With Mindripper closing and Scott Johns moving to Brainburst, some people have been wondering about the magic formula that keeps a site up and running. We’re pretty safe thanks to the Weaselly One’s tender care, but I think Mike Flores had a good idea in his CCGPrime interview: Find a niche.
Not every site has to be as diverse and professional as Star City, and I’d like to recommend two of these smaller, cozier specialty sites – kinda like that specialty corner bookstore that’s a welcome change from rows and rows of shelves. First, try Nate Heiss Magic Word (www.mtgword.com), a”living archive” of the best old strategy articles and reports. Pathetic inexperienced players will wonder what they need from old decks; smart ones will realize that strategy hasn’t changed a lot since 1996. Second, try Mike Bregoli’s Misetings (www.misetings.com), a touch of humor missed perhaps since the Dojo’s Impulse jokes.
Anyway, if you followed my Odyssey review, you might wonder why I kept saying,”This is a solid card, and I’m trying to think of a deck to use it in.”
Don’t good cards just build good decks?
No they don’t, but ignorant players enjoy dismissing Type I because they think it’s all about the power cards, or drop to their knees at the sight of a decklist with all five Moxen.
If we want to talk about good Type I, one novel way of doing it might be to do it from the other side. So let’s talk about a bad deck this time.
The Tier 97 deck of Dallas (ironically the venue of the last Type I Pro Tour in ’96)
It’s a bit tough selecting a bad deck for discussion, since it’s not worth discussing decks with selections from Ferrett’s Suck Netdecks collection. Amy English from the Star City list, though, reminded me of something I could use:
ICT: The Invincible Counter Troll, Roy”Random-Miser” Spires, as played in Game Master in Rowlett
Creatures (8)
4 Sedge Troll
4 Serendib Efreet
Counters (11)
3 Counterspell
3 Mana Drain
3 Mana Leak
2 Misdirection
Removal (7)
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Nevinyrral’s Disk
Others (10)
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Timetwister
1 Tinker
1 Wheel of fortune
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Mind Twist
1 Zuran Orb
1 Memory Jar
Mana (25)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
1 Sol Ring
1 Strip Mine
1 Library of Alexandria
4 Badlands
4 Underground Sea
4 Volcanic Island
4 Island
Sideboard (15)
4 Diabolic Edict
3 Red Elemental Blast
3 Pyroblast
3 Jester’s Cap
2 Misdirection
I seriously doubt Roy will mind, since I’ve said everything in this article at least thrice already on Beyond Dominia. Roy was a former regular on the #bdchat Newnet channel, and had an engaging 26-page thread on the Wizards forum with myself and Brainburst’s Jarrod Bright, a.k.a., Vesuvan. You can see the other side of the argument on that thread, where Roy reacted that Jarrod and I just don’t know how to play his deck right. Everyone on Beyond Dominia is also familiar with the deck JP”The Polluted” Meyer classified in the Tier 97 category, and dubbed”Incredibly Janky Troll.”
As you can see, every card in the deck is probably the most efficient in its class, and it features a number of restricted gems and Legends or Beta superstars. It has a diversity of cards, giving a player flexibility. The strategy seems to be aggro-control, and you can destroy or counter whatever your opponent has, then drop an efficient creature and protect it till it deals twenty damage.
Yet it’s weak.
See, decks actually have skeletons that you design before getting the actual cards together. The actual cards are just flesh and muscle – but deep down, different decks can have the same framework. For example, in any format with relatively cheap creatures and burn, you can have Sligh. If you read my Sligh Primer, I noted that Deadguy has been built in block, Type II, Extended, BYOB, and yet plays pretty much the same way. It’s the same strong bones under whatever is filling in for Jackal Pup.
In the same way, you can take the skeleton of a Type I control deck and translate it into other formats so long as you don’t twist the bones out of shape by trying to replace irreplaceable cards like Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus with completely different cards like Brainstorm and Lotus Petal. A lot of decks from Draw-Go to Oath of Druids inherited the skeleton of”The Deck,” for example.
As for ICT, it’s not bad because of the cards in it; they’re all good. It’s the skeleton.
This deck is like a buff, ripped guy from Muscle Beach with the skeleton of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The Biggest Problem?
Now, you might ask me – what’s the biggest flaw, then? If you’re an experienced enough Type I player, I’d say you should have stared at the mana base before anything else.
That’s right; the mana base.
