What our Goodstuff deck tried to accomplish was to present several gambit type problems to a beatdown format. By using mana acceleration, and both Exalted Angel and Ravenous Baloth, plus a card like Vine Trellis, we tried to make these decks either have an answer for our greater tempo swinging beats, or to force them into an extension of resources that we could then capitalize on with Wrath or Vengeance.
I am not the Wizard of Oz. I am simply a man, out from behind the curtain with some decks. I have a lot of cards and build a lot of decks. I’m going to tell you what I know and what I’m thinking about with regard to Regionals ‘04.
To start from the beginning, Card Advantage was an idea born out of the fact that Magic: the Gathering is at heart a resource battle, and that the initial resources are cards. Thus it was from here that it seemed easy to take the first step toward the foundation of the theory: whoever had the most resources (or then specifically the most cards), would or should win. With this general starting idea, we have something that is both simple and useful. However, as we later found out, this was not always completely correct in the way things were defined.
I played a twelve-land Affinity deck to a 9-1 record, winning two tournaments while dropping only one match in Swiss play to Goblins, which I later defeated in the finals. Also, the deck had enough raw power to take my eight-year-old son, Liam, into the finals of a Friday Night Magic event, even though he wasn’t playing it very well. In fact, in the finals against the more standard midrange Affinity deck of his opponent, he became disheartened when his opponent cast a Rush of Knowledge and then played out Myr Enforcers, Frogmites, and on the following turn, a Broodstar. His opponent’s Rush had allowed my son to play Future Sight in the interim, but his board position was almost non-existent besides mana and the Sight, so he conceded the game.
For fun I took his turn, cast eight spells and then Tendrils to win the game.
“Stupid Husk Tricks,” as I think Ted Knutson coined the term, can at times be pretty darn spiffy – yet in the end, we felt that they were a lot of flash without a lot of substance in our particular case. After doing a rebuild, some tweaking, and watching”Good Kid” kick the crap out of just about every deck we could throw at it, I have to present what I feel is the overall most disruptive deck in the format – a B/G deck that’s competitive.
GAMA is the Game Manufacturers Association, and once a year they hold a trade show to allow the manufacturers to show off their completely new games and tell the world what future plans they have for their older games. I guess I should tell you what we learned about the grandfather of all card games while I was there, even if some of it has slipped out already.
Sligh is in trouble; just about any green beast is their doom and Baloth is scoop time. Rotlung Reanimator isn’t good for them either. The good news is that it can occasionally jump Slide. And both of the elf decks present ran Biorhythm, which was being cursed by at least Slide player by the end of the day; it gets cast, the Slide player goes down to one or two life, and then several creatures come over to win.
There’s been a lot of debate about what sorts of decks The Rock and Reanimator are – and although people are wrong in their placement, there is a radical shift of the metagame clock that is happening as we watch. However, there are still lessons to be learned – and what can the metagame clock tell us about the viability of Aggro-Control and the future of Reanimator?
Budde said something that got my wheels turning when he said that the deck could create”infinite” elephant tokens. Well, when I think”infinite,” I jump straight to the phrase”game over” – so I asked myself if there was anyway to guarantee a one-turn kill. Turns out the answer is yes. Also, my Oversold Cemetery tech seems to be slugging it out at about 50/50 with U/G – better than most!
The metagame clock seemed to lay out the course of OBC fairly well, I think, only notably missing a few decks like”Pirates” and the Wake combo deck. Since Wonder Dog is a UG aggro-control deck, it should have beatdown enemies; that doesn’t seem to be the case with this deck, however, thanks to the cut-rate fatties. So what are the problems again when addressing the problems posed by format’s noted”best deck”?
What I have noticed about Peasant Magic are that it seems very beatdown-oriented; if I remember right, the Origins top eight were all beatdown decks. But Pauper Magic allows you to play with ideas like CounterBurn, Control Black, and Millstone… And attract customers to your store.
OBC is all about the green men and Buehler may yet be vindicated. Want to know how the OBC metagame is shaping up, what will be the most popular deck – and why? The truth is in here.
Doc, tell me straight out: Can this Reanimator deck be competitive in the current format? And what can we learn about how Reanimator decks work in general?
I love that show Connections, where this bloke named Burke takes you all over through time and all over the world connecting things together that you never thought would be connected. If I’m good here, maybe I can pull that sort of idea off and tell you why The Ferrett’s comments on the metagame vanishing in OBC were right.
The peasant Magic idea works well in cases where local participation is low. Let’s take my store’s attendance as an example: Prior to the opening, it was zero – the big goose egg. In following weeks, the store had six players in playing Magic on our Saturday league opening, then twelve the following one, then twenty by the third week!
