cult classics compilation (#1-#12)

Two out of every three weeks, I write a 200-300 word column for the Card Kingdom newsletter called Cult Classics. As a Music Nerd, the albums I tend to like are the ones that don’t sell terribly well when the first come out, but music critics won’t shut up about them for the next three decades, and nerds like myself get the album art on t-shirts so we can nod to one another and go “nice.” These are the Magical equivalents, or the closest thing tournament Magic has. None of them get at the horrific despair and loneliness that those albums do, but I’m hopeful that Khans of Tarkir remedies this.

The criteria to be a Cult Classic: it had to be a reasonable tournament deck, not someone’s awful ‘rogue’ concoction they played at FNM, nor an experiment to do the weirdest thing possible. During the time it was legal, maybe it even won some tournaments. However, it can’t be the #1 deck that people remember from an environment. Any deck that was ever “the best” for more than ten minutes is almost certainly out (though there’s a very specific deck I’ll break this rule for; that’ll probably be next week’s column).

Most importantly, it has to be cool, and since this is my column, what’s cool is entirely subjective. The deck that I immediately knew I had to write about, as soon as I had the idea for the column, was Tight Sight. If you don’t think a creatureless combo deck that kills by infinitely looping Predict once it has infinite mana off an empty library is cool, we have very different aesthetic sensibilities, and you might not enjoy these decks as much as I do. Basically, if a deck does something that sounds completely unbelievable for a competitive deck to do, or if it’s constructed in such a bizarre way that it looks like the base of it is going to creak and fall over at any second, it has potential to be a Cult Classic.

A lot of this I don’t consider to be my best writing. Due to the medium and the audience, I stay relentlessly positive the whole time, and I don’t have enough space to go into the personal connection I have with certain decks. Others, I needed to write something and only had one 15-minute break to write it. There are some passages and phrases, like the intro to “Dredge,” that I enjoy, though.

All the writing and coming-up-with-the-deck-to-write-about is mine (unless I’m forgetting someone’s suggestion and imagining I remembered it myself), but the writing shown has received some edits from a few people at Card Kingdom: Jordan Short, Chris Rowlands, and Justin Treadway, for which I’m very thankful. For example, there was one Frankenstein monster of a sentence that had a comma, a semicolon, a parenthetical, and maybe even an ellipses in it. They made sure to replace that with periods, and it certainly reads better for it.

The columns here were published from March to June of 2014. Anything I’ve added will appear after an “Additional commentary:” tag.

If you’d like to read these as they come out, along with some other excellent content from the aforementioned Card Kingdom people, go to cardkingdom.com and enter your email address on the righthand side of the screen.

One final note (really): sometime soon I'll go back and link all these cards to have mouseover functionality so that people aren't expected to know what Telekinetic Sliver is off the top of their head, but for now, I'd just like to publish this while it's current. Paste decks into deckstats.net or something similar to see what everything is.

Wild Pair Slivers – Time Spiral Block Constructed

4 Forest
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
6 Island
1 Mountain
1 Pendelhaven
1 Plains
4 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Urza's Factory

1 Darkheart Sliver
4 Dormant Sliver
3 Frenetic Sliver
4 Gemhide Sliver
1 Might Sliver
1 Mystic Snake
1 Reflex Sliver
3 Telekinetic Sliver
1 Venser, Shaper Savant
4 Wall of Roots
1 Whitemane Lion

4 Coalition Relic
4 Foresee
2 Take Possession
4 Wild Pair

Sideboard
3 Detritivore
2 Extirpate
1 Frenetic Sliver
1 Mystic Snake
3 Riftsweeper
1 Sliver Legion
1 Telekinetic Sliver
1 Teneb, the Harvester
1 Vesuva
1 Whitemane Lion

Wild Pair Slivers is a deck that takes all the “bad” slivers left over from drafts, four copies of a six-mana enchantment that does nothing when it comes into play, and what appear to be leftovers from someone’s trade binder and turns them into one of the most bizarre and powerful decks ever played in a Block Constructed format.

Six years ago, before Birthing Pod or Combo Elves made creature-based combo engines a normal part of Magic, Wafo-Tapa was putting his entire deck onto the battlefield with Wild Pair, removing creatures with Frenetic Sliver to flip a ton of coins (he won the flips, obviously, because this deck gives great karma), then drawing cards with Dormant Sliver when they came back. Wild Pair only cares that creatures have the same added power and toughness, so casting Wall of Roots and adding a counter fetches Dormant Sliver or any of your silver bullets for zero mana. Nothing. Which is about all your opponent can do against all-stars like Telekinetic Sliver.

Have you read those cards before? His opponents hadn’t. Some of them were probably too embarrassed to ask what just happened as they signed the match slip in his favor. The text boxes included such implications as “tap your entire board every turn for the rest of the game,” “I have a two-mana counterspell with buyback zero” (Whitemane Lion into Mystic Snake does quite a bit), and “I can attack with my entire deck because it all came into play with haste.”

Decks with small creatures got stalled out and combo’d. Decks with large creatures were too slow to compete. The incredibly popular blue-black control couldn’t draw enough cards to deal with Slivers. Next time you’ve never heard of your opponent’s cards, watch out.

Additional commentary: I don’t like how much I play up the “you’ve never heard of these cards!” in this explanation, because hopefully, all of the decks I write about use obscure draft leftovers. Otherwise, what are they doing in this column? Plus, Time Spiral Block Constructed had so many goddamn cards that no one could keep them straight. Still, though, I’m in awe that they designed a Sliver variant of Frenetic Efreet, got it to print, and it was actually good. Those must be the two best coin-flipping cards of all time, almost by default.

Tight Sight – Odyssey/Onslaught Standard

1 Flooded Strand
9 Forest
11 Island
1 Windswept Heath

4 Careful Study
3 Cunning Wish
3 Deep Analysis
4 Early Harvest
4 Far Wanderings
4 Future Sight
2 Krosan Reclamation
4 Mental Note
3 Moment's Peace
3 Predict
2 Quiet Speculation
2 Rampant Growth

Sideboard
2 Delusions of Mediocrity
3 Mana Short
1 Memory Lapse
1 Moment's Peace
1 Naturalize
1 Opportunity
3 Ravenous Baloth
1 Ray of Revelation
2 Roar of the Wurm

This deck is Art. In thirty years, when there is a Magic wing in MoMA, there will be a looped video of someone playing Tight Sight. Sure, any combo deck can sneak in a one-of as the only way to win the game, but how many decks can hide the fact that they have any win conditions at all?

Step one: get Future Sight in play. Step two: mill your entire library. This was before any fancy-pants dredge or Tome Scours existed, so you had to do it the hard way, meaning fetching every land from your deck, drawing cards, and using Early Harvest to not run out of mana. Step three: with zero cards in your library, cast Krosan Reclamation targeting Krosan Reclamation and Early Harvest. Cast those spells from the top of your deck with Future Sight an arbitrarily large number of times, then do the same thing except with Predict to mill your opponent. To reiterate: the deck’s win condition is Predict.

While it might seem a bit slow for modern tastes (a turn five win happens with a good draw), it’s surprisingly resilient against seemingly-faster agro decks with Moment’s Peace, which will make them sigh deeply every time you flash it back. The Cunning Wish package has some tricks, as well, including some surprise anti-control cards if they’re keeping their mana up for your big turn.

Anyone interested in combo decks should take a few minutes to goldfish Tight Sight a few times, because there has never been a more machine-like combo deck to see play in Standard. Once Future Sight is in play, all those cards that seem to do nothing work together to create a harmonious masterpiece, and that, deckbuilders, is true beauty.

Additional commentary: I started this blog several years ago to write about combo decks. At that point, I was playing Elves religiously. I started playing that deck because Storm was no longer legal in Extended. Years before that, I attempted to play Tight Sight in Standard. I say “attempted,” because I think I only ran it in a tournament once or twice; the local card store only had two Early Harvest in stock, which as you might imagine, was rather key to it functioning.

For some unknown reason, I thought my four rounds at a local tournament with a known-suboptimal version of a deck was worth writing up and sending to StarCityGames, back when The Ferrett was the editor in charge. He sent me a very nice personal rejection note, explaining why he wasn’t going to publish it. I don’t remember if I sent that in before or after my card-by-card review of Legions.

My strongest memory of the deck, though, was proxying it up to goldfish. I wasn’t up on the technology of using draft leftovers to make proxies (also, I didn’t draft), so I wrote the names of the cards on index cards and shuffled those, then played endless games sitting crosslegged on my bed next to my stuffed animals.

I haven’t actually tried goldfishing this deck in many years. I used to try to port it to Extended on a regular basis, which never worked out. I’m a bit worried that trying it now would be like seeing present-day Facebook photos of my biggest high school crush.

Ghost Dad – Champions/Ravnica Standard

6 Plains
6 Swamp
4 Caves of Koilos
4 Godless Shrine
1 Eiganjo Castle
1 Shizo, Death's Storehouse
1 Tomb of Urami

4 Dark Confidant
3 Kami of Ancient Law
3 Plagued Rusalka
4 Tallowisp
4 Thief of Hope
4 Ghost Council of Orzhova
2 Teysa, Orzhov Scion

1 Indomitable Will
3 Pillory of the Sleepless
1 Strands of Undeath
4 Shining Shoal
4 Sickening Shoal

Sideboard
2 Pithing Needle
1 Kami of Ancient Law
1 Enfeeblement
1 Pillory of the Sleepless
2 Blessed Breath
2 Umezawa's Jitte
3 Cranial Extraction
2 Persecute
1 Miren, the Moaning Well

It’s one thing to blindside people with a one-turn ‘win the game’ combo, or a colossal creature on the third turn, or burning people out from 15 life. But sometimes, you gotta take things a bit steadier. Play some 1/3s for two. Enchant some creatures. Trick people into thinking you were giving yesterday’s draft deck a shot in today’s Standard Pro Tour.

