A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 17: What if Onslaught doesn't matter?
Last time, we talked about the top decks of Invasion-Odyssey Standard. This time, we're moving on to Onslaught block.
Onslaught is built around a 'tribal' theme. In Magic terminology, that means effects that reward you for playing a certain creature type in your deck. Creature types in Magic – Dwarf, Elf, Merfolk, Nightmare, Beast, Dragon, etc – are a marker with no rules baggage of its own. But ever since Alpha there have been effects that care about them; specifically, there were Lord of Atlantis and Goblin King.
Although Alpha had precious few actual Merfolk or Goblins to buff, these cards proved very popular, and Wizards did more of this type of effect. Slivers and Rebels were created as creature types with associated mechanical baggage, for example. Onslaught block was built entirely around this idea; the creature types that mattered in it were a mix of classic ones (elves, goblins) with ones that had existed but only just got mechanical support (wizards, soldiers).
In Constructed, this had... limited impact. Nothing exemplifies the narrow effect Onslaught had on the Standard metagame more than the winning deck from the 2003 World Championship.
This is not very far from being an Odyssey Block Constructed deck! 'Wake' is a Bant (white-blue-green) control deck that uses several Odyssey card advantage engines to stay alive until it can cast Mirari's Wake, an Odyssey block engine card that helps it generate a ton of cards and mana. It's particularly punishing to any deck that wants to attack, with multiple ways of either stalling the opponent with Moment's Peace or taking attacking creatures off the board. Onslaught block is making contributions here around the edges – in the deck's eventual finisher Decree of Justice, mainly.
But look more closely at this list and you'll spot some things that will become extremely influential in the future – or immediately, in deeper formats with bigger card pools.
The Fetchlands
These are some of the most influential cards in Magic's history, and they barely did anything in Standard.
In Onslaught-era Standard, a fetchland was basically just a split card. Polluted Delta could fetch either a basic Island, or a basic Swamp. This was okay as a mana fixing land; relative to the 'Painlands' like Underground River, they had less flexibility but didn't have the potential to cost so much life.
However, in Legacy and Vintage, players had access to original dual lands like Underground Sea. This, of course, makes the fetchlands more powerful – in your blue-black deck, Polluted Delta can act as an extra eight copies of Underground Sea. Suddenly a two-color mana base was much more consistent.
Except, really, all the blue and black fetchlands could do this. So a blue-black deck could have as many as sixteen lands that were either Underground Sea, or could fetch Underground Sea from the library. And any given fetchland can fetch most duals; you can crack Polluted Delta to get a Tundra or a Tropical Island.
In effect, a fetchland can go get any color of mana with very little downside. Fetch/dual mana bases would quickly become standard in any Legacy or Vintage deck that didn't have compelling reasons not to play them, and they still are to this day. In the future, Wizards would print other dual lands with basic land types, like the shocklands and the triomes, as well as utility lands with land types like Dwarven Mine. All of those would expand the power of fetchlands in other formats; Modern would come to be defined by the 'fetch-shock' mana base where players are regularly taking 3 damage to the face to play their 1-drop.
When Wizards announced the new Pioneer format, they pre-emptively banned the fetchlands in it – because that was the surest way to make sure that format would have a different identity from Modern.
On top of all that, fetchlands also shuffle your deck when you use them, which has nonzero value. Many abilities let you peek at the top of your library; if the card there isn't good, shuffling your library is free card selection. And in Legacy, the existence of fetchlands suddenly made Brainstorm an enormously powerful card selection land. Understanding the timing of when to crack a fetchland and why became a rarefied skill for high-level players.
Fetchlands became so influential in Legacy and Modern that cards like Stifle and Shadow of Doubt would themselves see maindeck play as a form of mana disruption.
They are, by far, the most important thing that happened in Onslaught. Much more so than any Standard cards.
Oh, and Storm, too
You might have noticed an innocent-looking sideboard card in the Wake deck.
Storm has a reputation as the most broken mechanic in Magic. Mark Rosewater, when asked about whether an old mechanic might return, grades the probability on the 'Storm scale' – so named because Storm is the least likely mechanic to ever return to Standard. It is notoriously unbalance-able; every Storm card is either irrelevant or broken.
Well, supposedly, anyway. Wing Shards is actually a fair card. Storm is not problematic when it's put on reactive effects like that, which have an inherent cap to how much value they can generate. However, Wizards didn't just print Storm on reactive cards.
Any Storm card that can be used to win the game is inherently a finisher for a combo deck, and any combo deck that can cast a lot of spells in one turn is inherently in the market for Storm cards. Storm would come to be an archetype unto itself.
But, again, it didn't really do anything in Standard because the support for it just wasn't really there.
Information on Vintage tournaments around this time is a lot harder to come by, as the format was already not being sanctioned for high-level play by Wizards; this list is an archetypal one from an old article by Stephen Menendian.
This type of deck would basically persist in Vintage forever; if you look at a recent online tournament you will find multiple copies of Brain Freeze, which is the preferred win condition now. But this basic archetype of mashing up the Academy/Tinker deck with a Storm deck is a constant in Vintage.
Storm will impact basically every format deep enough to have both Storm cards and cards that enable Storm. We'll look at various other versions over time.
Even if in Standard it was somewhat overshadowed by Odyssey, ultimately Onslaught cards would have an enormous effect on competitive play for many years; it really planted the seeds of several pillars of Eternal formats.
Elsewhere in Magic
- Magic: the Gathering Online, henceforth referred to as 'MTGO', launched in 2002. By giving competitive obsessives the ability to play match after match after match, MTGO is going to drastically accelerate how fast metagames converge and how good the average tournament grinder is. More so than any card or deck, it's by far the most important development of 2002.
- Those creature type synergies in Onslaught did give rise to two significant competitive decks: Zombies and Goblins. Zombies was mainly a Standard thing, but Goblins would go on to become a perennial favorite in Legacy – or, for true sickos, in Vintage. The Goblins deck is simply a red aggro deck that makes use of various powerful cards from Onslaught that reward having lots of goblins in your deck.
- Elves, meanwhile, will eventually become a major factor in Extended, but that's a ways off still.
Next Week
Mark Rosewater breaks Magic.