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Editor:Webmaster. Friday 24th June 2005.
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 How the net killed Magic. Hi everyone. A quick introduction may be in order firstly. My name is Jason Scott AKA Mr Lucky. I am a regular Magic player from Canberra. I have been playing Magic since 1995 (I think). 4th Edition was out and I opened a ball lightning in my 1st booster I ever bought! Good times. I have never really won anything super-special, my fair share of pre-releases, 1 PTQ, placed 18th at nationals running a Dragon Engine. Nothing like a Pro tour or a GP but I have been around for many years now so I hope that still counts for something.
Moving along then into my main gripe with Magic. I have been more than a little frustrated at the way Magic has been slowly going down hill for me over the last couple of years. I know I am not alone here when I say that the Internet (combined with Wizards finding ways to miss broken mechanics) has begun to Kill MTG. I don’t know exactly when it started but since players started using the Internet to share/steal deck ideas and pool ideas Magic for me started to die. At first I didn’t even notice because I was still having way too much fun with my crazy rogue decks. Then slowly but surely when I turned up to tournaments I wasn’t walking into a room filled with 30 different decks that 30 players had built it was more like 15 decks from 30 players. Soon is became 10 decks that 30 players had built until you get to the days we have seen since pretty much tempest perhaps where you get a room of 30 people playing 4 decks. Now that to me is a sad, sad thing to see. My questions are: The only answer I can come up with is that people are just getting lazy. People don’t want to use their brain for deck building any more they just want to win. I will give you a recent example. The dreaded Ravager! How many scrubs have we seen piloting this thing to victory over the last while! I remember a game against ravager piloted by a player that could very well be classed as a scrub at the time where he decided to pile almost all of his artifacts onto 1 ornithopter for the win just to have me oxidize it and laugh. Problem was he still won that game because the deck just did what it always did and just won anyway. Now Ravager is just the most recent version of these ‘Evil’ net decks, but rest assured there have been many more before it, just look at U/G madness, Psychatog, Goblin Bidding, hell look at Academy even that far back!
The problem is that people had started using the net to get some ideas and have now ended up just ripping whole decks off. What started with mild interest has turned into a kind of drug habit. Once you start using you need to keep using because everyone around you is using as well. You can’t keep winning if you don’t use the net, so what is the answer? Go cold turkey? Or just give up someone else’s fun and play a net deck regardless of the little man inside who says, “nah get off the net you idiot, go build something yourself if you are such a good player”. But sadly the little man inside you got cranial extracted and now all you have is the bionic man inside you telling you “Just play Ravager, the deck is broken and people will respect you for winning”. Truth is that whenever I sat down to play someone playing ravager I just put a little black mark against their name in my “Boring Net Decker” book and tried to will my brain away to a happy place for the duration of our match. Never in my life have I felt so much like quitting Magic. The very idea that Magic could end for me was unthinkable until the last couple of years. Magic was life and things were good. Then along came U/G Madness and a little piece of the game (and me) died. Then Wizards in their infinite knowledge decided to print Goblin Piledriver and Warchief. The game dies a little more and so does my interest. Then the worst thing that has ever happened to Magic happened, the birth of Ravager. Truth be told I was the first person in Canberra to actually build an affinity deck. (Please note that I had not seen the pre-con deck). It started out as a combo deck with Vedalken Archmage because he seemed good with free spells. What happened was I kept not drawing him and just dropping like 14 points of power on turn 2 and I started to wonder why this wasn’t a beat down deck, so I changed it. I had the usual Frogmites, Myr Enforcers, Shrapnel Blast and Atog in there combined with Sombre Hoverguards, Chrome Moxes and then one day Anatoli Lightfoot comes up to me and says “hey, maybe Broodstar should go in that deck” and shows me a foil one. I looked at it and nearly had to go change my pants. As evidence of me being the first person in Canberra to play affinity I bought that Foil Broodstar for 10 bucks. 1 week later when I came back to Arena on a Wednesday afternoon I find it hard to locate someone who isn’t running my ‘new original’ deck. I frowned and threw the deck in the bin pretty much right there and then in disgust. I played a variation on my first deck of Affinity at 1 tournament and after losing to Broodstar Affinity (piloted by another inventive deck, “cough netdeck cough”, builder) in the first round I decided that I would never play affinity again.