That’s right: this deck made its debut in a 2006 Pro Tour. The engine behind the madness is Tallowisp plus the Shoals: your doomed opponent targets one of your guys with a burn spell, and you respond with Shining Shoal for free, tutoring up a sweet aura, saving your guy, and killing theirs. And you were tapped out the whole time. Now you can understand why the deck boasted an unbelievable win percentage against the aggressive Zoo deck that was one of the format’s most popular strategies.

Once the deck has survived the early game with its legion of rejects, forget it. All their guys are not attacking, not blocking, and they’re losing a point of life per turn for the privilege of having them remain in play. The midgame Tallowisp engine coexists happily with the Dark Confidant/Thief of Hope (!) engine to provide an endless stream of removal and 2/2s. Then, when it was pretty much hopeless anyway, Ghost Council provides a completely-impossible-to-deal-with threat to close things out.

In a lot of ways, the deck was ahead of its time: it controlled the game not with huge Wrath effects and “draw three cards” but creatures that subtly took over. The genesis of Faeries is here if you look hard enough, with its two-mana guys that aren’t worth a removal spell but annoy the crap out of you.

Additional commentary: I don’t have a direct personal connection to this one, but I know a lot of people who do. This is The MiseTings deck; for the short period that every good player on that site banded together and played Magic, this is what they came up with, and it led them to the Pro Tour. I’m pretty sure I was banned during this. Most of the people involved are now on GoodGamery, by far the best Magic forum on the internet.

Turboland – Extended (2003)

5 Forest
14 Island
1 Treetop Village
4 Yavimaya Coast
1 Battlefield Scrounger
4 Accumulated Knowledge
1 Capsize
4 Counterspell
4 Exploration
2 Gush
4 Horn of Greed
2 Intuition
2 Krosan Reclamation
3 Moment's Peace
4 Oath of Druids
2 Scroll Rack
3 Time Warp

Sideboard
1 Capsize
3 Deep Analysis
1 Dust Bowl
1 Gainsay
1 Intuition
1 Misdirection
1 Naturalize
2 Powder Keg
3 Ravenous Baloth
1 Thwart

Oh, Extended, our beautiful lost format. Where now we have Modern, once we had the seven-or-more year format where any amount of broken decks ran wild in a shockingly healthy metagame. This week’s deck is not some overlooked also-ran, but a deck that won a Grand Prix whose top 8 also included Psychatog with Gush, UG Madness with Daze, Tinker with pretty much every broken artifact not printed in Alpha, and Angry Hermit which would kill you on turn two with a single two-mana creature. The winning deck? Zvi Mowshowitz’s beloved Turboland.

True to its name, the deck works by playing Lots of Land. Exploration plus Horn of Greed is the basic acceleration and card-drawing engine, with Accumulated Knowledge for when three cards a turn isn’t enough, and Time Warp for when you’re not quite ready to let your opponent untap. Then, you Oath of Druids for… some enormous monster? Some untargetable, you-win-the-game-upon-entering-the-battlefield unbeatable thing?! No! Battlefield Scrounger, of course, everyone’s favorite common 3/3 for five. With Scrounger in play and your library in your graveyard, you can recur Time Warp for infinite turns as you cast Capsize with buyback to put your opponent’s board safely back in their hand.

The deck was famous for a few things: having one of the most powerful engines in a high-powered format, taking about half an hour to actually execute its infinite combo, and being nearly impossible to play correctly. Handing it off to anyone else is like tossing the keys to the International Space Station to someone who just got their learner’s permit (for cars, not space stations).

Two-card combos like Splinter Twin make for cool decks, but to me, this is real combo: the entire deck is the engine, with victory subtly nestled among its interlocking parts.

Additional commentary: I had an issue of InQuest magazine (maybe exactly an issue, even), and it featured a piece by Zvi about how the deck works. Can you imagine explaining this deck to InQuest readers? They even made him talk about what you could change for budget reasons. I remember that he compared it to changing an F1 car into a go-kart, and he said the closest thing to Oath of Druids was Propaganda, which I still find to be an interesting idea.

Snap – (Urza Block Constructed)

9 Forest
4 Gaea's Cradle
5 Island
2 Thran Quarry
1 Yavimaya Hollow

2 Barrin, Master Wizard
4 Cloud of Faeries
4 Deranged Hermit
2 Elvish Herder
2 Elvish Lyrist
4 Priest of Titania
4 Raven Familiar
1 Yavimaya Granger

2 Crop Rotation
4 Fertile Ground
2 Frantic Search
4 Snap
4 Stroke of Genius

Sideboard
4 Absolute Law
3 Contamination
4 Meltdown
1 Morphling
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 Swamp

A creature-based aggro-control-combo deck that could repeatedly replay Deranged Hermit, tap Gaea’s Cradle over and over, create a huge wave of card advantage, or make the opponent draw their deck. Welcome to two-set Urza Block Constructed!

One of the true “what could have been” stories in competitive Magic, this is a deck that finished Top 16… because it was tragically stolen before that round. Now, if it was me and someone was playing a Snap/Gaea’s Cradle deck in a Pro Tour and their deck disappeared, I’d crack open my binder and lend some cards, but what are you gonna do?

Chapin had to be ecstatic just to get this far with something so goofy: the deck starts off looking reasonable, with a familiar acceleration/Priest of Titania beginning into the popular Deranged Hermit, then things take a turn for the weird once the Snap/Frantic Search action to untap Gaea’s Cradle starts happening. Crop Rotation can even replace the Cradle with a fresh copy. Since your opponent is probably doing something that’s also blatantly unfair, because it’s Urza Block, the Elvish Lyrist and Barrin, Master Wizard should stall them for just long enough to do… whatever it is this deck did.

Before looking it up, I remembered the rough outline of the maindeck, but not the sideboard. That might be the most beautiful sideboard I’ve ever seen. A strictly blue-green main, with basic Mountain, Plains, Swamp, and 11 cards in those three colors in the side. The Contamination, it… it’s for… so that… look, I got nothing here. The Snap deck has broken me completely.

Additional commentary: there are a couple decks that I only know about because Flores wrote them up. I know, Chapin and Flores, my favorite people. Truth is, I used to read mothership Flores articles religiously, and this is one of the coolest things I got from that. Of all the decks I wrote about in the column, this is the one that I most desperately wish I could take to a tournament.

Mirari’s Wake – Odyssey Block Constructed

6 Forest
6 Island
4 Krosan Verge
1 Mossfire Valley
2 Mountain
3 Plains
3 Skycloud Expanse
3 Burning Wish
3 Circular Logic
3 Compulsion
4 Deep Analysis
4 Far Wanderings
2 Flash of Insight
2 Kirtar's Wrath
1 Living Wish
4 Mirari's Wake
4 Moment's Peace
2 Quiet Speculation
3 Time Stretch

Sideboard
1 Ambassador Laquatus
3 Bearscape
1 Cleansing Meditation
1 Envelop
2 Firebolt
1 Firecat Blitz
1 Kirtar's Wrath
1 Mountain
1 Quiet Speculation
1 Ray of Revelation
1 Skycloud Expanse
1 Time Stretch

Readers who’ve been playing for over a decade will scoff at this selection. “Mirari’s Wake?”, their old, creaking voices will ask, “what’s a tier-one Standard deck that won the 2003 World Championship doing in Cult Classics?” Well, I admit, it might be a bit higher-profile than most things featured here… but have you seen what it does?

A sideboard that supports Burning AND Living Wish. Nearly unbounded turns with Time Stretch. Quiet Speculation for Moment’s Peace, which was practically 150% of a Time Stretch against aggressive decks. Finally ending the game with Firecat Blitz tokens, and that art is just adorable.

Wake was that rarest of monsters: the combo-control deck, possibly the first of its kind in Standard, that was just as comfortable sitting back on card selection, mass removal, and counters as it was going nuts and making tons of guys. This is an earlier (Pat Chapin-designed) version, because I think it’s the coolest. The deck eventually evolved more toward three-color control that just happened to win off three copies of Wake; the more combo-oriented ones would have gladly played six. Such is the fate of powerful wackiness: the oddities get stripped off, the deck streamlined, and things like Burning Wish for Time Stretch fall by the wayside.

Time for some Serious Deckbuilding Lessons inspired by this: just because a new deck idea seems completely out-there, bizarre, or like a rickety schoolbus screaming down a winding hill at 120MPH, doesn’t necessarily mean there’s not the framework for a viciously-tuned championship-winning behemoth waiting for the right tuning (or a couple cards from the next set) to move it from the casual tables to the Top 8. Don’t write off weird decks just because they’re not quite there yet.

A final note: other Wake decks used Mirari to cast Cunning Wish, copy it, and return the original copy of Wish to their hand. It was amazing. It doesn’t work anymore. This keeps me up at night.

Additional commentary: Chapin deck number two. I found this because I wanted to show off some Wake deck, and this one popped up on a search. I think Chapin said something about how the format would be unplayable once people knew about Wake, or something, whatever. I didn’t even realize it was a Block deck and not Standard until I had to look it up while compiling this.

Gassy Knoll – Time Spiral/Lorwyn Standard

4 Fungal Reaches
4 Molten Slagheap
12 Snow-Covered Mountain
4 Spinerock Knoll

4 Bogardan Hellkite

4 Dragonstorm
4 Grapeshot
4 Incinerate
4 Lotus Bloom
3 Pyromancer's Swath
3 Rift Bolt
4 Rite of Flame
4 Shock
2 Tarfire

Sideboard
2 Ancient Grudge
4 Dodecapod
2 Empty the Warrens
2 Ignite Memories
3 Sulfurous Blast
2 Wheel of Fate

We’ve all played burn decks, right? Even the Mountain-averse among us have a basic familiarity with how they work. First, you spend a couple turns picking off important creatures or whatever. Then you build up some mana. Then you deal ten damage to your opponent, which lets you play a nine-mana spell for one mana off your land that was hiding it, then you tutor up four dragons that kill your opponent on the spot.

Classic mono-red burn deck, or something.

