AuthorOscar Tan

Artificer’s Intuition

Hey, it’s Blue, it mimics Survival of the Fittest, and Ben Bleiweiss pointed it out early on as a sleeper. Hot or not?

Oscar’s continuing review of Fifth Dawn for Type 1, this time including such platinum hits as Night’s Whisper, Serum Visions, and Bleiweissian mega-bomb All Suns’ Dawn.

Many of you might wonder why I dwell on cards I don’t think will see play in Type I, even if I end up with a list that rejects all the new cards. While the Johnnies in all of you might not like it, I want to impress the thought process upon the beginners and people like Steve Jarvis. Only after reading his Type I column am I fully reminded why it remains important to write about Eternal Witness for the teenager (or Nationals competitor) who’s at the Prerelease and has a passing interest in Type I.

We went through the creatures last week, and now move to the artifacts. These are the most interesting permanents of the Mirrodin block, and we’ll tend to the”Does this card do something no past card ever did?” rule now.

Auriok Salvagers
Okay, Ben Bleiweiss told us that this is a stupendous two-card, infinite mana combo with Black Lotus (or Lion’s Eye Diamond, actually), so we should get off our stagnant Type I asses and innovate up a Salvagers deck.

The day before I left Manila, I was surprised to see that Kevin Cron’s daily thread posited that “The Deck” was drifting towards the Exalted Angel-centered aggro-control deck Eon Blue Apocalypse, or EBA. In fact, his message ended, “How many more changes before we start calling it Aggro Control?”

Since I publicly told Randy Buehler that Type I players still subscribe to the old joke about Green, designers have paid close attention to the color pie, and the popularity of each slice has changed quite a bit. Mono-Red, for example, has been reduced to the pseudo-combo Food Chain Goblins, with burn all but extinct (except Fire). Mono-Black has disappeared as well, with even its revitalized disruption unable to cope with real creatures, not to mention the hilarity of discard facing off against graveyard-intensive strategies. Somewhere in all this shifting lies the much-maligned Green…

Thus, “The Deck” is getting left behind, to the point that some distinguished voices have been using it as the straw man for trumpeting “the real metagame.” Last month, for example, JP Meyer half-sarcastically called it “the best control deck in Type 1 as long as there isn’t another control deck that is more streamlined.” More recently, Phil Stanton called it “nothing but metagame customization” compared to Hulk. Are these pundits correct, and if they are, what building blocks exist to go about rebuilding”The Deck” for today’s Type One environment?

When a recent column of mine suffered a typo and got labeled, “You CAN Play Type II”, some wise guys joked it might be a “The Deck” against Ravager head to head. Talking about curious decks, though, Ravager actually heads the list of recent Type I novelties.

Today Oscar revisits the Keeper mirror match with legendary German deckbuilder Roland Bode.

More from the wild and wacky world of Keeper vs. Landstill!

“The Deck” is possibly compared to Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s the legendary control deck against which newcomers are judged, but it’s undeniably showing its age. Control decks have streamlined a lot since the days they could just lean on Mana Draining into Braingeyser, but today’s most modern ones have cheaper, more specialized engines. Today’s Head to Head will look at one of the more popular and original control creations to come along: Landstill.

In 1998 Cathy Nicoloff quipped about the Death of Sligh in Type 2,”Red’s primary problem is obvious. It has mucho death and no disruption. Any combo deck that can kill before red deals the final hammering can twiddle itself in peace for four turns without worrying.” Who knew that she’d be speaking truly about the death of aggro in Type I six years hence?