A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 4: What if You Didn't Cast Any Spells?
Last time, we capped off the first year of Magic's existence with a look at the first World Championship. This time, we are speeding up and heading into 1995.
This gap from mid-1995 to early 1996 is in more ways than one Magic's dark age. The initial wave of excitement from the game's release had subsided a bit, and now everyone was wondering again if the game was destined to peter out after a couple of years. Several expansions had come out after Alpha: Arabian Nights, Legends, and Antiquities. All of them contain important cards in the competitive metagame, though many such cards won't really be major players in this story for a long time – Bazaar of Baghdad will wait twelve years to become the broken card it secretly was all along.
The Dark came out shortly before GenCon 1994. Shortly after GenCon, Wizards printed Fallen Empires. Fallen Empires was the first Magic card set to be overprinted, signaling a slowdown in the game's initial rapid growth. Its follow up, Ice Age, contains a lot of cards and mechanics that players are nostalgic for; it's also the first expansion to come in 15-card boosters.
Magic has been around so long that there are several products we can name as the 'beginning of modern Magic'. Ice Age, the first expansion to contain 15-card boosters and a cohesive mechanical theme with cards meant to be played with each other, is the first such watershed moment.
Immediately after Ice Age came Homelands, widely considered to be Magic's nadir. Almost universally hated for its underpowered cards and unenjoyable design, Homelands went on to sell worse than any product thus far.
This is the dark age: In the storyline, Urza just blew up the world and caused a magical nuclear winter. Business-wise, the game looks wobblier than it ever has since its explosive initial release. Even the tournament scene from this era is widely forgotten; the organized play system Magic would have over the following 20 years doesn't exist yet, and recollections of early competitive Magic often leave this era out.
This is an important moment because it's the first 'split' in Magic constructed formats. Before January of 1995, there was just Magic, with one set of tournament rules. Now there were two formats — Vintage and Standard (known as 'Type 1' and 'Type 2' back then). Vintage allowed cards going back to the beginning. Standard allowed the last couple years of cards – the exact timing of Standard 'rotation' has changed over the years. But initially, it included Revised (A revised reprinting of Alpha, with some cards from early expansions put in and the Power Nine and other 'problem cards' taken out), The Dark, and Fallen Empires.
Standard is, going forward, our focus. It'll become the most popular competitive Magic format. Others will challenge it in popularity and importance, but it'll always be present. And it's the format that'll change the most dramatically, with near-100% turnover in the card pool. Vintage will eventually become a niche format played only by those who can afford increasingly out-of-reach, never-reprinted cards.
True separation between Standard and Vintage won't really happen for a few months. For the first half-year of its life, Standard will be in a dark age of its own. It'll be dominated by the most rancid decks ever put into card sleeves. Well, not put into card sleeves – this was 1995, so more likely people just wrapped them in a rubber band and then shuffled them up raw. You see, at this time, Standard was locked up in a vise. Specifically, Black Vise.
The game plan of the dominant Black Vise decks was simple: Blow up all your opponent's lands and creatures and keep them from casting spells. Soon, with some help from Howling Mine, they'll start holding a bunch of cards in hand they can't cast. Black Vise acts as a win condition that is fast, cheap, and difficult to interact with.
In 1995, this was extremely widespread on the still-nascent tournament scene. Separation between Vintage and Standard had led to a slower Standard format without the broken artifact mana from Alpha, which allowed land destruction to become much more powerful.
However, this meta was not simply a wasteland of land destruction decks that planned to make all your cards rot in your hand. There was another contender, an equally competitive deck with a very different gameplan. Some might say the opposite gameplan. You will notice that the example Vise decklist I shared was only the runner-up at the second-ever Magic world championship. You might wonder – what hero took down the mighty Vise deck? Who won that tournament?
Well, reader, a specter was haunting Magic.
...yeah. The winning deck from 1995? Alexander Blumke's Rack Control.
The win condition here is, of course, The Rack – Black Vise's mirror image, an artifact that deals damage if an opponent has emptied their hand. Or if you'd emptied their hand for them. Black Lotus might be gone, but Dark Ritual does a convincing imitation, and casting Mind Twist or Hipnotic Specter on turn 1 tended to ruin most draws. These cards were joined by a newcomer from Fallen Empires: Hymn to Tourach, an extremely powerful discard spell that had not been restricted (unlike Mind Twist).
So yeah. That's the meta for a good chunk of 1995 leading into the second-ever Worlds: The deck that doesn't let you have any mana versus the deck that doesn't let you have any spells. Magic has been trying to recapture the joy of these child-like early years ever since.
Next time: Black Vise is restricted in Standard. This will surely lead to a diverse and enjoyable metagame.