This deck was a very brief flash in the pan before Morningtide invaded with its Bitterblossoms, but what a flash this deck was. Though it didn’t win, the deck (yet another Patrick Chapin creation- what can I say, the man makes cool decks) had an incredible showing in the Standard portion, and two of its pilots made it all the way to the top 8. Its hybrid of Pyromancer’s Swath burn with Dragonstorm combo isn’t really comparable to anything in Standard; my researchers tell me the best analogy they can make is to the bizarre Cephalid Illusionist infinite life/reanimation combo decks of old Extended. When a mono-red deck with 17 burn spells has no point of comparison, something weird happened.

Time for our serious business Deckbuilding Lesson of the day: if your weirdo combo deck isn’t quite there, try shoving it together with another not-quite-there deck that shares some overlap. In this case, both Pyromancer’s Swath and Dragonstorm weren’t quite enough to make it on their own at the time, but the hybrid attack impossible to plan a gameplan against. Think of it like a Reese’s cup, on fire.

Additional commentary: holy hell, ‘Gassy Knoll’ has to be the worst deck name ever devised. ‘Tight Sight’ is embarrassing enough, but this is a deck name that’s 1) a pun, 2) awful magic slang, 3) a reference to the assassination of a President. That is simply unacceptable. When I told Justin Treadway the name of the deck, well… he wasn’t happy. Also, this is the third Chapin deck in a row, prompting Justin to threaten to change my column’s name to “Chapin It To The Limit.”


Full English Breakfast – Extended (2001?)

3 City of Brass
4 Forest
6 Island
1 Savannah
1 Taiga
4 Tropical Island
2 Undiscovered Paradise
4 Birds of Paradise
1 Bottle Gnomes
1 Elvish Lyrist
1 Flowstone Hellion
1 Gilded Drake
1 Morphling
2 Phyrexian Dreadnought
2 Quirion Ranger
1 Reya Dawnbringer
1 Sliver Queen
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
3 Tradewind Rider
1 Uktabi Orangutan
4 Volrath's Shapeshifter
4 Wall of Roots
3 Counterspell
4 Force of Will
4 Survival of the Fittest
Sideboard
1 Academy Rector
1 Bottle Gnomes
1 Carrion Beetle
1 Circle of Protection: Red
1 Gilded Drake
1 Masticore
1 Oath of Ghouls
1 Phelddagrif
1 Pygmy Hippo
3 Pyroblast
1 Recurring Nightmare
1 Seal of Cleansing
1 Spiketail Drake

Back when naming combo decks after breakfast cereals was the cool thing, Full English Breakfast came along to shake up the convention and provide the tournament scene with one of the most complicated decks ever made. It’s a creature deck! It’s a counterspell deck! It’s a combo deck with a ludicrously involved combo! It has 23 different creatures between main and sideboard!

This is an Extended deck from way back, when Extended was Ice Age forward, and specifically allowed the original dual lands, but not the rest of Revised. Yes, that was a real format. Survival of the Fittest-based decks were a pretty common alternative to Necropotence-fueled combo archetypes, but FEB was weird even at the time.

A bit of background to start with: Paul Barclay, the deck’s designer, was a Wizards employee who gave official answers to rules questions. He went on to be in charge of all rules for all Wizards TCGs. This is relevant, because no one else would be able to figure out that this works, let alone do all the other timing tricks involving the cards in different arrangements:

Play Volrath’s Shapeshifter. Activate Survival of the Fittest, discarding Flowstone Hellion. Volrath’s Shapeshifter now has haste, so attack. Activate Shapeshifter’s new activated ability eleven times. Before those resolve, activate Survival, discarding Phyrexian Dreadnought. The activations resolve. Shapeshifter is now attacking as a 23/1 with trample.

Okay! Now you know how the basic combo of the deck works. How do you actually play this monstrosity? Well you… cast… spells? Play guys??? Look, I’m a writer, not a pro player. I haven’t the slightest idea how to win a game with this deck. But please, put it together and share the confusion with friends and family.

Additional commentary: I’m sad both that any mention of this deck has to spend two thirds of its time explaining The Combo, and that I can’t find any specific record of when and where this deck saw play.

The naming conventions really went haywire after this deck came out. Cephalid Illusionist got featured in some sort of “variant” that barely resembles the deck at all, hence Cepahlid Breakfast, then it got merged with Life, forming Cephalife… columns like this are actually kind of necessary, just so the experienced players can bring newer ones up to speed on this arcane tournament history.

Also, a personal FedEx Arrow-type moment occurred for me when I realized that Life wasn’t just named that because of how the combo worked, but because that, too, was a cereal.

Cocoa Pebbles – Extended (1999?)

4 Badlands
4 City of Brass
4 Gemstone Mine
3 Peat Bog
3 Phyrexian Tower
4 Scrubland
4 Academy Rector
2 Phyrexian Walker
4 Shield Sphere
1 Aura of Silence
4 Dark Ritual
4 Demonic Consultation
4 Duress
3 Enduring Renewal
4 Goblin Bombardment
1 Mana Vault
3 Mox Diamond
4 Necropotence

Sideboard
1 Abeyance
3 Aura of Silence
1 Defense of the Heart
2 Peacekeeper
4 Pyroblast
2 Mana Short
2 Wasteland

Back when Tempest came out in 1997, it brought a new Big Scary Combo Deck in Extended called Fruity Pebbles: with Enduring Renewal, Goblin Bombardment, and a zero-cost creature, the deck could deal (gasp!) infinite damage. Now, this might seem pretty normal nowadays, but back then it was a bit more special. Around the same time, Necropotence-fueled black decks were the expected deck. Then around 1999, someone tried the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup technique (my favorite) of mashing the two together. The result: Cocoa Pebbles. Tony Dobson played this version at Pro Tour Chicago.

“Okay,” you might say, “so it added a completely broken card advantage engine to an existing combo deck. So what?” Well, this was actually a pretty big innovation. When you’re casting a turn one Necropotence the win condition you use after that almost becomes irrelevant. In a lot of cases, if you’re doing something as absurd as that, just find whatever kills them the fastest (especially if you can assume that they, too, have access to the same incredible engine that you do).

The big takeaway here that deckbuilders kept coming back to: three-card combos where none of the pieces do anything individually are bad. Card draw engines that pump out a near-endless stream of mediocre guys are pretty good. Card draw engines that find your previously-unreliable combo… okay, that works a lot better. Thanks, Necropotence!

Additional commentary: this one is just a history lesson, because I couldn’t come up with anything else that week.

Miracle Gro – Extended (1997)

6 Island
4 Tropical Island
3 Gaea's Skyfolk
4 Lord of Atlantis
4 Merfolk Looter
4 Quirion Dryad
4 Brainstorm
4 Curiosity
4 Daze
3 Foil
4 Force of Will
4 Gush
4 Land Grant
4 Sleight of Hand
4 Winter Orb
Sideboard
2 Boomerang
4 Chill
3 Emerald Charm
2 Misdirection
4 Submerge
Fun. Card.


In 1997, Alan Comer invented Legacy.

Now, I don’t mean the format called “Legacy.” That didn’t even get named until 2004, and this deck was made for old Extended. But with this monstrosity comprised of ten land, fifteen creatures, nineteen free spells, and sixteen card draw spells (none of which cost more than one mana), Comer gave us the basic shell for today’s Legacy Blue decks.

The creatures might not seem very impressive today. They were just some two-drops, but they did what the deck needed: you played a guy and used your free spells to make your opponent miserable. Their cards had a very low chance of resolving, with Sleight of Hand and Brainstorm keeping Gro stocked up on free countermagic. Then, you dropped Winter Orb to make sure they couldn’t even try to play anything. With that card on the table, Daze becomes better than free -because clearly that spell wasn’t backbreaking enough when it didn’t cost negative mana.

This deck is to modern Magic what mid-1940s computers are to iPhones. Sure, not all the parts existed yet, but the ideas are all there. With the printing of Odyssey, this deck moved toward Threshold. With Onslaught, the fetchlands made Brainstorm even more incredible. Then Legacy became a format, and UG aggro-control dominated.

Now, Delver of Secrets is king of the top tables, but even Tarmogoyf has the now-forgotten Quirion Dryad to thank for the long history of green dudes and Force of Will.

Additional commentary: the lengths people had to go to before fetchlands existed. When was the last time anyone cast Land Grant in a serious tournament deck? Whether Belcher counts is an exercise for the reader. While this deck’s ten lands was certainly, uh, novel, it turns out that you get to cast more spells when you play more lands, and the deck’s successors played something more reasonable in the fourteen-to-twenty range (and were often three colors).

Spread ‘Em – Jund Standard (Alara/Zendikar, pre-Worldwake)

4 Jungle Shrine
4 Seaside Citadel
2 Terramorphic Expanse
3 Arid Mesa
2 Misty Rainforest
3 Scalding Tarn
4 Island
2 Plains
1 Mountain
1 Forest
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Baneslayer Angel
1 Sphinx of Jwar Isle
4 Spreading Seas
3 Convincing Mirage
4 Ardent Plea
4 Captured Sunlight
4 Ajani Vengeant
4 Day of Judgment
2 Sigil of the Empty Throne
Sideboard
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Wall of Denial
4 Rhox War Monk
1 Sphinx of Jwar Isle
1 Sigil of the Empty Throne
1 Convincing Mirage

What do you do when there’s one ‘best deck’ in Standard? Well, you play something that beats it. But what do you do when that deck doesn’t do anything other than play the best cards in the format? Well… you have to get a bit creative. Gerry Thompson’s solution: turn their rather awkward manabase into Islands. Sprouting Thrinax gets significantly more difficult to cast when you have to tap Islands for it.

The previously-thought-unplayable card Spreading Seas was so good that not only is the deck playing a much worse version of it in Convincing Mirage, but also a ton of cascade cards… to get more Spreading Seas and Convincing Mirages into play.

The previous decks I’ve covered in this spot have often been goofy, playing overlooked cards because there was so much synergy with the deck. There is no synergy here; there is only hatred. When tournaments turn into 40%+ of the top deck, and no one can find anything that consistently beats it… well, extreme measures become necessary. You don’t want to be the guy with some brand-new deck that thinks your matchup against Jund might be pretty good-ish, then lose your first two rounds against it.

