A Compleat History of the Magic: The Gathering Metagame, Chapter 3: What if I Played Good Cards And Not Bad Cards?
Previously, I wrapped up the story of Magic's prehistory. Now, we approach the birth of a real tournament scene.
Summer of 1994. GenCon in Milwaukee. Zak Dolan is about to be the first person on earth to win a Magic world championship. His deck is... well it's a pile.
Thus far, early Magic has been a lot like watching footage of the earliest days of basketball – back when dribbling hadn't really been invented. Back when the refs would call a carry if you so much as looked at the ball funny. Guys would just stand around and pass the ball back and forth. The idea of moving with the ball was latent, but not present.
Thus it was in 1994 Magic: there's a beautiful, brutal game lurking under the surface, waiting to be born.
This is the dawn of competitive, high-level Magic. But a lot of the principles of deckbuilding haven't been established yet. It's worth looking at the winning deck from the very first Magic world championship to get an illustration of what has and hasn't been figured out.
Zak's deck was blue, white, and green. In modern Magic talk, color pairs and triads have proper names – UWG is 'Bant' – but this was two decades off back then. Still, to help highlight the historical continuity between decks, I am giving historical decks the names they would have in modern terminology. Period names will appear in (brackets), if any.
What the hell is going on here, seriously?
Dolan's deck is a control deck, and its appearance heralds one of the three traditional archetypes of Magic decks:
- Aggro decks play efficient creatures and attack the opponent for damage.
- Control decks trade resources with the opponent, gaining incremental advantages until they are far ahead on cards or mana, at which point actually winning the game is an afterthought.
- Combo decks draw a critical mass of their cards (either to find a specific two- or three-card combination, or to add together enough synergistic effects) and then win on the spot without caring about what the opponent is doing.
Beginners are often taught that combo beats aggro because it goes off before the 'fair' aggro deck can win; that control beats combo because the combo can't survive through a lot of interaction and counterspells; and that aggro beats control because it will typically play more threats than the control player can efficiently answer. This picture is neat, easy to understand, and entirely wrong.
Almost every Magic format is missing at least one leg of this supposed three-legged stool, and many are dominated by hybrid decks. Control-combo is a very common archetype. And in the future. we'll meet tempo and midrange – the missing two other deck archetypes.
In the metagame that Zak Dolan was facing, the opposition was actually often combo-aggro. These were aggressive red-green decks that played cheap creatures and attacked, but which carried the dreaded Channel Fireball combo.
Channel-Fireball works simply: You cast Channel. Then you spend all but 1 of your life to fuel a Fireball for lethal damage, killing your opponent for a mere 1GGR. The nature of the combo is that it only works if you're ahead on life, or close enough that you can make up the difference with real mana; this means that Channel Fireball doesn't really work as a pure combo. Pure combo decks plan to sit and draw cards, using their life total as a resource, until they're ready to go off; if you're sitting and hoping to draw into a lethal Channel, you're likely going to fall behind on life.
However, in an aggressive deck, Fireball (and the channel-fireball combo) provided critically important reach. Reach is the concept of cards that can be used to finish off an opponent after they've stabilized the battlefield; an aggro deck plays cheap creatures that are, in the long run, small and underwhelming. Eventually, you'll not be able to get through for damage – either because your opponent has played bigger creatures to block with, or because they've simply wiped the board away with creature removal. At that point, you turn to reach. Our old friend Lightning Bolt is the classic form of reach, a way of finishing off opponents who managed to stabilize at low life totals.
Historically, aggro decks without reach have been either unplayable or momentary flashes in the pan. Reach is what separates good aggro decks (typically, red ones) from bad aggro decks. Aggro decks without reach have tended to instead become more like midrange decks... but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Dolan's deck beat several of these Channel Fireball decks on its way to the top, but it's still filled with baffling deck construction choices. It contains a single Birds of Paradise, for example; its presence can't be explained. Was it there just to be the nth 'mana rock' given that the deck (correctly) plays one of all the restricted ones?
Why couldn't Dolan make up his mind as to whether Clone or Vesuvan Shapeshifter was better? (It's Clone). Isn't it incredibly marginal to play Ley Druid just to untap Library of Alexandria?
It's normal for control decks to play one-ofs – having specialized silver bullets in your deck makes sense when you plan for games to run long and to draw a lot of cards. But Dolan's deck goes absolutely hog wild with them, making precious few concessions to consistency. The four Swords to Plowshares are a testament to the relatively aggressive, creature-centric meta this deck was meant to battle in. It's interesting to note that while blue control decks would become infamous for a "draw-go" style of play that leans heavily on counterspells, Dolan ran only one copy of Mana Drain – though clearly he planned to use Recall, Regrowth, and Timetwister to repeatedly recur that single copy, eventually allowing him to answer the few cards in an opponent's deck that would matter.
Probably the most iconic feature of this deck is its finisher, Serra Angel. For a control deck, winning is an afterthought – you just play some large creature at a point in the game where your opponent has absolutely no exit. Some later control decks would find 'creative' win conditions that don't require putting actual threats in your deck, but we'll get to those in time.
Serra Angel is not regarded as a Constructed card nowadays. Back then, however, it was a big body that was still only five mana – cheap enough that Dolan could turbo it out on turn 1 or 2 with Black Lotus. Many similar decks of this era played Sengir Vampire instead, but the Angel is probably the better one. It attacks without tapping (an ability later keyworded as Vigilance), which gets around Stasis and Meekstone; Dolan would often be aiming to resolve a Serra Angel that could dominate the battlefield both offensively and defensively, then lock things down with Armageddon or Stasis.
In many ways, 'control' is a misnomer for this deck. Dolan wasn't aiming to exchange resources with the opponent; he wanted to get ahead then grind the game to a halt. This kind of strategy would, in later years, be called something else. But I'm getting ahead of myself again.
Next time: A specter is haunting Magic.