I recently won a 99-person, eight-round online tournament primarily on the strength of one card, defeating many G/R creature decks and a G/U Opposition deck with it. There are many answers to this card that a G/R deck and a G/U deck can run, but the decks that I faced simply weren't running any reliable way to deal with it once it entered play. I lost two matches in that tournament. One was to a mono-red deck that had a good answer to the card – lots of direct damage spells – so the card remained in my sideboard in games 2 and 3. The other was to the G/U Opposition deck that I defeated in the quarterfinals; I didn't realize that the card would be effective against Opposition until after I lost to it in the final round, so I didn't sideboard it in with my seven enchantment removal spells.

Can you guess what the card was?

Here's a few hints:

1) G/R and G/U don't have much in common. What card could stop both of them from killing you?

2) I was playing a deck with access to red mana and green mana, but no other colors.

3) Opposition + a bunch of creatures is a valid answer to this card. However, it takes a while to completely nullify the card, giving me time to kill my opponent around the Opposition lock or destroy the Opposition.

4) This card can stop a White Weenie deck in its tracks, but almost all decks with white mana can remove this card easily (if they didn't sideboard out the cards that can deal with it).

5) The card is in Seventh Edition but not Sixth Edition.

6) None of the Magic Invitational decks used this card.

Give up?

It's Ensnaring Bridge.

For three mana, you can completely shut down the attack phase. While your opponent sits there not attacking, you can burn your opponent to death. G/R creature decks can't do very much if they can't attack. Opposition decks can't attack with their creatures either if you keep your hand empty. Even if they tap all your lands during your upkeep, you can still throw instant speed burn at them, keeping your hand size at one.

I can't explain why people play G/R decks with no artifact removal whatsoever. Is the 2/2 creature you get from Thunderscape Battlemage so important that you'll run it over Hull Breach for your enchantment removal? Is it the black kicker, which you can only pay with the mana from Birds of Paradise and perhaps a few random copies of Sulfurous Springs? What benefit from running Thunderscape Battlemage is so important that you'll allow your deck to scoop to a three casting-cost artifact? Is white mana for Thornscape Battlemage that painful to include?

Actually, I can explain it. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the lack of artifact removal in the sideboards of G/R decks: No articles on the Internet mentioned Ensnaring Bridge decks as something to be worried about. None of the top 8 decks posted on www.mtgonline.com over the weeks since the Odyssey spoiler was posted contained Ensnaring Bridge. In pre-Odyssey Standard, it was only a minor nuisance, which was usually destroyed by a Thornscape Battlemage. The card did next to nothing against control decks with Recoils, Disenchants, Vindicates, Countermagic, and Millstones. Not many people are going to be running it, so I don't have to worry. Let other people waste sideboard slots to deal a card that nobody is going to play.

Well, I played Ensnaring Bridge in my deck last Friday, and I locked down deck after deck with a card that nobody expected, even though it was pretty obvious that it would shut down any deck that wasn't prepared to deal with it. The arguments in previous paragraph sound reasonable - but in the end, it comes down to this:"My opponents are going to be stupid and not run this card that will wreck me, so I don't have to prepare for it." Sometimes, that reasoning is correct, and people win tournaments without running into cards they knew would give them trouble. Other times, some weirdo like me notices that a lot of the decks in the Top 8 can't deal with an Ensnaring Bridge, and counts on his opponents to be stupid and run decks that can't deal with a specific card with a powerful, game-altering effect. This is why rogue decks are often successful once and only once; they too have glaring weaknesses that are often worse than the popular decks, but the decks that people are playing don't have any way to exploit them.

This is the deck that I won with:

//NAME: Defeat You.mp3
4 Scorching Lava
4 Shock
4 Firebolt
4 Volcanic Hammer
4 Flame Burst
4 Urza's Rage
4 Blurred Mongoose
4 Call of the Herd
4 Quirion Dryad
3 Skizzik
4 Mossfire Valley
4 Karplusan Forest
4 Shivan Oasis
4 Barbarian Ring
2 Mountain
3 Forest

Sideboard:
3 Tranquility
4 Hull Breach
4 Ensnaring Bridge
4 Dodecapod

I could do a card by card analysis of the deck, but it should be pretty obvious how it works. I'll be making a few changes before taking this deck to States, like moving Ensnaring Bridge to the main deck. If I run into more players playing decks that just can't deal with a three casting cost artifact that shuts down the attack phase, I'll be very annoyed for a few minutes and then be very happy when I win. Don't be stupid; if there's a card that hurts the popular deck that you're thinking of playing, either find a way to deal with it that doesn't hurt your own deck or run it yourself and beat the others that just can't deal with it.

Doug Scheinberg