How’d this deck do against the Vampires decks in the format? Lost. Any sort of aggro? Well, that’s what the entire sideboard is for. But tournament Magic isn’t always pretty, and sometimes it’s the ugliest kinds of strategies that are necessary to defeat the hideous monster at the top tables.

Additional commentary: one of the hardest of the columns to actually write, because the deck doesn’t really do anything interesting. It’s more of a Fun Police deck than an actual fun deck; something better talked about than played, like Stasis, or Eggs. Feel free to look back at all my closing lines and marvel at the more awkward-sounding ones. To me, they often read like a nerdy kid crossing his arms and quoting an action movie in front of the school bully, who then punches them in the face.

“Dredge” – Same Standard As The Above

4 Crypt of Agadeem
2 Drowned Catacomb
3 Island
2 Misty Rainforest
1 Mountain
4 Scalding Tarn
3 Swamp
3 Verdant Catacombs
4 Architects of Will
4 Extractor Demon
2 Fatestitcher
4 Hedron Crab
3 Monstrous Carabid
4 Rotting Rats
4 Sedraxis Specter
4 Viscera Dragger
4 Grim Discovery
1 Ponder
4 Tome Scour

Sideboard
3 Blister Beetle
3 Deathmark
3 Immortal Coil
2 Kederekt Leviathan
4 Spreading Seas


“You can’t call that deck Dredge!” the old man cries in futility. “There’s no actual cards with Dredge in it! Dredge is a specific mechanic, you maniac kids!” This deck doesn’t care. Sunglasses on, it’s skateboarding down the railing of your grandparents house while playing a wicked guitar solo. “Whatever, dude,” it says as it slams a Gogurt in like two seconds. This Dredge deck doesn’t care about your “rules.”

Like the original Dredge decks, this one has one goal for its early turns: put cards in its graveyard. It has Hedron Crab, Tome Scour, and a bunch of dudes with Cycling to do that. Then, the real engine of the deck comes online: Crypt of Agadeem. Unlike the original Dredge decks, which looked at spending mana the same way that gazelles look at lions, this one can power out some huge things with Crypt for 15, then untapping it with Fatestitcher, then Unearthing pretty much the entire graveyard in one turn. Then, the Extractor Demon triggers means your opponent’s library disappears.

It’s not the fastest graveyard-based deck ever made, but it has a surprising amount of disruption with Rotting Rats and Sedraxis Specter. Even if your engine isn’t fully operational, you can still just cast guys and make attacks and blocks until your graveyard is in a better state. If they use removal, well, there’s a decent chance they’ll see those creatures attacking them again soon.

It’s called “Dredge” because “graveyard-based deck that put a lot of cards in its graveyard to use it as a resource before instantly killing the opponent” was too long, and decks this effective need something snappier than that.

Additional commentary: I was worried the opening paragraph, especially the Gogurt reference, would get edited into oblivion. Instead, Justin linked the word to an image of the product. The man is a true artist in numerous ways.

don't pass conspiracies in cube

It’s pretty common that I’ll disagree with people about how good certain things are. It’s pretty rare that I’ll know for a fact that I’m right, and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. Conspiracy-type cards in cube are unbelievably powerful, and the only reason people would disagree is not playing with or thinking about them enough.

I know that not everyone is on the same page as me, because I’ve seen discussions pop up: “how high do you take Backup Plan?” First, obviously. “Well, there are a few conspiracies that seem good enough, but the Hidden Agenda ones don’t seem powerful enough for my cube.” The Hidden Agenda cards will immediately be among the best cards in your cube, and it doesn’t matter what kind of cube you have.

First, let’s categorize them. There are four good non-Hidden Agenda conspiracies:

Backup Plan
Power Play
Advantageous Proclamation
Worldknit (this one is a bit weirder; I’ll get to it)

There are six good Hidden Agenda Conspiracies:

Iterative Analysis
Unexpected Potential
Brago’s Favor
Double Stroke
Muzzio’s Preparations
Secrets of Paradise

Here’s what all conspiracies have in common: they don’t go in your deck. Normal drafts, where you’re struggling for 23 playables, are a bit different than cube, where you might have 5-15 cards you don’t want in your deck. Every card you pick is forcing out another card, and chances are, there are good reasons for the card leaving your deck to go in; there’s even a decent chance you picked it highly and were pretty excited to play with it. Drafting a card that doesn’t take up space in your deck is a very big deal. This already puts conspiracies in a good place.

Then, you get to actually looking at the global conspiracies, and holy god are they good. Backup Plan is more powerful than any card in a Modern, Legacy, or otherwise non-powered cube, and the only question is whether it should get picked over Sol Ring, Black Lotus, and other cards at the peak of powered cube. As long as you have one card of that power level, you should absolutely take Backup Plan: you have twice as good a chance of having that Ring or Lotus in your opening hand. (Actually, slightly more than that: as your deck gets smaller, you are more and more likely to draw it.) Cards like Preordain are in Cube—and actually quality cards—because they make our initial draws better. Backup Plan does about ten times as good a job of that. Your hand is better half the time, and you practically never mulligan, and the best cards in your deck are far, far easier to find.

Power Play is the other easy one. If we assume that playing first in cube gives the player about a 55% win rate (I don’t have the data, but I think it’s around that), a 5% increase in win rate per game is monstrous, and very difficult for even the best cards in any deck to do that by themselves. It won’t visibly win the game by itself like a lot of powerful cards do, but again, you get it every game. Slight advantages every other game add up to a similar effect as a windmill first-pick powerful spell.

Advantageous Proclamation is very straightforwardly useful. I don’t think it’s nearly as good as the above two, because it’s a fairly marginal benefit: you cut the worst three spells in your deck (not easy), so your other cards get drawn marginally more often. I don’t think it results in too much net increase in power level, but it’s still noticeable.

Worldknit is the real oddball. It’s not good, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun to make it work. I can’t remember ever being as happy during the drafting portion as I was making a Worldknit cube deck: started mono-blue, then Worldknit, into Mutavault (!!!) then every good spell in GWUB, including a very late Chained to the Rocks. 40 spells, 21 Mountains, 5 nonbasics. My deck wasn’t close to as good as the people who had drafted actually powerful conspiracies, but sometimes that’s not what it’s about. If you’re actually trying to win a draft with conspiracies in it, I wouldn’t recommend being the Worldknit deck. However, if you pass Worldknit, you will be immediately be branded as The Worldknit Passer and correctly mocked the rest of your life for it. Look at all the fun you passed up. Look at it.

Now, to the real meat of the disagreement: how good are Hidden Agendas? The immediate reaction people have is that they’re not very good in cube, because you only have one of every card! You actually have to draw the card! Draw a card that you drafted!

Shockingly, it’s not that difficult to draw a card that’s in your deck. Believe me, I checked: every game, you draw seven cards in your opening hand, and hopefully, some of those are ones that you drafted. It does happen. Not even the most obnoxious of variance-induced-tilters, or black-turtleneck-clad of fatalists, will claim that drafting Jace is pointless because you have to draw it.

Say you’re drafting blue, and 12th pick, you get a Divination. Why is Divination in the cube? Whatever. Then, next pack, you get a Thirst for Knowledge. Hell yeah! That card is so good! So, you build your deck, and Thirst makes it, but Divination doesn’t. That makes sense.

You spent a pick to upgrade your Divination to Thirst for Knowledge. That’s what Hidden Agendas do, except that some of them do it a lot better.

You can probably get a Preordain in the middle of a pack. But what if you have Double Stroke? Scry 2, draw a card, then Scry 2, draw a card… that’s power nine-level. Mana Leak for U is absolutely unbelievable. Even with something as dinky as Miscalculation that you can get fairly late, you now have a super-Force Spike, and Force Spike was already a first pick-caliber card. Lingering Souls that draws a card on both ends is disgusting. A one-mana creature that’s already good enough to play, but now it taps for mana, is quite a bit better than Birds of Paradise, which again: already a first-pick.

What Hidden Agendas do is allow you to build your own top-tier cards, either by making your best cards practically unbeatable, or making your 23rd card as good as your first.

Overall, I’d rank them like this:

Backup Plan
Power Play
Double Stroke
(Extremely good cards go here: power, etc)
Iterative Analysis
Brago’s Favor
(Other classic first-picks go here: Karn, Jace, Swords, etc)
Secrets of Paradise
Muzzio’s Preparations
Advantageous Proclamation
Unexpected Potential
(NOW ENTERING THE --->FUN ZONE<--- br=""> Worldknit

The one that people might overrate a bit is Unexpected Potential. Unlike the other cards on the list, it requires you to have an off-color card that otherwise could not make your deck. The only exception is if you just make an already-playable card easier to cast, in which case you deserve a medal for being the world’s most boring person. The medal is brown.

This requirement means that it’s forcing a card that would otherwise make your deck out, and you might have to pick that good off-color card over something that might make your deck better already. This probably isn’t a good way to play Jace in your green-red deck, because you’re passing some good cards to get it. A better use is playing something that goes around late because of color requirements, like Cruel Ultimatum, Sphinx’s Revelation, or a multicolored planeswalker. The best use I’ve seen is Qasali Pridemage in a mono-red deck. Unexpected Potential certainly has its place, and rewards creativity, but I wouldn’t pick it over the best spells like I would the better conspiracies.

Hopefully, everyone reading is on board with The Truth that conspiracies are incredibly powerful. So… should they go in your cube? The answer is probably not, at least not long-term.

After some drafts with them, they change things a lot. The normal rules of what cards cost what, and have what effect, go out the window. The first draft I did with conspiracies, my first-round opponent led with turn one Plains, Stoneforge Mystic, search up Batterskull, go. My turn one was not quite as exciting.

It’s a similar experience to powered cube: lots of incredibly powerful things happening, laughing and calling over friends to watch what happens, huge blowout games that start with things like one-mana Farseek that gets copied.

