[Article] May Metagame Breakdown

[Dr. Sylvan]

http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/expandnews.php?Article=7516

Thanks go to Jeek, the Sweater Monkey for his Perl mastery. And of course Stefan Iwasienko a.k.a. Womprax, the morphling.de typing slave.

I swear Jeek requested to be called "the Sweater Monkey", hope I spelled Wompy's last name correctly.

[rvs]

Your restrict mana drain argument is pretty bad. The same could be said about FoW. (in terms of the comparison with clamp in T2).

[Dr. Sylvan]

I just assumed everyone knew FoW was sacrosanct. Mana Drain has not been proven to be in the same category.

Also, for the record, it's not a 'restrict Mana Drain' argument, it's a 'this is getting into the zone where we should strongly consider restricting it' argument. I don't think it should remain a sacred cow of the format, so I'm trying to get everyone comfortable with the idea that it's the card closest to restriction at the moment.

[Zherbus]

I just assumed everyone knew FoW was sacrosanct. Mana Drain has not been proven to be in the same category.

You're probably still too new to the community then...

[Ric_Flair]

Phil, good job.  You have finally staked out a controversial position with the Mana Drain comments.  Prepare for a deluge of oppositition.  Before that happens let me say that I think that there is a bit of ambiguity in the reasoning you borrowed from K-Run.  

It is possible and likely that Mana Drain is a cause of the lower average cc in T1.  But there is another factor that is impossible to separate from the Mana Drain effect in the real world--combo.  Even in a world without Mana Drain, I have no doubt that the power and speed of T1 combo would cause a similar effect.  People that hope to hard cast Juzams should go play casual.  Even with Mana Drain out of the way, combo will insure that the average cc is low.

Furthermore, Mana Drain actually raises the average cc allowing for cards like Mindslaver, Skeletal Scrying, E. Angel and formerly Morphling to be played.  Now Slaver could be played without Drains, but not nearly at the same frequency.  If you did your numbers without these Mana Drain assisted monster cards, what would the average cc be?  Lower I imagine.

Finally, the number of decks a card shows up in in T1 needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  Really, as Steve has pointed out, because of the power level of certain cards, a vast majority of decks include probably between 30% and 40% of the same cards.  One end is a deck like FCG which is almost exclusively composed of FCG only cards, but once you move past that deck you see that combo shares tons of cards with Tog which shares tons of cards with Drain Slaver...and so on.   The de facto card pool is so small that overlap is natural.  I think the frequency of appearance test needs to be amended to include some consideration of the style of deck.  Now if Mana Drain starts showing up in FCG then there is an issue of overuse.  As it is now, I think that there is so much overlap between decks, especially control decks, that mere frequency alone is not a good enough consideration.  Add to this the lamentably uninnovative metagame (driven really by three or four people), the lack of high profile money events to spur innovation, people's nostalgic streak when it comes to the format, the bias towards control naturally existing in the format (blue has nearly all of the best colored spells) and the prohibitively high cost of switching decks and I think it is clear that Mana Drain's frequency is not quite the harbringer of restriction that it would initially appear to be.

[jpmeyer]

I've personally thought for a while that restricting Mana Drain would probably be the best way to break up a control deck-dominance if such a thing ever needed to occur.

(For the record, I don't do either: booze or road trips. Both are highly overrated, and instead people should be using Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a soporific while enjoying the warm, comforting artificiality of a Hot Pocket.

Is that supposed to be a reference to The Core?

[PucktheCat]

One key difference is that Mana Drain is much more reactive than Gush. Gush can be used to save your Underground Sea from a Wasteland, but that doesn't make it any less capable of proactively winning the game. Mana Drain, as a prerequisite for effectiveness, requires the opponent to play a spell (Remember Animaniacs? Good Idea: Draining your opponent's spell. Bad Idea: Draining your own spell.),

I think this is a critical point.  I for one am much more forgiving of dominating cards if they still allow for some interaction.  In spite of the various attempts to set up objective standards for restriction I still think a big part of the determination is subjective, and one of the most important subjective factors is: are the matchups this card creates interesting?  For the most part they are, and not in spite of Mana Drain, but because of it.

Also, the low casting costs in the format are much less a product of Mana Drain than the overall high throughput mentality that deck construction takes in T1.  If you are drawing a lot of cards, as all good T1 decks do, and you actually want to play more than one of them a turn, which again all good T1 decks do, you need your spells to be as cheap as possible.

