Some of you may have seen my set reviews for Type 4, some of you might even have read them — and some of you may even have clicked through Ted's link to Stephen Menendian's first article about the format and read that. If this is all the exposure you have to Type 4, this article is for you.
On the other hand, some of you may have never heard of Type 4, or have and are wondering what all the fuss is about. This article is also for you. From the rules, to building your stack, to general drafting strategies and play tips, in this article I will cover what it means to play Type 4, and hopefully you'll join the rest of us in this mad world of huge, flashy effects for absolutely no mana whatsoever.
The Rules
Since Type 4 is a format for Magic Play, it had darn well better have some rules. Type 4 is played with a large (typically around three hundred cards) highlander-style stack of cards, which are Rochester-drafted among all players. Many people have their own house rules they add, but some are common across the board.
Rule #1: You Have Infinite Mana.
Why infinite mana? To make things fun. Since mana cost is one of the major tools Wizards of the Coast uses to balance power levels, a lot of really amazing cards with neat or powerful abilities are kept from seeing much play because they cost too much. Allowing players infinite mana makes a lot of cool but pricey cards very, very good. Classic examples of this are Planeswalker's Scorn, Fervent Denial, and Dregs of Sorrow. In fact, it makes a lot of cards too good, which I will discuss further when I talk about building a stack. Thanks to this rule, you will get to play with a lot of cards you could never otherwise have justified including in a deck.
Rule #2: You May Only Play One Spell Each Turn.
Because allowing players infinite mana allows for insane levels of brokenness, a limiting factor had to be introduced. Restricting players to only one spell per turn keeps them from going absolutely nuts, and allows other players a decent chance of responding to whatever nutty play you try to make. In a normal game of Magic, for example, you can often protect a key spell with a counter of some sort. Not so in Type 4. If you play something, you've generally put all your cards on the table. Since you've just used up your spell limit for the turn, any opponent with a counter can shut you down. The result is that you have to play strategically, baiting with some cards to clear the way for others.
Rule #3: Starting Hand Size Is 5, Though The Maximum Is Still 7.
Just like Rule #2, this is a limiting factor. Allowing players to start with seven cards simply allows them too many options for a format with such swingy effects as this one.
Optional Rules
Optional rules also exist for governing how things like incarnations work, and letting alternate casting costs (ACCs) have an actual effect. The following are a couple of examples.
You have one copy of each basic land, but you may not do anything to or with them (i.e., Anger works but you can't entwine Betrayal of Flesh).
If you pay the alternate casting cost on a spell (besides the WUBRG on Bringers or allowed by Fist of the Suns), that spell does not count toward your one spell per turn.
These are, of course, just examples, and you can play with whatever works for you. The Brass Man, for example, allows you to play even the ACC for Bringers, and some people give you an infinite number of basics and allow you to treat them however you want.
Building a Type 4 Stack
It's hard to go wrong with building a Type 4 stack. Just go through your collection, and throw the few hundred flashiest cards you have into a set of matching sleeves, and you're well on your way.
There are a few guidelines, however. As I mentioned earlier, allowing players infinite mana makes a lot of cards too good. For this reason, you will want to exclude any spells that do infinite damage, gain infinite life, pump power infinitely, and other such effects when mana is not an issue. This means you won't run into situations where someone plays a first-turn Fireball to kill everyone else and win right then. Also banned is Nezumi Graverobber, whom the past few months have shown is just far, far too powerful to be in the stack.
As for what flashy cards you actually should include, I have some good news and bad news there. First, the bad news: A lot of cards that you will want for your Type 4 stack are old. A lot of cards you will want are rare. Some of the cards you will want are even expensive. Not everyone has easy access to Chaos Orbs, Elder Dragon Legends, Tornados, and Serra Avatars, so getting your hands on what many consider to be staples of the format may be difficult at first. I, for one, had a devil of a time getting my hands on a Quicksilver Amulet and a Time Stretch. (May I suggest our convenient StarCityGames.com Online Magic Store? – The Ferrett) Do not let this discourage you, however, for there is also good news.
It turns out that a lot of Type 4 cards are bad (from a competitive standpoint, at least). One of your biggest staples, for example, is Vedalken Orrery. No one hoping to win a Pro Tour would be caught dead with Orrery on his deck registration form, but it is a must-have for anyone trying to build a serious Type 4 stack. Being bad makes these cards cheap, and you will likely be able to pick up most of what you don't already have as throw-ins in trades. Back when Onslaught rotated out of Type 2, a friend of mine just gave me a number of Onslaught block rares that were suddenly near-worthless.
In addition to being bad, a lot of good Type 4 cards are recent. When I first started building my stack back in September, I had very few older cards, so I just shored up a lot of holes with stuff from Mirrodin and Onslaught. Both Kamigawa sets and Unhinged have also contributed a great many playable cards to the format, and I encourage you to look over my Unhinged and Betrayers set reviews for ideas. Things like Rockshard Elemental and Kodama of the North Tree may not make the cut in your final stack, but they are fine for when you're just starting out.
The kinds of cards you will want to include are for the most part obvious. If you look at a card and think “This would be awesome if it didn't cost ten,” you've probably got a winner. Fatties, wraths, counters, burn, life gain, removal, utility creatures, broken enchantments and artifacts, and draw are all important components of a solid Type 4 stack. Ultimately, you want your stack to contain about 300 cards, as 300 is evenly divisible by three, four, five, and six players. But if you don't have that many cards you can use, you can generally get away with a three- or four-person game once you get up to around one hundred and eighty or two hundred cards.
