Since my last article appeared on the same day as the World Trade Center attack, some of you may have understandably missed it. If you’re interested in the latest installment of collegiate Magic with bribes, check it out.

Now, back to today’s article:

A couple of months ago, when I was praising the strong presence of green in the Type II-dominant Fires, deck I wrote:

"I don’t expect that green will be left center stage for very long. Already we are being pushed aside by the addition of Tahngarth and Flametongue Kavu with Planeshift. We never get to take center stage for very long. After all, green is a support color, our time as a headliner is just an accidental aberration.

"When Apocalypse comes out, I imagine we’ll be back in our supporting role. But until then, I’m going to play Fires and I’m going to like it. I’m going to revel in that brief moment of glory when the former Perish or Morphling player whines about how Fires is too good, or about how their favorite color has been neutered because it can’t beat green."

Can I call ‘em or what? As far as I can tell, Apocalypse put control decks (read: not green decks) front and center. I think Fires still has some life left in it, and green is certainly showing up in a lot of decklists, but it is fading, and fading fast. Already islands are outnumbering forests at most major events by 2:1 or more. When Odyssey rotates in, Fires will be gutted and I expect that green will fade considerably.

As I write this, the Odyssey prerelease has been held - although I didn’t go, so I’ll know within a day or two exactly what green got in Odyssey. The Sideboard did tease me with instant-speed green elephant generators in the card previews for Odyssey. Promising, but I’ll wait until I can get real cards from the full set into my hands before I get my hopes up.

Thanks to the strong gold cards in Invasion block, green will stick around for a while as a component in a lot of decks... But they’ll be decks splashing green for gold cards or mana consistency. They won’t be green decks splashing other colors for support.

So why does green suck?

Well, the best hypothesis I’ve heard so far comes from Dan May over on ccgprime.com. In Ferrett’s interview with Randy Buehler, Dan picked up on a comment by Randy that most of the Magic R&D folks preferred to play control decks.

"So what?" you say?

Well, I read right over that interview comment myself...and I probably would have read right over Dan May’s mention of it if Brian Epstein hadn’t the day or two before emailed me to ask why green sucks. (Or was it: Why does everyone think that green sucks?)

I replied with a fairly stock answer... Critters, which green has a lot of, are fairly fragile in Magic. Mana acceleration, green's other strength, isn’t that great when all you can do with it is cast more fragile critters. Red can Shock small critters and Illuminate bigger ones. Blue can counter the biggest, meanest critter you’ve got for UU (Counterspell) or 1U (Remove Soul), not to mention the ability to bounce them so they have semi-permanent summoning sickness. White can take out big critters for 1W (Reprisal), has plenty of weenies for blocking everything else, and let’s not forget Wrath of God (2WW) that makes all the critters go away. And B has Dark Banishing (2B) and Plague Spitters (2B), among other things, in its arsenal.

Compare all of these to green's best (and only) targeted creature removal Desert Twister (4GG). By the time you can cast this, even with mana acceleration, the control player already has you beat.

So with all the mana acceleration the green mage can muster the best they can hope for with their six mana is to either get a monster through control long enough to inflict some serious damage on the opponent, or cast more weenies than the control player can deal with. But weenies are White's thing, so why play green?

But, that’s only part of the answer. This explains why the best players don’t play green - why green is a kiddie color.

The deeper question is, how did this happen to green? What did green ever do to deserve all this disrespect?

And the answer is contained in passing comment in an interview...most of the R&D players prefer to play control decks.

They don’t play beatdown decks. They don’t understand how truly fragile a beatdown strategy is without some sort of backup. These folks see a 2/1 uncounterable untargetable Blurred Mongoose and they make it a rare.

Huh?

A 2/1 critter is dead the second it sees a 1/x blocker on the table. Every color has a 1/1 for one or two available to them... And a 1/1 critter is all it takes to shut down the Mongoose. I expect that the control player could find a 1/1 critter or better somewhere in their deck to shut down the Mongoose. The three I played against last Friday night certainly had no problem. And the fourth, a creatureless deck, was packing Earthquakes.