Leo

[Jhaggs]

Dr. Sylvan,

When you prepare your data for your "Archetype Concentration" section how difficult would it be to make your numbers regional?  I am curious to  see how similliar/different something like the Dulmen meta game compares to that of an East Coast Meta game over a 3 to 4 month period?  Also, I am wondering if a more regional archtype breakdown would be more conclusive in trying to predict the Top 8 archtypes for several big tournaments coming up.  Is it more important for players to read about the meta game in terms of the type 1 format as a whole or would seperating your data into major "locations of play" be more revelant for event preparation.

I'm not tyring to create more work for you but if I were a type 1 in D.C., why would I care about data from the European tournaments for my upcoming events?  I'm guessing that the number of fish builds that top 8 are drastically different in these regions, right?

EDIT: I realize that you are painting the picture of what the format looks like in an all encompassing fashion but I was just trying to see if you actually had the data collected and readily availible to present on a regional basis.

[Jacob Orlove]

Certainly the average casting cost hovering just over two inclines one to agree that spells as expensive or moreso than Drain are difficult to justify (and this average is so low despite the upward bias of various ACC cards counting as their listed mana cost).

This actually has very little to do with mana drain. The problem is threefold: decks need to be really, really fast, which requires cheap spells; we have access to every tournament legal card in the game, so we'll only play with the best--and generally the cheaper, the better; finally, all removal spells except deed and disk cost 2 or less, and Force of Will costs zero. Your spells HAVE to be ridiculously cheap, or you'll constantly be losing tempo.

And the real distortion in the average CC numbers isn't Force of Will so much as it is Workshop.

[Dr. Sylvan]

Is that supposed to be a reference to The Core?

Nope. :)

Re: Non-Drain Average-CC Distortions
You guys bring up a very valid line of reasoning; I certainly don't think Drain is the only thing skewing CCs downwards, and because of the inability to hold the other variables constant this will likely never be enough to restrict Drain on its own. It's just something I thought was important, since it's always been mentioned whenever this has come up. My feelings here are probably influenced by when I was actually really playtesting Enchantress and I had the constant brick wall of "play a 3-cc bomb that should decisively swing things my way--Drain, damn". I still think that without Drain, there would be more cards played, especially at 3-cc, just probably not a huge number.

As to the prevalence condition, Tony, I definitely know what you're talking about with deck overlap. I'm just not sure which cards deserve to be protected by this consideration. Brainstorm and Force of Will are the only unrestricted cards I can think of off the top of my head that I'm not surprised to see in almost any random deck, because the preconditions for wanting to use them are so minimal. Mana Drain is a card which makes people look at a list and say 'no, this doesn't fit, Drain is too controlling'. All of the other highest-occurrence unrestricted cards (except dual lands) conform to what I would call normal restriction perspective, because they are not cards that can be adopted by a strategy without specific reason.

And the real distortion in the average CC numbers isn't Force of Will so much as it is Workshop.

Quick count for May shows 115 artifacts with 4-cc or higher vs. 136 Force of Will. :)

When you prepare your data for your "Archetype Concentration" section how difficult would it be to make your numbers regional?

Well, I didn't, but I'll give it a whirl. I can't do this within a single month, because there's basically only one tournament per region each month (except for the crazy Italians), but over several months I can try to make it valid. To exclude completely irrelevant information, I'll keep this to March, April, and May.

5 4C Control
5 Fish
4 Food Chain Goblins
3 Control Slavery
2 Dragon
2 Hulk Smash
2 Oshawa Stompy
2 RG Beatz
1 Draw7.dec
1 EBA
1 GAT
1 Goblin Sligh
1 Landstill
1 MadDragon
1 Rector Trix
1 Secret Force
1 Sligh
1 Terravore LD
1 TnT
1 U/G Madness
1 Vengeur Masque
1 wMUD
1 Workshop Slavery

7 4C Control
4 Charbelcher
2 Hulk Smash
2 Madness
2 Vengeur Masque
1 Control Slavery
1 Gro-A-Tog
1 MadDragon
1 Modular Genesis
1 Mono-White Weenie
1 Landstill
1 Workshop Slavery

11 TPS
10 Hulk Smash
7 Dragon
6 4C Control
6 Madness
6 Rector Tendrils
4 Stacker
3 Affinity
3 MUD/wMUD
3 TnT
2 Food Chain Goblins
2 Stax
1 12-land Stompy
1 Fish
1 Goblin Sligh
1 MonoBlue Control
1 R/G Beatz
1 SuperGro
1 The Rock
1 U/rPhid
1 Vengeur Masque

Now I have to go to work.