It’s a very different, and fun, experience once in a while, and I encourage everyone who wants to spice up their drafting to give them a shot a couple times, but if you have a lower-powered deck through no fault of your own, it can get rather exhausting. Some matches feel completely out of hand before they even start because of the power level you’re looking down, which isn’t a good experience. It’s definitely a time where the peak of the fun happens in the first or second game, but after a match or two, I wanted to shuffle up and try another draft.

The exception to this is Worldknit. While I think it would get a bit boring to see someone with a huge Worldknit pile every single draft (especially since they probably will not win most of their matches), drafting it is really, really fun, and any open-minded cube designer should throw it in if not permanently, then once in a while. I specifically recommend putting it in when the other conspiracies aren’t in, and not running Worldknit when they are. A 66-card concoction isn’t going to stand much of a chance against the better Backup Plan or Double Stroke decks, but free from their oppression, it might do pretty well as the only conspiracy in the draft. It might trainwreck the draft of the person to their left due to the incredibly confusing “signals;” whether this is a disadvantage or a hilarious bonus is up to the reader.

I probably wouldn’t put Advantageous Proclamation in a cube, because it’s just not a very interesting card to draft. Yes, the deck that has it gets a bit more consistent. But there’s no interesting impact it has; it’s just an across-the-board slight increase in everything. It’s more of a modifier on a spreadsheet than a Magic card. No one is having a better time because they have Advantageous Proclamation under almost any circumstances.

If you’re drafting with Conspiracies, just take them. If you’re building a cube, consider them carefully, but know that your Magic drafts might not resemble Magic as you know it.

the case for full-art lands

Today I will happily write about something I know nothing about: graphic design. What I lack in traditional graphic design schooling I hope to make up with my knowledge of Sweet Basic Lands.

Wizards has released full-art lands with three different sets: Unglued, Unhinged, and Zendikar. All of them were received extremely well, and both the Unglued and Unhinged lands started selling for more individually than the packs retailed for, which was quite the accomplishment as there was one in every pack. Zendikar’s basic lands got more attention than almost anything else in the set, save for maybe the return of fetchlands and the rarity of Lotus Cobra. Even when the set was being opened en masse and the full-art lands were everywhere, people were constantly haggling over them and trading for the ones with the art they liked the most. It’s one of the very few times that Magic players seemed to care about the aesthetics of their cards, rather than just using the shiniest/rarest/most expensive versions whenever they could.

Wizards was understandably pleased with the warm reception, and made sure to make clear that the full-art lands were a special thing for Zendikar, and would not be in every set, but that they would come back at some point. That was five years ago, and every set since then has had normal, boring, same-old normal-frame lands.

Full-art lands should not be a once-every-five-or-six-years thing. They should be on every basic land, every time.

There are good reasons for this.

They make learning the game easier.

I’ve taught the game to a bunch of people. One of the standard steps is explaining what lands are, why they are important, and that, after they untap and draw, they should check to see if they have a land to play. In these early games, the only lands in the decks are basics. Full-art lands make it very easy to tell the difference between lands and spells, because they really stand out.

Say that you’re a brand-new player, and this first game will teach you the rules of Magic. You’ve heard the thirty-second summary before launching in. This is your first hand:

Could you pick out what the land is, without assistance from the person teaching you? Maybe. You could look at the name of the card. The shading is slightly different. There are some subtle aesthetic differences that distinguish the basic land from the spells.

Now, say you’re in the exact same spot, but this is your hand instead:

Which would be easier?

Let’s not play around, here. I was making those images, and even I wasn’t prepared for the night-and-day difference in how much clearer it is to use Zendikar basics.

The benefits to new players would be enormous if all basic lands were full-art: they would instantly be able to recognize which of their cards were basics. This might be a small thing, but it’s a very, very important one. Acquisition is every bit as important as Wizards keeps telling us it is, and acquisition doesn’t just mean changing marketing strategies. It means changing the game visually to make it look better and cleaner.

Way back when, Portal came out, introducing the “big mana symbol in text box” look to make the lands stand out more to new players. They then realized that the same concepts applied to the lands in every set, so they made it the default. Now it’s time for the next logical step.

They make looking at the board state easier.

This works exactly the same as above, except this time, it’s with experienced players.

You’re moseying along against some awful mono-red deck playing terrible cards, and you are paying attention to the creatures in play and the cards in hand and what each person might draw and the life totals and the time left in the round and how his Mutavault affects the race, and you’re fine with him blocking with Mutavault, so you attack, and… oh, hell.

Now, instead, imagine that everyone instead uses exclusively full-art basics.

A lot clearer, isn’t it?

People like them.

Here’s the last one, and it’s a big one. People absolutely love full-art lands. People like looking at Magic art, and the cool art featured on cards can even be a reason that people decide to take a closer look at the game. If every basic land had that amazing full-art frame, that would be a lot more cards devoted to showing off the high quality of modern Magic art to people that don’t play.

There’s a reason that, five years since Zendikar was printed, people are still trading for, buying, and playing with non-foil versions of them every chance they can get. The set sold a lot, and there was a full-art basic land in every single pack, and still people pay $1-$2 per land to use in every deck they have, or hundreds of lands for their Cubes. People want to use the full-art lands all the time, and Wizards disagrees.

Their reasoning is pretty bad to now print them more often, usually along the lines of how they want them to be special and a big deal when they appear. But things don’t have to come every six years for people to enjoy them: people like Dragons, and Angels, and fun draft environments, and Terese Nielsen art, and they make sure those happen more often than once every six years. Sure, they wouldn’t be unique if every set had full-art lands, but is a lack of uniqueness really so bad? They would replace a mediocre-looking thing with a cool-looking one, therefore making Magic an overall more aesthetically pleasing, easier-to-learn, and overall more attractive game.

Isn’t that what we all want?

Print full-art basic lands. Every basic, every set.

If people don’t like them, there have been two dozen years of non-full-art lands to choose from. I’ll probably stick with Portal Three Kingdoms basics, myself.

we want women to play our game, or whatever

Hello, ladies. We sure would love if you’d put down your nail polish and try our card game. It’s, like, totally spectacular! There are SO MANY women who are already playing this game. As an example, here’s a mid-level employee at our company that plays Magic! All her superiors are male. She’s dating one of them.

We’ve tried literally everything imaginable to get women to play our game. There’s a woman who writes 200-word pieces for our site a couple times a week. This one time, we even had a woman design some cards for us. She’s a programmer now.

There are women in our card art. Please feast your eyes on some Steve Argyle-illustrated women, Identify with them, and maybe dress up? Y’all like dressing up, and stuff. So do that.

Did you see that one Elspeth? She’s super pretty. She plays Magic, I think.

Hey! You like vampires? We have vampires. I mean, do you actually like vampires? We did a market research poll from people that currently play our game and heard that vampires are fine. We think they’re a Women Thing? I don’t really get it, myself, but whatever. It’s for the ladies! I’m all for anything you girls are into.

Look, let’s cut to the chase. We measure our game’s popularity by how many people show up on a Friday night to organized competitive tournaments populated mostly by people who’ve played the game for five years, and all you women are really letting us down. You act like there’s something stopping you from going to these!

Is it the card backs? We can change those. Did you know we almost made them pink for Arabian Nights? We didn’t. But we could.

Do you not even know how to play? God, you women are so needy. Just walk up to any group of guys you don’t know and ask them to teach you. Boom! Done! Next. Problem.

It’s not like we haven’t thought about this before. We’ve had meetings. We have all our best guys on the subject. We even followed their recommendation and made the foils shinier. They’re SO shiny now, you have no idea.

Have you heard of Felicia Day? She’s this SMOKIN’ hot babe (all of us are totally into her) and she plays Magic. She’s also a woman.

I know! Okay. I’ve got it. You girls are going to LOVE this. You know those game designers you love, like the Penny Arcade guys? We’re gonna get them to design cards for us! Oh my god this is such a great idea. We’ll get like, fifteen different guys to design cards for us and even put their names on the cards. You girls are sure to be a fan of at least one of those men, and then you’ll play our game. I’m getting a promotion for this.

I’m on a roll here. I can feel it. Okay. You know all those girlfriends you have, and you like talk about whatever it is, and you’re like “omahgawwwd there are like no single guys” well check THIS out: Single guys! Magic tournaments! Tons of them! They’ll practically be lining up to talk to you! They will probably even literally line up to talk to you. That will be the best thing. Come on, you’ll love it.

Let us know what you think, ladies.

-Wizards of the Coast Division of Female Outreach

destroy magic online and start over

Magic Online is doomed. Magic Online has doomed us all. Magic Online must die.

This is not something reformable. We have had eleven years for potential reform, and it all leads us back to the same place: a bad interface for an unstable product with a bad economy. In an age when online games are so much larger than real-life ones, there’s a good reason why Magic Online is a niche product: it is bad. Only people who are already extremely invested in playing Magic will ever bother with Magic Online.

Its badness is not limited to the recent crashes, the crashes that suddenly matter because Brian Kibler was the one to write about them. Look up announcements about previous Magic Online crashes: this sort of behavior has been going on for ten years with very little in the way of improvement since then. Tournaments should not crash due to having a thousand people in them. They should not crash with ten thousand people in them. If Wizards wants ten thousand people to play Magic Online, they should make Magic Online capable of holding ten thousand people.

Magic Online does a great job of implementing the rules system of Magic. This is overlooked, and people pay too much attention to relatively minor card-by-card bugs in the program. These are understandable, because Magic is complicated. But the outside-of-game bugs shed a lot more light on how horrific Magic Online is: if you are in the finals of an 8-4 draft in first place and drop, you get the first place prize. Instead of removing people’s ratings from the client, it simply has an image that covers them up, so if you’re really fast you can still see rating. How could this possibly happen? Why are there hacks upon hacks to keep the program functioning?

Why does Magic Online stress a new computer more than actual commercial games?

Why is Magic Online the only online game in existence that can’t handle the slightest bit of network instability?

Why does Magic Online randomly disconnect players who are on rock-solid connections, not inform the player they’ve been disconnected, and expect them to find workarounds to get back in the game?

Why are we okay with this?

