A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 7: What if my opponent's cards don't matter?
Last Time, Jay Schneider brought one of the most prevalent deck archetypes into existence.
This time, we're exploring two very different blue decks that emerged during the ferment of that 1996-97 era. It's time catch up on Blue's role in the current meta.
Turbo-Fog
Often, when there's a Best Deck, a deck emerges that specifically attacks that deck. During the height of Necropotence's dominance, an anti-necro deck arose from the ashes of Black Vise.
The Necro players want to gorge on cards? Let them! The Turbo-Stasis deck simply wants to play Howling Mine and Stasis, thus preventing anything productive from happening for turn after turn after turn. You might notice that this deck has no win condition – except for the Black Vise left in the sideboard, there's no way whatsoever to deal damage to an opponent.
That's because the win condition is simply decking the opponent. In Magic, if you would draw a card but your library (draw pile) is empty, you immediately lose the game. The hidden 'win condition' in Turbo-Stasis is actually Feldon's Cane – which allows the Stasis player to shuffle their graveyard back into their library so that their opponent will deck first.
This is the first Howling Mine deck to be called "turbo," but it won't be the last – henceforth many decks that use Howling Mine (and similar effects) to accelerate themselves will be called turbo-whatever, most notably Turbo-Fog.
Except Owling Mine, for some reason (I guess the pun was more attractive than 'Turbo-Owl') but that's a story for another post.
Turbo-Stasis and other early Stasis decks like Vise decks are examples of the 'prison' archetype. While a control deck tries to reactively deal with an opponent's threats, a prison deck tries to proactively stop them from ever presenting threats in the first place. Prison, and prison's latter-day descendants, will be important in some metagames... but not often. Wizards seems to think they shouldn't be due to their unjustifiable belief that Magic should be 'fun.'
Fish
Another of Jay Schneider's contributions to Magic is the 'Fish Heads' deck, later known simply as 'fish'. So named because it plays a lot of merfolk.
[This list comes to us through later-day Usenet posts, and is not 100% accurate. For one thing, all the card names were misspelled and I had to fix them.]
A fish deck is described in period sources as a 'blue weenie' deck, or a 'weenie control' deck. Nowadays we'd say aggro-control – but I'd really call this a tempo deck, as it can't actually play from behind like a control deck.
The idea is simple: Play some very cheap creatures. However, unlike the Sligh deck that followed up with some less-cheap creatures and direct damage to finish the opponent, the Fish deck follows up those cheap creatures with disruption. Aeolipile and Essence Flare are both bad, inefficient removal spells that are available to blue. Zur's Weirding allows for locking the opponent out of drawing cards – sure, the opponent can do the same, but if you're the one with threats on the board, that's perfectly acceptable.
"Tempo" is one of the most nebulously-defined concepts in Magic strategy; roughly, tempo advantage means having the initiative, being able to use every part of your turn (all your mana and your attack step), having more mana's worth of threats in play, and being ahead of your opponent in the damage race. It's almost impossible to quantify or define what tempo is in a real game situation, but almost every aggro deck tries to get ahead on tempo. If you have a bunch of cards in play and your opponent has a bunch of cards in hand, that signals a tempo advantage.
As vague as 'tempo' is, the idea of a tempo deck is very much just getting ahead and then staying ahead by preventing an opponent's plays from affecting the board state. Tempo decks play fewer threats than aggro decks so they can play more, and more exacting answers to disrupt the opponent's plays. Tempo decks have not historically been very successful except in very specific circumstances – their play pattern of getting ahead early and staying ahead until the opponent dies can be fragile. As far as my research can ascertain, the Fish deck never had the volume of play or tournament success that the Turbo-Stasis deck did during 1996 – But it's an influential deck. While tempo has rarely been viable in Standard, blue-based tempo and aggro-control decks would eventually become the deck in several formats with deeper card pools.
One last thing
The card I've studiously avoided mentioning so far:
Force of Will makes both of those decks work. It lets Fish protect its threats after tapping out to play those threats. It lets Turbo-Stasis protect its game plan through Stasis. Force of Will is an immensely format-defining card; if you can play Force of Will, the dynamics of how the game works are entirely different. It'll eventually rotate out of Standard, but will basically never stop being relevant in formats that allow it. Force of Will is still played to this day.
Countering spells is as old as Magic, and the term Magic players use for counterspells as a card archetype is nearly as old: 'permission.' Playing against a deck full of counterspells feels like a game of 'mother may I.' Counterspells are a totalizing answer – they completely prevent an opposing card from doing anything, with very few exceptions.
There's a well-known adage about Magic, attributed to old-school pro Dave Price: "While there are wrong answers, there are no wrong threats." This is, generally, true; Merfolk of the Pearl Trident can attack for damage just as well as any other creature, and your opponent will have to either present a greater threat, or answer it somehow. Whereas your answers can match up poorly against opposing threats: Swords to Plowshares can't kill Black Vise; Disenchant can't kill Erhnam Djinn.
But Force of Will is basically never wrong, as long as you're prepared to pay the price of using it. Usually, the way unconditional countermagic like Counterspell can "miss" is because you don't have the mana to cast it on the turn when your opponent's important spell comes down. Counters particularly struggle to be relevant against low-curve decks that have one-mana threats in them, of course.
Force of Will, though, just doesn't care.
Next time, we make a brief stop at the 1996 World Championships before we move on to the Mirage expansion, 1997, and beyond.