A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 8: What if my 60th card doesn't matter?
Last time, we talked about some of the major blue decks that were relevant in 1996-era Standard. This time, we're stopping by the 1996 World Championship to take stock of the landscape, such as it is now.
In truth, information about the specifics of this tournament is hard to come by. We know the winner's decklist, but as far as I can surmise, only vague descriptions of the other decks survive. 1996 Worlds is the first World Championship of the pro tour era; no longer a one-off event at GenCon, but rather the culmination of a true professional circuit. The amount of coverage and information is going to increase dramatically over the next few years, but for 1996, we have to make do with scraps.
Out of the top four decks of the World Championship, two were playing variants of the Necropotence deck we know so well:
- Henry Stern, playing a mono-black Necropotence deck
- Mark Justice, playing a red-black Necropotence deck with Shatters and Pyroblasts – this was an anti-meta version of the Necro deck, intended to be able to answer Turbo Stasis by destroying Howing Mine and Stasis.
The other two, however, are playing other archetypes we're not quite familiar with yet.
Tom Chanpheng won the championship with this classic iteration of a perennial archetype. In the early days, any deck with small creatures was called a 'weenie' deck, but the term only really stuck (probably thanks to the power of alliteration) to 'white weenie' as an archetype.
White weenie decks are aggro decks like their mono-red counterparts, but their lack of reach pushes them towards becoming either more like midrange decks (with slightly bigger and better creatures, good removal, and some way of generating card advantage) or to rely on disruption to take away the opponent's ability to stabilize.
For the most part, Champheng's deck was purely on a plan of playing efficient creatures and attacking for damage. The four copies of Disenchant give it some ability to disrupt the most common non-creature decks – Necropotence and Turbo Stasis. But, in draws where it found either of those cards, it could use either Armageddon or Balance to win. Armageddon would slam shut the door once the mono-white deck was ahead with creatures, preventing the opponent from making plays to stabilize. Balance could be used to beat other creature decks as a mass removal spell, or to force noncreature decks to empty their hands and sacrifice a bunch of their land (alongside judicious use of Strip Mine); after that, the white deck would win by attacking with animated Mishra's Factories, or by playing their last creature out of their hand.
Note the two Sleight of Mind in Chanpheng's List. Those were meant to deal with things like Circles of Protection, but Chanpheng forgot to register the four Adarkar Wastes required to cast it, making them entirely blank cards.
Olle Råde, the final player in the top four of the World Championship, played a green-white deck with its own creatures-and-disruption game plan. We don't have a decklist for that, but we do have a similar one from earlier in the year.
The 'Erhnamgeddon' deck benefits from various quirks of this 1996 metagame. First, the existence of both Llanowar Elves and Fyndhorn Elves in the format; those cards are basically functional reprints of one another, and they allow the deck to have 8 one-mana accelerants in the deck. Second, the presence of both Sylvan Library and Land Tax, which give this green-white deck enviable access to card advantage.
The game plan is simple: Play some nonland mana sources and a turn-3 Erhnam Djinn, then Armageddon your opponent. Erhnam Djinn is hardly a great card, but it existed at a spot in the curve, in this format, where it would simply dominate any board state it came down in.
Mana denial of one kind or another was everpresent in this 1996 metagame, and here we see two examples of decks using Armageddon in different ways. While the white weenie deck simply wants to use it to shut the opponent out of the game after getting ahead, the Erhnam Djinn deck is trying to set up a game state where they have mana and the opponent doesn't, through some combination of mana creatures and Land Tax.
Elsewhere in Magic
- 1996 sees the official start of the Legacy format. Legacy is like Vintage – you can play cards going back to the start of the game – only cards that are restricted in Vintage are typically banned outright in Legacy. Over time, Legacy will become very popular as a more balanced way to play competitive Magic that still allows using cards from throughout the entire game's history.
- I didn't do a whole post on The Deck, Brian Weissman's seminal blue control deck, because really 'blue control' as an archetype was around from the start, and the capital-T The Deck was a Vintage deck. But let it be known that Weissman is credited with popularizing the concept of card advantage – ie, the idea that cards (in hand or in play) are a resource, and it's good when one of your cards can defeat two of their cards, and so on. Variants of The Deck will continue to persist in Vintage for many years until Vintage mutates into something much more broken and much stranger – we'll take a peek in, oh, let's say 10 or 20 years further in this story.
Next Time
In October of 1996, Wizards will publish Mirage, the next Magic set and the start of Mirage block. This will bring about another rotation of the Standard format, a whole new metagame, and the first 'true' combo deck.