Even if Magic Online was recoded from the ground up to be stable, reliable, and well-programmed, it would still be bad. The founding principles of Magic Online were made in 2002, and have barely changed since then, while the rest of online games have had a sea change in the way that we interact with each other through games, and how money and time relate to online games. Namely: “free to play” exists now.

The basic ideas behind F2P are that when a player plays a game, they should be rewarded for the time they invest in it, and not charged. But, if they want to hurry up their progress, or get cool new things, they have to spend money. Magic Online is exactly the opposite: as phantom queues show, Wizards sees the act of simply playing some Magic and not getting any cards as something they should charge for. This is insane. If people just want to play the game for the joy of playing it, the system should reward that, not expect revenue from it. If I feel like playing some games of League of Legends, not only will I not pay for it, I’ll get some points for winning or losing that, over time, I can use toward new heroes.

Why doesn’t Magic Online do this? Because it’s from 2002, not 2013.

The Magic Online economy makes no sense. Instead of players spending money for cards and getting those cards, they have to jump through a thousand hoops with a jerry-rigged “trading” system in order to spend tickets to acquire cards. There are thousands of bots offering the same things, and no in-client way to look up prices, and no way to check stock without opening a trade with the bots. Want to spend five cents on something? Fuck you. No sane person would wish for this to be the system, but it’s evolved that way, so… guess we’re stuck with it.

This is one of the plainest examples of the sunk-cost fallacy that I can think of. “We can’t just start over,” says Wizards of the Coast, about their program that desperately needs to be started over. “We’ve sunk so much time an energy into it! It’s been working just fine for eleven years!”

It has not been working fine for eleven years. It has, in fact, sucked.

If they invest the money necessary to rebuild Magic Online for the modern era, they risk making a program that could actually get players into the game. A program that allows players to play for free, and then monetizes it by having them spend money on packs. A program with an honest-to-god auction house, to buy and sell cards for in-game money, in order to build decks.

A program that isn’t a program, because it runs through a web browser, because again: 2013.

Magic Online running as an iPad app, connecting without issue to tournaments filled with players from all over the world.

This won’t happen. Wizards will keep throwing fix after fix at Magic Online, desperately trying to get it to crash slightly less often, working just well enough that only their digital division is embarrassed when a well-known player talks about it, instead of the entire company.

gtav review: chaos, linearity, and the open world test

Sometimes while playing GTAV, I didn’t think the designers of the game knew what made it fun.

The important part, of course, is that the game is still fun. How can it not be? It’s Grand Theft Auto in a new city, with Rockstar’s ever-present attention to detail and quality, and the reviews have been universally lavish. Going around jacking cars, causing chaos, and escaping from cops is the same as it has been (with some improvements) since GTA3. ^[1]

But other times, like thirty seconds after I start doing yoga or in yet another shootout, I sigh and wonder if maybe someone has been whispering evil things into the designers’ ears. Things like, “the game needs more distractions that have nothing to do with the enormous world in the game,” or “players really just want to have gunfights with bad guys all the time.”

Of course, the game needs missions and things outside of the main campaign around the city. But these should always remind the player that they are playing Grand Theft Auto. Many of the game’s side-missions accomplish this beautifully; the ones that have Franklin working with a paparazzi are perfect at merging an unglamorous occupation with extant mechanics and a healthy dose of satire (this sort of mashup is a GTA series staple, and among the reasons I’ve grown to love it), but I have no idea what golf, tennis, yoga, etc etc etc are doing in the game. One of the properties players can buy unlocks the opportunity to slowly meander underwater in search of nuclear waste. I wish I was making that up. I cannot imagine the state of mind one would have to think this is what people are looking for in this series.

If it was limited to entirely skippable and irrelevant diversions, that wouldn’t affect my opinion of the game hardly at all. But it’s not. The main missions, the heart and soul of the game, fall into the same trap that GTA4 and San Andreas^[2] did: here are some guys in a small area. Kill them all. GTA4, in a decision I would use a time machine to go back and change long before I considered using the device to assassinate Hitler,^[3] introduced cover-based shooting to the series; GTAV, on more missions than not, will have you slowly advancing through conveniently-placed half-height blocks and other miscellaneous objects in order to kill all the enemies.

This is dumb. The strengths of the game are not in gunplay. Despite promises with each release that the shooting is way better this time really we mean it, the only way to get through these is still with habitual abuse of the autoaim system in a way that feels cheap and gamey every firefight. The best way to dispatch unseen enemies is releasing aim, then re-aiming to lock onto them and hit them with a shotgun blast. This is needed because the way players are intended to use the autoaim, by flicking the right stick from one side to the other to go to the next enemy, is a bit finicky and will sometimes unhelpfully aim slightly next to the now-dead body instead of finding the guy with a shotgun who is having no trouble blasting you.

This inspires me to come up with this simple test for all future developers of open-world games: when doing a mission, is the player doing anything that they could not have done in a specific genre game (eg racing, shooter, helicopter sim)? If they are not, it should probably not be in your open world game. The most notable breaking of this rule was most egregious in Far Cry 3, a critically-praised game that had a few interesting tasks for the player when roaming around (but not too many), and a main story that had the player repeatedly walking down extended linear hallways over and over to trigger the next half-cinematic. There are plenty of fine linear games that do their thing and they are more than welcome to do that, but let’s separate the two categories of linear and open-world games a bit more here. Players who pop in an open-world game should be able to get away from the rigid structure of linear games, and today’s open world games aren’t providing this.^[4]

The open world with linear quests is a formula that feels built on budget-dictated compromise, whereas its inverse of a linear story with several ways to get past each obstacle feels much more rewarding. Deus Ex is the canonical example of this,^[5] but games like MGS3 that people actually bought did it as well, and Hitman: Blood Money implemented it absolutely beautifully in a way that is unlikely to be replicated any time soon. The times when GTAV lets the player approach something however they want provide some of the best missions: in one, the player has to hijack a slow-moving truck in a heavily-defended caravan, and I wanted to play that mission over and over trying out different tactics. On the other hand, an open-ended assassination mission just led me to stand by the mission’s start point, wait an eternity for him to leave the hotel, and snipe him, then run away. Mission complete. Hooray?

The big introduction to the series is heists, and I was extremely impressed by how they were executed. The structure of a heist gives a great natural progression to the missions,^[6] the heists themselves have multiple ways the player can choose to do them,^[7] they’re affected in noticeable ways by the NPCs the player decides to hire for that mission (and while that’s all scripted, it still led to great moments of “thank god I hired THAT woman” and “oh no, why did I pick this dumbass?”), and the heists themselves are the most fun missions in the game.

I can’t discuss this without spoiling something about the heists: there are barely any. In fact, there are five, and one of those has no options for hiring people, while another one has no options to it (and only one person to hire) and is just another “kill all the enemies” mission. The game makes a huge deal out of showing you how to do heists and how the people will get better the more you use them, which makes the fact that you’ll only use your hacker once more in the entire game feel really shitty.

A radical idea, then: the game’s big new mechanic/theme is heists, and the heists are super fun, and the idea of them is that you use the same people from one to the other, so why weren’t there more? Like, a LOT more? Why aren’t 90% of the main story missions either heist or heist-setup-related? Instead, it’s more killing of guys.

For decades now, action games have half-assedly implemented stealth systems. The difference between a true stealth game and the accursed half-assed stealth system is pretty clear: in a stealth game, you can stealth around all the time, not just in the 10% of it when it explicitly tells you “HEY, BE SNEAKY NOW OR YOU’LL AUTO-LOSE.” Real stealth games have levels of enemy awareness between having no idea where the player is and actively shooting at them. Real stealth games don’t have cinematics that trigger enemies all automatically knowing the player’s location, with no chance to re-stealth. (Real stealth games have re-stealthing, by the way.) One of the game’s least excusable anti-fun interactions is that when a player misses a shot with a silenced gun on a foe. The foe will immediately know where the player is, start shooting, and all the other enemies start running toward you. For the sake of fun gameplay, missing a shot should do nothing, and alerting an enemy should leave a good half-second window for the player to recover by taking them out before they tell their buddies where you are.

GTAV apparently thought enough of its stealth mechanics to make it one of the stats that characters have. The stats in this game are a completely unnecessary addition to the game that serve no real gameplay purpose. The characters already had differentiation via their different abilities, and there was never a time playing on a character when I consciously thought “gee, I wish I was playing a character that was better at this thing I’m doing.” And if it doesn’t affect gameplay, then what’s the point?

The writing in the series has long been the shining example of the best the video game world has to offer, and that continues here… mostly. Michael and Trevor have a great dynamic,^[8] but Franklin is just kind of… there. I assume he’s supposed to be some sort of audience stand-in, because he’s mostly reasonable but wants to generally earn money and maybe kill/rob people if necessary, or whatever. It’s like his entire storyline was cut at the last minute. The satire that runs through the game (as it has through all Grand Theft Auto titles), though, fell much flatter in this one than in previous games. It’s like they were going through the motions: gotta make fun of Big Tech Trends one and two and the latest best-selling game series, right? Part of what felt off about it, though, was that after a dozen years of us living in the modern era of Grand Theft Auto, hasn’t the series itself elevated to the point where, had it been any other game, it would be the one getting parodied? Why isn’t the son in the game playing a game based on GTAV, since it’s the best-selling game in the world?

Does this come across as nitpicking a game that’s really good? It should. I spent about 30 hours in GTAV over four days, and I worked a full shift on two of those days. I enjoyed the game. But when this much time and money (and money and money and money) is sunk into a AAA project that gets unanimously adoring reviews, we should examine each aspect of it a bit closer.


^[1] This is slightly unfair to the newer iterations of the game. If one goes back to the GTA3-based games, it’s pretty obvious that the escaping-from-cop mechanics were, well, bad. You were basically not supposed to get away from them once you got to a certain level. The whole “find a pay-and-spray” thing was just never a good idea, and the game improved substantially when it went away from that model entirely.

^[2] I did not enjoy San Andreas very much. The missions were tedious, and the open world combined with a lack of anything interesting in the empty space made the game, well, boring.

