Help! I don't know what to play for States! I've been sorting cards and looking at deck lists. I've been coming up with my own ideas, some original and some not so original. There is just too much to choose from and I am sooooooooooo confused.

Don't believe me? Feast your eyes on Larry Whysall's recent article with, it looks like to me, eighteen - eighteen - different post-Odyssey Type II decks. Sure, as the environment sorts itself out there won't be eighteen Tier 1 decks, but for right now the field is wide open. With this many options, it's really tough to know what to play.

Yep the field is wide open for States and I couldn't be happier. Look at it, just look at this environment that WotC has given us...It is really great!

Yeah, yeah, I've heard the complaints about Odyssey too. Too many high casting cost spells, no broken cards, yadda, yadda, yadda....

Fooey. Post-Odyssey Type II is going to be a great environment.*

It is the absence of broken cards and the lack of cheap spells that will keep the environment healthy. Players will continue to have to interact with each other. Good cards that would be ignored in a faster environment become playable. Look at Overrun, for example. Last time that card was legal (Tempest block), it saw precious little, if any, play in Tier 1 decks. Why? At five mana, it was too slow. You were dead before you had a chance to cast it. That's right - even with mana birds and mana elves, you'd be dead before you could cast Overrun.

But now it is showing up in some of the early post-Odyssey Type II decks. Decks that actually seem like they have a chance to win. In today's environment, Overrun isn't considered too slow to play anymore.

Some folks are complaining that a lot of the cards in Odyssey are just overcosted and/or underpowered versions of older cards. I prefer to think of them as fixed versions of previous cards.

When I look at the cards in Odyssey, I don't see pale imitations of previous cards; I see cards that have some real potential in the current environment. Mike Mason had it exactly right in a recent article when he said that you have to evaluate cards based on what is in the environment now. Not what it was like a few years ago, or even a few months ago - how does the card fit in the environment today? That's what makes a card good or bad, not whether it is better or worse than some prior incarnation.

Haunting Echoes...Without Dark Ritual, this would never have seen play a few years ago. Too slow. Even with the Ritual, it would likely have been considered a crap rare, because if you got to the point where your opponent had anything in their graveyard worth stripping out, you were already dead. But now, even in a Ritual-free Type II environment, people are seriously looking at this card for tournament play.

And before you start complaining about the cost of the spells in Odyssey, you should remember that a few years ago this is exactly what people were asking for - the people living through the horror that was Urza's Block Type II wanted this. A time when the environment had more than enough undercosted spells to make turn 5 and 6 wins possible only if both players were mana screwed.

There were plenty of rants back in those days about how broken the whole environment was and how too many cards were undercosted and unbalanced. Some folks even went so far as to write tutorials for WotC R&D to help them figure out how to price cards fairly.

Well, Wizards listened. Or if they didn't listen, they still did what a lot of us wanted them to do: They got rid of the degeneracy. They started printing strong cards with appropriate casting costs. They slowed down the environment... They made it possible for people to interact again instead of facing off for two games of solitaire.

And I'm glad.

Sure fast wins are still possible... Sounds like some of the green decks are goldfishing on turn 4 pretty routinely... We'll see what happens when they face real opponents. Most games are going to last five or six - even ten or twelve - turns.

Nice.

Maybe this set will end up like so many before it...A set with only a handful of cards that are worth playing. A set where you open pack after pack looking for one of about six rares, because those are the only cards worth playing.

But I think not. I think that we'll end up with a lot of playable cards in this set - maybe as many as six to eight per color. That may not sound like a lot, but when you start with twenty-four land and you use four copies of each spell that you choose for your deck, you only need a total of nine playable cards to make the deck. If there are only six playable cards in Odyssey green, you only need three more playable cards from 7^th and Invasion block combined to make a mono-green deck. That seems like it should be possible.

If there are six playable green cards in Odyssey and three in 7^th and three in Invasion block, that's twelve playable green cards, which means...(dig out the old combinatorics notes here)...220 playable mono-green decks.** Multiply that by five colors and...you get 1100 different mono-color decks!!! Throw in the bi-color and tri-color decks and the number of potential decks gets positively astronomical!

(Um, not all of those decks are good, though - I think we'll be lucky to see even one playable mono-green deck... - The Ferrett)

Okay, maybe I'm ever so slightly exaggerating - but I think the point is sound. I think when things shake out, we'll see a bunch of different decks in Tier 1. Six to eight, at least. In addition, there will be variants on those six to eight decks that reflect individual preferences and local metagames.

This should leave us with a nice healthy Type II environment.

So, back to my dilemma. Green certainly got some good stuff in Odyssey and looks to be a strong favorite going into States. This makes me happy, because I like playing green.

But even choosing green, I still have too many choices: Mono-green Stompy with flashback, threshold, or squirrels and Overrun? Or should I go G/R with a bit of a Fires flavor? But G/R with a touch of land destruction worked nicely for me at States last year...Could it again? But what about G/B? I just got my G/B deck working a couple of weeks ago, and it only loses Blastoderms and Horned Trolls... It should be possible to make something out of it. And G/U... What about G/U? I've got a really bad G/U deck that won a few matches...Maybe I could fix it up and play it. Or G/W... Surely someone has noticed that you can slap an Armadillo Cloak on a Mystic Enforcer, getting a 5/5 Spirit Linked trampler that grows to 8/8 and learns to fly with threshold? I've heard that that kind of evilness is pretty good when it's on your side of the table.

This is too hard... I'm not even going to consider other colors or color combinations. I've only got a little over two weeks left and I have no clue what I'll be playing.

Ain't it grand?

Shuffle up,
Michael Granaas

* - I don't work for WotC and I don't own any stock in Hasbro...I say this as a hobbyist, not a paid lackey or unscrupulous profiteer.

** - Error Warning: computations done without the aid of a calculator.