You’d think that after three weeks of watching the"server not found" message over at StarCity, all of the site’s feature writers would be screaming to get an article up loud enough for to give the Ferrett a migraine... But to tell the honest truth, though, Magic just hasn’t been as exciting as it used to be. Let’s face it, what did we see out of Seventh Edition? Static Orb decks and some new tri-colored control. Well, isn’t that special? Wa-freaking-hoo. Apocalypse, on the other hand, looks like it’s going to be a whole new animal. Sabbaticals are fun, but playtime is over, and I’m happy to be back to what I love: Writing. I hope you’ll all bear with me while I get my writing legs back under me.*

I must say that one thing that has surprised me a great deal this last week is the relative lack of concrete Constructed Apocalypse analyses. Sure, there’s the usual assortment of card-by-card analyses, but very few people have come out and said anything about the possible applications of Apocalypse in actual decks. Could it possibly be that there aren’t any applications at this point? Surely Wizards wouldn’t release a set that has a grand total of five or six cards that will actually see play at a major Type 2 or Extended tournament, would they?

Why not? They’ve done it before. Fallen Empires is a prime example of a set that didn’t bring a whole lot to the tournament scene. In fact, right off the top of my memory, I can only think of a few cards from Fallen Empires that have seen significant amounts of tournament play: Goblin Grenade, High Tide, Hymn to Tourach, Order of Leitbur, and Order of the Ebon Hand. I trust those players who were around during the Black Summer still have nightmares about Hymn and the Orders, right? I know that playing against High Tide was traumatizing for anyone who was an Extended newbie (like me) when it was developed.

To tell the truth, I’m not really all that surprised that a set as radical as Apocalypse is bringing mass confusion into Constructed. It’s been obvious for quite some time that Wizards is throwing the entire Invasion block behind accomplishing the goal of an environment that strongly encourages multi-colored decks. What makes Apocalypse so different is that it is the first set in Magic history to actually promote enemy-colored gold cards. Personally, I think it’s a bit crazy. The main problems with throwing opposing colors together isn’t so much about the cards, but about their fundamental strategies. Take, for instance, Blue and Green. The Green mage has always been about playing the fattest possible creatures as quickly as possible. The Green mage has massive mana acceleration and seeks to use every mana source to its full advantage to cast creatures and boosting spells. Blue, on the other hand, has always been about conserving mana for use to counterspell anything cast by an opponent. Blue mages want to hold back, while Green mages want to send out everything. Starting to see a conflict? Enemy-color decks may very well prove to be unstoppable, since each color can shore up the weaknesses in it’s enemy; however, it’s important to realize that enemy colors were not originally designed to cooperate with each other. Some (such as Blue, Red) work together very well, but others will be a stretch to pull off. Still, I must admit that having enemy color gold cards promotes multi-colored strategies.

For better or for worse, this trend toward multicolor is beginning to slow constructed down immensely (although it’ll be a while before Extended feels it). It’s interesting to note that this slowdown is causing Beatdown to undergo some radical changes. Traditionally, Beatdown was all about the fast weenies — take a look at the most successful Beatdown decks of Ice Age block, Mirage block, Tempest block, or Urza’s block, and you’ll see what I mean. We have Necro, Sligh, Stompy, White Weenie, Suicide Black, and Hatred (some people call it a combo deck, but it is technically Beatdown). Each of these decks was centered around about putting down a large amount of small creatures and then doing something to stall the other player long enough to win. In modern Type 2, there is nothing that operates under this strategy except for mono-white Rebels (which isn’t too popular these days) and possibly Skies (although its creatures are a bit too fat to be called weenies).

Because Wizards is simply not releasing enough playable one, two, and three casting cost creatures, it is becoming almost impossible to play a traditional Beatdown deck. Instead, Beatdown has swung in the completely opposite direction. Instead of focusing on cheap little guys, Wizards is focusing Beatdown on larger mid-sized creatures that are more expensive, but generally do more for the mana investment than the old school weenies did. For instance, take Blastoderm. At four mana, 99% of players agree that he’s a bargain for a 5/5 untargetable stick. Sure he has fading, but that doesn’t really hurt all that much. Want another example? Look at Noble Panther — a 3/3 for three mana is pretty good, but add in optional first strike and he’s golden. Chimeric Idol is another good example of a well-costed, mid-size"creature."