^[3] Much less risky. Assassinating Hitler never works out well.

^[4] Game developers today seem extremely hesitant to release a player in an open world with the intent of genuinely letting them wander. This used to be very common: even those series we think of as linear, like Final Fantasy, used to have extended portions of the game where the player was simply thrown into a place and expected to stumble across something resembling a plot five hours in. There’s a reason we’ve moved away from this, of course: it sucked. It was a confusing mess with no reasons given to the player as to why they’re doing what they’re doing. A better-executed example of a good open world would be the first Fallout, where the player has a set end goal that they need to accomplish, and the feeling of wandering with only a vague direction in mind perfectly mirrored the vast world with only scattered civilization. Sure, it could have used a bit more guidance at times. But these pseudo-open-world games with a rigid linear quest and irrelevant durdling available are just total bullshit.

^[5] Only a few thousand people bought Deus Ex when it first came out, but everyone who did started an unreadable blog about game design.

^[6] This reminded me of the wonderful set of Thieves’ Guild sidequests in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where the player undergoes a series of smaller heists that all yield one important item that is needed at a critical time in The Big Final Heist. Instead of seemingly-unrelated quests involving just stealing stuff, I felt like I was really doing something productive toward a set goal, and the payoff during and after TBFH made everything worth it.

^[7] Okay, two ways. Still counts.

^[8] This includes a car ride where Michael accuses Trevor of being a hipster, and it rivals Portal in how good it is as comedy writing.

more magic jobs that can make you $$$REAL CASH MONEY$$$

Okay so we all play this game, right, but let’s set all that “game” shit aside for a second and focus on the real question: how can I make Real Cash Money off of intolerable nerds with too much of their parents money. Remember, the bank takes $20 bills even if they smell like a Five Guys Fart Burrito. That’s where I come in: I’m here to tell YOU what YOU need to focus on with this *makes a shitload of air quotes* Trading Card Game.

1. Creepy Exploitative Coach of Small Children

Basically you’d convince a bunch of parents and the like to get you to “teach” their kid Magic: the Gathering, and that would involve berating them constantly and make their entire life revolve around Magic: the Gathering like it does for any “true” pro player. Hopefully, we get to a point where if you haven’t been playing since you were in Necrotic Ooze-filled diapers, the game will be totally inaccessible to you since you have absolutely no skill and probably do things like play “other games” in your spare time, scrubbo. But don’t worry if you can’t actually “play Magic” or “teach Magic” or “interact with children,” because that won’t be your job at all! You just get them to play it nonstop, make sure they sign a binding contract that entitles you to a huge chunk of their lifetime earnings, and have no social contacts outside of you so they don’t know that you’re actually awful in every conceivable way!

2. Screaming Head

We already have a ton of people that will vehemently give their overly-sensational kneejerk reactions on a website, but do you really expect people to read??? Read words??? In 2013??? Please. This is the Information Age, and information should be delivered VERY LOUDLY. What Magic needs is the equivalent of ESPN, where people can yell at each other about whether a certain player is “elite” and give absolutely no useful content or context about anything so that casual observers understand that Magic is a thing that people care very, very deeply about. Let’s face facts, having people berate each other for hours will be way more interesting than goddamn Eggs matches.

3. Payday Loan Service Specifically for Magic Players

When smart people look at a community like Magic pros who travel constantly on a limited budget and have an unreliable source of income, you know what they really see? Profit. Like, I’m just spitballing ideas here, but if payday loan companies can blatantly market themselves to minority groups and low-income people living paycheck to paycheck, why can’t you do the same but like instead of “500% annual interest” it’s like a “Tarmogoyf Loan” because if you don’t constantly check how big it is you’ll probably just die. Look, these are just ideas.

4. Magic Pro Groupie

Self-explanatory.

5. Motivational Speakers

Basically they don’t like help you get better or entertain you or act worthwhile in any way, they just remind you that “hey! You’re not wasting your life away at all, you’re doing something really useful by learning to play Magic! It could even, like, lead you to playing more Magic and we know how great that is!” You see, Magic players oftentimes will feel weird guilt-esque feelings like hey maybe I should be having sex instead. But no. No that is bad. So just tell them like “no you should not be having sex, also you look great. $100 please.” This idea is pretty much Travis Woo but for money.

6. Inside Trader

Okay have you ever seen the salaries that Wizards people make? Ahahaha they suck so bad. They get all these applicants that are all “hello I am competent professional that will design good client for Magic Online Digital Objects, please pay me a rate that is competitive with what I could be making at a similar non-game-related position” and Wizards be all “haha nerp” because some guy’s resume said that “like oh my god dudes I love Magic so much!!! Magic for teh epic winzorz!!! I looked at HTML source code once” but they only have to pay THAT dude like $30k. So this is why it’s so important for us to make Real Money off Magic: no one other than the executives at Hasbro is doing that at the moment. Here’s where the real hotness comes in, though: bribery. Yeah son. So you can be all “hey why don’t you tell me what cards will be the best ones two years from now” and they’ll be all “nope” and you’ll be all “I’ll give you $10” and they’ll be like “oh well then sure,” and they give you a list of cards but they actually didn’t playtest enough to find out what would be good. I might not have thought this one through.

7. Go To Magic Tournaments and Steal People’s Bags

This is undoubtedly the best way to make money off Magic.

criticizing a criticism of critiques

Doug Beyer wrote a response to a question on tumblr about dealing with criticism, and it’s started to spread from Magic to the larger Nerd Art Community. As soon as I saw that a Wizards-employed person was writing about criticism, I almost tripped over myself in a silent movie-era slapstick manner to respond to it, because I have deep disagreements with most in the Magic community regarding criticism. Basically, I think it’s a valuable thing, and others disagree.*

Beyer, to his credit, doesn’t say that one should just ignore all criticism… but he starts off by saying that artists should try to see what the author of the criticism was saying. This is completely off, for a few reasons: first, intent is bullshit. I’ve criticized a lot of things in a lot of ways over a lot of different mediums. I’m not sure I could tell you what my intent was for all of them, other than I’m saying what I thought at the time. The artist doesn’t need to put themselves in the shoes of the critic, because all the information they have is there already, without the need to divine the authorial intent of the critic: they can already see the criticisms. They can judge each of those criticisms independently of the critic, and independently of each other.

Let’s use a non-artistic example here. You go for your morning run, since you’re an active, attractive person who cares about your physical health. Unfortunately, you have to deal with an emergency in the morning (eg someone in a forum Mafia game accused you of being scum), and are unable to take your morning shower. You dash into work, and the office bully, who you loathe due to the fact that well he’s just an idiotic bully, tells you that your shirt is “like, so gay” and that you smell “like a gym locker room today.” You can analyze these criticisms independently of who he is, and independently of one another: you know that your shirt (which features an elephant taking a picture of itself with its trunk) is the absolute best, while you smelling bad… there’s a good chance he’s right on that one.

In this case, getting outraged that he’s criticizing you for the smell is probably the wrong way to go. You will not look like a coward caving to a bully if you run out for some deodorant. You will, however, continue to smell terrible if you don’t, and no amount of loud protestation on your part will change this.

On the other hand, if your beloved mother, who has not an unkind bone in her body, comments to you that you will never get anywhere if you continue to wear t-shirts and jeans to work, you can safely smile and nod and entirely ignore that criticism because you work at Google and earn $250k a year. Sometimes, criticism from even your biggest fans and supporters doesn’t mean that you should question something, but instead that those fans and supporters have no idea what they’re talking about.

Especially when it comes to arts-related as opposed to smell-related criticism, there will be plenty of times when you make something that you know is incredible because it was exactly what you were hoping to end up with, and other people just don’t get it at all. These people might have even adored things you’ve made previously, but if you were previously recording solo acoustic guitar songs and now you’re the second coming of Jesus Lizard, it’s pretty safe to ignore that. This isn’t because of who those fans are, or whether they’re trying to hurt or help you, but by the criticism instead. Criticism doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong, and lack of criticism does not mean that something is right. There’s been plenty of great art intended to shock, offend, infuriate, grate, piss off, and even to itself criticize, so if that’s what you’re going for, then a lack of criticism should send up a red flag. People not caring can be worse than criticism.

Mr. Beyer ends by reminding us that criticism is “just words,” so who cares? This is the biggest load of shit I’ve read in quite some time. It’s very possible that what you’ve created is “just mostly-water organisms making vibrations in their throats,” or even markings on a page intended to symbolize that, and if not, then it’s still work made by and (probably) intended for human consumption that won’t affect the larger universe. Human communication is what makes us special as a species, so the communication we have with each other had better matter or we’re all fucked. Since this is all just words, I’d like to remind Mr. Beyer that mdj4jmf8ir.

In short: criticism does matter. It should not be ignored because of who it came from, and neither should it be listened to because of who it came from. Listen to it on its own merits. Sometimes, critics will be wrong. Use criticism as a tool to better make what you want to make.

*For the purposes of keeping this a short response to a specific thing Mr. Beyer wrote, I’ll use the same interpretation of “criticism” he was using, ie negative feedback given to an artist about their work, mostly unrelated to the fields of literary criticism, art criticism, etc. I promise I have some fascinating thoughts relating criticism in the Magic community to the art and ideas of Marcel Duchamp, however.

six games of cube

Somewhere in the Magic: Online user agreement that no one has ever read, there is probably some clause prohibiting more than one person from influencing decisions on a draft, and that clause was written by someone with a PhD in funhating. Everyone should try playing Magic: Online with people they know, because a) it’ll stop you from doing some really dumb things that you would have smacked yourself on the head about five seconds later, b) it’ll make you consider options that never occurred to you, c) you’ll find out what other peoples’ internal monologues are like when they consider drafting/play decisions, d) it’s just a good way to spend an evening.

I arrive at the home of my friend Natalie, who is not just a Google programmer, but by far the most-programmer-y person I know. Her laptop is hooked up to her rather large HDTV, and she is halfway through drafting some sort of mono-red deck in Holiday Cube. Let’s not dwell on this: she drafted mono-red in Holiday Cube, and the lack of success was entirely justified. She is also being advised by a guy named Ben, who advocates for taking combo-esque cards and generally trying to drop nuclear weapons on the play area at all times, an approach I wholeheartedly endorse.

