In Five-Color Magic, White gives you Balance, Swords to Plowshares, and Armageddon. Distinguished company, distinguished indeed. All of them, powerful in control, combo, aggro, or midgame — who doesn’t love watching a team of Mongoose, Werebear, and Terravore plump up as you blow up the world?
Agnostically speaking, Blue is the most powerful color in Prismatic. Every deck runs a solid base of Blue cards, and more often than not, simply by dint of having effects like Compulsive Research and other card drawing, it represents a lot of the best effects in the format. Black and Red are both good colors, and hard to cut — but only because of how they interact with Blue.
In my little jaunt of looking for mono-colored decks that thrive in Prismatic, the lure of the Almost All-Basic Manabase was powerful. I mean, really. But there’s also the lure of some nonbasics. As soon as I hit upon the lure of going with All-Basic… I found the siren call of the Coffers.
Prismatic has proven to be an interesting field in which to venture. For a start, I found the format very deep. In normal Magic, you have sixty cards to work with; that’s not a lot of space, especially when anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four of those cards are occupied with the process of sitting around tapping for mana.
In the context of Magic, you can’t just sit around and constantly complain about the same old thing. The rate of change in this game is such that any change that’s enacted now won’t see the light of day for two years, apparently. Invasion Block was a travesty for balanced design, one that heralded the end of Blue’s reign of terror, and its immediate follow-up was Odyssey Block.
Whoops.
This time of transition gives writers a lot of options, and ironically, we can’t take them all. I thought when I started this, I’d have a lot of decks seriously hurt by the departure of Kamigawa block; I liked Kamigawa a lot, and I felt it got a far too knee-jerk reaction from your average Magic player. I hated Mirrodin far more than I hated Kamigawa, so hearing people saying Kamigawa was the worst block ever made my gut tighten.
With the advent of Ravnica block, making a good multicolor deck has become a lot harder to me. Other, more fiscal writers can afford to start a decklist with Hand of Cruelty and Paladin En-Vec, knowing their manabase will support it. Without that reliance, you look for other, more readily available ways to improve your chances.
It is in the mind of almost every single rogue (“bad”) deck designer to one day discover an archetype, to be the man with their name in lights, and the one who gets to bequeath a stupid name upon a deck and hear people recite it whenever they chat about matchups. It’s a pipe-dream, of course, since enthusiasm and a lust for glory only make up a small fraction of good deck design, with hard work, skill, and an ability to play the game as well as build for it make up the majority of the rest.
Yesterday, I laid down the rules — of sifting through old decklists, seeing what goes missing, and seeing what can fill those holes — and started work on Snow Dad. Snow Dad lost its entire engine, so it becomes a very different deck in the exchange — other decks are far more subtle shifts. We lost a card advantage engine, so we’ll use a new one — the rebel toolkit.
We’re going to take a dance through some old decks — casual decks — and see what the transition has brought. Now, there are going to be a lot of articles like this in the coming months. Untested, undeveloped, casual decks, that are basically all just showing the really aware what not to do. For the rest of us, there’s still some good to it, because how we’re going to screw up is as important as what we’re going to get right.
Now that no one’s talking about Prismatic much, I figured it was time to give the format a shot. I’d dabbled in Prismatic before, and found myself really frustrated. Initial forays into Prismatic Magic were stymied quickly by the presence of opposing power, and the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. So let’s run down a quick check for the impediments for the casual Prismatic player…
I have found I am willing to pay 2-3 tix for a good card that goes in a lot of decks, and only about .5 tix for narrow cards. There are some good, fun, narrow cards — like, say, Heartbeat of Spring or Weird Harvest — that are only really good in one or two decks. Phyrexian Arena? Sure! Early Harvest? Get bent! Which is why when you find an uncommon that lets you build around it, you cherish that card. You cherish it with all of you that there is.
Tallowisp… I’m going to miss you, brotha.
Who here likes mana flood? I used to hate it, back when I played Pansy Salad, an 18-land elf deck, in the days of Onslaught Block Constructed with a collective cardpool between myself and my competitors that featured maybe two dozen rares total. Despised it; couldn’t imagine running anything that would actually put more land into play, certainly early because well, I had elves for that. And they did cool things, like tap to make an elf huge, or make everything else block them.
With the change of time comes a re-evaluation of decks. I don’t play my Glare deck any more, having sold my Yoseis. My Zo-Zus have found a better home, my Meloku and my Shining Shoals having raked me in quite a tidy sum compared to what I paid for them, and I am as we speak idly picking my way through the trash bins of Coldsnap, seeing what might one day be worth something, and what, in the meantime, will be fun to play.
Home stretch now. You’re only three days away from seeing my face replaced with Tim Aten’s, or Billy Moreno’s, or, you know, someone people who dislike me want to see. Never going to quite grok how this works out. I mean, you can stop my stuff from existing – stuff you “didn’t pay for” – by just waiting a few days and looking again. Who knows, there might be something that you like put up here… though god knows if you’d tell them.
