Is Mana Drain currently out of place?

[Vegeta2711]

If I wanted to write an article on this topic, I would've already, so I'm keeping this concise in the interests of discussion / not boring me to tears.

In the past year, Mana Drain has slowly declined from being one of, if not the scariest card to face in the hands of a good player to one of mere annoyance. It's taken a long time, perhaps too long, but finally people have incorporated at least some of the basic anti-drain measures (At this point I'd like to reference Cron's article about playing around Drain). In addition, decks have increasingly become proactive and the disruption reflects defending spells directly at the cheapest possible cost rather than sitting and waiting.

For example, MDG runs multiple Misdirections to win early game counter-fights over Ancestral Recall (both sides) and Gifts Ungiven. Just about every deck running significant black has begun running 3-4 Duress because it's proactive disruption and avoids the normal fights involved with trying to counter something. Fish has much more pressure on it to run cards like Misdirection or Daze as dirt-cheap ways to win counter wars.

This fact is even more apparent when you consider how many decks truly care about Mana Drain as anything more than a slight speed-bump. Combo doesn't care anymore because just about every answer they have is cheaper, Duress, Xantid Swarm, forces of their own, etc. and they have boatloads of threats. Gifts is more focused on running the opponent over than sitting back and trying to play control in most matches. Fish doesn't even care if it's cards get drained. Workshop decks are the only remaining decks that really take a major impact from Drain anymore and they've hit a major decline lately.

Simply put, has Drain become the slowest part in control decks? It's a reactive card that costs UU and more importantly, requires opportunity, to truly be effective.

Note I'm not saying we should all cut Mana Drain from decks ASAP, but I figured I may as well throw it out there.

Cron Article: http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/7063.html

[Dante]

Interesting.  Good points.  I remember when Randy Buehler played the meandeck Gifts/(Oath) deck up in Seattle and his comments were along the lines of "Mana Drain is the worst card in the deck but of course you wouldn't cut it.."

[dicemanx]

I agree with this perspective to some extent and have felt this for the last year and a half when I played GiftsX almost exclusively. I very rarely had games decided by Mana Drain mana, but I still feel that Drains won games based on how my opponents were playing (at times incorrectly) around them

[Liam-K]

Pitch Long > Grim Long kinda proved this.  Misdirection is better than duress because free is cheaper than .

What this has found me doing is using my mana drains more to attack key enemy spells than to defend my own, simply because then I need less mana at once.  I still find drain very useful in this regard, even if the "oops, I get a million mana" impact tends to come up a little less.

[Razvan]

It does something unique, and can be often be used offensively, rather than purely defensively. Duressing something useless is one thing, mana draining something useless is another. That's why it's still good.

But good points. The advent of Duress/Xantid/Misdirection as secondary protection that's cheaper than Mana Drain (and proactive) might signal a decline in popularity.

[Demonic Attorney]

For a while I've thought that Mana Drain had lost its edge in terms power relative to the other foundational cards in the format.  Drain often just fuels another card-advantage spell, leaving you in better position than you were before you countered a spell, meaning you've leveraged a card advantage gain out of an otherwise 1:1 exchange with your opponent's countered spell.

Decks today aren't quite as bothered by that.  Combo will have another must-counter bomb online within the next turn or two, Dragon can use a resilient draw engine to keep up with you and churn out 1B endgame spells, Oath can often play its main threat before UU comes online and from there all it needs is an uncounterable land, Fish can cram multiple threats into the same turn, and you can't Drain all of them; even other blue-based control decks have started to supplement their control bases with Misdirection, Duress, REB, or Mana Leak, so they can win counterwars and make Mana Drain less of a factor.

I think the explanation for this new situation is that, after many years, the format has started to adjust to Drain and plan around it.  Rather than relying on the same mid-costed sorcery-speed threats that fall right into Mana Drain decks' gameplan, people are now relying on threats that can get around Drain, and/or protecting their important cards with effects that block Mana Drain.

Stepping back for a moment, I don't necessarily see this as a fundamental shift in the format that will have a permanent effect on the power level of Mana Drain.  Instead, I see this shift as a regular adaptation of the format to a metagame presence, much as basic lands increase from time to time in response to an increase in the number of Wastelands being played, or the greater quantity of maindeck graveyard hate as the format's reliance on graveyard recursion goes up.  Like most other things in the Vintage metagame, preparation for Mana Drain comes and goes in cycles, causing Drain decks to become more or less popular and in turn affect the format's willingness to dedicate limited deck resources to preparing for it.

[PucktheCat]

In my mind, the best reason to play Drain as a 4-of has always been Workshop decks, especially Stax.  I experimented with cutting Drains (1 or 2) from Gifts in summer '04, but the surge in UbaStax here in the midwest made that a bad plan.  In an environment without as many 'shops it makes a lot of sense to shave a few Drains (or perhaps cut them entirely).

[rvs]

To answer your main question: it depends on what you want it to do. The only way that it'll work if if you drain just about anything given the opportunity, making it a blue ritual. Since I started playing some T1 again with the Drain-TPS deck, it's funny how it's the worst card in the entire deck, but is overall just a tad stronger than Duress, since you are guaranteed to at least hit something, and then on the back of that win during your own turn.