I figured to be short on time this autumn, and was not planning to play in the most recent Classic Quarter Invitational Qualifier. But next year’s was expected to be the final CQ Invitational, and after my great success in the format this summer, I didn’t want to put competitive Classic behind me just yet. The Invitational has fantastic prizes, and this was likely my final chance to qualify. So on the last night of registration, sitting in a stadium parking lot, buzzing from the thrill of victory after my Missouri football Tigers chomped the Florida Gators, and possibly still buzzing from the thrill of Jameson shots and cheap beer earlier that afternoon, I decided to register.
Navigating through Gatherling.com on my cell phone — not an easy feat — I managed to pull up my old Bant Excalibur list at the registration page. I had great success with this list, so why not just go back to the well one more time? There were definitely things I would change, but at this point I didn’t have time to make any sweeping adjustments. I thought about cutting the Cold-Eyed Selkies, which were underperforming in the metagame, but cutting three blue cards was going to have an impact on Force of Will. There wasn’t a quick, easy answer to this, so I left them in. I made a couple minor tweaks to the sideboard, and submitted the following list:
Classic Excalibur by RexDart
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For more about the deck in general, you can refer back to the first two Eternal Warrior columns posted at puremtgo.com, where I extensively cover my successes with the deck in previous Classic player-run events. The sideboard tweak was swapping in a Ravenous Trap for one of the Tormod’s Crypts. I would go on to face Dredge in the Top 8, which brings us to the editorial portion of this article: the philosophy of hate cards.
During the mid-90′s, there was an explosion of collectible card games which followed in the wake of Magic‘s success. In those early years, it was already quite apparent to CCG designers that they could not easily force players to play the game “as intended”. The 20 Black Lotus, 19 Timetwister, 1 Fireball deck was not the sort of thing Richard Garfield imagined when he created the game. Wizards of the Coast created the Duelists’ Convocation International, later to be known as the DCI, and attempted to get things under control by banning and restricting cards.
As the game evolved, the concept of “hate cards” expanded as well. Originally you had cards like Gloom to hose mono-color strategies. This grew into Blood Moon and Gorilla Shaman, designed as an attempt to keep the era’s signature mana base of dual lands and artifact mana in check. Psychic Purge from Legends was an early example of a narrow hate card, intended to combat Mind Twist — though the DCI trumped that attempt a short while later by simply banning Mind Twist altogether. Over the years, hate cards in Magic have become more sophisticated, more subtly crafted, and tuned for specific environments.
Magic‘s approach to hate cards is not the only approach you could take. I like to use the Star Trek and Star Wars CCGs by Decipher as examples. Those games were designed to feature popular characters dueling with lightsabers, flying spaceships into battle, and solving missions on distant worlds. Actually getting the competitive game to resemble anything like that was an uphill battle from the start. The most popular competitive strategy in Star Trek was to place dilemma cards under your own missions, rather than your opponents, in such a way that you could earn the necessary 100 points to win in just a couple turns. How did Star Trek‘s designers deal with this? They printed hate cards. Really, amazingly, completely over-the-top hate cards. I’ll show you an example here:
For those unfamiliar with the game, let me explain what this ridiculous hate card actually does in Magic terms. Imagine you took Leyline of the Void and made the following changes to it:
*It is now an emblem, and cannot be removed or interacted with in any fashion;
*If you have it in your deck, you can search it out at the beginning of the game and put it into play;
*It has the additional text “If your opponent plays a card named Bazaar of Baghdad, he or she loses the game.”
Decipher’s developers believed that if you wanted to kill a strategy, you killed it. Thoroughly and completely. Not everything required such drastic measures, of course. The Star Wars game had numerous minor hate cards designed to combat “unfair” strategies. To make sure they did the job properly, nearly all of them had the equivalent of “uncounterable” and “shroud”. Isn’t it strange, if you really think about it for a second, that Magic allows nearly all of its hate cards to be vulnerable to counterspells and common removal? Imagine for a second that Rule of Law had “uncounterable” and “shroud”. Imagine that Storm and High Tide decks couldn’t simply board in four copies of Echoing Truth to deal with any and all hate cards. What if they had to board into global enchantment removal of some sort? This would certainly make it more difficult. If Magic‘s developers hate the Storm mechanic as much as they claim, it’s hard to see why they never bothered to give the anti-Storm hate cards any built-in protection.