Dual lands can’t be used as a crutch to excuse you from being as picky as a confused player in the Apocalypse Prerelease. Before even looking at what individual cards do, you can sense deformities in the skeleton just by counting colors, again, exactly like a Sealed Deck player.
Magic is Magic, whether Type I or Draft.
Mana (25)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
1 Sol Ring
1 Strip Mine
1 Library of Alexandria
4 Badlands
4 Underground Sea
4 Volcanic Island
4 Island
If we exclude the Lotus, ICT has the following sources:
Blue – 13
Black – 9
Red – 9
Green – 1
White – 1
Breaking up the spells by color, it has:
Blue – 19 (8 with double blue)
Black – 7 (including Sedge Troll)
Red – 8
Green – 0
White – 0
It’s not as bad as it looks on paper, but if you’re one of the Beyond Dominia players who took up the challenge to play against ICT using Apprentice, you would’ve noticed how you can stall him in the early game by using Wastelands and Strip Mine to cut him off from black (or a swamp for Troll) or double blue. It’s the Type I equivalent of a 6/6/6 land distribution in Apocalypse Sealed Deck, and the stall is enough to get a big Mind Twist in your face.
Sedge Troll
2R
Creature-Troll
2/2
Beta rare
Sedge Troll gets +1/+1 as long as you control a Swamp.
B: Regenerate Sedge Troll.
The deck is actually based on the old”Monkey May I?” decks, but you can see how bad Sedge Troll really is for the deck. It’s exactly like trying to play a BR card like Shivan Zombie or Terminate in an Apocalypse Sealed Deck that’s half blue. Yes, one card destroyed the mana base. Note, for example, how the deck is forced to use Mana Leak before using four copies of Counterspell and Mana Drain.
(I like Sedge Troll as much as anyone, and even have a Beta copy, but not in this deck.)
The Islands are a hedge against nonbasic hosers, but you’d think City of Brass would help. Even the off-color Moxen seem unnecessary in a deck that doesn’t really have a lot to accelerate unless it gets lucky opening hands or wants to Tinker for Memory Jar.
STOP!
Before reading on, try to spot the other flaws for yourself…
Flaw #1: What’s The Real Strategy?
I said the deck looks flexible, but when you think about it, confused is probably the better word.
Is it an aggro deck?
Doesn’t look like it, since it has only eight three-mana creatures for offense. These creatures end up blocking early against aggro, but aren’t fast enough to rush a control deck.
Is it a control deck?
It might act like one against an aggro deck by dropping a Sedge Troll, countering a few spells, then using Disk, which Troll survives. But it can be rushed nevertheless. Against a control deck, though, it doesn’t really play like control since it’s easily out-countered, out-drawn, and completely hosed by The Abyss. It isn’t likely to keep up with a combo deck that can handle two counters, either, especially without Force of Will. (Roy says that Force of Will is unnecessary card disadvantage in the deck.)
And since it can’t aggro and it can’t control, it’s not really aggro-control, either, is it?
Like I said, it looks flexible, and it can win, but it’s just that all its opponents do the things it wants to do better.
Flaw #2: No Card Drawing
This deck has a number of powerful restricted card drawers like Timetwister, Wheel of Fortune and Memory Jar. So why do I say it has no card drawing?
In theory, you can play out your hand quickly, especially with Moxen, then cast Twister or Wheel next turn and get an”advantage” by trading your depleted hand for a fresh one and having more on the board than your opponent even if you both draw back up to seven.
In practice, you don’t ever want to cast these cards.
Against an aggro deck, your creatures and other spells are more expensive than his, and he benefits first from them. Roy did exactly what Alex Shvartsman didn’t want to do in his last Invitational deck, in other words, which is to hand the opponent more ammo.
Against a control deck, if he’s not going to get the more powerful hand given the contents of both decks, he can easily counter. If he’s behind, you don’t want to cast these anyway, and these usually don’t break a stalemate in your favor. Or, he can tutor for Mind Twist.
Besides, do you want to cast these and discard your hand with the counters you held back?
Thus, ICT is left with Ancestral Recall and Yawgmoth’s Will, and gets left behind by a number of other decks.
Flaw #3: Miscellaneous Problems With Individual Card Choices
Efficient as all the cards are, a number are misplaced.
Lightning Bolt is an efficient anti-weenie card, but it doesn’t kill a number of creatures – most notably Morphling. It can be thrown at the player, but just four of them in a slow deck is hardly enough to justify their use.
Nevinyrral’s Disk gives the deck an anti-enchantment capability to make up for the lack of white, and can be used with Sedge Troll. It’s rather slow, though.
