Hello once again! As I mentioned last week, I had finally finished my overall list of black cards that my multiplayer group, and now I was going off on a tangent before discussing the blue cards that my group uses. The tangent itself is still about blue, however, so I am managing to stay within the color scheme.

Over the last month or so, there have been articles appearing on the site that are arguing that the color blue has become too powerful in some formats. To some limited extent, blue's virtues have been extolled, but the overwhelming sense lately seems to be that to win, one must play mono-blue, or blue splashed with another color.

The articles, specifically, have been the following:

In Defense of Blue in Multiplayer, by Jeff Wiles, 2/12/02
Bear With Me: There's Three Decks At The End, by Bennie Smith, 2/20/02
Reply to"Bear With Me," by Iain Telfer, 2/22/02
Green's Fact or Fiction is Mulch, by Dan May, 2/28/02
Blue - The Ultimate Color Hoser, by Michael Granaas, 2/28/02
Force Of Will: Blue In The Twenty-First Century, by Will Rieffer, 3/8/02

I found each of these articles had something interesting to say - either a new aspect of why blue is lopsided was covered, or a statement that prompted me to disagree. With this range of articles, I decided to give my view of blue from a multiplayer standpoint. I also wanted to comment on the validity of various statements made in said articles.

In preparation for this article, I presented to my group's Blue Mage all of the articles mentioned above, with the exception of the last one, and asked him to give me his thoughts on the four articles arguing against blue. When I read what he had sent me, I blinked, read it again, and then copied it down. When I spoke to him over the phone, I jokingly told him that I presumed that he did not want me to quote what he actually said in this article. He replied that no, on the contrary - feel perfectly free to put it in. So, here it is, verbatim.

The following statement of opinion is not mine, and does not reflect or express my beliefs:

"I have read the four articles. I am noticing a trend among Magic writers who whine like little nancies when they face Imperial Blue. They are almost invariably green mages - and therein may be the psychological truth behind their hatred of that most noble of colors. You see, Imperial Blue is the thinking color. Green is the color of play duh big monstah and bashen you wit it - I.E., not a thinking color. In fact, thinking may very well be anathema to green players."

Now that my group's Blue Mage has presumably captured your attention, I shall present my take on the aforementioned articles, in the order that they appeared.

Jeff Wiles starts off with his multiplayer discussion by quoting a statement from one of Pierre DuPont's articles:

"Never play blue. People will assume you will counter their threats, and you'll die more quickly than you should."

Jeff gets off to a good start by saying that you cannot dismiss a color wholesale like this - and people should not. On the other hand, my group is knowledgeable enough to know that anyone playing blue should either have their life totals lowered into single digits immediately if not outright killed. The problem is that circumstances do not necessarily permit that... Which is where I start to find faults with what Jeff says.

He stated that one should not mislead oneself into thinking that mono-blue can win in a multiplayer game, particularly with more than three players.

He also states that if a player does win with mono-blue, then your opponents need better decks, more practice, or both.

He states later in his article that mono-red, mono-green, and mono-black are also all poor choices in multiplayer games. The one color that he feels can hold its own is white - and all of the other colors become viable for victory if white is splashed with any of them.

While I can certainly appreciate someone who considers white to be a dangerous color, I completely disagree with everything else he says. As far as I am concerned, Jeff is doing precisely what he said earlier that people should not do - and that is to dismiss a color wholesale.

I disagree with his statements for the simple fact that there is not a single color, including brown (mono-artifact), that I have not won a five-person multiplayer game with using a mono-colored deck. My playing group also disagrees - not because they have read Jeff's article but because they've all won with mono-colored decks at one time or another.

The most immediate counter-argument to my victories is that the law of averages dictates that if you play a color enough times over the course of years, I obviously should eventually win with it, right? While technically true, this argument is lousy, as it does not, in my mind, fairly take into account the various players' skill levels and the decks involved.

Which brings us back to Jeff's statement. If I win with mono-blue, then all four other players either suck, have lousy decks, or both?

First counter-argument to this statement: Out of the seven members of my playing group, four (including myself) have been playing multiplayer since Unlimited or Antiquities, somewhere around there. The other three have been with us since about the Urza's trilogy - and despite playing for a shorter amount of time, they are just as good as the original quartet. Two of them, brothers, have dueled with one another and in tournaments often enough to the point where they are probably better at deck construction than I will ever be.

Now let's take the"lousy deck" part of the statement: If what I said about the quality of my players didn't negate that anyway, since I think good players aren't normally in the habit of building decks that suck... But even if you do have lousy decks, you have four lousy decks. How indescribably bad do four decks have to get before they are incapable of defeating one? If four people pounding relentlessly on one person can't win, then I would agree.

I think that what decides whether a mono-colored deck will win or not gets decided in the subtler, more nebulous things that go on during a game - such as what threats are put out when, who deals with said threats, what cards end up being drawn, politics, and so on.

In Bennie Smith's article, he mentions that blue's weakness - that of difficulty in handling permanents - is a sham, buried in an avalanche of quality bounce spells over the years. To start off with, I am not sure I ever knew that blue's weakness was in dealing with permanents. (It was - The Ferrett) If this was the case, then I would tend to almost agree with Bennie's statement. While I do not think that there have been anywhere near as many bounce spells per se over the years as there as have been forms of counterspells, I would certainly agree that blue has the capacity to take care of whatever disadvantage it may have with permanents.

But does blue have more ways of getting around, its disadvantage compared to how other colors are allowed to get around their own? I think that to a certain extent, it does. For example, while green has flyers, still really does not have anything that regularly flies worth mentioning other than maybe Killer Bees and Cockatrice. But it does have a decent backup in the form of creature enchantments that allow ground-based troops to block flyers, and it does have spells that do well in mass killing of flyers - although that usually comes at a cost of causing damage to players as well. So this color does okay here.