The key thing to watch as your stack grows is to keep your ratios consistent. Having too many cards of one type tends to unbalance the stack and keep the game from being as fun as it could be. One problem I had for a while was that I had just about every counter commonly used in the format, but not many of the fatties. This made games take forever, as players would generally be able to counter any serious threat. My stack now has about a third again as many creatures as Wrath of God effects, other removal spells, and counters combined, which seems to be a pretty good mix.
Another ratio you need to watch is that of artifacts and enchantments to artifact and enchantment removal. A lot of the most powerful cards in Type 4 are either artifacts or enchantments, so it is critical that you have enough removal for them to keep them from dominating the game. Between counters and removal, my ratio of artifacts/enchantments to cards that can handle them is a little bit more than one-to-one, but I've had people tell me that they thought that I needed more removal. Again, go with whatever works for you.
Type 4 Staples
Some cards are synonymous with the Type 4 format, and no stack should be without them. Here are a few of those cards.
Mischievous Quanar
So good he needs errata, the Quanar has a unique ability that makes him both very cool and exceptionally valuable. A first pick every time he's flopped, the Quanar makes every morph in your stack that much better, as your opponents won't know if your face-down creature is him or just a Krosan Cloudscraper.
What's the errata, you ask? You may only use his copy ability once per spell.
Urza's Rage
Big flashy effects that cost tons of mana are what Type 4 is all about. Uncounterably stealing half of someone's life at instant speed is a perfect fit. Just watch out for that Deflection!
Vedalken Orrery
Permanents hitting the table at instant speed is simply insane. Casting sorceries at instant speed is just nuts. You haven't truly lived until you've said “In response, I Balance.” Not only does it give you the powerful ability of playing your spells any time, it also increases the number of spells you can play, by not limiting you to instants on your opponents' turns.
Decree of Silence
Another rule-breaker, the blue Decree is one of the very few cards in most stacks that will allow you to counter a spell after you've already played one. Not only that, but it also draws you a card. And sometimes, when it's down to two players, you might even want to hard-cast it.
Note how three of these four cards essentially break Rule #2, the spell-per-turn limit. Clearly the ability to work around the Arcane Laboratory rule is central to the format, and a lot of the most powerful cards do that in some way.
Drafting Your Stack
Once you've got a stack built, you'll have to find some people to play with. Though you can always just deal out the stack like you would any other deck of cards, the best way to set up Type 4 is to Rochester draft your stack. I won't lie to you: drafting it will take a long time, but it's also fun and results in decks that are far more balanced and personalized than merely dealing out the stack.
There are many different approaches you can take towards drafting from a Type 4 stack, depending on the kind of game you like to play. Some people like to employ a “castle” strategy, picking up lots of defensive cards like Shield of the Ages, Wraths of various kinds, and big blockers like Crowd Favorites or Myojin of Cleansing Fire. Others like to draft lots of creatures and cards like Survival of the Fittest, which let them go aggro and dig up utility creatures like Willbender to fit the needs of a given situation.
Still, most people prefer to eschew creatures for the most part, and focus on drafting as many instants as possible. This strategy works because it allows you to have a great many options available at any given time, and it certainly doesn't hurt that a lot of very powerful cards are instants, such as Flash of Insight or Beacon of Immortality.
You could also choose to focus on attempting to draft some sort of infinite combo. One of the most infamous such combos is the Glasticore combo, consisting of Glarecaster and Masticore, which generates infinite damage. And of course, if you don't want to think too much, you can always just draft whatever card is currently the most powerful and run with that. If you choose the latter strategy, however, be careful to get a good mix of spells. You don't want to accidentally end up without any artifact removal, for example, or Darksteel Colossus could ruin your day.
Playing the Game
Now that you've got a stack drafted, there are a few things to keep in mind as you play Type 4. The high power level of almost every card in your stack means that games can often be very swingy, and what may seem like a powerful position one moment could be utterly devastated the next.
The key to doing well in Type 4 is to be careful about when you play your bombs. Your opening hand will likely have two in it, so pick which one you really want to resolve and lead with the other. If it doesn't get countered or otherwise dealt with, you've got something big on the table. If it does, then you've still got your better bomb to play later.
Another thing to keep in mind as you play is that overextension is fatal. Despite the fact that you will generally only need three or four creatures to kill an opponent, you will rarely see anyone with more than one under his control at a given time. Part of this is because of the prevalence of wraths and other removal constantly wiping things out — but the larger reason is that those wraths encourage people to keep some men back, in case what they have out now fails them. In addition, continuing to play things on your turn willy-nilly when you already have a big bomb like Soothsaying or Holistic Wisdom out leaves you horribly vulnerable. Type 4 players can be extremely vengeful, and if the most powerful player leaves himself open the others will try to take advantage of that.
Lastly, be aware that like all melee multiplayer, Type 4 is very political. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, and other similar clichés all apply. Bear that in mind as you play your spells, because it may turn out that Arcane Denial doesn't suck so much after all.
Type 4 Resources
Before I go, I just want to point you in the direction of some other resources for Type 4. Certainly after this week, there will be plenty of Type 4 action on this site for you to find, including my previously published set reviews, but the following sites also have valuable information.
Limited Infinity
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/feature/198
Stephen Menendian's original article on Type 4, written a year ago.
The Type 4 Sticky on The Mana Drain
http://www.themanadrain.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20790
Though The Mana Drain is more commonly known for Type 1, the casual forum has some of the best Type 4 information available anywhere, and the linked sticky contains a number of stack lists and discussions of individual cards.
That's all for me today. I hope you found this article interesting, and that you plan to look into building your own Type 4 stack for you and your friends to enjoy this, the greatest of formats. Until next time,
David 'Klep' Kleppinger
dr.klep@gmail.com
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