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.
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.
