[Premium Article] Schools of Magic: History of Vintage: 2001

[Smmenen]

Very proud to announce the latest chapter in the History of Vintage series! Chapter 9: 2001 is live!

 http://www.eternalcentral.com/?p=4109



Blurb:

2001 was the beginning of a Renaissance for the Type I format. After half a decade of slow decline, tournament interest and enthusiasm surged, as players organized tournaments online, in Europe, and as Origins and GenCon became major Type I tournament scenes. Witness the rise and fall of Accelerated Blue, the dominance of Fact or Fiction, and the emergence of the first Welder-based Workshop decks, Gush strategies, Sapphire Oath, and much, much more! Rediscover long-lost decklists and tournament report excerpts that capture the feeling and experience of the format in 2001. Revisit the debates between players like Tom LaPille, Oscar Tan, and Matt Smith, and learn history’s judgment of their arguments. Continuing Stephen Menendian’s epic History of Vintage series, Chapter 9 (2001) is a dramatic turning point in the history of the format. At 30 pages of action-packed history, this chapter is not to be missed!

Free Excerpt:

[Begin Free Excerpt From Schools of Magic: History of Vintage - 2001]

After years of malaise and slow decline, the Type I format seemed to be turning a corner as 2000 drew to a close. With the schism of formats and the institution of the Reserved List years earlier, Wizards of the Coast and tournament organizers deliberately withdrew support from Type I by shifting their emphasis to Type II, and, later, other formats. Wizards managed the format’s Banned and Restricted List and sponsored an annual Type I Championship at Andcon every fall, but that was about the extent of their support. The format was treated more as a Barnum curiosity than a legitimate vehicle for experiencing the game of Magic. Wizards gave Type I critical visibility as a regular format on the Magic Invitational, a token gesture that underscored rather than reduced its marginalized status.

It is not surprising that local tournament support and interest in Type I continued to dwindle over the second half of the decade. Inquest magazine, fighting this trend, saw an opportunity and sponsored a $50K tournament series in the summer and fall of 1997 with disappointing results and turnout. Like a big budget movie that bombed at the box office, there would be no sequel. It was a valiant, but failed experiment.

1999 was the nadir of the format’s long decline. It was not much of an exaggeration to refer to the format as “dead.” Wizards’ support was in name only. The Type I Championship at Andcon (organized by Andon Unlimited) had been discontinued, organized Type I tournaments had dried up, and Urza’s block shattered the format’s reputation and status quo by precipitating three separate waves of restrictions. Despite this, green shoots were visible in the deadened environment.

For the first time in many years, excitement and enthusiasm for the format was palpable. Player interest and passion had been focused and channeled through the platform of Beyond Dominia, which gave a voice and outlet for Type I discussion and debate. The format had been carefully sculpted by DCI intervention, and the Type I format that appeared in the fall of 2000, after the restriction of Necropotence, was once again attractive to many players. Combo had been successfully neutered, and not only were control decks once again top tier, but aggro decks had re-emerged as well.

If the metagame of the November 2000 Invitational was any indication, Type I was about to enter a Renaissance of sorts. Players were clamoring for tournaments, and tournament organizers seemed more willing to oblige. Neutral Ground was hosting regular Type I tournaments in New York, and Trader Online was hosting even larger monthly tournaments in Germany, called the Dülmen. Even more prominent tournaments were about to launch online for the first time. 2001 would be the first year that community led and organized tournaments were created with an eager, global player base seeking out the Type I experience.

The carefully tended format was becoming a control pilot’s dream. With Keeper decks seemingly ascendant based on their performance on the Magic Invitational, and with Necropotence now a victim of restriction, adherents of the Weissman School believed they had entered the promised land after several years in exile. By the end of the year, they would awaken from a blue nightmare that would prompt, yet again, more restrictions.

Tournament of Champions

Discussion, debate, and deck advice was not enough to satisfy the intense player interest evident on Beyond Dominia. The advent of online Magic platforms such as Wizards of the Coast’s Magic Encyclopedia and Dragonstar Studio’s free Apprentice made it possible to use the Internet to test and play Type I games. This opened up the possibility of not only free match play, but Type I tournaments organized online. This possibility was seized by the staff at Bdominia, and the first Tournament of Champions was organized.

Players submitted their decklists in advance to the tournament organizer, which would be kept secret until after the tournament had begun. Randomized Swiss-style pairings would be announced on the forum at roughly a rate of one round every few days (faster than correspondence chess, but slower than real tournaments). Players were expected to contact each other and arrange a time to play their match, and were also expected to report their results and write up a summary of each round. The first such tournament kicked off in the final months of 2000, by the end of the year the winner of the first Tournament of Champions had been crowned.