(Note: I only just now scrolled down to the list of card occurrences and noticed that Knut put the WTF of the Month on Fire/Ice instead of Razorfin Hunter, because I forgot to add it before submitting, and mentioned it to him in IRC while both cards were being mentioned as Welder-killers. lololol @ F/I as the WTF.)

[Eddie]

I like most of your articles, but I think your Mana Drain argument is pretty weak. For me, Mana Drain is the spell that makes the big cc playable.

Restricting Mana Drain would result in a HUGE meta shift with combo as the winner. No control deck would be able to cast 3-4+ cc cards (which they often need to establish real control). And other decks won't cause they don't need to. Mana Drain is the tempo boost control needs to stay alive. I strongly believe the format needs a good control deck to keep it interesting, encourage players to build new decks and keep 40+ other cards from the restricted list.

Anyway, props for all the number crunching. I love statistics.

[Toad]

CTRL + F "Battle of Wits"

No occurences found

:<

[Dr. Sylvan]

CTRL + F "Battle of Wits"

No occurences found

:<

Toaddy, remember that this is just the May article, and June isn't even over yet. :)

[Ric_Flair]

So prompted by this thread I decided to conduct an experiment and try to establish deck "cores" or modules.  That is, a set of cards that all or nearly all of a given archetype use.  This is, of course, a subset of the "supercore" cards--cards that all or almost all decks play.  Here is what I have so far, in this extemporaneous little study.  Note that I am considering somewhat generic versions of each major deck and not including the SB.  The basic point is to show that prevelance alone is not a sufficient indicator of a card's brokenness in Vintage.

Supercore:

1 Black Lotus
1 Strip Mine

Every deck in the format should play these if possible.  There is no reason not too.  Not a big revelation there.

Control Core:

4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
4 Brainstorm
2-3 Cunning Wishes
3-4 Polluted Delta
3-4 Underground Sea
1 Flooded Strand
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Jet
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Time Walk
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Yawgmoth's Will
1 Island

That is 32 cards.  Every single one of these cards shows up in the numbers above in all of the following decks:
4C Control/Keeper
Tog
GAT
Control Slaver
EBA

So in essence 28 cards are different from 6 deck archetypes.  That is a huge degree of cross over.  Note that most of these decks also run 2-3 Misdirection but I did not include them because they are not ALWAYS included.

Workshop Core:

4 Workshops
4 Goblin Welders
4 Brainstorm
4 Thirst of Knowledge
1 Tinker
1 Memory Jar
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Mana Vault
8 Solomoxen Crypt
4 Volcanic Islands
3-4 Blue fetch

37 cards.  With this core you can make:
Stax
Control Slaver (sans 4 Workshops)
Workshop Slaver.  

That is an even higher amount of crossover.  Less decks, but more cross over.  If you modulate 10-12 cards you can make all of the Workshop archetypes: 7/10 split , MUD, wMUD, and Tangle Wire TNT.  Only Broodstarrunner is a serious variation.

Combo Core:

4 Dark Rituals
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
1-2 Tendrils of Agony
8 Solomoxen Crypt
2-4 Chromatic Sphere
1 Ancestral
1 Time Walk
1 Tinker
1 Memory Jar
1 Timetwister
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Mind's Desire
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Yawgmoth's Will
1 Yawgmoth's Bargain
1 Necropotence
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Burning Wish

That is 36 cards.  And with this core you can build:
TPS
Draw 7
Belcher

This takes a slight shift of focus and adding a few different cards as the kill or for supersearch in the remaining 24 slots.

Aggro Control Core:

4 Force of Will
3 Null Rod
1-3 Daze
4 Standstill
1-3 Misdirection
1 Ancestral
1 Timewalk
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Black Lotus
4 Faerie Conclave
4 Wasteland
2-4 Islands

33 cards.  This builds:
Fish
Gay/r
and with a few tweaks
U/G Madness
Landstill  

This is alot of decks with the same base, not as much in other archetype cores, but still a lot.