Sedge Troll and Serendib were used because the creator wanted to drop blockers earlier than a Morphling could be, but they’re not as hard to kill as they look. Some aggro decks still have Diabolic Edict, Swords to Plowshares, and Incinerate, and The Abyss just kills them. Again, Sedge Troll’s regeneration isn’t enough to completely confuse the mana base.
There might be a few others you’d want to comment on, but you get the idea, and it goes back to my misshapen skeleton theory.
Flaw #4: Weak Sideboard
Sideboard (15)
4 Diabolic Edict
3 Red Elemental Blast
3 Pyroblast
3 Jester’s Cap
2 Misdirection
Again, the sideboard has staple cards (except the Cap, which went out of style in 1998 at the latest). What’s wrong with it?
Well, the obvious problem is that the sideboard has fifteen cards against control and practically nothing else for the other matchups. I’m not quite sure why this happened (small store metagame or pathological hatred towards Beyond Dominia control players who regularly comment on the ICT deck), but that’s how the deck was built.
The less obvious problem is that the sideboard isn’t even effective against the deck it’s supposed to screw.
Like I said, control decks do out-counter and out-draw ICT, and it’s because of all of the flaws already noted – especially the lack of card drawing. (Check the log at the end of this article to see what I mean.)
The sideboard doesn’t address any of those flaws. What it tries to do is turn into a Draw-Go deck but without the card drawing, and use Jester’s Cap instead of Morphling.
4
Artifact
Ice Age rare
2, Tap, Sacrifice Jester’s Cap: Search target player’s library for three cards and remove them from the game. Then that player shuffles his or her library.
The Cap is a four-mana artifact that costs six to activate, and getting six mana before someone takes control of the game isn’t simple, especially against an opponent smart enough not to walk into Mana Drain. And even if it actually slips through, it’s not a guarantee of winning. The control player might have a Morphling in hand already. A mono blue deck will have at least four, so a single Cap does not win the game. Other types of control will, at best, lose two Morphlings (or two equivalents) and Stroke of Genius to the Cap, but may have some other option available such as Mishra’s Factory or Gorilla Shaman – and staying in control for twenty turns isn’t difficult if you can outdraw the opponent. Cap, in short, is dated.
The lack of card drawing makes the number of counters sided in irrelevant. The control player can afford to play cards can’t afford not to counter, then refill while ICT waits to topdeck more. Plus, Diabolic Edicts are dead until late in the game unless the control player sides in creatures, and the red blasts don’t even touch other key cards such as Mind Twist and Yawgmoth’s Will. ICT cannot even afford to hold back and assemble a hand of seven counters, because the opponent is not going to just sit there.
Heck, the other control deck should also out-mana ICT. Wastelands can deny red or double blue in the crucial early phase, making the additional counters useless.
Pretty much the only way ICT is going to win even after boarding in fifteen cards against control is if the opponent sides in too many anti-creature cards, draws these dead cards, and the ICT player topdecks perfectly.
So there you have it, a weak deck with the entire Power 10. (To be quite honest, I played ICT and was soundly beaten by a guy on #apprentice on Newnet with a pre-Odyssey Type II mono red deck and he was even playing Shock targeting me on turn 1. It’s that bad.)
Hopefully, examining a weak deck can give you a better idea of what a good deck looks like. What’s the point of all this? Next week, I’ll begin a new series of articles discussing control. I think it’ll be really good, because I’m going to go through some of the subtleties of Type I’s most complex deck type to date, and the drafts have even been read by some good control players from outside Beyond Dominia.
Check out the next column.
Rakso
[email protected]
rakso on #BDChat on Newnet
Manila, Philippines
Type I, Extended and Casual Maintainer, Beyond Dominia (http://www.bdominia.com/discus/messages/9/9.shtml)
Featured writer, Star City Games (http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/archive.php?Article=Oscar Tan)
Proud member of the Casual Player’s Alliance (http://www.casualplayers.org)
P.S. – Just to show you exactly what I was talking about when I detailed the weaknesses of ICT, here’s an old post from Beyond Dominia. I wasn’t feeling well and stayed home, and was using my Mom’s computer because of a glitch in my connection. A certain Random-Miser had been spamming on Beyond Dominia lately, then issued a”challenge” against all comers because he had finally installed Apprentice. I had a couple of decks loaded on that other computer, so used the name”Negator” (Beyond Dominia’s most noted spammer) and told Miser I’d be glad to be the first to play him on #bdchat. It was 10 PM in Dallas at the time, and noon in Manila.