The Blastoderm (2GG) is untargetable, but not uncounterable. And even if the Blastoderm should get through the wall of counters, a few sacrificial blockers (1/1s will do fine, thanks) makes it fade away without really bothering anybody.

The Kavu Chameleon (3GG) can’t be countered, but it can still be targeted. Sure it can change colors, which helps a bit against some control strategies, but it can still be destroyed outright, or made ineffective, by a bunch of different spells.

Gaea’s Herald (1G) 1/1 Creature spells can’t be countered by spells or abilities. Now, this is lovely, but only in a matchup against blue - and even then, you have to find a way to protect it from bounce or direct removal. Otherwise it is just a generic 1/1 critter that is easily killed.

That’s absolutely all of the counter control critters that I can think of in green right now. (Shouldn’t there be a pro-black critter on this list somewhere?) Make a mono-green deck out of these and some mana accelerators and maybe - just maybe - you’ll win a few games against blue control.

That’s it. Even with nothing but the best anti-control creatures that R&D gives us, the green mage can’t win a match against control using a beatdown strategy. R&D isn’t giving green the tools it needs to mount a serious beatdown threat to control. R&D likes control, they understand control, and beatdown (read: green) gets hammered because of it.

Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Yep, I’ve thought of this too, but I sure can’t make it work. I just can’t find enough good green control spells. I’ve already mentioned Desert Twister. Of course, there is Creeping Mold and... and... and....

Excuse me for a minute while I go check my green binder....

Let’s see here... Can we count the Fog variants as control? I suppose we can. Hmmm, oh yeah - here’s Hurricane...damages all flyers and both players. Nature’s Resurgence...both players draw cards. Wing Snare...2G Destroy target creature with flying.

Wow! I’ll bet that the control players are wondering why they didn’t think of green sooner... Not!

Okay, let’s keep looking...Let’s stick with Invasion block to save a little time and not worry about a set that will be rotating out in about a month anyway.

Let’s see...Invasion block green control... We’ve got Bind, Tangle, Tranquility, Wallop, and Tranquil Path. (I have a couple of empty spots in my binder, so I might have missed one or two.)

We can beef up green's control a bit more by counting critters that can be used to destroy artifacts and enchantments, but not by a lot.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s just me, but even with all of 7^th and Invasion block, I don’t think I could build a decent green control deck that would compete in IBC.

So the control themes have not been allowed to bleed over into green. At least one color remains pure. Weak but pure.

But at least when it comes to beatdown, green has the winning cards... Right?

I’ll concede that at the high end (4cc and above) green has some pretty good critters, possibly even the best critters in the game. The problem with these creatures, as I’ve already mentioned, is that control players have plenty of low-cost (3cc or less) answers for these critters. Below 4cc, green has the largest number of critters, but not necessarily the best.

Every time a new set is released I open a box or two of packs in wild anticipation of the cool green critters I’m going to find. And, yes, I do find a bunch of cool critters that I can dream about including in some sort of a beatdown deck - something I’ll soon be doing with Odyssey.

But, then, I start to notice other critters in the set. Sure, green typically (always?) has the most critters, but it seems that the other colors have one or two critters each that are just flat-out superior to comparably priced green critters, and a handful more that are just as good. Think about it... When was the last time that the best creature in a set was actually green? I’m thinking Verdant Force in Tempest... But even then, I’m not sure that was the best critter in the set.*

All of this because the folks at R&D prefer control decks and, logically, don’t understand beatdown well enough to design creatures for beatdown decks.

Oh, sure, they understand how to design a small number of solid to excellent critters to go into a control deck. But the range of critters needed for a purely beatdown deck? Nope - they just don’t get it.

Here’s hoping that they get a beatdown player working in R&D...SOON!

Michael Granaas

* - Of course, the benefit of playing green is that most of your rare cards end up being really cheap because, well, they suck - so it is a really cheap color to play.