From these four lists we see that there is a sub super core for most decks in Vintage.  It includes:

Sub Super Core:

4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
7 Solomoxen
3-4 Blue fetches
1-3 Islands

So the issue of crossover really can't be seen as a problem that is exclusively a Mana Drain problem.  The whole format or nearly all of the format is inbred using the same group of cards.  Really the format is 100 cards plus Oshawa Stompy, Dragon, and FCG.  We used to have a core built around Mask, but it has seemed to fall off as too slow or too unpredictable or too unstable or all three.  That is it, that is all of Vintage.  I guess this shows how small the actual card pool is too.  Steve's comment about this deck is half that deck and so on is really true.  

One question that comes to my mind is whether this much focus on essentially four sets of cards is a sign of improperly built decks and unnecessary variance.  I think it is.  As formats develop on the PT where there are more players and more events we see decklist rapidly homogenize like in the case of OBC's U/G Madness deck and T2's R/G of the same era.  I think the better the format comes less we will have of the slight variation decks like Draw 7 v. TPS.

[Saucemaster]

Supercore:

1 Black Lotus
1 Strip Mine

Every deck in the format should play these if possible.  There is no reason not too.  Not a big revelation there.

Okay, since everyone and their mother is going to jump on this, I'll get straight to it first.

1) some people argue about Lotus in Fish.  Leaving that aside for the moment,

2) NO ONE is arguing for, e.g., Strip Mine in Draw-7.  Combo doesn't have time to waste screwing one of your lands.

Other than that, nice post.  

[Jacob Orlove]

And the real distortion in the average CC numbers isn't Force of Will so much as it is Workshop.

Quick count for May shows 115 artifacts with 4-cc or higher vs. 136 Force of Will. :)

And how many of those artifacts cost 6, 7, or 8 mana? One Sundering Titan distorts the average about as much as two Forces of Will.

Also, if Drain really was that influential, then we'd see more morph creatures played. Hystrodon should be a better call than Troll Ascetic in mono-green builds, if Mana Drain is truly warping the format.

[PucktheCat]

And how many of those artifacts cost 6, 7, or 8 mana? One Sundering Titan distorts the average about as much as two Forces of Will.

How do you figure?  Force of Will costs 0 and is recorded as costing 5.  Sundering Titan costs 8 in the statistics but costs effectively 6 with a Workshop in play.  Force of Will is much more of a distortion.  Even if you say that Titan is only there for Welder (which isn't true) that would mean it should be ommitted from the results (like Worldgorger Dragon might be).

Leo

[Dr. Sylvan]

Sorry this reply took so long to post, the internet in my apartment was down last night. (Some of you don't think 21 hours is a long time, but, well, just look at my custom title.)

168 cardnames overlapped among all six of my time periods so far. Not 100. :p (Darksteel cards counted if they were present all legal months.) The number that occurred at a rate greater than or equal to 1.0 / T8 every month is 87. This might be more in line with what you're thinking.

Tony, I agree with a lot of the idea of multiple decks in the same core (though it's a bit of a stretch to put Conclave, Misdirection, and Standstill in the UGmad core package). The point of my statement earlier was that while these cores exist, they are made of much more generalizable cards. Most of the overlaps you point out are in the manabases and restricted cards, with FoW and Brainstorm.

Then you point out a couple of unrestricted cards in each "core" that are mandatory for the group members, like Cunning Wish, Mishra's Workshop or Thirst for Knowledge. Those aid my point rather aptly; there has been discussion (or brief, rapidly-quelled murmurs in the case of TfK) about restriction of those cards. What I'm looking for is a reason why Mana Drain is different. We know Force of Will is different. I conjecture that Brainstorm is different--only if it were in nearly every deck or making combo too good would Brainstorm fall off the wagon, AFAIC.

My thinking is that Mana Drain's function is narrow enough that it does not fall into the FoW/Brainstorm "protected" category. Even if its power level mandates its use in all control decks, it still isn't going in combo (only control-combo), for example.

(BTW: Take Chromatic Sphere out of that combo core... only one of the 16 TPS/Draw7 decks in 2004 had them.)