Incidentally, this was only the first of a long line of defeats for the”invincible” deck that was out-countered at every turn…
The slaughter of the century… KEEPER vs INCREDIBLY CRAPPY TROLL!!!
The challenger: (taken from a post on Beyond Dominia)
“By Random-Miser on Wednesday, October 03, 2001 – 03:20 p.m.:
“Here is a deck that slaughters all the decks on that list of yours.
“ICT -The Invincible Counter Troll, by Random-Miser
4 Sedge Troll
4 Serendib Efreet
4 Lightning bolt
3 Nevinyrral’s disk
3 Counterspell
3 Mana Drain
3 Mana leak
2 Misdirection
1 Timewalk
1 Timetwister
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Tinker
1 Wheel of fortune
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Mind Twist
1 Zuran Orb
1 Memory Jar
1 Sol Ring
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
1 Black lotus
1 Strip Mine
1 Library of Alexandria
4 Badlands
4 Underground sea
4 Volcanic Island
4 Island
Sideboard:
4 Diabolic Edict
3 R.E.B
3 Pyroblast
3 Jesters Cap
2 Misdirection
“The deck slaughters Sligh, Parfait, and Stompy with little difficulty, and can stand to OSE, BBS and Keeper before sideboard. After Board it flat out slaughters OSE, BBS, and Keeper. Disks and bolts also deliver some mighty nasty pain to stacker and similar aggro decks.
“If ya want somethin’ that beats the field ICT is it.”
The representative of Beyond Dominia:
// Rakso Keeper (still under testing and tuning; not played in three months so decklist should be changed after this match)
// Blue
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Morphling
4 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
4 Fact or Fiction
1 Time Walk
3 Impulse
1 Ancestral Recall
// Black
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Mind Twist
1 Diabolic Edict
1 The Abyss
// White
1 Dismantling Blow
1 Swords to Plowshares
1 Balance
// Red
1 Gorilla Shaman
// Green
1 Regrowth
// Others
1 Masticore
1 Zuran Orb
// Mana
1 Tolarian Academy
3 Volcanic Island
1 Undiscovered Paradise
4 City of Brass
4 Underground Sea
3 Tundra
3 Wasteland
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Strip Mine
1 Sol Ring
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
1 Black Lotus
// Sideboard
SB: 1 Circle of Protection: Red
SB: 1 Swords to Plowshares
SB: 1 Aura Fracture
SB: 1 Masticore
SB: 1 Pernicious Deed
SB: 4 Red Elemental Blast
SB: 1 Misdirection
SB: 4 Rootwater Thief
SB: 1 Compost
GAME SUMMARIES:
Summary of game 1:
Rakso out-counters Random-Miser and gets an Abyss, then a Masticore, then a Morphling into play. At one point, Rakso had Library of Alexandria out and thirteen cards in hand including two Force of Will, two Mana Drain, one Mystical Tutor, and one Fact or Fiction.
It’s a bit hard to lose with thirteen cards during your opponent’s end-of-turn, but Random-Miser keeps up the valiant effort of pretending to think and pause even though his opponent can guess how many counters he is holding…
Summary of game 2 (after sideboarding):
Rakso sideboards 3 REB and 3 Rootwater Thief.
Random-Miser sideboards 4 Diabolic Edict, 3 REB, 3 Pyroblast, 3 Jester’s Cap, 2 Misdirection, then claims he made a mistake sideboarding…
Random-Miser plays a first-turn Cap and Misdirects Rakso’s Force of Will. Rakso loses Morphling, Masticore, and one Rootwater Thief. He then plays a second Cap. Since Rakso used Impulse and Fact or Fiction to draw into the remaining Thieves, he lost Yawgmoth’s Will, Ancestral Recall and one Mana Drain.
By this time, Rakso had already used his Regrowth and lost all but one of the Thieves, but he had the last Thief on the board and two counters/REB in hand.
Rakso won after removing or countering three REBs, three Pyroblasts, four Diabolic Edicts, three Jester’s Caps, three Nevinyrral’s Disks, Timetwister, and Yawgmoth’s Will.
Random-Miser concedes at three life… Rootwater Thief damage hurts.
(Note To People: Rakso also had an Apprentice log file of all the moves during each match, but it ballooned this article to seventy-someodd pages, which was a little much. If you’d like a transcript of this butt-whuppin’, email the man and say”howdy!” – The Ferrett)