But what about spells and artifacts? Well, let's look. I know green has ways of getting rid of enchantments, obviously - but again, it is usually through an all-or-nothing method. Either everyone can have them or no one can - including the green player. So this can be construed as a problem. And while I am pretty sure that green has something somewhere that can take care of artifacts, the fact that absolutely nothing comes to mind other than Crumble tells us that there is a serious disadvantage. (Verdigris - The Ferrett, channelling Rizzo's one-sentence articles, and then will later write a 20,000-word interjection to make up for it)

Red, on the other hand, does deal with artifacts... But this time it is the enchantment arena that red suffers in - and I can come up with nothing that takes care of this problem. Black had the double whammy of having to deal with both artifacts and enchantments - and again, while I know that somewhere out there is a black card that deals with these things, I cannot think of them, thus ensuring that these colors have distinct disadvantages.

Blue's disadvantage does not, to me, from a multiplayer standpoint, come from a lack of dealing with permanents quite so much as that it needs an enormous amount of mana to do the job. Capsize pretty much takes care of any individual permanent, barring complications; what makes it better capable of dealing with blue's supposed problem of permanents is that it has buyback. This spell alone does not render blue's inability to deal with permanents a moot point, however. There are many more spells that will not be mentioned here that also take care of the problem.

So if massive mana requirements are, in my games, how blue becomes nigh omnipotent, how does one go about stopping this? I will explain my theory on this later, once other topics are covered.

Iain Telfer's article had two points that I found interesting: The first was his commentary that he thought Bennie got things almost right. It isn't that blue has a monopoly on card drawing - as the other colors do have this ability if you look long enough. Decent card drawing is another matter, as I do not think that it can really be argued that blue doesn't hold prominent place here. But is card drawing itself the key to the problem... Or resources? Big difference, there.

And I think Iain makes a good point in that it is not necessarily card-drawing that is what needs to be spread out more, but resources. Case in point: My green decks have practically no artifacts in them that serve as mana producers - there are so many ways to get mana in green that you can probably play creatures with ridiculous casting costs via normal means twice as quickly as you could with any other color, except possibly black.

Dan May's article serves as a good continuation along the point as Iain's, and says it possibly more clearly in some ways, as well.

Mr. Granaas's article has another couple of points to the mix... First of all, his much-repeated line of:

"Things that prevent your opponent from killing you are color hosers."

While Mr. Granaas is using this statement obviously with reference to blue, personally I think this statement is a little broad. Based on this, there are an overwhelming amount of cards in any given color that can fall into this category. But anyway.

A much more valid argument is the one that he uses when he says that blue has so many different variations on a theme - seventeen variations of Counterspell post-Torment. I do not participate in tournaments, and personally I find strictly dueling boring, but even I think that this is a very important point. Are there variations of Disenchant? Yes there are. And as a white mage, I have argued in past articles about how powerful this specific card is. But ultimately, it is good for only two things: Getting rid of an enchantment, or getting rid of an artifact. Counterspells, in seventeen different forms, allow you to not worry about the enchantment or artifact from ever hitting the table in the first place.

Oh, and if it matters to anyone out there, the absolutely most pain-in-the-neck counters to deal with in multiplayer are the ones that actually allow you to untap your lands afterwards. Remember when I said that in multiplayer, the blue mage needs massive amounts of mana to pull things off? Well this is where R&D basically gives the game to the blue mage on a silver platter, thank you, gentlemen. Now the blue mage can counter your stuff for free, and still have the mana to do something else on player number two's turn, and number three, et cetera.....

Mr. Granaas does not miss the point either that even if blue happens, for once, not to have the mana to counter something from hitting the table, there are bounce spells around so that the blue mage can say,"Okay, let's try this again."

So just exactly how does one go about dealing with blue in multiplayer? Well, there may be those of you out there who are fall into one of the following groups: The first may fall into the category of being in favor of killing the blue mage first, always, without exception; scream and leap at whoever shows an island on the table!

A commendable course of action, but with flaws. In the early multiplayer game, of course blue cannot counter everything that comes out. But attacking with the weenies that you have out there takes time - and in the meantime blue has managed to get out their 1/1 chump blockers, then their multiple Walls of Fog (another bastard of a card), Propagandas, and...

Oh, all sorts of things.

Possibility two: Land and artifact destruction. Another good idea - but if you specialize in this, the odds of your staying power for the duration of the game is limited, unless everyone else is so grateful that you shut the blue mage down that they all surrender to you in gratitude. Yeah. Right.

Possibility three: Play a deck not entirely dissimilar to the one mentioned above, except that this time you play cards like SCRAGNOTH! Or CITY OF SOLITUDE! Or TSUNAMI! Or BOIL! This last is aptly named, as it is also what the blue mage's blood will do when you successfully cast it.

Possibility four: Try all of the above at once.

The most effective, in my personal opinion, is killing the blue mage.

My group has had so much blue flying around lately (no pun intended) that even the blue mage I interviewed is thinking about building anti-blue decks. And naturally, the people who are complaining the most whenever facing blue, somehow never have enough of a hatred of the color that it precludes them from actually playing the color themselves. Personally, I find ironically that several of the cards that I find the most annoying are from one of blue's enemies - red. Specifically, Jokulhaups, Wildfire, Wheel of Fortune, Sneak Attack, and so on.

Well, that about covers it for this week. Next week, I'll be starting with blue creatures and which ones we use in multiplayer. So until next week, take care!

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