So all the results from Regionals are in, and in the upset of the century, Affinity took over 50% of the slots for Nationals. And you were so shocked to find that out, weren't you? I know I was. Of course, I don't know what percentage of the decks played at Regionals were Affinity, but I would imagine that it's a safe bet to assume that a proportionate number of Affinity decks were played, as made it into the Top 8. I wish I could give you my own experience from Regionals, but I didn't go. It really bothers me that Wizards always chooses to schedule Regionals during Finals time . . . grrr. Besides, if I had gone I'm sure you wouldn't be interested in hearing about how I went 5-4 anyway. But I digress.

Bear with me as I state much of what you already know. First of all, I won't go so far as to say that this metagame is boring. Far from it, it is really a very exciting time to play Type II. You can win on turn 3, without having to put any real work into it, and 11/11's are everywhere. As a friend of mine put it, if you had said four months ago that we would be using Fireballs and Ornithopters in two of the best decks, if not the two best decks, that Type II has to offer, we would have ROFLMAO LOL OMFG (that means we would have laughed a lot, for you intarweb surfers who eschew casual conversation online) until you would have hung your head in shame at your ignorance and stupidity.

I will, however, say that the metagame is predictable. Everyone claims to have the tech. Everyone claims to have the answers. The truth is, we all know that anyone who says their version of Tooth and Nail only loses two out of every seven games to Affinity, because of that secret creature that they entwine into play, is just ridiculous and wrong. Again, though, any metagame becomes severely predictable after a while. The danger, then, comes when one deck is predicted to win constantly, and does so with an alarming degree of regularity. The problem, thusly, (yes, I said thusly. You'll live) lies with the sheer number of people who play Affinity, thus pushing it's already volatile and rapacious style of play into the realm that is dreaded by all: total dominance.

So what do we do fix this problem?

Simple. Stop playing Ravager Affinity.

Hmm, what? You thought I was going to have some grand answer for this? My Constructed rating isn't even over 1800, what the hell do I know about a healthy format? All I know is that every one of you people who played Affinity at Regionals have only yourselves to blame for the problems in Type II. Especially those of you who played it and sucked. For shame, you suckers, for in your random sideboarding flaws, or careless sacrificing of useful artifacts, you have ruined it for all the people who actually managed to struggle and strive to Top 8 with that pile. If some of you had just held back and played Goblins or Tooth and Nail, the headlines we'd be seeing would be"Affinity, despite only comprising 4% of the field at Regionals, somehow manages to come out from, err, center field, to take Type II by storm with the number of decks it places in Top 8 slots."

Okay, that's what the headline would be if Faulkner wrote it, but you get my point. Instead, we have total dominance. And what do you have to say for yourselves? I know that you wanted to play with a deck that smashes more face than Bobby Brown, but now we have, say it with me, total dominance. So just stop playing the deck, and it will all work out fine. Doing so will spark the returning of Eternal Dragons, just like the good old days, and we will swat those pesky Goblins and their new toy away, whenever they start to bother us.

Okay, okay, I don't really mean any of that. But Ravager Affinity is here to stay.

Duh, Scrub, tell us something we don't know . . .

Getting there, getting there. The problem with the whole total dominance thing is that the deck has achieved the critical mass for total dominance after two short sets. Tog wins Worlds, and rotates. Wake wins Worlds, and rotates. Ravager Affinity wins Worlds . . . twice in a row? Ugh. But there's no way for anything, or anyone, or any deck to stop it (that we can foresee, for now. For real.)

So how do we neuter the pesky, stupid, ridiculous Affinity deck? There can be, always, a case made for some tasty, tasty bannings. (I'm sure that sentence is a grammatical nightmare. I appreciate that you stuck with it until the end.) There have been a number of creatures banned recently, albeit in Extended. Nevertheless, this does mean that a creature, such as Arcbound Ravager, could easily have its head on the chopping block. If you're into that sort of thing. Skullclamp and Disciple of the Vault have been talked about, and if I am to glean anything from Kaltros' rebuttal, the grunts, Frogmite and Myr Enforcer are actually to blame. Except, I don't really believe that for a second. Sorry dude.

Bannings are a funny thing. They are very necessary sometimes, but you never want to go overboard and ban too much, or you can completely kill any semblance of fun in a format. Wanting bannings is like being pregnant. You either are, or you aren't, except in the case of bannings, you either want them or you don't. Like wanting or not wanting a disease. Except no one really wants a disease. Oh, the hell with it.

The point is that no one is on the fence when it comes to this crap. All respect to Wizards R'n'D, but the Future Future League must be a whole lot of grab-ass followed by Diablo II on Battle.net. How in the name of Jebus could they let something like the entire Affinity mechanic slip through the cracks? I believe that both Mark Rosewater and Randy Buehler are on record saying that the entire"untap your lands" mechanic was a mistake. Once the deck gets rolling, how is playing a Frogmite for free any different? Yes, I know that Tolarian Academy had a big part to play in that, but even excluding that card, there's a reason that almost any halfway decent card with an"untap your lands" mechanic is still banned in competitive Magic.

With Affinity, it gets even worse. At least Cloud of Fairies doesn't read,"When this comes into play, untap two lands. Add one colorless to your mana pool for the rest of the game." So somehow, the entire, broken mechanic made it to print. And boy it's good. It's so good, that two-thirds of an Ancestral Recall isn't even a requirement. Waitaminute, that's because of that other mistake that they made. Never mind.

