Apparently this is what Storm was like back in 4th Edition

A few months ago, one of my friends showed me Shandalar, a game from 1997 (right after Tom Chanpheng won the world championship with a White Weenie deck including Balance and Armageddon - no coincidence). And I watched and followed along as he slowly built up a burn deck that mowed through the sadly-lower-than-20-life opponents you face in that game.

So the other day I was bored and decided to try it for myself, ready to do the same. I pretty quickly got frustrated by the 90's part of the game - no instructions, terrible decks to start with, and brutally-punishing gameplay where opponents would fly out of nowhere to duel you (and they run faster than you), win on their strength of playing fewer than 3 colors with no fixing, and then steal a random card from your deck. Oh, and you could pay them to not duel, but they demand a third of your starting gold at minimum. And you can try to buy better cards - like more basic lands in your color - but all your money is going towards paying people to not rob you of cards, and when you run out they start forcing you to duel anyway.

So basically a normal 90s game. I've played them before and know how to get strategy and then play the game, but I didn't start with the intention of playing burn against opponents with 8 life just to spend several hours building my deck up to playability.

So I opened up the deck editor and put together my burn deck with moxes, black lotuses, and the blue power-9 - because why not play the best cards in the game? - and the all of 3 pure burn cards available: Lightning Bolt, Ball Lightning, and Fireball. With Shivan Dragon for value. And I ripped through opponents - at least until I hit Kismet. Turns out it kills Ball Lightning, which is probably why it was in the 1994 World Championship deck list. So that duel was harder, but the power 9 is named that for a reason.

Anyway, after playing a while I wanted to try to build the best deck possible - good enough to beat the boss of the game, who I heard rumors of having a silly amount of health. A bit of research online led me to something like the list below.

If it's not clear how the deck wins, think of the old Academy decks, where you Braingeyser to force your opponent to draw their deck + 20. Except here instead of Mind over Matter, you drop a bunch of mana rocks, Hurkyl's Recall to put them back in your hand, then recast them for net mana gain. Timetwister draws more cards and puts Hurkyl's back in your deck, so you can actually go infinite with mana and card draw.

On turn 1. Whiffing requires you to not draw one of the 12 0-cost mana-producers, or not draw one of the 12 card-draw spells. I don't know what my exact consistency was, but I'll put it this way: in the middle of comboing off, I misclicked and skipped to my second main phase, emptying my mana pool and mana-burning me down to 2 life, and then I started comboing off again and won. And with the old-school mulligan rules, you could mulligan to another 7 if you didn't have a land in your opening hand... which is conveniently always true in this deck. So it was a low number of games I didn't draw a combo.

The two Black Vises in the deck are actually completely unnecessary, and make the deck less consistent (they should be 2 more Braingeysers), but I got bored of producing 50+ mana every game and was happy enough to just play the 2 vises and Braingeyser my opponent for 7 instead. I guess I wouldn't have been happy playing Academy back in the day either.

So when I got bored of that, I put together this much more fair deck:

"Fair." If you haven't seen Necro in the Guantlet of Greatness, I encourage you to watch. Turn 1 Dark Ritual+Hypnotic Specter wins games, and this version is (in my opinion) possibly better. Despite not having the namesake best-black-card-of-all-time, or Hymn to Tourach, Demonic Consultation, or Contagion (and clearly being worse in the mirror), this version has more consistent T1 Hypnotic Specters with Black Lotus (and just as many Strip Mines for their first land), and more consistent Mind Twist-the-opponent's-entire-hand. Junun Efreet is a bit awkward, but it fills the role of the second most efficient beater (after Hypnotic Specter) I could find in my card pool.

This deck was much more fun because I actually got to interact with my opponent. I won a lot, but lost some too. My toughest match was against the opponent who started with a Serendib Efreet on the battlefield (with effective haste, since she controlled it from the start of her turn), went first, put Unstable Mutation on the Efreet and attacked for 6 before I could play a card. By the way, in this game your life starts at 10, and this particular opponent started with 36 (the boss of the blue castle). Thankfully I had picked up a few items to raise my starting life to 15, and a Swamp, Mox, and Terror later I was back in the game. I put a few Black Knights and a Hypnotic Specter on the field while she cast some Howling Mines and then Time Walk. Then Yotian Soldier - notably immune to Terror - and Stasis. Did I mention she got Flood for free as part of the dungeon effect? Luckily for me, she couldn't tap down all my creatures after spending that much mana, or pay for Stasis (a misplay - I think she could've won the game with better sequencing), so the Stasis ended and I was able to untap enough Black Knights to profitably block a 6/7 Yotian Soldier with two Unstable Mutations. And shortly after that I won.

So what's the biggest revelation I got from all this? Force of Will, crazy and broken as it is, was absolutely necessary to stem this crazy meta. Or would have been, if banned/restricted lists hadn't been enacted first.

Edit: I wasn't able to beat the game with the silly u/r combo deck because it seems casting Hurkyl's + mana rocks 10 times uses up the stack space and crashes the game. So I thought I'd try taking turns.

It worked pretty well, and it was refreshingly fun to actually attack.

I just saw someone Force a copy of Mind's Desire

...and win

When you include game 3 as well, this match is just insane. One of the most entertaining matches I've seen in a while.

In another match: how do you win when your opponent has Time Vault, Voltaic Key, and Tezzeret on the field, but you don't have an answer?

First preview for a custom set I'm working on

A few cards in a white archetype

Since the owner of our resident cube left, I've been working on a custom set to draft, with a similar power level as a legacy cube. Some of the cards in the set are reprints, like Thalia and Linvala, and some are new, like World Clay and Keeper of Quiet. The plan is to have 4 of each uncommon and 2 of each rare. So a curve for a deck built in the white taxes archetype might look like the cards above.

