Each year, I put off the scheduled column for a week and sift through reader mail a second time. Today’s the day. I’ll answer questions on the Type One World Championships, defend my dislike of Back to Basics yet again, and try to calm Anthony Alongi the heck down.
Yes, we saw a handful of Legions cards in noncompetitive play and especially in theme decks. However, Carl Devos, a.k.a. Professor X, the Belgium chapter of the Paragons, is the only Type I player on the planet happy with the set, having used a few Morph triggers in his Vengeur Masque. (Apparently, some people see the silver lining in anything.) Anyway, Scourge is probably a more exciting set as third sets are wont to be
This article has been in the works with Stephen Menendian, a.k.a. Smmenen, the Paragons’ other law student, for several weeks now, but I wasn’t home mornings (evenings in the United States) because of my law internship. Then Gush got restricted – so hell, we did the games on the last day of my internship, at 2:30 a.m., and with me loaded with tequila from the mini-party with Joey, the other intern. Interesting? Definitely.
Certainly something was broken in Growing ‘Tog, and it cannot be denied that the sheer size of its men made so many decks unplayable. If restricting Gush is your solution, though, you have to justify it due to synergy with other cards since it just isn’t that powerful on its own. (The closest analogy is Frantic Search.) The problem, however, is that you have no other alternative except for Psychatog, unless you want to ban Fastbond, which is impossible because Tolarian Academy, Memory Jar and Yawgmoth’s Bargain would have to go first… And it may well be that restricting Gush still doesn’t stop the deck.
Dream Halls single-handedly demonstrated how easily a”without paying its mana cost” ability can be abused, as Zvi demonstrated in the old Type II with his infamous monstrosity. Now fast forward to 2003. Dream Halls has long since been restricted, thanks to crazy Time Spirals and other brokenness. In Type I, what can you do with a Dream Halls-esque Storm card and every zero-cost mana artifact and one-mana blue manipulation spell ever printed? You can stand a damn good chance of breaking the format.
We experienced a pure motherlode of Type I tech thanks to Legions and its creatures, so I’m sure you could hardly keep your pants on while awaiting Scourge. But seriously, there’s one card in Scourge that I think is so good that it might have the potential to make it into”The Deck”… And today, I’m going to test it out to see how it works.
Today, we explore the most basic of all blue-based aggro-control decks. It’s called Fish by default, but you also know it as Merfolk and Skies. Fish, as we noted last week, suffers from the classic weakness of having weenies that are pathetic in combat. If you’re playing control or combo, however, that doesn’t really help you, because you’re not going to do a lot of that. Examining a game against Fish will help you analyze the more complex aggro-control decks we’ll move on to later.
When a beginner sees creatures, especially weenies, he usually labels a deck”aggro.” When he sees control elements, especially counterspells, he usually labels it”control.” Aggro-control decks, however, have creatures and counterspells. The problem with misidentifying an archetype, as usual, is consequently not knowing how to play against it, much less sideboard.
I wrote last week’s Back to Basics column because I thought I had to clarify a concept discussed in the previous week’s column. Now, it turns out that I have to clarify the clarification, and people ribbed me that the beginner’s article still went over the beginner’s heads.
Magic has a small number of fundamental rules: One land per turn, one attack phase per turn, a certain maximum power-to-mana ratio for creatures, and one card drawn per turn. Breaking this last rule – one card per turn – is one of the most basic yet most powerful strategies in the game.
Taking a page from other blue-based decks from High Tide to Forbiddian, Roland added red to his deck in anticipation of the mirror, and went 7-0 at the last Dülmen, beating two other Growing ‘Togs. To make room, he even removed Berserk, figuring he wouldn’t need to slip past as many blockers. This is the deck that many people are now claiming is almost unbeatable. It proves, they claim, that Gush is broken.
Some less experienced players drop”mana curve” like a buzzword, but fail to truly grasp it. Some, for example, just clipped an old Beth Moursund”Deck Deconstruction” column from The Duelist, and the accompanying table for spells for each mana slot. The result is posts on the Wizards boards telling Type I Sligh builders that they need three- and four-mana spells to complete their mana curves, which would only slow the decks. Let me explain it to you.
Wizards pointed Type I players to Illusionary Mask when they introduced Morph trigger creatures. Building a deck around Mask, though, requires a bit of work, and you need to Mask out a really good creature to make all that worth it. So far, the standard is set by Phyrexian Dreadnought, and it’s a very tough one.
I envisioned the Control Player’s Bible as a detailed reference that beginners could look at without the sometimes-haughty intimidation they sometimes get in Type I websites. The problem is that as I covered the basic discussions and had to move on to more complicated details, I got feedback saying that some beginners who caught the Bible in the middle couldn’t keep up. Somewhere there, I got the idea of starting another sub-column strictly focused on beginners again.
If there’s a weenie that caught people’s attention and even held some for quite a while, it’s Caller of the Claw. The logic went like this: Four power for three mana is mediocre by Type I standards (look at Phyrexian Negator). Four power for three mana in green just doesn’t cut it. But six power for three mana? Things start looking up.
