TagVintage

Last time, I discussed the appearance rates of the cards currently on the restricted list, and took the opportunity to explain why some of them don’t belong there. This week, I’m going to look at a lot of noteworthy unrestricted cards and discuss their fluctuations over the last seven and a half months. For the people who’ve been paying close attention to Type One over that whole time, there won’t be many surprises here, but for the relatively un-hardcore reader, you can catch up on a lot of conventional wisdom all at once.

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?”

Type One – vast wasteland of Magic cards, where over ten years worth of clutter dot the landscape in pockets of Haves and Have Nots. For every Ancestral Recall, there are three Carnival of Souls. Wait, Carnival of Souls is being played in competitive Type One decks now. I meant for every Ancestral Recall, there are three Food Chains. Wait…. Screw it – for every good card in Type One, there’s an equally good card out there just waiting to be broken in the right deck. With the complex interactions between so many different cards there, you’d think there’d be many more viable decks out there than what the current crop of Type One players have come up with so far.

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.

Back in 2003, Aaron Forsythe wrote an article explaining how R&D looks at the Banned and Restricted list. One of the pearls of wisdom in the article was when Forsythe said,”in general, if a restricted card isn’t showing up in decks, its status probably deserves some scrutiny by the DCI.” I happen to be an expert on what cards are played and not played in Type One, so I figured I should get around to looking at the list right before the June 1st announcement.

In this half, Steve covers Landstill and U/G Madness.

In part one, I reviewed decks A-F on the SCG gauntlet – tracing through each deck’s game plan, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and describing the relevant matchups. The purpose of this effort is to assist readers trying to figure out what they might want to play and how to shore up archetype weaknesses by describing the decks of Type One in a candid light – free (hopefully) from the distortions you might see from someone promoting their pet deck. In this article we look at decks that start with the letter G-M. We begin with what is undoubtedly one of the best decks in Type One and yet is the most confounding, irritating, and mystifying:

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…

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.

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?

This month is a watershed in data collection, because for the first time in 2004 I’ve gone a whole month with just one missing decklist (FCG). I know some of you don’t get the major physical stimulation I do from that knowledge, but I’m sure there are some of you that feel the same. I feel vindicated for my efforts to harass and torment the decklist underreporting of the world. This cajolery yielded fruit such as two Frenchie decklists that they still don’t want published, but are in the totals anyway.

More of this in-depth look at the fastest growing format in the game.

In the past, Vintage was not a tough nut to crack. With a minimal amount of research you could either completely break the format by importing an Extended favorite, finding a deck the Germans were working on and perfect it, or stumble across it through greater experience. Not so anymore – at least for the foreseeable season. The DCI has done its job and restricted all of the egregious offenders leaving a remarkably balanced format. No less than seven new archetypes have emerged this year as real competitors, as well as revamped approaches to old favorites.

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.

I have dissected a variety of Hulk Smash builds – fifteen total – looking for the trends in winning cards. This actually worked out a lot smoother than when I did the same thing to Keeper, because Psychatog is a card which invites much less flexibility to a deck that uses it, whereas Keeper is nothing but metagame customization. The first thing I did was amass a set of thirty-eight cards (and one sideboard card) that were played in all fifteen builds available from my metagame summaries of the last six months.