A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 12: Mark Rosewater Breaks Magic
Last time, we finished up the story of Mirage-Tempest era Standard. This time, we're moving into late 1998 and 1999, and looking at Urza's block – made up of the sets Urza's Saga, Urza's Legacy, and Urza's Destiny.
There's no better way to start talking about this than just taking a little tour of all the broken cards. Here's little panorama of every card from Urza's block that would be banned in a Constructed format over the course of 1998 and 1999:
Urza's block more or less doubled the size of the Legacy banlist by itself, and even through all the bans it reshaped the format and led to a number of cards being unbanned because the power level of the format was simply higher. Urza's Saga may very well be the most broken expansion in Magic history. Wizards had made other power level mistakes before, and they've made others since, but nothing on this scale. It is the stuff of legends
It's said that at Pro Tour Paris, where Extended with Urza's Saga was first played, players joked that there were three stages to the game: the early game (coin flips to see who goes first), the midgame (mulliganing), and the late game (turn one). It's said that Bill Rose, then a vice-president at Wizards, summoned the entire design team into his office and chewed them out for an hour.
Worse, the release of Urza's block had the feel of a slow-moving trainwreck. Urza's Saga comes out in November of 1998. By the time Urza's Legacy release day rolls around, Wizards is painfully aware that it's also full of broken cards. Memory Jar is banned basically on release day. To this day, no rational explanation has come out as to what went wrong, exactly. But it seems like a confluence of factors mostly driven by a failure to sit down and put those individually cool cards together into decks before sending them to the printers.
The resulting environment came to be known as "combo winter." Let's take a little walking tour of a deck from this very specific window of time – before Tolarian Academy was banned.
Admire its purity. This deck is built to do two things: Make lots of mana and draw lots of cards. Nothing else matters. The win condition is simply to Stroke of Genius targeting your opponent, causing them to instantly lose as they try to draw from an empty library. It's an exaggeration to say that this deck kills on turn one. It typically kills on turn 2 or, if you have a slow draw, 3.
Tolarian Academy is used to make lots of mana in conjunction with cheap and free artifacts. This mana is then used to cast overpowered draw spells like Windfall – or, ideally, Time Spiral. Time Spiral's "untap lands" clause is itself very transparently broken, but in combination with Tolarian Academy it's ridiculous, as it turns into a card that refreshes your hand and nets you mana. Eventually the Academy player resolves a Mind Over Matter, which turns Stroke of Genius into a mana-generating spell (as cards can be pitched to untap Tolarian Academy or various mana artifacts). The play pattern is to stroke yourself for 30 or so. Then (with so many artifacts in play that Academy taps for as much as 10 mana) stroke your opponent for 300 or so.
This deck also benefits from the presence of extremely powerful card selection. Brainstorm and Scroll Rack can turn useless extra Islands (drawn from casting Windfall or Time Spiral) into more action. And Intuition gives the deck unparalled consistency – you see, nowhere on Intuition does it say you have to search for three different cards. The normal use of the card is to search for three copies of Tolarian Academy, thus ensuring you get to put one into your hand.
This deck would not be long for this world – after laying waste to various regional tournaments, Tolarian Academy was quickly banned. 1999 was what I'd describe as a "ban-driven meta" across all formats – cards would get banned, new broken cards would emerge, those cards would then be banned. Lots of decks emerged during this time only to get slapped down by bans, but I want to highlight two of them: Zvi Mowshowitz' Bargain deck and Kai Budde's mono-red artifacts deck.
Originally developed by Zvi Moshowitz and played by Charles Kornblith at Worlds '99. This is essentially a big mana deck similar to the earlier Academy deck, but its primary engine is Yawgmoth's Bargain – a card that was designed very clearly as a 'fixed' Necropotence. Surely at six mana it can't be as good as Necro was at three, right?
In actuality it was substantially better than Necro. Getting to just draw the cards immediately made it interact powerfully with any kind of life gain effect, which the deck abused to dig even deeper into its library. Eventually, all those Dark Rituals and Turnabouts would be fed into a powerful Yawgmoth's Will – allowing the player to recycle all of their mana-generating spells once again. Show and Tell, a perennially broken card that would feature in many Legacy and Vintage combo decks, was used here to make Yawmoth's Will into a three-mana play.
Blaze was used as the ultimate kill condition. Unlike the heady multiplicative effect of Tolarian Academy, this deck operated on a razor's edge of burning its life total for cards and mana.
Originally developed by Kai Budde – the other name often cited as the GOAT of competitive Magic. This is an example of a new archetype that will show up from time to time. Until now, mono-red has meant aggressive decks full of cheap creatures that "go under" the rest of the metagame. This is something new; this is Big Red, a red deck that aims to make a lot of mana, deny the opponent very much mana at all, and then beat down with large and powerful creatures. Rather than going "under", it goes "over the top" of other decks.
Mana disruption as powerful as Wildfire would rarely exist in Standard, and consequently Big Red would rarely be an archetype in Standard. But the combination of big mana and mana denial in a mono-red shell would periodically reappear in Legacy, Extended, and later formats like Modern.
The legacy of Urza's block is, above all else, Wizards becoming a lot more cautious about certain types of effect. For example, it's kind of insane that City of Traitors and Ancient Tomb were both in the same Standard environment; those two are still, to this day, basically the only lands that you can just play and immediately tap for two colorless mana like that. Similarly, it's absurd that Windfall and Time Spiral both got printed in the same set. Normally, over the course of Magic's history, there's not even one draw-seven available in Standard.
Elsewhere in Magic
- The brokeness of the Urza's Saga environment led to major structural changes within Wizards meant to prevent something like this from happening again. They succeeded in ensuring that something like this only happened again three more times (so far).
- Gaea's Cradle, Tolarian Academy's little sibling, was only ever banned in Block Constructed and continued to help enable a mono-green "stompy" creature deck during this time.
- Other popular archetypes at this time include Reanimator variants, mono-black "suicide" aggressive decks (characterized by playing oversized cheap creatures with drawbacks like Sarcomancy and, of course, mono-blue control.
Next Time
Wizards overcorrects and releases Mercadian Masques block, infamously one of the most innocuously low-powered blocks ever.