The buzz is in the air, the slow building excitement of a new Type 2 ready to be explored and exploited in the months leading up to Regionals. How will Darksteel shake up the metagame? Will any of the anointed Tier 1 decks stumble and fall? Will any Tier 2 or completely new archetype rise up to take their place? Will there be any secret tech that flies under the radar long enough to surprise and conquer like Ralphie Treatment or Turbo-Haups in years past?
Greater Harvester
I was a huge fan of Braids, Cabal Minion and played Pirates and other Braids decks to some success while Psycho-B*tch was around. Greater Harvester might be even better. There’s a ton of things going for this card; as a 5/6 it’s got a huge threatening body that can put away a game quickly if it’s ability disrupts your opponent for a turn or two. And that disruption ability! Having your opponent sacrifice two permanents each time you hit them is amazing. The only hiccup is the fact that your opponent will likely want to chump block, trading his worst creature for your least-needed permanent.
Wait just a minute though – that’s not really a hiccup at all since Black is chock full of removal!
Maybe you played in the prerelease. Maybe you’ve been following the spoiler on www.mtgnews.com; maybe you’ve read the official spoiler on Wizards’ Darksteel page. At any rate, you’ve got a brand new set of cards to digest, process, and evaluate for Constructed play. While I appreciate the folks who do a complete, card-by-card evaluation of the set, I’d instead like to share my thoughts on what I think is the cream of the crop, the sharp edge of Darksteel. That’s what we’re all really interested in anyway, right?
I keep running across people online and web articles bemoaning the current state of Type 2 as being”stagnant” and”boring.” Supposedly U/W Control, Affinity, and Goblins have the format in a stranglehold, that there are no other decks worth playing.
Really? I have a fistful of decks that say otherwise.
With the evolutionary shot-in-the-arm of Mirrodin, Extended had turned into a monstrous format. Wielding bone-crushing brutality and terrifying speed, the top decks tore up lesser creations with the savagery of Fast Mana and Broken Tutor Effects. Stax, Tinker, and Seeeeething Gobvantage thundered and roared across the landscape, with Tog occasionally darting in to take down weaker and unprepared players.
Then one day, a bright DCI light blazed across the sky and hit the format like an Extinction Level Event. The impact crater marked the passing of the Power decks, but also marked the ascendance of the smaller, more flexible and fair decks to finally have their day. The format has chilled and it’s time for the shrews to take over.
You know, year after year I would march to the tune that States should mean more. A few months after the euphoria had died down from winning States in 1999, it hit home that winning really didn’t mean anything. There were few pros playing, so I wasn’t truly the best player in the State that day. I didn’t get an invite or byes to some higher-level premier event. I had a plaque and a bag and a modicum of satisfaction that I was no longer considered a complete scrub by the more competitive players out there, but that was it. I mean, you still have to play fairly decent Magic to win one of these things, so do something to make it matter.
This year, I changed my mind.
Every year after States, I like to review the top decks and see what new cards have made the biggest impact. In years past, this has been my”See, I told you [Set X] didn’t suck as much as you thought it did” effort to shut up the naysayers that crop up after each release – only this time, most people seemed to really like Mirrodin. So while I’m not really trying to make a big point this year, it’s still fun to see what’s working from Mirrodin. So what are the best Constructed cards to emerge from the artifact set?
Bennie clears house on his past articles, discussing why he really loves control (just not the hard counterspelly kind), goes back to see whether he’s been able to beat the notorious Chuck, and airs his views on Magic writing – and tells you why his viewpoint is valid even if he has no pro points, dangit!
I used to doubt myself, wondering why I hated playing blue-based control. Was it a flaw in my character? Did I just lack the patience and imagination, or the downright skill to play such a deep and complex color? Why did I despise what has become known as the now nearly defunct Draw-Go style of play?
But I now realize the truth: Blue was boring because it was too good, and the people who leaned on that style of Magic were lazy players.
When I think of Magic’s customers, I think about players like you and me, who purchase this beloved cardboard crack made by Wizards of the Coast – and in terms of product, they’ve been knocking the ball out the park. But there’s more to the health of Magic than decisions made by R&D in designing and developing good sets; the way Wizards treats the distributors and game shops that sell Magic is important, too. And according to our game shop owner and some recent events I’ve been involved with, Wizards is the hands-down worst gaming company to deal with, period.
While I imagine the top decks from Detroit will be dissected and analyzed in depth, I decided to zero in on how has Scourge impacted the metagame. I compiled all of the cards used in the Day 2 decklists to see what Scourge cards had the most impact. We’ll start with the Top 10…
Everyone at the shop fully expects me to have the ability to kill everyone at the table at any point in the game, and I’m a threat that needs to be eliminated regardless of what I have in play and how friendly I’ve been so far… So I find myself the target of”random kills” all the time. The watchword is if someone can take me down, they will, no questions asked… Because they figure they may not get a second chance.
I’ve already seen people howling about the loss of Counterspell as a sign that Wizards is still hell-bent on making blue the worst color in Magic. I don’t think blue is in that bad shape. It’s just not the blue you’re used to, and that’s a good thing.
When Onslaught first came out, we were tantalized with the prospect of powered-up theme decks that were actually competitive. There haven’t been a lot of those in the history of the game – Slivers, Merfolk, and Rebels have been pretty much it. Randy Buehler called Clerics, Soldiers, Birds, Wizards, Zombies, Goblins, Beasts, and Elves the”tribes that matter” in the Onslaught block – so I’m going to take a look at how each theme panned out over the course of the block.
Basically, the system is set up to punish the regions that have a more active Magic community. The odds are grim if you competed in the Ohio Valley Regionals; with 674 people brawling for eight slots, you had a measly 1.19% chance to qualify. But fortune smiles on you if you live in the Southwest, where attendance was 213 people, giving you a 3.76% shot at the top 8. Your chances of qualifying go up 315% percent depending on where you live. Is this fair?
