AuthorJP Meyer

There’s only one thing that I know at all about Type 1.5: that people have wanted a banned list separate from Type 1 for years in order to bring it out of the shadow of Type 1. Personally, I don’t know anything about any of the decks. I have no idea where any scenes are. I don’t know who the big shot players are. If I had to tell you what decks were good, I’d just have to make a totally unfounded guess. But I do know that the new bannings are good for the format, and I’ll tell you why.

First off, I am going to say that I don’t think that Crucible of Worlds should be restricted right now. I just want to make sure to get that out of the way nice and early. I also want to level a formal outcry against the top 8 of GenCon. That top 8 was totally illegitimate, as it did not consist of 17 Four-Color Control decks, 9 Fish decks, and 6 GroAtog decks. In all seriousness, I thought that the top 8 was great and couldn’t have asked for a better one.

Crucible of Worlds was definitely the breakout card of the tourney. It seemed that everyone’s knee-jerk response to Crucible was to run it as a combo card with Zuran Orb and Fastbond, although after seeing the clunkiness of this combo pretty much everyone gave this up. Today, I saw Crucible of Worlds being run in tons of different decks to great success.

This past Saturday, 167 competitors participated in the eagerly anticipated StarCityGames.com”Power Nine” Tournament!

Wondering what the top eight decklists looked like? Want to hear why the top eight finishers played what they played? All of that and more is just one click away!

Welcome to the Type 1 portion of combo week! My disclaimer for this article is that not only is building new decks in Type 1 freaking hard, but building combo decks are even harder because the benchmark is ridiculously high. You’ve got Draw-7 and Belcher, which both have a fair number of potential turn 1 kills if you want to go for speed, and if you want to go with more mid-game power, you have Dragon and its ability to draw three extra cards per turn. That said, I’m treating this more like an experiment and I’m giving it my best shot.

Beacon of Tomorrow
There’s gotta be a way to go infinite with this. The problem is that it probably requires Gaea’s Blessing to reshuffle some combination of Mystical Tutor, Demonic Tutor, and Lim-Dul’s Vault – and I don’t think I’ve seen Gaea’s Blessing played since 2000.

Like I’ve said before, cards don’t rotate out in Type One in the same way that they rotate out of Standard and Extended. If you want to get rid of a deck once and for all, you’ve gotta restrict something major in order to render it unworkable. And as much as people dislike admitting this, sometimes you’ve gotta put aside a deck because another comes out that – dare I say it – is strictly superior.

The problem here is that the deck is woefully underpowered. Think of some the most explosive opening draws that you can think of for decks like Tog, Keeper, Slaver, or combo. They’ve got lots of different hand combinations that win the game that turn, either literally or figuratively. Landstill really can’t hope for much outside of turn 1 Ancestral Recall or Balance, which would generate probably only around four-for-two card advantage.

Flores’ article from two weeks ago on strategy superiority and rogue deck design really caught me with respect to Type 1. In Type 1, there are so many powerful cards available that failing to build your deck in a way to try to grant yourself strategy superiority against a large number of opponents seems unacceptable.

Aggro waxes and wanes a lot in Type 1. It just came off one of its worst protracted periods yet, having to contend first with GroAtog and then with Long.dec. Right now, aggro is on the upswing, but there’s a big difference between the aggro decks now and the aggro decks that used to be prevalent. Part of this is that the new decks are leaner and meaner, but there are other, more subtle elements as well.

Like Steve Menendian wrote last week, Tog has completely changed around how the metagame in Type 1 needs to be viewed. This week, Knut’s asked me to look at how Type 1 would change without Tog. In terms of how the metagame would be changed, it’s pretty obvious. I’m going to focus on the various lessons that Tog has taught to Type 1 deckbuilders.

I was thinking about doing the usual tournament report thing, but I played Tog four out of the seven rounds, and almost all of the games went the same way. Oh sure, I could’ve hammed them up a little more and all. I mean, it’s a lot more entertaining to read”FINALS: JP”The Irresistible Force” Meyer vs. Kevin”The Immovable Object” Cron, but giving you strategic advice on your Tog deck and how the various matchups should play out will save everyone time.

Furnace Dragon

Call me crazy, but I really like the idea of running this in the sideboard of TnT for use against other Workshop decks. My reasoning is that it isn’t very expensive because of affinity, and because its ability makes it completely impossible for them to try to play around it with Goblin Welder to keep permanents they like in play. Of course, I’m probably horribly wrong here, since they’re probably better off just running Artifact Mutation or whatever, but this does only take up one sideboard slot.

I was really going to title this article “This is Type 1. Playing Fair Sucks,” but I thought that this one was catchier. Anyway, this week, I’ll be going over one of everyone’s favorite buzzwords in Type 1,”collateral damage,” and give you the inside scoop on Oscar”Cinnamon Buns” Tan.

Back in November, Knut suggested to find the ten most important issues to Type 1 players and to base an article on this. I thought of ten questions on my own which I polled members of The Mana Drain on. Helping me to interpret the data is Steve”Smmennycakes” (he loves it when you call him that) Menendian and providing color commentary is Vintage World Champ Carl Winter.