one) with the Eric Lauer designed Lauer-Potence deck. It was R/B/w. Mike Flores wrote an article about Necro decks, and he felt that Adrian Sawyer’s R/B Pimpsta-Potence II deck was more representative than Lauer-Potence. Alternatively, the Free Spell Necro decks from after the Legends rotation were also very powerful, although they flourished in an entirely different metagame. Let me know which one is strongest.
Necro also powered some combo decks, like Cocoa Pebbles. (Quick history lesson: for a while, decks were being named after cereals. Fruity Pebbles, Cocoa Pebbles, Wheeties, Special K, even Trix. That trend ended with Full English Breakfast — which was “so much better than cereal.” I can hear you kids asking why we named decks this way — well, we were young and stupid once, too.) Anyway, Fruity Pebbles used Enduring Renewal, Goblin Bombardment and a zero-mana creature, like Phyrexian Walker, to deal infinite damage to an opponent. Cocoa Pebbles coupled the Pebbles combo engine to the broken card drawing of Necropotence. However, I think that a lot of those old combo decks were Tier 2 at best. For that reason, I am going to initially exclude combo decks like ProsBloom, Pebbles variants and Free Whaley. (Hmmm — Great Whale has been un-errataed, so the Survival / Recurring Nightmare / Great Whale works once again.)
I will include at least one Necro powered combo deck, and if you either played Extended in the past or have read my stuff for a few years, you will know which one. Trix, of course. Trix is the most insane Extended combo deck I have ever faced extensively. (I never faced JarGrim, for one.) I definitely want Trix in the mix, and I want the fully powered version, with Necro, Dark Ritual, Demonic Consultation and Firestorm. Even without knowing the rest of the field, I would bet on Trix to finish well.
However, there are three other combo decks from that era that might be able to overpower Trix. I’m thinking about the decks from the first Combo Winter: Academy, High Tide and JarGrim. JarGrim is insane – here’s why. The only argument against including it was that it was only tournament legal for a little under a month, before an emergency ban nailed it. It was never played at a Pro Tour, but it was legal for one Grand Prix. Academy falls into the same category — it was very briefly legal, then banned before big events occurred. The one Pro Tour that did feature Urza’s Saga brokenness was Pro Tour: Rome, and the dominant combo deck of that PT was High Tide.
High Tide decks vanished with the next Extended Rotation, which took Fallen Empires (including High Tide and Hymn to Tourach) out of the format. The dual lands, however, were left in. The resulting format had a lot of very powerful archetypes. At the second Pro Tour, Christian Luhrs finished first in the Swiss with Counterslivers, but Bob Maher won with the Ped-Bun-designed-but-named-for-Bob Oath of Druids deck. Maher Oath is a shoo-in for this tournament. Other famous decks from that tournament included Free Spell Necro, Coca Pebbles, Sligh Decks, Survival decks and so forth. Mike Hron, recent PT champion, made Day 2, then finished ninth in a GP two weeks later with his Squee-bind deck. I like Squeebind — it might make it in.
Actually, Squeebind is one of a bunch of Survival of the Fittest decks that could be included in the tournament. The classic Survival decks were primarily U/G, and were built around Tradewind Riders, card drawing and counterspells. My personal favorite version was G/B, and I’ll probably include the version I played that season. Other options include many-colored control versions, or the absolutely insane Full English Breakfast. I don’t think I want to include FEB, mainly because I intend to include a brief strategy guide, and a short play by play for each match in the tournament. Neither the strategy guide nor game summaries involving Full English Breakfast would be short or concise.
The tournament should include a Sligh / aggro Red deck. Seth Burn Pooh Burn is a classic of the genre. Other alternatives might include RDW2k, or Goblin Sligh. Even Goblin Sligh has several variants worth considering: Should that version be Lackey Sligh, GoboVantage, a more recent Goblins deck – or even a Goblins combo deck like Goblin Bidding (although that was more famous in Standard) or the Dirty Kitty Goblins / Fecundity deck. My initial thought would be to include RDW2k, but I’m not a Red mage. Maybe I’m missing something. Let me know in the forums.
The tournament should also include a Reanimator deck, or at least something built around the graveyard. The most successful Reanimator deck at a Pro Tour is probably Benzo, although that deck was heavily modified for PTQ play. Other variants came into and out of existence, as various components (e.g. Entomb) were banned, or rotated (e.g. Necromancy and Animate Dead.) Moving forward through time, the Reanimator style decks morphed into Reanimator decks with Exhume, Hermit Druid / Sutured Ghoul combos, and later Cephalid Life – a combination of the infinite life deck (cleverly called “Life”) and the Sutured ghoul combo deck. Cephalid Life might find a slot, just because of that combination. For that matter, Life could even be worth including. Maybe not. However, before we leave Reanimator decks, we have to mention Ichorid. Rizzo’s brainstorm is worth considering.
I had been back in about 2000, and at least one other combo deck from that era deserves at least a mention: Pandeburst. Whether you called it Pandeburst, Saproling Dance, or 21, the deck tore through its library to dump Pandemonium and Saproling Burst into the yard, then cast Replenish. Removing the fading counters from Saproling Burst, timed correctly, created creatures with power of 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 — which deals 21 damage thanks to Pandemonium. Saproling Burst was also included as a combination element — most notably in the Carpe Noctrum deck, but the best Burst deck has to be Pandeburst.
