Date: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 23:30:31 -0400 From: Matthew Roskoski Subject: Why blue is/will be so dominant As always, I'm a few days behind the times. Sigh... I'm still working on general principles for the post-Weatherlight Type II. I'm really thinking blue/X may well be where it's at. A couple of comments - one in a reply to me, one in an independent post - seem suggestive: "Robert I. Eachus" said: >But the metagame effect (of Gerrard's Wisdom) will be that decks that >can be locked down after doing about 20 damage will be dead. You need >insane speed with followthorough to make weenies work. "Chritopher Y S Koh" said: >Almost all magic rounds in a swiss system are played best of 3 games. The >key to blue's success appears to be irrespective of what deck an opponent >plays in the first game, the blue player will be able to disrupt it, for >example if playing against a big creature geddon, the key card to protect >against will be against the geddon, against a pros bloom deck will be the >drain life and or city of solitute, against a Jokul gargoyle deck, the >jokulhaups etc. This will often lead to blue winning the first round. I think these point to the two strong reasons why blue/X ought to dominate. Reason #1 - super-fast kills are harder to come by. Yes, you can get a turn 3-4 kill, but you take a massive risk doing so, and are just begging for a single counter to rock your world. The traditional bane of the big blue decks are weenies, and they're getting progressively weaker. Between incredible recovery cards like Gerard's Wisdom and mass weenie hosers like Aether Flash, it may be hard to mount a quick offense _and_ have staying power. Reason #2 - the threats in the environment are so diverse. There'll be boring burn, there'll be standard 1-1 LD, there'll be Prison, there'll be black weenie, w/ and w/o Orbs, Necratogs etc., there'll be weird LD that relies on Settlers, there'll be mythical U/G, there'll be 5cG, there'll be ProsBloom and Squandered Stasis, there'll be Jokulhaups. I think we're coming up on one of the most diverse Type II environments we've ever seen. I think blue gets an advantage there, since countermagic is the ultimate in flexibility - it can balk almost any variety of threat. Now, Weatherlight does supply a number of ways to mess with a heavy blue deck, Mana Web being my favorite. And, it should be possible to craft a solid G/R beatdown deck, using much larger creatures than such a deck typically employs - Fallow Wurms, Behemoths, Orggs etc, which should be resistant to lots of weenie control measures. But, it looks to me like a deck with a large blue component stands the best chance of coping with a remarkably diverse field. Peace Matt Roskoski