A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 10: Whirlwind Tour of Tempest-era Standard
Last time, we looked at the Prosperity Bloom deck from Mirage and its impact on the game. This time, we're rushing our way through 1998 with a look at the various archetypes and decks enabled by the arrival of Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus, the three sets from Tempest block.
Cursed Scroll Red
This is one of the heydays of mono-red, thanks to the printing of Cursed Scroll. This Jay Schneider list from early 1998 is exemplar:
This isn't quite a 'true' burn deck – it still plays a good number of creatures, and some of them are even expected to live for more than one turn and attack for damage. But it's clearly on a single-minded plan of turning its cards into damage, and with the staggeringly low land count of 17 lands, it has a lot more spells to turn into damage than most decks.
What's unusual about this deck is its incredible staying power. Scalding Tongs and Cursed Scroll are both repeatable sources of damage that demand very specific answers. The presence of hard-hitting topdecks like Fireblast and Ball Lightning mean that even if you kill all their creatures and get them down to 0 cards in hand, you can die to them at any time from as high as 6 life.
The Necro Summer that Wasn't
The big holdover from previous Standards is of course Necropotence. While Necro remains in the format, it's lost a lot of its biggest enablers (Zuran Orb, Ivory Tower, and so on). Necropotence would eventually fall off over the course of 1998.
One of the balancing factors on Necropotence is its cost – BBB, three black mana. This heavily incentivizes playing Necropotence in mono-black or nearly mono-black decks, as even one land of the wrong color precludes a turn-3 Necropotence; and while Dark Ritual is still present in the format, putting Dark Rituals in your deck is a lot better if you consistently have black mana on turn 1 to cast Dark Ritual, and a good amount of powerful three-mana black cards to cast off your Dark Ritual.
Limiting yourself to black cards meant you had to reach deeper into the color for cards to play, which hurt overall card quality. And the lands in Mirage-Tempest Standard allowed for incredibly greedy mana bases that played all five colors and happily combined the best cards in every color.
Also suppressing Necro was the arrival of other card advantage engines that were, arguably, just as powerful – we'll take a look at them soon.
5-Color Whatever
At this point in Standard, there's just a lot of five-color lands that you can put in your deck. They all have appalling drawbacks, but who cares – you get to play all the good cards!
This is hardly the only four- or five-color deck in this environment. Four-color green (a more creature-oriented midrange deck) and four-color white (White Weenie splashing several colors) both show up in this environment. The card that makes all this work is, of course, Reflecting pool – which can piggyback off the other 'rainbow' lands in the deck to make any color of mana, but with no drawback at all.
Whether in a five-color incarnation or with a more conservative mana base, blue control is very present in this metagame. Tempest block is a goody bag of blue control tools; the Buyback mechanic introduced there is obviously much more relevant in control decks that make games go long. While the 5CU list above doesn't play Capsize, many blue lists of this era did; and basically all of them played Whispers of the Muse.
At this point, you could play 8, 12, or 16 cards in your deck that counter spells – plus Whispers of the Muse or Capsize. Once a player with one of these decks had six mana, it was often all over; opponents would either run their spells into the countermagic (Often Dismiss, which generates card advantage in itself), or they'd let them use their mana to draw cards or bounce their permanents with Capsize.
Capsize is one of the biggest "fun is zero sum" cards in Magic. If you've never Capsized someone's lands, I highly recommend it.
Slivers!
We can't talk about Tempest without talking about Slivers, probably the most popular mechanic introduced in that block.
Magic had printed various "lords" at this point – creatures that buff other creatures of the same type, starting of course with Goblin King and Lord of Atlantis. The joke with Slivers is that they're all lords; all slivers buff all slivers, including themselves. Every creature you play in a sliver deck makes all your other creatures better.
Slivers in Standard in this era are not a top-tier deck, but they are competitive. And they will make numerous comebacks and show up in other formats over the years. Slivers are "firsts" in many ways – they're one of the first creature types to come with a solid mechanical identity of their own; they're the first "tribe" in Magic to exist across all five colors; they're one of the first creature types that are totally original to Magic and not drawn from fantasy fiction. Sliver Queen is the first five-color creature in Magic.
This period list is one example:
In this case, slivers are used as the aggressive plan in an aggro-control deck. Note the use of Mana Leak, a perennially important card that will often be available in environments without Counterspell. And even here, where Counterspell is legal, Mana Leak still gives decks that aren't primarily blue an option to splash countermagic, or just a way of playing more two-mana counterspells than "just" four.
Acknowledgements
Decklists for this article are taken from an archive of The Dojo, the first website to really distribute Magic strategy and decklists in an organized way. The Dojo is going to be our main primary source for the remainder of the 90's, until official articles and coverage from Wizards of the Coast picks up.
Elsewhere in Magic
- 'Counterburn' decks start showing up around this time. These are blue-red decks that use counterspells as answers to threatening spells, and burn spells as both finishers and to kill smaller creatures. Never a very successful archetype, but a beloved one to a certain perverse type of player. It's notable that they are at this point being championed by Patrick Chapin – a very important pro player whose decks will show up several times in future chapters.
- This is the heyday of Rochester Draft as a tournament format. In Rochester Draft, packs are opened on the table one at a time, and players take turns picking cards from each pack – essentially, it's like a normal booster draft but with totally open information, leading to extensive mind games. This is harrowing for most normal players and takes forever to get through, but it's beloved by a certain type of competitive player.
- While I chose to highlight a Jay Schneider list, and he called that list "burn", this Cursed Scroll archetype of mono-red aggressive decks would also come to be known as "Deadguy Red."
- Tempest block is the first Mark Rosewater-led design in Magic. Mark ('MaRo') would go on to become Head Designer for Magic, a position he still occupies and from which he has tried (unsuccessfully) to kill Magic many times.