A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 11: A Game of Zones
Last time, we explored some of the key decks of the Mirage-Tempest metagame. But we left the best for last with two of the most interesting and influential decks of this era.
Magic is a game played across several zones; primarily, the hand and the battlefield. But the game's neverending hunger for design space would inevitably lead to interactions with the other zones – the library (your deck of cards waiting to be drawn) and the graveyard (your discard pile of dead creatures and spent sorceries).
Tempest block contains the seeds of two of the earliest decks to make heavy use of the library and the graveyard.
Oath of Druids
This a texty, complicated card, so to break down what it does when it's in play: At the beginning of each player's turn they check if they control less creatures than their opponent. If they do, they may reveal cards from the top of their library until they find a creature; they then put that creature onto the battlefield and all the other cards they revealed into their graveyard.
In theory, this is a symmetrical effect that equalizes the battlefield – whoever has fewer creatures in play gets to put a bonus creature into play. In practice, well, we already know everything about how "fair" symmetrical effects actually are.
But Oath is a weird card to talk about at this point in Magic's history, because it's hardly at its best. Even though the following Oath deck is regarded as a "deck to beat," the titular card is actually kind of unimpressive in it; future decks will make much better use of Oath of Druids.
There's two things about this deck that future Oath decks would improve on, mainly in Vintage (as Oath of Druids would quickly be banned in Legacy).
First, it's just relying on the opponent playing creatures to turn on Oath, which isn't necessarily reliable. Creatureless control and combo decks can make Oath a blank. In the future, the printing of Forbidden Orchard will make Oath something you can reliably trigger regardless of what your opponent is doing.
Second, the creatures this deck can put into play with Oath are themselves, with the hindsight of 30 years of Magic, pretty unimpressive. Of course, when you cheat it into play on turn 3, Archangel is still a huge threat; and this Oath deck is built so that if they kill your Archangel it will just go find another one.
But future Oath decks will have access to things like Griselbrand to cheat into play. They'd also often make much more effective use of Oath's secondary effect – the ability to dump a large portion of your deck directly into your graveyard.
This early Oath of Druids deck is essentially a blue control deck that uses Oath as a sort of one-card combo to punish any and all creature decks by immediately creating a board advantage. Sylvan Library is a broken card advantage engine that allows the deck to find its answers. Since drawing your Archangels and Spirits of the Night is bad (you're not looking to actually cast them from your hand), Brainstorm gives the deck both more card selection and a tool to put them back in the library where they belong.
Spike Feeder acts as a handy little speedbump that can be reasonably played from the hand as well as put into play by Oath, and which can sacrifice itself to ensure Oath will trigger. The ability to gain life also pairs very nicely with Sylvan Library, which can turn that life into extra cards. Since this deck can take a long time to win the game, and it gets no value out of cards in its graveyard, Gaea's Blessing is used to ensure you don't deck yourself in cases where you have to fetch your last creature and it's close to the bottom of your library.
As far as I can tell, this is the first competitive Magic deck archetype to play cards it actively doesn't want to draw.
Survival of the Fittest
"Reanimator" decks that use reanimation spells to cheat a big threatening creature into play have been an idea since the very beginning – Animate Dead was a card from Alpha. But the power level of big, powerful creatures in early Magic left much to be desired; these decks will get better over time as Wizards realizes that creatures cards that cost 7 or 8 mana can be much more powerful than they currently are.
But the printing of Survival of the Fittest gave these decks a perfect enabler, and there were good reanimation spells in the format to capitalize.
The Recurring Nightmare is something new. While it does feature some big creatures to cheat into play, it's also using graveyard recursion for value – most of its creatures have an effect when they come into play, or can be wrung out for a bit of incremental advantage before being sacrificed to put another thing into play with Recurring Nightmare.
What makes this deck brilliant is that it uses both halves of Survival of the Fittest. Survival reads like a quirky rare that lets you turn creatures in hand into other situationally-better creatures, at the cost of mana – which typically wouldn't really be worth it. But Survival really solves both halves of Recurring Nightmare: It can dump a creature in the graveyard that's worth reanimating, and go get a cheap value creature that you can sacrifice to Recurring Nightmare.
You can chain Survival activations – discard a random creature to get Spirit of the Night; discard Spirit to get a cheap creature you can sac to Recurring Nightmare. Mana-generating creatures like Wall of Roots and Birds of Paradise are used to enable the Survival player to activate Survival more times and still cast their other spells – while also being creatures that can be pitched to Survival themselves.
This deck comes at just the right time in Magic design – the "value creature" has just come into its own as a common card archetype and there's a bunch of them running around, including two of the most archetypal value guys of all time in Man-o'-War and Nekrataal.
Survival enables this to be the first version of a 'toolbox' deck – a deck full of handy but situational cards that can be tutored up from the library when needed, giving the deck access to pre-sideboard 'silver bullets' in common matchups.
In fact, the deck has three distinct game plans depending on which of its two key cards it draws:
- With just Survival, you can search for useful 'silver bullets' in your deck to disrupt your opponent and generate value.
- With just Recurring Nightmare, you can sacrifice your various value creatures to recur your other value creatures, thus accumulating incremental advantage.
- If you have both, you can discard any random creature to get a powerful creature; then discard that powerful creature to get a cheap value creature you can cast and sacrifice to Recurring Nightmare.
There's also another, earlier version of the Darwin Kastle deck running around this time. This one is more of an explosive combo deck that uses Living Death as its reanimation spell rather than Recurring Nightmare. The idea is to activate Survival multiple times, fill the graveyard with an overwhelming army of creatures, and then cast Living Death – which essentially kills all creatures in play and brings back all dead creatures. That deck's main weakness, of course, is that it struggles to gain an advantage against an opposing Survival of the Fittest!
While Recurring Nightmare and Living Death both read like powerful cards, it's really Survival of the Fittest that will end up banned in Legacy.
Elsewhere in Magic
- Another of the blue control archetypes popular around this time – yes, early Magic tournament play saw a lot of blue control – is the 'Forbidian' deck featuring Ophidian as a card advantage engine and Forbid as a way of locking your opponent out of the game with those cards. Jon Finkel is playing this deck around this time, and will go on to be one of the names generally cited as the GOAT of tournament Magic.
- Forbid is in some ways even more oppressive a card than Force of Will; Wizards has on various occasions seen fit to print other counterspells that cost 0 mana to play. But while Magic currently contains 246 cards with the text "Counter target spell" on them, Forbid is the only one that can easily recur itself like that. The closest they've come is Fervent Denial, which can only recur itself once and is priced to be almost unplayable.
Next Time
Mark Rosewater breaks Magic.