Wanna try something fun?

How about Mana Maze Solitaire with a legacy Dredge deck.

I just heard about this game from Mark Rosewater's podcast. I looked up the rules, and thought "I bet it'd be easy to destroy all cards in a dredge deck." And I happened to have one proxied up.

It quickly became apparent that dredge was not made for mana maze solitaire, and mana maze solitaire was not made for dredge.

I decided to try the first suggested setup, 6 piles of 10 cards each. As I was shuffling, I realized 8 of the lands in my deck deal 1 damage to me, and in mana maze solitaire you start with 1 life. So instead of 12 viable lands - Gemstone Cavern, Mana Confluence, and Cephalid Coliseum - I had 4. I hoped to get lucky. When I layed the piles out and flipped the top card of each, I found I did have a Gemstone Cavern, plus a Breakthrough, Putrid Imp, Golgari Grave-Troll, Faithless Looting, and Lion's Eye Diamond. A solid dredge hand.

When I saw Putrid Imp, I immediately wondered if just casting it would let me destroy every card from every pile. Then I realized I didn't have to cast it, and couldn't move it off the pile if I did.

I re-read the rules. My hand was definitely separate from the piles, so no insta-win there. But Putrid Imp would still be useful if I got extra cards in my hand.

Then I realized I had no idea how card draw was supposed to work. I re-read the rules again. There was no mention of card draw spells, probably because they weren't supposed to be in the deck. And then I realized there was no draw step, so dredge could only trigger off card draw spells. And my only way to destroy cards was with dredge.

And the only way to get extra cards in hand was with Breakthrough, so Putrid Imp wasn't as necessary as I first thought.

So. I decided I would draw from a pile into the separate area for my hand, and I would choose what pile to draw from. And I would flip the top card face up before deciding which pile to draw from. And I would dredge from the piles too, using the same rules.

Then I saw Lion's Eye Diamond, and realized that without a hand, it was a straight Black Lotus. So I had more mana than I first thought. I sacced it for red and cast Faithless Looting to put the grave-troll in my graveyard. Then I went to work.

My board in the middle of resolving a Breakthrough. The shiny Narcomoeba in the middle sits on top of my graveyard.

And while playing I realized a few things:
1. I didn't have to put Narcomoeba into play, so I didn't.
2a. I did have to put Bridge from Below tokens into play. So I needed to either reveal bridges close to last, because my only creature destruction was Cabal Therapy and Dread Return. And Dread Return would put a creature back into play. That meant I could put a maximum of 4 creatures on the battlefield - though at the time I thought I could go up to 10 because I forgot Dread Return requires you to return the target to the battlefield.
2b. I didn't know what was considered "in play" for Bridge. I checked the rules again, and learned that every revealed card was in play - even though they were also in my hand/on top of my library (libraries?). Yet another aether vortex.
2c. So if I put Bridge into my graveyard, then every creature I dredged or discarded would create zombie tokens.
2d. Unlike regular solitaire, this game didn't have a rule allowing you to move cards on top of a pile to an empty space.
2e. Therefore, I had to dredge Bridge to get at the cards beneath it.
3. Bridge was going to kill me.

As luck would have it, I revealed a Bridge on top of 7 other cards. I raced to figure out a way to play around it, but couldn't think of anything besides "put it in my graveyard and hope all the cards below it are non-creature cards."

I put it in my graveyard, and then almost immediately put 5 zombie tokens on the field while dredging. I had lost, though I didn't realize it at the time, and kept going.

Then I found another Bridge on top of 5 other cards. That was when my stomach started getting in knots.

When I revealed the third Bridge, I realized that there was a way around it I hadn't realized: I could use Breakthrough to put it in my hand. Then I could destroy the cards beneath it on the pile. Then I could use Putrid Imp - or better yet Cabal Therapy - to discard it after getting rid of all my creatures.

But it was too late. I ended the game with all my paper cards destroyed, but about 10 zombie tokens on the battlefield.

So. It is possible to win with dredge. You just have to:
-Draw non-damaging mana sources.
-Use Breakthrough to put Bridges in your hand.
-Then dredge your deck.

If you want to play it, I recommend sideboarding in some pain-lands for Lotus Petals, and some Firestorms or Darkblasts for the zombies.

Vintage is Great!

If you've never seen vintage play, you're missing out on some of the hypest games in magic.

I've been going through the backlog of the Vintage Super League for just that reason. In one of my favorite games thus far, Randy Buehler won a match over Kai Budde with Dredge. Up to this point, Dredge (which I'm still getting accustomed to writing instead of Ichorid, the name I was introduced to) had something like an 0-14 record in the VSL. It won games, but not matches, and even in the video description they call it the "Dredge curse".

Now I love Dredge, because it ignores the fundamental rules of magic: you don't need mana, you don't really need lands - save one - and you don't need to cast spells. And I love seeing it do well, and thinking of it as a top-tier deck. But losing that many matches in the VSL makes me think it's just not.

They say Dredge's win rate is directly proportional to how much people prepare for it. When people sideboard against Dredge, they're favored to win - especially now that Grafdigger's Cage and Rest in Peace exist. But Dredge did win a big tournament - whose name I can't remember right now - watch the VSL to get it. But maybe the competition in the VSL is just that much higher that Dredge can't do well.

Or maybe the pervasiveness of Shops decks with T1 Wasteland/Grafdigger's Cage was keeping Dredge back. Less of a problem now that Chalice of the Void and Lodestone Golem have been restricted.

Either way, Randy chose to pilot Dredge against Kai Budde's UGw control deck with maindeck Rest in Peace. And he won in the most ridiculous way possible.