A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 21: The Era of Business Decisions
2006 would see, quietly, the start of a major transformation in Magic. For ten years, the game had been built on the block model: Every year of Magic consisted of one large set, and then two thematically-connected small sets. Ravnica, City of Guilds came out in the fall of 2005, and was followed by the small sets Guildpact and Dissension, which all worked together, narratively and mechanically, as one unit.
But the block model had three big holes in it.
- If a large set was a miss, guess what: the next two sets are also in that same world, using those same mechanics. There was a yearlong commitment to a specific take on Magic.
- Small sets in general were problematic from a design standpoint. They invariably sold fewer packs than a large set, because there were fewer cards to get. Limited play also skewed this; a large set would be drafted by itself, while small sets were only drafted as one pack alongside other sets in the block.
- In addition to the block expansions, Wizards was putting out a core set every other year. This meant that one year they'd do four major products, then next year they'd do three.
This entire system was arrived at from reasonable design choices, but it makes no business sense. Why are you going back and forth on how many products you put out every year. Why are you making these small sets with noticeably worse returns. Why are you putting a whole year's worth of eggs all in the same creative basket.
Wizards would eventually abandon the block model entirely, but that's still years away. First, they're going to experiment with multiple different solutions to these various problems. This era of experimentation is going to start, in 2006, with the release of one of the most unique sets ever put into Standard: Coldsnap.
Coldsnap is not a normal set. It's a small set, released in the middle of the year, between Dissension (the final set of Ravnica block) and the next large Fall expansion, Time Spiral. It basically takes up the slot that, in an odd year, would be occupied by the core set; the first of many "fourth sets" that would fill this slot.
The framing of what Coldsnap is would be almost like a portent of what was coming in the 2010s, an act of corporate brand revisionism that prefigures every time in the last 20 years a story seemed written just to be put directly into a fan wiki.
Coldsnap is, supposedly, the third set of Ice Age block. If you don't remember Ice Age, it's the large set that came out in 1995, followed by Alliances and Homelands. That last one was really a standalone, thematically unconnected to Ice Age. So, retroactively, Wizards replaced it with Coldsnap. If you go on the Magic fan wiki, it'll describe Ice Age block as consisting of:
the large expansion Ice Age in June 1995 and two small expansions, Alliances in June 1996 and Coldsnap in July 2006.
Which makes it seem like Wizards just took a ten year break from printing Magic cards. But we're not here just to talk about the idea behind Coldsnap. We're here to talk about the cards, and what the cards did in Standard. We're here to talk about one of the most egregious short-lived decks in Standard history. We're here to talk about CounterTop.
It's an odd choice to play only two copies of Counterbalance and only three copies of Sensei's Divining Top – perhaps Mori wasn't so sure of the combo itself, or this is a nod to the fact that the second Counterbalance is just a dead card. The two copies of Muddle the Mixture in the deck can, either way, be used to search for Counterbalance, helping with consistency without the greater possibility of drawing a dead card. In truth, the Countertop combo is used to lock the game away once you're already a little ahead.
Here's how Countertop works. With Counterbalance and Sensei's Divining Top in play, one can repeatedly manipulate the top of one's library to keep hitting counterbalance, countering the opponent's spells for free. In a pinch, top can put itself on top of the library, which guarantees it can always counter 1-mana spells; that by itself can be backbreaking against certain decks. But Counterbalance isn't meant to be an ironclad defense so much as just a source of incredible advantage – randomly zapping the opponent's one, two, and three-mana spells and allowing the Counterbalance player to save their real counterspells for other threats.
Permission decks have long been a feature in Standard, but this is the permission-est deck of all time. A control deck is defined by its interaction, and this deck's interaction consists of 3 Condemn, spending counters from one of its two copies of Umezawa's Jitte, or 14 counterspells. All this is fueled by Dark Confidant, one of the greatest card advantage engines ever printed. 'Bob', as it's known (after Invitational winner Bob Maher, whose likeness is on the card) even has extra synergy with top, which can mitigate the card's drawback.
Countertop would go on to become a fixture in Extended, but its reign of terror in Standard was short-lived – Kamigawa block, which Top comes from, was only legal with Coldsnap for a brief four-month window before the release of Time Spiral. As such, Countertop receded into the mists of history. But Coldsnap cards still had a broken part to play in the ongoing drama of the Standard metagame.
Elsewhere in Magic
The other deck from this era that is remembered as a classic archetype is Solar Flare, so named after the art on Angel of Despair. This blue-white-black control deck had access to an extensive suite of interaction, that it used to prolong the game to cast Zombify and return a powerful creature from the graveyard. It exists in a bit of a funny low-powered era of Magic where the reanimation spells have been nerfed (compare Zombify to 2-mana Animate Dead) but the reanimation targets are far from the peak of power that they would have years later.
Next time
Is Ignite Memories lethal?