A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Part 22: On my upkeep, suspended Lotus triggers
Remember Storm?
The goofy-seeming but inherently very broken mechanic from Scourge?
In that chapter of our story, I wrote about what Storm did in formats other than Standard. But Storm, then, was never able to do much of anything in Magic's primary competitive format. A dedicated Storm deck has to cast a lot of spells in a single turn. To do that, it needs to draw lots of cards and generate lots of mana, and the supporting cards for that didn't really exist in Scourge-era Standard.
But then, in 2006, along came Time Spiral. The set had a nostalgia theme, and one of the main facets of that was bringing back old, beloved mechanics. Time Spiral had more named keywords than any set up to that point, including fan favorites like Cycling, Flashback, and Morph. It also featured a smattering of new Storm cards... and one old Storm card, hidden in Time Spiral's 'timeshifted' sheet of retro-border reprints.
Nowadays, this style of 'bonus sheet' is done all the time, and those bonus cards are usually not legal in Standard; it adds chase cards for collectors, wanted reprints for Eternal formats, and spice to the Limited environment. But Time Spiral's timeshifted cards were the first version of this idea, and they were very much legal in Standard. adding dozens of additional cards to what would become one of the most overstuffed Standard formats of all time.
The reprinted card in question is Dragonstorm – a goofy Storm card from Scourge that married that set's dragon theme to its Storm mechanic. Dragonstorm looks very much like the kind of card that doesn't do anything, a fun janky thing to make work. It costs a whopping nine mana.
Nine mana ended up being very castable in the right deck. Every Storm card has, essentially, a 'kill number.' How many copies of the Storm spell is enough to kill your opponent? Tendrils of Agony kills with 9 Storm. Brain Freeze tends to need about 15 Storm.
Dragonstorm only needs three, thanks to the printing of Bogardan Hellkite; you put four Bogardan Hellkites into play and they immediately burn your opponent for 20 damage. And of course, that's in order to kill instantly. Three is typically going to be enough, if you think you'll get to take your next turn and attack with at least one dragon.
You do need nine mana, but Seething Song is right there in the core set, getting reprinted over and over; Coldsnap includes Rite of Flame, an even better ritual. And Time Spiral contains Lotus Bloom, a riff on Black Lotus that was perfectly suited to the Dragonstorm deck.
To round out the strategy, Storm had some strong card selection and a few key pieces of interaction: Gigadrowse is an inspired inclusion, used to force interactive decks to tap out at the end of their turn or to essentially gain an extra turn against attacking decks.
In many cases, the Storm player would simply cast rituals into Bogardan Hellkite itself; depending on what the opponent was doing, a 5/5 dragon that came down at instant speed and immediately sent 5 points of damage at the opponent could be enough to win the game by itself. In post-sideboard games, one would typically board out all of one's creature removal against the Storm deck, after all.
Storm would be a, uh, scourge of Standard for a whole two years, until Time Spiral rotated. But miraculously, in a very deep and complex Standard environment, Storm turned out to be good, if not broken. This is a classic version that Makahito Mihara piloted to a World Championship in 2006:
This archetype had a surprising degree of longevity, though, seeing play in tournaments all through the 2006 and 2007 seasons. It very nearly won back to back Worlds – Patrick Chapin made it to the 2007 finals with a one-year-later, mono-red version of the deck that still featured the Dragonstorm combo but had a much more flexible game plan. Instead of card drawing, it used burn spells and Pyromancer's Swath to tear down the opponent's life total, sometimes winning by playing a big spell out of Spinerock Knoll.
This version of the deck played Ignite Memories out of the sideboard as a faster (if unreliable) kill in the mirror match – it doesn't take many copies of Ignite Memories to kill if you have a Dragonstorm or Bogardan Hellkite stuck in your hand, especially after the opponent has pitched a couple Shocks at your head.
This version of the deck is (in)famous for one of the most exciting finished in Pro Tour history, the Worlds 2007 semifinal match between Chapin and Gabriel Nassif. A high-stakes Dragonstorm mirror match meant that multiple games in this match were decided by Ignite Memories rolls.
Dragonstorm was the rare archetype that was never completely broken, but was very effective in Standard for the entire lifespan of the set that spawned it. But this era of Standard is remembered as one of the most diverse and exciting times; Standard had a big card pool, the cards were complex and nuanced and skill-testing, and a lot of different archetypes were viable. It was also rife with complex interactions, unintuitively powerful cards, and a shifting, bewildering metagame. For a certain type of player, this is the golden age of Standard play.
That 2006 World top 8, for example, features a few exemplar decks from this era:
- The red-green beats deck, a 'small midrange' deck built around beating down with Kird Ape, but which also featured Llanowar Elves to accelerate itself and Call of the Herd as a source of card advantage.
- Boros (Red-White) deck, a simple aggro deck featuring efficient small white creatures and powerful red burn spells.
- The 'Urzatron' deck, an archetype that used the 'Tron' lands (Urza's Mine, Power Plant, and Tower) to generate big mana as fuel for a control gameplan. Tron decks had been around on and off for a long time – the Urza lands had been reprinted in core sets repeatedly – but this version broke through by using a package of strong blue control cards.
This is the prototypical balance for a Standard metagame – aggro, midrange, control, and combo are all relatively viable and playable.
Next time
I've glossed over the other archetypes and events of that 2007 season, but Lorwyn block either enacts or prefigures many big changes for Magic. The era of the planeswalker is about to start – quietly, at first.