These types of creatures have lead to a whole new type of Beatdown — one where it’s more important to be playing high-quality creatures than simply throwing out a horde of dirt-cheap little guys that feature a high power. Despite the fact that the basic means of winning, creatures, is the same as it has always been, Beatdown is a whole different animal in modern Type 2.

So what exactly have we lost, possibly forever? Sligh and Necro are definitely gone. During the Ice Age blocks the first true weenie decks began to arise; Necro had its start during this period, and so did the original Sligh. Both were based upon a fairly simple, yet at the time revolutionary, principle: Play a lot of small dudes, then disrupt your opponent like crazy. Sligh accomplished this disruption by playing out several small creatures like Ironclaw Orcs and then using burn and Orcish Artillery to make sure that no other creatures would be able to stop the random weenies from their appointed beatings. Necro decks did something very similar, but they did it much more effectively. The original Necro decks would play out a small creature, such as Hypnotic Specter or Black Knight, and then use massive amounts of discard to make sure the creature didn’t meet any unfortunate accidents. As soon as humanly possible, the Necro player would drop Necropotence and then use the power of the Skull to refill their hand. At this point, the initial horde of weenies would be joined by an even larger horde. Whenever the Necro player needed to replace his army or find some removal, all he/she needed was to tap into Skull power and draw some cards. Both Sligh and Necro could typically win by turn seven at the latest.

The death of weenie didn’t stop there, though. The Stompy decks of Tempest/Urza’s Block are now officially dead for two reasons: First of all, there isn’t any brokenly insane mana acceleration (namely, there’s no more Gaea’s Cradle or Rofellos). Second of all, Green no longer has the insanely fast weenies and cheap, effective boosting spells that it once did. These are the two factors that made Stompy so successful during Tempest/Urza’s/Mercadian Masques Blocks. I don’t think anyone who played tournament Magic during that period will ever forget the horror of having a Vine Dryad cast during their turn and then watching the Stompy player play Gaea’s Cradle, Rancor up their Dryad, and then attack for three on the first turn. If that was a forgettable memory, then I’m sure the second-turn forest, Wild Dogs, Pouncing Jaguar, and a random Rancor isn’t. For those who are keeping count, that’s a grand total of fifteen damage on turn three if you didn’t have any blockers. Yes, that’s right — it did suck to be Blue back in those days, because the earliest one could expect to drop some kind of defense against the horde was on turn three... If you were really lucky.

Another casualty of the way the multi-colors are slowing the environment down has been the turn three or sooner Combo deck.** For some reason, I seriously doubt that anyone misses these dirty Combo decks, though. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, it was the very pros that played them constantly who complained to Wizards about how bad they were for Magic. If I were to nominate one of R&D’s decisions for the Smartest Move You Ever Made Award, it would be the decision to drop Combo faster like a bad habit. Sure, Combo still exists, but modern Combo decks don’t hold a candle to those of the past. Phyrexian Tyranny/Teferi’s Puzzle box and Turbo Chant may technically be Combo decks... But they aren’t nearly as potent as High Tide, Jar, Trix, or even SabreBargain were. While some may argue that the loss of weenies is a bad thing, there isn’t really much to be said about keeping Combo decks in tournament Magic.

To be truly good, a Combo has to be fast enough to go off before the environment’s strongest Control deck can stop it from doing so (usually the Control deck does this with counters or land destruction). In addition, it usually has to be played in a field that is as anti-control as possible. The reason for this is that most of the time a good Combo player will never lose a game to Beatdown, except in the case of a really bad hand. In an Anti-control environment, not only are most people going to be playing Weenies or some other form of Beatdown, but the Combo deck’s natural enemy — Control — won’t show up due to the metagame hate.