Getting back to the historical sequence, the Maher Oath era also saw the most powerful version of Stasis — the one featuring Gush and Morphling — freezing the fun out of Magic. Stompy decks flourished, eventually turning into Elves!! at GP: New Orleans. Some decks built to prey on the metagame also appeared; Three Deuce being one example. At the same time, Zvi championed Turboland, and the deck did well around the world. Zvi went on to win GP: New Orleans with a revised version of Turboland, but the earlier version — with all the broken cards — is clearly better.
The beginning of the next season saw a number of bannings aimed at Trix, Full English Breakfast, and Pandeburst. Trix lived, but Counterslivers, Survival and so forth all died. Sol Malka morphed Survival decks into The Rock, and The Rock went on to win GP: Las Vegas. GP: Vegas also saw the debut of Miracle Gro, and Super Gro — Miracle Gro with a white splash – went on to dominate the format.
Another set rotation kicked in at this point. The dual lands, 5E and Ice Ages through Mirage left the format. This created a whole new crop of decks, lead by the “built for you by R&D” decks like U/G Madness and Goblins. Aluren was probably the best combo deck in that season — unless you consider Psychatog a combo deck.
Speaking of Psychatog, some version of Dr. Teeth should be included. The only question is which one. The earlier versions did not have access to Damnation, but the more recent builds don’t have Gush, or Corpse Dance, or Shadow Rift. Which version is more powerful — or is it one from somewhere in the middle, possibly a dredge-powered version with Pernicious Deed. PT: New Orleans also saw a Tog deck that included Isochron Scepter and Fire / Ice. I’m undecided on which to include, so tell me in the forums.
Moving along the historical timeline brings us to Pro Tour: Tinker, and the insanity surrounding the combination of Mirrodin and Uzra’s block cards. Tinker decks, like Iron Giant, Suicide Brown, and Hato Up had featured powerful artifacts, but nothing like what Mirrodin brought. Three main archetypes dominated the PT: The Clock (built around Goblin Charbelcher and Mana Severance), George W. Bosh (Tinker with Goblin Welder), and basic Tinker variants. At least one of those decks should probably be included in the tournament; maybe two.
Mind’s Desire and Life (a.k.a. A Beam — Loop Junktion) decks also appeared about this time. This period also saw the last appearance of Hatred decks. Hatred decks actually first appeared years earlier — I missed them in the timeline. I also missed other famous decks, like PT Junk, U/G Oath, Squirrel Prison, Pirates!, Accelerated Blue, Legion Land Loss and so on. And, of course, Secret Force. Jamie Wakefield deck, and the best fattie ever printed, may not be Tier 1, but I will include it in the mix. Jamie is the one writer that is just a pleasure to read, and I have been punching up websites looking for his stuff for years. Jamie may not be as good a deck designer as Flores, Lauer, EDT, Brian Kowal or Adrian Sullivan, but none of them write like Jamie, either. So Secret Force is in, just because I say so.
For similar reasons, I am going to include an early Enchantress deck. Enchantress is a classic deck, and a personal favorite. I played Enchantress before I played G/B Survival, and occasionally afterward. Enchantress had a lot of flavors — everything from beatdown to the Endless Wind versions that abused Palinchron.
Moving a year forward brings us to the 2005 season. Boros was a force here — and that’s one reason that it saw so much play at last year’s Worlds. Affinity was also a powerhouse — although Skullclamp and Disciple of the Vault were already banned. If I can find a decklist of an Extended Clamp-Affinity deck, that should probably make the tournament. In a precursor of the present environment, CAL decks were already playing Burning Wish, Seismic Assault and Life from the Loam, but not yet Terravore and Devastating Dreams. Other powerhouses included Scepter Chant and a raft of Psychatog variants. One other deck of note — Balancing Tings — made a decent showing that year, including a Top 8 at Copenhagen.
And that brings us to the present.
The purpose of this whole exercise was, at least partially, to see how the Extended decks of today stack up against the best decks of the past. For that reason, the tournament is going to include at least a couple decks from the current metagame. Prior to GP: Dallas (and Planar Chaos), my analysis showed that the format had three Tier 1 decks and two Tier 2 decks. Tier 1 included Affinity, Flow Rock and Aggro Loam. Tier 2 included TEPS and Boros. After GP: Dallas, Aggro Loam is clearly on top, although “Gaea’s Might Get There” (a.k.a. Domain Aggro) decks can now also claim Tier 1 status. (Psychatog and TrinketTog decks were discussed above.)
In the spirit of March Madness, here’s my first take on the 32 decks that should be in the tournament. These are in alphabetical order, and are not final. If someone can make a convincing argument that a deck should be included, or if enough people get together to draft another deck, I’ll consider it.
9 Land Stompy
Affinity
Aggro Loam
Angry Ghoul
Belcher / Tinker
Benzo
Cephalid Life
CMU Gun
Counterslivers
Elves!!!
Enchantress
Flow Rock
Free Spell Necro
Gaea’s Might Get There
G/B Survival
George W. Bosh
Hatred
High Tide
Legion Land Loss
Maher Oath
Pandeburst
Psychatog
PT Junk
RDW2k
Scepter Chant / Beat Stick
Secret Force
Squee Bind
Stasis
SuperGro
Trix
Turboland
U/W Tron
Next week, I’ll reveal the brackets and cover some matches. Match coverage will include decklists, some basics on what the deck does, and the play by play. A few weeks from now, we should have a winner, and a bit better handle on the relative power of Extended decks through the ages.
Now — to the forums!
PRJ
Pete {dot} jahn {at} Verizon {dot} net