[Ric_Flair]

Sorry everyone for a few errors on the lists.  It was a top of my head thing, with no research.  You guys are SO meticulous.

@ Saucemaster:

First, your right about the Strip Mine thing.  No self-respecting combo deck uses Strip Mine.  Correction noted.  However, on the issue of the Lotus, there is just NO GOOD REASON not to play with a Lotus.  None.  Aside from money issues EVERY deck can use and benefit from the inclusion of a Black Lotus.  EVERY DECK.  No matter what the newbs and budget denizens say.  Is it required?  Maybe not (I would just say a flat out no, but someone might find a statistically insignificant benefit), but it certainly never, ever hurts.

@ Phil

I apologize for the attempt shoehorn UGmad with the other Aggro control decks.  I did mention that it required some alterations to the the main core to make a UGmad deck.  Maybe I was not clear enough.  Either way, the point remains, though less coherent now, that all of the major Aggro control decks, sans GAT, run on a good percentage of that Aggro control core I laid out.

This comment confused me a bit:

Then you point out a couple of unrestricted cards in each "core" that are mandatory for the group members, like Cunning Wish, Mishra's Workshop or Thirst for Knowledge. Those aid my point rather aptly; there has been discussion (or brief, rapidly-quelled murmurs in the case of TfK) about restriction of those cards. What I'm looking for is a reason why Mana Drain is different.

What exactly does that mean?  I am not sure how showing that Cunning Wish is a core card in Control decks helps make your point.  Mana Drain might be one of the "most core" cards in the control core, but it is not crossing over into different cores like Force or Brainstorm.  There are three issues I fail to see as being satisfactorily addressed.

Issue one is Force of Will's sacroscant nature.  I understand that it stems the tide of combo and is the glue that keeps the format together, but all this is premised on a Vintage that is roughly similar to what we have now.  There is a good precedent to keep Force of Will around, but there is nothing in the structure of the game itself, or the format for that matter, that makes Force of Will necessary.  They could decide to let combo run rampant, look purely at power, and conclude that Force of Will is truly the best unrestricted card in the game (which it is) and restrict it.  It may suck, it may not be the format we like, but they could do that and do it with some reasoned approach (taking down the best unrestricted card that is used too much is normally a good reason).  They could also go for a reset and cut back control in general, cut back combo in general, and add two dozen cards to the restricted list, including Force of Will, all the while still making for a "balanced" format.  It may be different, it may suck, but again there is a reason behind the action.  But in the case of Force of Will the community as a whole has seemed to agree to live with the anamoly that is Force of Will, namely a ridiculously powerful card that is not restricted for the sake of the format.  This is a reason, but so is premise behind banning it, as I outlined above.  Force of Will is a special case, but only because the community would not support more radical actions.

Second problem is Brainstorm.  Brainstorm is nearly as ubiquitous as Force of Will and we all seem to just shift it to the side, saying "Well it is only card manipluation...its not like it is Slaver or something."  True the effect SEEMS innocuous enough, but given its level of use there must be something to the card other than it being merely good.  Cards that are "merely good" do not show up this much.  My thought is that Brainstorm is actually much, much better than we give it credit for, especially in combination with the fetchlands.  Its effect is not simply a blue collar, mid sized effect for a cheap price.  With fetchlands, Brainstorm is damn near a game making effect.  But again, we want to leave it alone because it is cheap to get, because it is a common, because it has been around for so long with no real problem, because it is innocuous seeming.  Bullshit.  Brainstorm is really fucking good.  If Mana Drain's ubiquity gets it a second look, Brainstorm needs one too.  Read that carefully.  I am not saying Brainstorm should be looked at.  I am merely saying that ubiquity, especially in a format with so much overlap, is not, alone a good enough factor.  Numbers alone cannot be the end or really even the beginning of the analysis.  They can be signposts but that is all.

