Geth’s Grimoire
Lots of beginners who want to build Rack decks oooh and aaaah when they see Megrim. Thing is, unloading your discard on the opponent is top priority, so your opponent has no hand by the time you have a moment to remember to play Megrim. At that point, a creature cleans up far better.
Geth suffers from the Megrim problem as well.
Incidentally, my goal here is not just to point out the top picks. I see the traditional set review as a beginners’ intellectual exercise, and I’m more interested in the thought process, especially articulating why some hyped”Timmy” cards glitter but aren’t quite gold.
As my habit goes, we start with the simplest category, creatures. Talking shadow price, we’re mainly talking power-to-mana ratio (see”Counting Tempo, Part II”). Even if you’re interested in the ability, you’ll still prefer it come with a decent-sized warm body.
The past year has changed control decks a lot. Fetchlands have strengthened mana bases. Stifle, coupled with the classics, Gorilla Shaman, Wasteland, and Strip Mine, have given control decks the tools expand their repertoire of mana denial, helping to slow the game to a point where they can effectively answer everything the opponent throws at them. Psychatog emerged as one the best kill cards ever, while Decree of Justice provided a virtually uncounterable and, thanks to cycling, never dead win condition.
Today I’m going to take a look at more decklists than you can shake a stick at and pinpoint the control decks to beat for the 2004 metagame.
Many Type One players scan new spoilers lists in eager anticipation as a young child might await Christmas morn. Some Type One players are patient; they prefer to wait for an accurate spoiler list in order to carefully read every card, analyzing how to break each new Type One playable. Other people, like myself, wait in apprehension. We want bombs and generally useful cards, but we don’t want cards like Mind’s Desire. But what exactly is Trinisphere you ask?
Although Hulk Smash and raw firepower was the top deck going into Vintage Champs, changes in the metagame made”The Deck” and its flexibility the Blue-based deck of choice once again. For example, the December 12, 2003 Dülmen saw three top German players-Oliver Daems, Roland Bode and Falk Bernhardt-Top 8 using”The Deck” with Isochrons, and it also featured prominently in January 2004 European tourneys. Since the notable event in this slice of time is mainly the release of Mirrodin, it’s easier to understand the evolution on a card-by-card basis. I spent December finishing off my theory articles and January starting with my midterms so I haven’t been able to really update my deck, either, but here’s what’s on my plate for reference…
Furnace Dragon
Call me crazy, but I really like the idea of running this in the sideboard of TnT for use against other Workshop decks. My reasoning is that it isn’t very expensive because of affinity, and because its ability makes it completely impossible for them to try to play around it with Goblin Welder to keep permanents they like in play. Of course, I’m probably horribly wrong here, since they’re probably better off just running Artifact Mutation or whatever, but this does only take up one sideboard slot.
In the course of the games I have pulled from testing, I’ll explain how the”Who’s the Beatdown” articles written by Flores and Mowshowitz pieces tie into this matchup, and I’ll explain how this matchup plays out, and the ways in which the both decks struggle to win. I’ll conclude with an examination of potential changes both decks may decide on, in order to improve the matchup.
The format change that Onslaught block spurred was nothing compared to the next base set released; Mirrodin. Mirrodin brought us a large list of playable, and even some borderline broken cards. At first, I believed Chalice of the Void to be the stand out card of the set, being a powerful hoser against a variety of decks, while allowing you to play around it and minimize its effect on you. Many people complained that Chalice was the end of Type One as we knew it, ruining a variety of decks, and making budget aggro virtually unplayable. As it turned out, many decks really weren’t hurt that badly. Burning Academy in particular, being the most heavily affected by Chalice, found ways around it, and budget decks were unplayable anyway. Who knew?
Last time, I approached design for Vintage from the perspective of whole sets, trying to use general trends to show how a set could be aimed at Vintage without individual cards designed for Type 1, even if the sets that came out on top were overrepresented because of a couple of cards usable in a wide variety of decks. In the forum thread after the article, I got multiple requests to look at the individual card breakdown, so that’s my objective this time.
I was really going to title this article “This is Type 1. Playing Fair Sucks,” but I thought that this one was catchier. Anyway, this week, I’ll be going over one of everyone’s favorite buzzwords in Type 1,”collateral damage,” and give you the inside scoop on Oscar”Cinnamon Buns” Tan.
In September I drove to Akron, Ohio and played in a Beta Mox tournament, which I won handily with Long. Then, November 2nd I flew to Kansas City, Missouri to play in a Power Blue tournament. First place was Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, and Timetwister, while Second place was a Mox Sapphire. I was going to wait to present this report after December 1st, if the DCI decided not to Restrict Lion’s Eye Diamond because I was going to do another article series updating the deck and going into more detail on how to play it.
That’s kind of moot now though, so you get two tournament reports instead and more thoughts on 2003 and Long.dec.
While we need to turn the corner to see what’s up ahead, a look back will keep things in perspective and help crystallize the lessons we’ve learned along the way, and tie up some loose ends. Type One has gone, in one year, from being a dead format to being a playtested and supported format. Starting with Aaron Forsythe’s article at the beginning of the year in which he asked the Type One community what should be unrestricted, the DCI has been listening.
Last month there was some discussion of designing cards for Type 1, or whether it was even possible to do so. Last week, I took ten major T1 tournaments and analyzed them for what they told us about the metagame, and this time I decided to take the same Top 8s and see how sets in the past have managed to sneak their cards into Vintage.
There is no room for budget deck builds in a full-proxy metagame, and any deck that cannot stop combo madness quickly just plain fails.
With such a unique (some would say skewed) environment, I quickly ruled out Keeper for its weakness against Long, as well as Spoils Mask, Long, Dragon and Madness as decks that just weren’t going to be fun to play with. Knowing I would be facing many workshop decks, and more importantly, Long.dec, I chose to run U/R Fish, a deck holding great versatility in the sideboard and with enough counters to slow combo down. More importantly, it could support Null Rod, which would prove incredible in the troubled times to come.
Now we look forward at the 2004 metagame. The restriction of Long has certainly opened up the field for many decks. However, two cards are going to become central to the 2004 Type One Metagame: Mana Drain and Mishra’s Workshop. Multiple decks will be running both cards and using them for nice tempo boosts, which lead to unrecoverable game states. These two cards will define the metagame and the decks built around them. In actuality, Mana Drain is probably going to see three to four times as much play as Mishra’s Workshop in top 8s, simply because of availability. Nevertheless, both cards should be watched carefully.