Natalie takes a second to record the results in her master file that tracks all tickets/product incoming and outgoing, and we fire up the next draft. The first pack doesn’t have much of interest to me other than Exhume, so I advise taking that. I had forgotten that she would actually listen to advice I give, and she takes the Exhume. The next pack has some generically Good Spells and a Sneak Attack, which Ben and I passionately lobby for (arguments consist mostly of “it’s Sneak Attack!” and “SNEAK ATTACK!!!”). We follow this up with Myr Battlesphere and Palinchron (unquestionably the most ambitious and cool-seeming but actually not very good of all the cube’s expensive creatures). Our fortunes take a turn for the better in pack two, when we’re passed Mana Vault, then open Sol Ring in pack three. The final decklist:

1 Exhume
1 Sneak Attack
1 Eureka
1 Necromancy
1 Firestorm
1 Goblin Welder
1 Faithless Looting
1 Nether Void
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Wildfire
1 Necropotence

1 Myr Battlesphere
1 Palinchron
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1 Sphinx of the Steel Wind
1 Frost Titan

1 Worn Powerstone
1 Mana Vault
1 Gilded Lotus
1 Selesnya Signet
1 Boros Signet
1 Sol Ring
1 Basalt Monolith
1 Dark Ritual

1 Simic Growth Chamber
1 Gruul Turf
1 Dimir Aqueduct
1 Ancient Tomb
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Bayou
1 Shelldock Isle
2 Island
3 Swamp
3 Mountain
1 Forest

Game one has a hand with lands, Mana Vault, Basalt Monolith, Myr Battlesphere, and Necromancy, so all of our decisions leading up to this moment must have been completely correct. Further cementing this fact, our opponent leads with Karakas, Isamaru, no further lands until turn six. Hopefully, they didn’t offer up their firstborn child in exchange for drawing a land, because on that turn, they play Maze of Ith. By this point, we have Myr Battlesphere in play, and that’s at 50% effectiveness against the Maze. Based on our opponent bouncing Isamaru at EOT with Karakas, we know that they have Balance and are trying to draw the second land for it. When they finally draw the Island to cast it, they’re at eight life. We cast Firestorm for five in response, hitting them and all our creatures, allowing us to cast Necromancy at end of turn on Battlesphere, in order to attack with four tokens, only one of which can be stopped by the Maze.

Game two shows us a couple bad hands, then a five of Swamp, Mountain, Sol Ring, Selesnya Signet, Frost Titan. Our concerns about the potential for Turbo-Nothing are diminished when our first draw is Gilded Lotus. Our opponent curves Isamaru into Nearheath Pilgrim (it really was in Holiday Cube!). We draw Necropotence and cast it off our Gilded Lotus, drawing five, going to 13, then 9 off our opponent’s attack. Their Land Tax seems like the less-effective card advantage engine. We cast Frost Titan tapping a land (in case they have one-mana removal and another land), go to 5 to draw four cards, and block the Pilgrim going to three. Gideon’s Lawkeeper does not seem very effective, either. However, that does leave our opponent with multiple creatures that can attack, and our life total is not too high, so we cast Wildfire, leaving them with a board consisting of Land Tax. Then we attack, tapping Land Tax. Land Tax does not untap, and they have no plays on their turn. We skip our draw step and cast Palinchron off zero lands. Our opponent concedes at 18 life.
Now that we have defeated the cube juggernaut that is White Weenie getting terrible draws, we move on to round two. Our first hand has a black-producing land, Dark Ritual, Necropotence, and I don’t care if that’s not really all that hot in Cube it’s still really cool and retro and all that so stuff it. We go to 15 and discard some reanimation spells and targets.

Our opponent has turn three Izzet Signet into Wake Thrasher (clearly coveting the Basalt Monolith we drafted), which temporarily gives them more of a threat than our Simic Signet into Sneak Attack. They attack us down to 7, because turn one Necropotence is a hell of a self-inflicted clock. Our Nether Void draws Mana Leak, but our Sneak Attack activation resolves. Sphinx of the Steel Wind makes the life totals a bit more palatable. On their next turn, he attacks into open red mana, which leads to Sneak Attacking Goblin Welder, which leads to Sphinx, which leads to them conceding.

Our game two hand has lands, Mana Vault Worn Powerstone, Sneak Attack, Nether Void. We play Nether Void on turn two. They concede. We high five over our ability to outplay our opponents.

Round three leads with Faithless Looting, discarding Dark Ritual and Necropotence. We continue our earlier high-fives, this time for having the presence of mind to avoid Cool Things and make The Tight Play. Anyway, our first spell is Basalt Monolith on turn three, and on turn four, we’re at six life facing down Treetop Village, Flinthoof Boar, Boggart Ram-Gang, and a Bloodbraid Elf that cascaded into Sword of Fire and Ice. We cast Eureka in order to put Myr Battlesphere and Sneak Attack into play. We choose not to put Emrakul into play for free. We Sneak Attack Emrakul, and our opponent concedes.

In what COULD BE the final game of this report, our hand has a bunch of lands, Sol Ring, Frost Titan, Emrakul. My rules about keeping hands that can cast Sol Ring are fairly strict. We draw a couple more artifact mana sources in the first couple turns, then draw and cast Wildfire on the third turn, leaving our opponent with Chrome Mox (R/G from Boggart Ram-Gang) and Sword of Fire and Ice. A couple turns later, we add Gilded Lotus to our magnificent collection of mana sources, and that leads to Frost Titan the turn after. The second-most-heated debate of the night: do we tap Treetop Village or Chrome Mox? Magic is a difficult game. We go for the Village. Our opponent attempts a comeback with a 1/1 Stormblood Berserker, which we swiftly lock up with our next Frost Titan attack. They cleverly equip the Sword to the tapped creature, preventing us from tapping it in the future. We draw Vampiric Tutor, and are faced with the most crucial decision: how do we hardcast the Emrakul in our hand? We use some of our remaining clock time to stage formal debates about whether to tutor for Dark Ritual or Mana Vault. The conclusion is that the most dramatic possible play is to cast Emrakul off nothing but permanent mana sources.

So we do. Cube is great.

What did we accomplish in this draft? We ended up with a deck that doesn’t play like anything from any “real” limited format, of course, because Cube decks rarely resemble non-Cube limited decks. We got a deck with the rare virtue of being able to surprise us as we were playing it. This is quite a difficult attribute to end up with, as decks constructed for the purpose of winning games value consistency as a path to victory, and surprise can only come via the deck doing different things. In the six games, the deck did a different thing every time, and they were each spectacular in their own way. Did these wonderful conclusions occur against the best decks in situations that gave our opponents the best possible chance to be competitive? Absolutely not. Our opponents had some combination of terrible decks and terrible draws the entire time, but that only served to reinforce our perception.

Drafting Cube is like a personality test to tell you what you enjoy about playing Magic. People will naturally drift toward certain archetypes, while justifying each decision they make as the logically sound one; others unapologetically force the same archetype every draft they do. Drafts like this one are the best tool for reinforcing notions people had going in. It would probably take at least five complete disasters attempting this sort of deck before I even consider it’s not a very good strategy, solely because of this one fantastic experience. It would be easy for anyone to read this and nod their head, saying how they can plainly see that it was all the result of good luck, but will you say the same thing about your own draft when everything goes perfectly? What about when you draft the same deck you always do and it collapses in every game?

Part of what gives Magic such lasting appeal is the amount of variety in decks and archetypes. Not because players enjoy playing twelve entirely different decks, but because they settle on one strategy as Their Thing, and play it at every opportunity in every format, and if there’s nothing close to it in a certain format, then that format obviously sucks and is no fun.

Cube is another example of how, as Magic has aged, the community has obtained more and more power in designing their own experiences. When Magic was brand new and everyone was bad, all players were able to control was what colors they played (since picking two colors and playing every card in those colors was the best way to get enough cards for a deck). Then, when people bought way more cards than the designers of the game assumed they would, Deck Design became a possibility; players controlled not just the plays made within a game, but what game pieces they had, and that was a crucial step forward in game design. Years passed, and the large number of players and cards necessitates separating Magic into “type one” and “type two;” now players could control what cards other people would be playing, and go into tournaments knowing roughly what to expect. More and more formats followed, obviously, but Cube is the first way to play that puts power previously allocated only to Wizards in the hands of players: Cube isn’t really a format, but a structure for people to design their own formats. The designer of a specific Cube chooses what aspects of Magic to include or disregard, and if that designer doesn’t like a certain strategy, playstyle, or card type, it may as well not exist for the purpose of that Cube. The designer gets to unilaterally revise the history of Magic to their liking, and the participants play games from some of the cards they selected which came from some of the cards the designer selected.

When I first visited Seattle about a year ago, I had never played cube before. Then, when I moved here six months after that, it became the default way to play Magic with people I was hanging out with. Cube requires no additional money from people playing, no one needs cards other than the person providing the cube, and it’s perfectly at the intersection of playing Magic because playing Magic is fun and playing Magic to win. I would still go to tournaments, sure, but then I would leave with the miserable feeling that really, I’d have enjoyed myself more if I had been playing cube, which led me to the even-more-miserable realization that I, Jesse Mason, have become that thing I’ve been trying to escape, trying to overcome, trying to be better than for the last dozen years: I have become a casual player. I am no longer interested in trying to qualify for the Pro Tour, because I am not currently good enough to play on the Pro Tour, and becoming that good would require hundreds of hours of honest-to-god work, and the idea of doing that much work sounds dreadful, and if I’m going to spend that much time slowly learning more and more without really enjoying it then maybe I should use that time getting a better job or something.

So that’s what has brought me here: writing about Magic, a tournament report about six games played online, and I didn’t even play the games. Because we all must find, within the things we claim to enjoy, what it is we actually enjoy about them, and sometimes we have to dig pretty deep.