Finally, if we are to combine three factors: ubiquity, core ubiquity (the % of decks in a given core that use the maximum number of copies of a given card), and raw power, then two other cards deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Mana Drain.  Goblin Welder, while not as useful in as many decks (largely because of money reasons, Welder decks are far more expensive, on the average, than decks that use Drains), is ALWAYS a 4 of in its core.  It is also at least as powerful.  It combos well with amazing cards, cards that are already good on their own like Moxen.  Whereas without Drain, many cards, like Exalted Angel, just are not good enough to see play.  Welder is also cheaper to cast and less of a color commitment in a deck and to cast.  Furthermore Welder has crossed into other cores, showing up in Belcher.  Think about that.  Welder is so powerful that even despite summoning sickness it is used in a deck that has TWO land and wants to win on Turn 1.  It must be awfully good to make the cut.  Dark Ritual, in the combo core, is similarly powerful.  In Sui it is not that bad, but in combo Dark Ritual equals mana, which equals cards, which equals damage.  Even when analyzing ubiquity, core ubiquity, and raw power Mana Drain is no better than Welder and is slightly better than Dark Ritual.  Yet no one has called for these cards to go solo.  

Bottom line if Mana Drain is a topic for discussion so should be Force of Will, Goblin Welder, and Dark Ritual.  Mind you I think everything is fine and NOTHING should receive a suspect glance, but if Mana Drain is a target other cards should be too.

[Dr. Sylvan]

You guys are SO meticulous.

It is literally both of my jobs to be meticulous. "i told u i wuz hardkore!" :D

What exactly does that mean?

I was saying that the cores seem to consist of (1) mana, (2) already-restricted cards, and (3) restriction targets, with very little else. These three categories cover pretty much every card you list, with a (4) for FoW. (Tendrils of Agony isn't really a great restriction target, but back during The Long Flamewars I remember Solaran_X saying he'd rather see it go than Will, so I'll say it counts as at least "actionable".) Null Rod is the only exception to those groups that I see, if you move Brainstorm out of the protected category.

Bottom line if Mana Drain is a topic for discussion so should be Force of Will, Goblin Welder, and Dark Ritual. Mind you I think everything is fine and NOTHING should receive a suspect glance, but if Mana Drain is a target other cards should be too.

Oh I agree that those cards are up for grabs, too, and that nothing should get axed, but I suppose I'm rather liberal with my "suspect glance"-distribution. To me, ubiquity isn't the end-all, be-all of a restriction argument. It's just a solid starting point, especially in cases where the objective power of a card/deck isn't clear (like it was with Gush).

Because seriously, a good restriction argument needs inflated rhetoric, false analogies, radical policy tangents by underinformed posters, discussions of who actually liked the Urza-era, citations of "supporting"/"similar" past restrictions, AND suggestions that all of the participants go play Type Two if they can't handle the heat, as a minimum just for it to register on the Fun-O-Meter.

Since we have all of that covered pretty thoroughly within an hour of a restriction thread opening in the Open Forum (it takes a whole six to twelve in the closed forums because people don't refresh often enough), I figured the least I could do if I was going to stir up trouble would be to give the flamers a number to misquote when the party gets rolling. ;)

[Ric_Flair]

Can we create a sticky with Steve's restriction tests and the unrecovered early game swing test on it and tell newbs that work through that analysis before posting "X card needs restriction!" threads?  At the very least it will weed out the number of stupid posts (like the one a week ago that used a sample size of one whole tournament top 8 to cull out restriction material).  At best we may get some intelligent policy discussion going.  And that is REALLY hard to do.  Policy talk disintegrates faster than flash paper.

Also I posted the cores post because it demonstrated how much overlapped there is both vertically (throughout a given core) and horizontally (across the cores themselves).  Some of the cores have a very high level of vertically consistency...all of the decks in that core use pretty much the same first 30-40 cards.  This is best seen in the Prison/Workshop core.  Those decks are really just fighting over which cards to use in the last 20-18 slots.  Other cores, like the aggro control core are genuinely more diverse.  But even there there are a good number of cards every deck "simply must" use.  For this reason ubiquity is just not reliable indicia of being worthy of restriction.  I am not sure if I can persuade the still unpersuaded by showing my point from a different angle, AGAIN, but that is what I am trying to do.  Ubiquity ain't enough.  When the de facto cardpool is this small (REALLY REALLY SMALL, especially in comparison to the number of legal cards) and manabases this flexible, nearly every card in the cardpool will look omnipresent to a certain degree.  DAMN that Fire/Ice it is everywhere!?!?!

[jpmeyer]

How about this: while you could potentially make a Mana Drain deck (and like I said, Slaver and Tog are pretty close to being "Mana Drain decks,") I can't see how you would make a Brainstorm deck or a Force of Will deck.