So what archetype do we have that’s had relatively few changes? Control... And man, is it getting harder to stop control by the minute. It is simply inevitable that in any slow environment, control decks will become more and more powerful as things slow down. Permission may or may not be strong (depending on the card pool), but when there is no dominant Beatdown deck to put players on a clock, some form of control will rise to tier one. This is what we face once Mercadian Masques rotates out of Type 2 in about three months. Let’s face it — Rebels will be getting exiled to Extended, and Blastoderm will be waving good-bye to Type 2. For better or for worse, Fires will be losing it’s star creature, as will PT Junk (G/W decks). Blastoderm’s major strength is not its high power and toughness, but its untargetability, which protects it from everything but global removal. Once Blastoderm is gone, it will be harder for anyone playing Fires to keep creatures out in the face of Black spot removal and the watered-down"spells" we’re calling burn these days. To make matters even worse, Fires will lose its"Oops, I win" condition (That’s Saproling Burst, folks — The Ferrett) when Nemesis rotates out with Masques. As for Counter Rebels, it’s safe to say that we’ll never see that in Type 2 again.

All this ties into the original point, which was that Apocalypse is very surprising. To quite honest, I have absolutely no idea what Apocalypse is going to mean to Standard tomorrow, much less a month or two from now. But I do know this: Type 2 is going to start looking more like Limited once Masques rotates (assuming that Wizards doesn’t do something really crazy with Odyssey). Once that happens, it’s going to be very hard to win with Beatdown in high-level tournaments. Still, I doubt that Beatdown will ever completely vanish from the Tier One of decks; with the slowdown in the environment, it looks like a version of Suicide Black might not only be possible, but effective as well.

So by now you’re probably wondering why I went from Apocalypse to Weenies and then back to Apocalypse, right? Well, I’ve talked about all this simply to set myself up to make one point and one point only: Wizards is far from achieving the balance that they set out to find when Invasion was released. What do I mean by balance? I think that for an environment to be perfectly balanced, it would have to be one where all decks were approximately equal in strength and there is an equal amount of Control and Beatdown represented in the Tier One decks. The fact that Wizards hasn’t achieved this balance may well be a very good thing.

Let’s look at the current Type 2, for example. There are no broken, utterly dominant decks in the current environment, and it’s not balanced at all in terms of the number of decks of each archetype that are considered Tier One. If one were to look at the Top 8’s for different Nationals throughout the world, one would see that with the exception of Fires and the occasional Skies deck, most of the Top 8es consist of control. Probe-Go, Opposition-Static Skies, Nether-Go, the occasional U/W control and Counter Rebel; these decks show up everywhere. As a matter of fact, the only truly Tier One Beatdown deck at this time is Fires. Now I’ll concede that Fires is the most played deck in Type 2 (whether it deserves to be or not), but there should still be at least one or two other Beatdown decks lying around that could be considered Tier One.

This environment is great for those of us who love playing control or Fires, but for the Beatdown player who’s tired of Fires, there really isn’t much to choose from. Between Wrath of God, counterspells, and Fires there really isn’t much in the way of a Beatdown deck that can reliably win without stooping to some kind of countermagic — and that is precisely the point that I’m trying to make. By slowing the environment down a great deal, Control becomes the top dog by default. When a player is forced to slowly cast out threats, that puts him/her in a position of extreme vulnerability to both disruption and removal. Look at it this way: If you have to pay four mana for a decent creature, then by the time you can cast it (even using mana acceleration) it’s at least turn three. I can counter on turn two and I can Snuff Out on turn one. If your creature instead cost one, then I might be the one in trouble... But since it costs one, that means it’s probably going to be the only spell you cast on that turn. Starting to see the problems with slowing down?

So how to fix this problem? Well, we could look to Control’s traditional enemies, Red and Green, to fix things. They aren’t much help, though; Red, for one, is a broken, shattered remnant of its old self that’s only fit to be played as the second string to a stronger color. I haven’t seen a burn spell worth playing in quite some time (maybe Prophetic Bolt, but it’s not a mono-red spell), and red’s traditional small fast weenies are notoriously missing. Land destruction isn’t what it used to be, either. Green’s chief method of killing control was its speed; Stompy killed Control mages before they even had a chance to find some removal. So with Red and Green speed out of the question, the only other reliable method for stopping control is more untargetable fatties like Blastoderm. Even then it may not be enough, because of a little class of spells that delights in not letting cards see play (counterspells).

