Subject: for best of the net
Date: Sun, 2 Aug 1998 18:59:34 EDT
From: Welzin@aol.com
To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com

why green doesn't suck

  First, looking at the current T2 tourney scene (sorry, no swords for white),
there seems to be two powerful decks based on or entirely green.  first, The
oath (of druids) deck is so powerful that if you aren't playing it, you should
expect to lose to it.  And guess what, the deck is based on green and splashes
blue and either white black, or red (or a combination thereof) for a kill
card.  if you need a design, there are plenty around, and the power card is a
green card, the oath, as are the cards that keep it functioning at optimum
levels, spike feeder (and possibly weavers).  Then there is the other miracle
of T2, SGD.  While it may be just a Stupid Green Deck, it was played by 2 of
the top 8 players at nat'ls, and beat sligh 80% of the time (which is
necesssary since 50% of every environment is sligh, which explains why it
still wins--throw enough balls at a hole and eventually one will go through).
It can even beat tradewind lock decks, and uses green's great creature
elimination card- Desert twister- the perfect answer to a just cast tradewind.
It can even do it fourth turn.  Combined with LD (creeping mold), any blue
deck should have a run for its money as it tries to fend off resource
destruction and uses GG or more each turn from a vineyard.

Then i have to question the paradigm of mono-color.  There are few mono decks,
for any color, that are hyper-competitive in the T2 environment.  The reason
for playing multi color decks should be obvious, more flexibility and reduced
chance of getting screwed by your opponent's sideboard.  Suiblack has a hard
time dealing with light of day, or sligh w/ warmth or chill.  Usually, these
become i win cards for the other deck if it is well constructed.  Suiblack and
sligh will almost always lose to a 5C deck or to tradewind lock (and to SGD, a
mono green deck), as will fish and white weenie.  And big blue variants will
always lose to hyper-offensive decks like sligh, which is the reason you don't
see them anymore, b/c 50% of the enviroment is sligh.  Splashing basically
helps a deck overcome its shortcomings, like disenchant into sligh, or burn or
control of some sort into green, it allows a deck to do what it otherwise
couldn't.  Do you hear red and black players yelling that they can't deal with
enchantments, and WotC must change this?  Of course not, they splash or they
deal with the short-comings.  Sure, every deck has its heyday, such as the
dominance of Necro during the black summer, but as the environment changes, so
do the dominant decks, and as red fades as a truly powerful mono deck, green
is rising (SGD) and other, multi-decks, are becoming power houses.  Also,
regional meta-gaming is all-important.  If a lot of people in an area play
green consistently, then expect to see anti-green sideboards(perish) and don't
play green in such an enviroment.  If no one plays green then you won't see
perish and you could even play stompy without peril.  I guess the moral of the
story is, mono green is back (SGD), splashing and multi-color makes a deck
more powerful, and the viability of a deck depends on the metagame.  Green is
designed to a certain spirit and fills that niche nicely.  Every other color
gets splashed into winning decks more than it gets a mono winning deck, so why
shouldn't green.  Just b/c a scrub can throw 40 red cards and 20 mountains
into a deck and beat a green deck built the same way doesn't mean green is not
as good, it just takes more thought to build mono-green than sligh, which is
why SGD just came around.

Hope this explains why a)mono green doesn't suck (SGD)  b)mono decks aren't
necessarily competitive anyway, for any color, and c) why sligh manages to win
an occaissional tournaments

regards,

Nick Johnson
welzin@aol.com