[Ric_Flair]

How about this: while you could potentially make a Mana Drain deck (and like I said, Slaver and Tog are pretty close to being "Mana Drain decks,") I can't see how you would make a Brainstorm deck or a Force of Will deck.

This is a curious phenomenon that Aristotle talked about in a number of books.  His basic question is similar to these:  what does your tongue taste like, your inner ear sound like, and your nose smell like?  In essence these questions are unknowable because you can't taste without a tongue, hear without an ear, or smell without a nose.  The default is unknowable because knowledge without the default is impossible.  

In the same way, one could say that all decks using these cards are Brainstorm or Force of Will decks or both because without these cards the given decks would not work, which is largely true.  These cards are so much the default cards that decks without them are almost assumed to be not possible.  As such, every deck is a Brainstorm/Force of Will deck with the means to the ends (Mana Drain/Workshop) and the actual ends (Tog/Slaver) tacked on at the end, filler of sorts.

We are all hitting at the same time here.  My post is started before but finished after JP's.  Weird.

[Raph Caron]

I totally agree with Ric_Flair's posts. I think the reason why we have so many successful variants is the power of the core decks. I'm exaggerating here, but you could possibly stick whatever cards you want to them and you could still achieve some success, just thanks to the flexibility, consistency and power these core cards provide.

Personnally, I think the core decks are simply too big and powerful. But that's just me.

[Saucemaster]

@ Saucemaster:

First, your right about the Strip Mine thing.  No self-respecting combo deck uses Strip Mine.  Correction noted.  However, on the issue of the Lotus, there is just NO GOOD REASON not to play with a Lotus.  None.  Aside from money issues EVERY deck can use and benefit from the inclusion of a Black Lotus.  EVERY DECK.  No matter what the newbs and budget denizens say.  Is it required?  Maybe not (I would just say a flat out no, but someone might find a statistically insignificant benefit), but it certainly never, ever hurts.

Well, I agree, but I was trying to head off the "Lotus in Fish" arguments because they're entirely beside the point.  Like I said, I thought that was a very good post.

I also agree that ubiquity is pretty obviously not in and of itself enough to trigger restriction.  At issue is whether ubiquity in and of itself is actually problematic--i.e. should it raise any alarms or make us trigger a few of The Doctor's "suspect glances".  I agree with Ric_Flair here that it shouldn't, but I'd actually take it a step further: those of us who are after a stable and Spikey format might actually see the omnipresence of 4-of Core cards as the sign of a robust metagame.  The more ubiquitous a certain set of cards is, the more the deckbuilders and players have settled the question of decklist variance and the more consensus that reflects in the format.  That is all good, and makes interesting metagaming possible.  The real question, I think, isn't the presence of large numbers of 4-of Core cards around which decks can be built; any robust metagame is going to have those.  The real question is what exactly the format *becomes* when the decks utilizing these broken four-ofs begin to take over.  We've had a pretty stable metagame with a number of top Mana Drain decks for months now, since the Wish/LED restrictions at least.

In other words, I think that the omnipresence of certain cards, cards around which entire archetypes are built, is actually a good thing.  It's when those cards are showing up AND they fit, for example, Steve's criteria for restriction--that's when we have a problem.

[Ric_Flair]

I agree with Saucemaster's comments about certain cards being so powerful that they facilitate strategies that would otherwise not be strong enough, on their own to make.  It is healthy, in my mind, that you can run Slaver without Workshops because of Mana Drain.  Even better, it is very healthy that you can be competitive with the aggro control core.  Null Rod is so good, such a powerful card in this format, that it enables a good deal of decks that otherwise would not make the grade.  Fish or UGmad without Null Rod is called crap.

But here is the REAL sign of a healthy metagame--decks outside those decks with well defined cores are good and win.  Dragon, FCG, and Oshawa Stompy (where have you gone Oshawa Stompy?) are good enough to win tournaments and yet they have very little in common with any of the four deck types with cores.  One could say that there is a fifth core built around Bazaar including 4 Bazaars, 1-3 Squees and so on, but that is probably the extent of the commonality, meaning that that is merely a good card combination.  

So the fact that these "abberational decks" especially decks like FCG can and do win is a very good sign of a healthy metagame.  Such a good sign, in my mind, that no cards deserve suspect glances right now.