As much as I hate to say this, the closest Magic has ever been to a perfectly balanced playing field (in terms of archetype representation in the Tier One of decks) had to be Urza’s Block. The reason that the whole thing worked was quite simple: The environment was fast enough for Beatdown to be effective against control decks, but the combo decks in the environment were really great for smashing weenies. The control decks weren’t quite as strong, but they smashed combo quite handily: the basic Paper, Rock, Scissors routine. There were multiple deck types for each deck archetype and there was a good deck for people of all tastes. Those who were into control had Accelerated Blue or Flores Black. Beatdown players had Trinity Green, Angry No-Hermit, and Stompy. And for the twisted souls in our midst, there was SabreBargain and Replenish. No one who wanted to win was locked into a specific archetype (although the environment slanted away from control during that period) in the way that we seem to getting shackled to control in modern standard.

So while slowing down has certainly given us a much less hectic playing environment, is it really good for us? I believe that slowing definitely has its drawbacks, because another interesting feature of slow environments is that they make counterspells that much better. Think about it logically: If player A has three counters and Player B has three spells, then in a fast environment it would be harder for Player A to counter all three spells. Since his spells are cheap, Player B will be more likely be able to cast more than one spell a turn and catch Player A tapped out. Take the above situation and put it in a slow environment, where counterspells cost the same amount as in the fast environment — Player A’s counterspells cost the same amount, but Player B’s spells cost twice as much. It will be much easier for Player A to stop all three of Player B’s spells, simply because it is more likely that Player B will only be able to cast one or possibly two of those spells in any given turn. As long as Player A doesn’t foolishly tap out, he should be able to easily stop Player B’s spells.

To be honest, I don’t know which of the two situations is better. On the one hand, slowing down the environment has made Magic a much more social and enjoyable game... But on the other hand, it’s limiting the types of decks that can be effective. Every environment has limiting cards, and the more of these cards a deck can deal with the better it will do. Unfortunately, this environment’s defining spells are Blastoderm, Counterspell, and Wrath of God. Why are these the limiting spells? Simple. If you can’t beat Blastoderm, Fires will kill you. If you can beat Blastoderm but can’t survive counterspells, U/W, Probe-go, and Nether-Go will kill you. If you can survive Blastoderm and counters, then you’d better be able to survive a Wrath of God/Wash out because if you can’t you’ll die anyway. These spells are a lot easier to work around than, say, the limiting factor in Urza’s Block/Masques (which was Replenish and its related buddies, or Deranged Hermit and co.). Still, the wide range of effects among these three limiting cards makes it much harder to create a Rogue deck that can do well against all of the other decks in Type 2.

In the end, I suppose that the perfectly-balanced environment is a dream. Even if Control, Combo, and Beatdown were all equally represented in Tier One decks in a future environment, it wouldn’t take long for someone to develop the Hand Grenade to throw the balance off. So it seems like for the time being, we’re stuck with an environment that has no balance between the deck archetypes and where Control is becoming the lead deck archetype. Don’t get me wrong; I really don’t mind. Control is, perhaps, my favorite deck type and has been ever since I began playing around with it. Even before I had ever heard of Control, I was playing a Sligh deck that had much more burn than was good for the deck in it. What can I say? I liked being able to clear my opponent's creatures off the board faster than a water cannon clears crowds. But the problem is that with so few Beatdown decks available in the top tier of Magic, it is quite possible that many players are slowly being turned away from the game. Perhaps no more players are leaving than did during Mirage/Tempest/Urza’s Block, when Beatdown was king, but it still doesn’t feel right. Fortunately, for those who can’t stand control, there’s always multiplayer and Extended to play in. (Well, I’m not so sure about Extended... — The Ferrett)

In the end the solution lies mainly in the hands of two groups: The Deck designers who discover new deck types and find ways to get around and beat the metagame, and the R&D employees who decide where our game is going. There has never been a time in Magic that has introduced so many fundamental changes as this one. We’ve gone from fast and furious death matches to a much slower, more elegant dueling style in the course of one set rotation. It’s an exciting time to be a Magic player, because I don’t think that even R&D knows what effects the move to multi-colors will ultimately have on Constructed. Maybe it’s just me, but I get the feeling that Apocalypse will cause some very big surprises once we’re all done playing around with it.

-Israel Marques, II

-Member Team AWWAJALOOM

* - However, if I write a sucky article please feel free to send me hate mail. There’s no excuse for bad writing.

** Being marked for total annihilation by R&D hasn’t helped Combo decks either.