I know, R'n'D is a tough gig. Getting paid to play Magic all day, now that's gotta suck. I know I couldn't do a better job, and honestly, I do have a lot of respect for what they do, and I know that they walk a thin line between making things fun and making things right. But c'mon, they have the fate of six million dorks the world over in their hands. Not since William Shatner uttered the words"Get a life, people!" has any one man held such power over the nerds as MaRo holds over us, and as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility.

So, now the mistake has been made. The die has been cast. Affinity is not getting any worse, people. The deck can fight through dedicated hate, a metagame of destruction, and an upset stomach, to claim a whole bunch of slots at Regionals. So does something need to get banned? If so, what?

Personally, I like having Skullclamp around. I like having aggro on top again. I like having my opponent think a few times before Wrath of Goding. Somewhere, I hope, Jamie Wakefield is smiling. So that card, mistake though it might have been, should stay. Because I like it, and this is my article. If you don't like it, write your own damn article.

While I don't like the whole Combo-Control feel that Ravager Affinity gets when your opponent drops Disciple of the Vault and an Arcbound Ravager, and while I really don't like is the nausea that I feel when both get dropped against me, I can live with it, because it's aggro (albeit blisteringly fast aggro). I remember being impressed that Gro-A-Tog could win on turn 3 consistently in 1.5, and this is a whole point five larger.

So, ladies and gentlemen... Ah, who the hell am I kidding, no ladies play Magic. So, gentlemen, here are our candidates for bannings: the little guy who eats other guys to get big (get your mind out of the gutter), the little guy who makes sure someone else pays for all the little guys that go away, the little guy who comes out like a really little guy, and the big guy who comes out like a little guy. Plus the tool that throws your little guys going away parties.

Now here's the punch line: we don't need no stinking bannings. Bannings make us feel slightly used, like we saw the goods, but then she put her shirt back on. But printing more cards, now, that makes us feel good, like a heroin user after he stops being addicted to heroin, because he replaced it with his addiction to methadone. What we need, my friends, is another card. A hoser, if you will. Wizards needs to have an impromptu"You Make the Card," with the sole intent being the development and printing of a card designed to stop the machine that is Affinity. And I know what I have something in mind as my first submission:

Affinity Can Bite Me
2
Players can't play activated abilities of artifacts.
"Bite me!"

That oughta do it. Affinity? Where? [I think we call it Damping Matrix. - Knut] You mean locked down on the other side of the board, while I play my six-card combo designed specifically for the purpose of infuriation? Oh yeah, right. Or we could do something more along the lines of:

Annoy Affinity Players
2
Players can only untap two artifacts per turn.

That might actually work. Want to untap that Ravager? Ok, hope it's worth it. Want to untap two lands? Too bad one doesn't start with Mi and end with shra's Workshop. Besides, Affinity could quite easily recover from something like that, I think, but it slows them down, and that's the whole point, I guess.

In sum, contact your local MaRo, and let him know that you want another"You Make the Card." If we work together, we can destroy this menace before it poisons our drinking water. Fail, and the next two years of Type II are going to be quick and dumb, like a fly, or small woodland animal.

So that's all I have in the way of, um, strategy. Yeah, strategy. Now I'm going to talk a little about jerks and Magic. If you wish to leave because you have had enough of this from the flamewar that ran rampant after Metalhead's article, I understand.

Still with me? Oh, happy day. I know that after reading Metalhead's article on jerks that play Magic and act like jerks, you just couldn't wait to hear the ol' Random Scrub's take on it. Don't worry, don't worry, I'll keep it short.

I liked his article, and, in principle, I like pretty much all of his points (I only say pretty much because I think I like all of them, but I can't remember them all offhand.) There will always be jerks, foul mouthed little boys, whiners, and complainers. There will always be people who rail against you in their tournament report. However, there is one thing that Metalhead and I might disagree on.

As far as I'm concerned, those people he talks about can do whatever they want, and say whatever they want. But they had better be prepared to back that trash talk up, and I don't just mean with their play. Like the old saying goes, they can be King Sh** of Turd Mountain; they can go to an PTQ and be God for seven rounds, and then they can go home and clean their messy little room and pop their pimples. But anyone who rails at a thirteen-year-old, after he topdecks to beat them is pretty pathetic, honestly. I wouldn't want to be them. So let them run their mouth, and call a judge's attention to it. Or feed it back to them in the parking lot. Not that I'm advocating violence, but anyone who is going to run his mouth over a card game where people play with fairies and goblins deserved to be smacked around a couple of times.

To the"I'll act and say and do whatever I want-ers" by all means, do it, say it, act it. When you get out there into that crazy world outside Magic tournaments, remember that no one cares that you have the"right" to pull that crap, and being right isn't going to matter a whole lot when you piss off the wrong person. Do whatever you want, but prepare to suffer the consequences.

Until next time, remember that if you see someone playing Tooth and Nail or MWC, they obviously Top 8'ed at Regionals with the deck. Everyone else has switched to Affinity.

Matt"96% of Nats Plays Affinity" Walker
Random_Scrub in the crazy StarCity forums.
Iceman2265 AT aol DOT com