For better or worse, that isn’t what we have in Magic. In the Dredge matchup, having to use a variety of lesser hate cards probably makes the game more interesting. There are certainly several interesting decisions that present themselves in deckbuilding and in match play. Some effects are “one-shot” like Tormod’s Crypt or Ravenous Trap or Bojuka Bog. Other effects are permanent and active until removed, such as Wheel of Sun and Moon or Leyline of the Void. The popular Grafdigger’s Cage allows the Dredge player to continue filling his graveyard, but leaves him unable to do anything with it until the Cage is destroyed. Rest in Peace is the best of all, acting as both a one-shot graveyard exiler and a permanent to prevent filling the graveyard thereafter, but even that card has the weakness of being played at sorcery-speed. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and if there were it could still fall prey to Cabal Therapy. The post-board Dredge games are actually an interesting meta-game all to themselves.
Magic‘s approach is certainly more interesting and thoughtful, I’ll give it that. But this approach requires players to devote a huge chunk of available sideboard space to fighting a cute little mini-game against the broken decks, or hope to dodge the deck in a single tournament, or just play something faster and more broken themselves. You might look at the Vintage/Classic metagame and decide that Dredge, as a combo-like deck that doesn’t rely on casting spells, is a useful foil to both blue control decks and Lodestone Golem decks alike. But I doubt any careful metagame analysis is behind WotC’s refusal to kill the deck. They believe philosophically that in the eternal formats, nearly anything which can exist should exist, and if you don’t like it you can go play Standard. If they must, they will ban individual cards, but they won’t soft-ban disfavored strategies by printing powerful hate cards. That is a valid philosophy, and has its merits. The way the current crop of game developers enjoy the game may not be the same way you and I enjoy the game, and this philosophy protects us from a developers’ rogue crusade against certain decks he dislikes. But it’s worth remembering that it isn’t the only possible approach to game development. There is probably room for hate cards to be more effective than they are now, by making them a bit harder to answer, and I would like to see at least some cautious steps in that direction.
The tournament itself went fairly well for me. Round 1 was played during my move into a new house, and I wasn’t able to record it. Round 2 I had to forfeit to my opponent, as I got home too late from picking up some new furniture, but I basically got that one back when my opponent had to do the same for me in Round 5. Rounds 3 and 4 you can see here in the videos. Round 6 was win-and-in against a very cool Orcish Lumberjack deck, and I felt quite fortunate to get the win in what should have been a difficult matchup if not for some unlucky draws and mulligans on my opponent’s part.
The Top 8 match is against Dredge. You can likely guess how Game 1 went — though, in hindsight, I should at least have attempted to mulligan to a Wasteland or Strip Mine to have some early interaction. The post-board games show the difficulties of a non-combo deck in trying to stall the Dredge player long enough to win.
The good news is that I have qualified for the final Invitational on the basis of my Top 8 finish. So that guarantees more high-level Classic in my future, and I will definitely be bringing it to you here. For now, enjoy these videos, and as always, be sure to let me know what you think in the comments.
A big issue to me is that the hate cards cost more than the broken combos. Except fow but that itself needs hating.
I’m pretty shocked that you don’t run Bojuka Bog when you are running Knight. Even if you’re too scared to run it maindeck due to the risk of drawing a black source, in the board it seems incredibly helpful.
Tutors for hate help aleviate the massive sideboard slot problem.
Very interesting discussion about the way WoTC implements bullets. A couple of other notes because I also played swccg and find the comparison interesting. SWCCG lacked two features that magic does have – sideboarding and rotation/ban list. SWCCG made it a point of pride that they would never ban or rotate cards, which created all sorts of problems. Which they then solved with a combination of absurd, narrow/powerful bullets and power-level errata. Ultimately even this was unsuccessful, and they introduced “defensive shields” (very late in the game’s life) which was essentially a sideboard which started on the table and you were allowed to play a certain number (usually 3) of your sidebaord cards at any time during the game and they couldn’t be interracted with in any way by your opponent. That eventually solved some of the more broken strategies in the game permanently, but was extremely inelegant.
In general, I think WoTC does bullets fairly well although the fact that they’re not strong enough to completely push certain decks out of the game does lead to some silly post-sideboard games where if the opposing player draws and resolves their bullet (eg. leyline turn 0 vs dredge) the game is just over, making for some silly, swingy games. On the other hand, SWCCG’s solution ultimately meant that certain degenerate decks like numbers* or operatives were just 100% unplayable.
* 3,270 to 1 and never tell me the odds must rank among the stupidest cards in TCG history.
I miss SWCCG so much….