Do other people feel the same way as I do? Surely I am not alone here! I know a couple people who build their own stuff but they get smacked down at every tournament because their deck isn’t “Tier 1”. My next question now is “How is Wizards going to keep me playing their game?” If they are going to keep printing stuff like this I am just going to take my money and go play Starchamber. I don’t want to quit Magic but they aren’t leaving me with much of a choice and neither are any of you. I want everyone who may read this to think really hard about why they go online to find decks tournament after tournament. Is it just because you HAVE to win? Is it because you think you can’t build decks? Is it because you don’t have enough time? (They usually give you some notice in advance for when tournaments are on). Is it because you are too lazy to build decks and would prefer to just rock up on the morning of the tournament with some American guy’s deck list and ask around for the necessary cards to build it? Please tell me because when you really think about it nobody ever needed the net, and they never will. All you need is a brain and some cards. Try it some time, I Double Dare you! I mean look at invasion, sure the block had colour fixing technology that made me able to run a 5 colour draft deck with 13 lands in it and go 5-0 at a draft we ran one day but the constructed format was pretty open. I think one of the main reasons why invasion wasn’t overly net decked was because there were just so many decks that were viable due to the high count of quality cards in the block. Apocalypse has been known as the best set ever for rares and it helped the environment for a while. I wouldn’t necessarily say that making more good solid rares is the answer because you are bound to get something like Ravager popping up again. I am quite happy with the somewhat slower environment we have at the moment with the exception of Tooth and Nail. I think making Kamigawa Block nice and slow has been a nice change from the turn 4 kills of the last few blocks. I know this is all ‘radical’ thinking and to listen to me is like having some pagan over to give a seminar on “the most efficient way to bleed a goat” at your church luncheon, but please hear me out. You and the Internet are killing what Magic truly was to begin with. Without the creativity and the originality you might as well just ask Wizards to sell you “Tier 1” precon decks built by the Future Future League as soon as they can find some testers who weren’t stoned or something when they approved cards. (Turn of phrase, as far as I know none of them are actually stoners, though it would explain a lot). Just get some real Pros in a room and start pumping out Precons that are ready for Pro Tour play Wizards, what are you waiting for? You are just cutting out the middleman, that’s all. You will be saving people lots of time searching the net for decks and they can go back to surfing looking for nude photos of Paris Hilton. I don’t think that building your own deck is too much to ask for and just think about how proud you would be one day when you manage to win a tournament with a deck you built, not just some Pro Tour player’s deck you tried out the night before! Basically my point is that even though Wizards has come up with the decks they think you ‘should’ play doesn’t mean you have to. You can till be competitive without net decking. I will include a few notable decks that I myself or crazies like me in Canberra have played and done well with in major events. Well, getting all that off my chest feels a lot better but I am not sure its really going to help. Lets see if any of you can give up your addictions and start having some fun instead. I would really like to see some new and interesting decks running around at Regionals this year so get cracking boys and girls! I hope you have all seen something you can think about and that you might have actually enjoyed reading my rant. Turbo Slaver Dudes 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder Spells 3 Echoing Truth 3 Mirrodin’s Core Turbo Nothing Dudes Spells 4 Ensnaring Bridge 4 Windswept Heath Just a note on Turbo nothing. This deck was run by Matt Williams at nationals on day 2. He did pretty badly on day 1 but managed something like 5-1 or 6-0 on day 2. Pretty impressive really for a rogue deck ? goes to show that rogue = good! Dragon Engine Enchantress Dudes 1 Dragon Engine Spells 4 Treachery 11 Forest
Until next time, Jason Scott
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