A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 2: NOW That's What I Call Magic
Last time, I discussed the metagame during the very earliest phases of Magic. The peace of that idyllic time was disturbed by the arrival of the Plague Rats.
Well, it wasn't just Plague Rats, but Plague Rats figured heavily in this story. The original rules for Magic specified a very simple, and very inadequate, deck construction rule: Your deck had to be at least forty cards. That's it.
It's worth noting that the (now widespread) idea that having fewer cards in your deck makes you draw the best ones more often was, at this time, largely still lost on the playerbase. This deck construction rule is actually still used to this day – in Limited play, where you open a few packs of random cards and are only allowed to play with the cards you open. But most Magic play is Constructed – where you just use any cards you own, as long as they're legal in the specific format you're playing. And in Constructed, the rules quickly evolved to require at least sixty cards, and at most four of any one card.
There are many reasons for this rule change. It lessened the impact of individually very powerful cards, of course. It made it so a greater diversity of cards saw play. But also: In the very early days, there was a rat plague.
Here's the thing: If you can play as many copies of a card as you have in your deck, some cards... scale. Obviously Plague Rats, a seemingly innocuous Alpha common, is a prime candidate for this. Typical Plague Rats decks also mixed in some amount of Sinkholes. Early Rat-Hole decks were some of the first recorded attempts at truly optimizing Magic. Destroy your opponent's lands so they can't cast spells, then start playing Plague Rats until you have an overwhelming board. Remember Circle of Protection: Black? You'll notice that the earliest printing of this card is actually from Beta, the first limited-run reprint of Alpha. That's because it was mistakenly left off the file in Alpha. For the first few months of Magic's existence, there was no Circle of Protection: Black, and the rats could not be stopped.
There were other degenerate 20-20 decks at the time, of course. One made use of Psychic Venom and Twiddle to lock down the opponent's lands while dealing damage. Apparently, this actually worked, at least enough that early Magic usenet posters were mad about it!
But one of these decks stands above all others as the progenitor of an actual archetype.
The 'boon cycle' in Alpha contained five instants (ignore the word 'interrupt' on Dark Ritual – that's just old-timey rule-speak for 'instant that counters spells or makes mana'). Each costs one mana and does three of something. Like many cards in Alpha, they are important points in defining the identity of the five colors – their share of the 'color pie', the mechanical and thematic space of Magic as divided among the five colors. They form a perfect gradient of power level.
- Ancestral Recall is broken, one of the Power Nine, arguably the most powerful non-artifact spell in all of Magic. It's the only Boon that's rare; all the others are commons.
- Dark Ritual is mildly broken; a powerful card and a major part of many a tournament deck, but still not so catastrophic that it wasn't reprinted several times. Notably, rituals that make fast mana would eventually move over to Red's slice of the color pie.
- Giant Growth is a staple of Limited, and almost all Limited formats have their own Giant Growth-with-this-set's-mechanics variant. It's one of the most riffed-on cards in all of Magic. And, very occasionally, one of those variants has seen Constructed play. We'll meet some of them about 20 years down the line when Infect shows up.
- Healing Salve isn't worth the cardboard it's printed on. Widely considered one of the worst cards in Magic, it exists mainly to teach players a lesson about the true value of your life total – that is, the only life point that matters is the last one.
And then there's Lightning Bolt, which sits squarely in the middle. Lightning Bolt is a powerful card that meaningfully impacts every Constructed format it exists in, but it's not broken, and Wizards has seen fit to reprint it into several modern formats, though it's much more common for sets to contain a card that's somewhere between Lightning Bolt and Shock in power level.
The problems begin, however, when players start jamming 20 of them into a deck.
Here, let's play a game of Magic to illustrate this. I'll be Red. You be, I don't know, White.
Turn one: Mountain, Lightning Bolt. You go to 17. Your go.
You play a Plains or whatever.Turn two: Mountain, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt. You're at 11. Your go.
You: Plains, White Knight.Turn three: Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt. You're at 4. Your go.
You: Plains, attack with White Knight (I'm at 18), cast something or other.Turn four: Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt. You're dead. I show you the Lightning Bolt I still have in my hand.
The logic of the burn deck is as perfect as it is brutal. One lightning bolt is three damage. Seven lightning bolts is twenty-one damage; lethal. If you play first, over the course of a four-turn game you will draw ten cards – your starting seven plus three. If your deck is 70% Lightning Bolts, you will, on average, end your opponent on turn four. Pristine. Inevitable.
Nothing so pure could be allowed to exist in a tournament format. And so, the four-of card restriction was born, thus putting the rat plagues, snakes, and lightning to rest. Of course, the burn deck would return – Wizards would eventually print enough Lightning Bolt variants. But for the time being, Magic was safe, and a formal tournament scene was being born.
Next time: The first Magic World Championship, at last.