A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 18: Mark Rosewater Breaks Magic
Last time, I wrote about the legacy of Onslaught block, the last set of the brief 'golden age' of Magic design that started with Invasion.
In 2003, Magic is entering a new era – the story cycle that began with Odyssey is closing, and for the next several years, Magic is going to hop from plane to plane telling mostly self-contained stories with each block. The cards themselves get a visual redesign (the Eigth Edition frames) that itself neatly cleaves the history of the game in two; a decade later when Wizards creates the Modern format, they'll set the starting point of the card pool here.
Unfortunately, this new era of Magic will begin with one of the low points in competitive play. Mirrodin, the first expansion of the new block, was released in October of 2003. Darksteel came out in January and utterly broke Standard. By June, Skullclamp was banned to try and fix the format. When that didn't really work, and after winter had come and gone with Standard still in a dire state, they banned a whole slew of other cards.
What's notable is that none of the banned cards have the mechanic that would get blamed for the broken deck that would prompt these bans. The mechanic the deck itself was named after: Affinity.
In fact, none of these cards have ever been banned, in any format. Thoughtcast only started seeing play in Modern after several complementary pieces were printed in recent years. The interesting thing about the Affinity cards is that they ask a lot to be playable, but they can then skip right past playable and into being rate monsters. Myr Enforcer's ability to simply be a 4/4 for 2, 1, or 0 mana a lot of the time is a very powerful upside. But to achieve this, you have to put a lot of artifacts in play very fast.
What's been somewhat forgotten in all those years is that Affinity was really just another deck until Darksteel was printed.
This list is attributed to Kai Budde, though I can't find definite confirmation of its provenance. Either way, it's representative of what people were playing right after the release of Mirrodin, though there was substantial debate about which cards to include. This was, in its time, a powerful tier 1 Standard deck – but it had meaningful competition from blue-white control decks and aggressive goblin decks.
This iteration of the Affinity deck is essentially a tempo deck that's trying to get on board extremely fast. The entire mana base consists of 16 artifact lands and 4 Chrome Mox; the 4 Welding Jars are essentially also part of the "mana" for this deck, as they cost 0 and help cast Affinity cards. Turn-1 Frogmites are very possible. Once the deck has dumped its entire hand onto the battlefield in two turns, it uses various card-drawing spells to refuel until the opponent is dead.
Atog was originally just a goofy card from Antiquities; because it was funny, it gave rise to a whole 'tribe' of atogs that 'ate' different things – Chronatog, Auratog, Atogatog. We've met Psychatog, the only one of the bunch that was a tournament card. But original-flavor Atog became the poster child for cards that radically changed their significance in a new environment. Like the flavor text on the Mirrodin printing of Atog says:
On Dominaria, a scavenger. On Mirrodin, a predator.
Kai's take on Affinity used Atog as a way to turn all of its cards into damage for one final lethal swing. This build would be controversial – many players would prefer a slower-going version of Affinity using countermagic instead, with the idea of playing only large affinity creature, that could be played for little or no mana, thus letting the Affinity player hold up a counterspell to protect them. But Kai's build would prove a little prescient.
Darksteel would, later, crack the format wide open by adding multiple cards that made Affinity much more powerful.
Arcbound Ravager is a much better Atog than Atog! It provides the deck with the same element of reach as Atog, but it also gives it enormous resilience – destroying a Ravager just gets its counters moved onto another artifact creature. Alongside Disciple of the Vault, each artifact in play represents a huge amount of damage.
This deck's synergy is simply too strong. Artifacts in play help cast Thoughtcast, grow Cranial Plating, and then sacrifice to Ravager, or to Shrapnel Blast – triggering Disciple of the Vault in the process.
The thing is, though, this was the second place at Worlds 2004. The winner was actually Julian Nuijten, with a very different deck.
This is a ramp deck – ie, a deck that wants to play mana acceleration until it can cast a very powerful and expensive spell. In this case, it's ramping towards a big Decree of Justice or towards returning Eternal Dragon from the graveyard and casting it. To get there, it uses Astral Slide to do two things: First, to 'slide out' the opponent's creatures, blanking them for a turn. Second, to 'slide' its own Eternal Witnesses for value, returning the cards it's cycling back to its hand.
Slide is an early version of what would be known as a 'blink' or 'flicker' effect – exiling ('removing from play', in 2003 rules-speak) a creature and then returning it to the battlefield. This can be used to cause its enters-the-battlefield effects to trigger again; it enables all kinds of tricks. Decks that pair blink effects with value creatures would become a perennial favorite over the years.
However, you might be asking: Clearly the Affinity deck could be beat; after all, it lost the finals to this Slide deck. So, why did it need to be banned?
The answer is in that selfsame Slide list. Four Viridian Shaman and four Oxidize; eight pieces of artifact hate between the mainboard and sideboard. Meanwhile, three of its Plow Unders (an enormously powerful card in any ramp deck) are sitting in the sideboard becaus they match up poorly against Affinity.
Affinity was not broken by being unbeatable – it was very much beatable. But it was broken because of how centralizing it is. Beating affinity required an enormous deckbuilding commitment, creating a metagame where every deck is either affinity, or anti-affinity.
Slide is really a classic rogue deck – a deck that exists to exploit the metagame it lives in, but which isn't particularly powerful of its own accord. Astral Slide specifically matches up so well against Ravager. In Magic's rules, a permanent on the battlefield and a card in exile are distinct game objects, and if the card is put back in the battlefield, it becomes an all-new permanent with no memory of its previous existence. Which is to say: when a Ravager comes back from exile, it comes back as a brand-new ravager with only one +1/+1 counter on it. Astral Slide's ability to blank a combat step was very powerful against a deck that relied on a few big committal swings to win.
Meanwhile, decks like Goblins (which had been very viable before Darksteel) had been pushed out entirely. Attendance at Standard events tanked. Wizards first banned Skullclamp to slow down both Affinity and other broken decks abusing the card. Unfortunately, Skullclamp's ban came right around the time when Fifth Dawn printed Cranial Plating into the environment, giving Affinity decks (and only Affinity decks) a ready-made replacement.
Eventually, people were so sick of it that Wizards chose to salt the earth. Banning the artifact lands essentially legislated the deck out of existence.
Elsewhere in Magic
- A sleeper card from Mirrodin was Goblin Charbelcher, which would give rise to all kinds of decks trying to play very few, or ideally zero lands.
- Up through 2004, Worlds was held right before the release of the new Fall set and Standard rotation; in 2005, Wizards changed it so it was held right after. This was a pretty obvious move – showcasing the new cards and the new Standard right away in the biggest tournament makes total sense. But the timing of it, of course, also meant that there was only ever one Worlds with Mirrodin in Standard, as 2005's Worlds 'skipped' it; I'm sure Wizards was very content to let that happen.
Next Time
How exactly do you pronounce 'jitte'?