Mono Blue Ophidian Control, 1st Place Beyond Dominia Type I Tournament of Champions 2000, By Michael Bower (aka mikephoen)
[Business] (35)
4 Force of Will
3 Misdirection
4 Mana Drain
4 Counterspell
2 Forbid
1 Annul
4 Powder Keg
2 Nevinyrral’s Disk
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
2 Soothsaying
4 Ophidian
2 Morphling
1 Zuran Orb

[Mana Sources] (25)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
17 Island
1 Strip Mine
4 Wasteland
   [Sideboard] (15)
4 Hydroblast
2 Treachery
2 Tormod’s Crypt
3 Annul
3 Back to Basics
1 Disrupt

Canadian Michael Bower’s Mono Blue Ophidian Control deck not only took down the inaugural Tournament of Champions, but took many Bdominia regulars by surprise. Mono Blue Control had arrived in Type I.

Bower took his cue from Zvi Mowshowitz’ Mono Blue Control deck from the first 2000 Magic Invitational, which was the only deck in that portion of that tournament to go 3-0. Both decks eschewed the typical preference for multi-color control in favor of a far more streamlined archetype. Both decks are anchored by Ophidian, one of the best card drawing engines of the era. Both decks also featured a high density of countermagic.

Mike Bower ran more Misdirections than Zvi (who ran none), but lacked the more efficient countermagic like Mana Leak, and eschewed Impulse and Brainstorm that Zvi’s deck included. One of the most important innovations here was the incorporation of a full complement of Powder Keg, to clear out Jackal Pup-level threats and remove Moxen as well. Back to Basics out of the sideboard would lock up and lock out any multi-color control opponent. Soothsaying was an unusual and controversial card that was popular on Bdominia, but less popular among pros or players like Brian Weissman.

Michael Bower’s performance would strike an important note and set the tone for 2001.
[End Free Excerpt]

The entire series is available here:  http://www.eternalcentral.com/?tag=history-of-vintage

[Demagoguery]

I just finished reading this chapter and it's some great stuff. I'd advise people to pick this up and give it a read as not only does it show the history of deck evolution throughout Vintage but it also provides an insight into the times and the public opinion of Vintage. It's a great tool for those of us who are interested in promoting Vintage as a format, seeing as it contains various arguments for and against the format, that have changed little to this day.

[Smmenen]

I really liked your point that " it's interesting how people complain about a lot of the same things back then as they do today, even if Zoo was dominating."    The whole debate that Matt Smith prompted is extremely ironic - and revealing -- from this distance.

It reveals that the issues with the format are always superficially complaints about speed, etc, but at core, are masking something else.  Matt Smith's examples of why "Type I sucks" being Channel-Fireball at a time when Mono blue decks were dominating the format were pretty ridiculous.

But it also explains why these debates seem to recur on a roughly annual basis.   

Was there a decklist in this article that most intrigued you?  This article had tons of tournament decklists. 

[Demagoguery]

I tend to be very informed about deck lists of the past so it's hard to really be intrigued by one, but I did find the UR Stacker 3 list very interesting as I played Shops for a while but never really thought about using Su-Chi to basically bypass the restriction of the Shop mana usage and thus open up space for things like Fact or Fiction.

One thing I don't really see explored a lot is the unpowered aspect of Vintage. Now while in the past this might have not been possible, in the current day and time the hate available is much stronger and doesn't fall victim to the same issues as past hate did, as in the case of Null Rod being easy to answer as it was an artifact. More so, it's weird to see how players don't believe unpowered decks to be "real" decks. I've had many conversations recently where I brought up the topic of unpowered decks, being both inspired by the Sanctioned Vintage events that have been happening lately and the performance of White Trash at the LCV, but I've generally got the same responses of either the decks are simply "Legacy" decks, that they're "janky hate decks", or that a deck is inherently worse if it doesn't at least run the on colour moxen.

I understand that a lot of decks do benefit from Moxen, and as a deck builder it's easy to include them because they can allow you to play your 2 drops earlier, but White Trash was a powered deck that cut Moxen over time and has been better for it. I think the fact that Moxen are effected by so many cards these days, and the fact that Thoughtseize and such are balanced around the fact that they can't hit lands, can allow us to reconsider the benefits of the Mox. Of course they are still a valid strategy and powerful includes, but there has to be a lot of unexplored design space that forgoes the Moxen, seeing as there are more than a few cards these days that interact differently with Moxen than they do with Lands.

[Smmenen]

I had also forgotten about the Stacker 3 lists using Su-Chi to fuel Fact or Fiction, but had remembered how useful Shivan Reef was to the evolving UR Workshop variants of the era.   That was interesting to me, too. 

Perhaps one area that I've glossed over are some of the unpowered decks of the era.   The main reason for that is that many of these decks appear and then disappear -- so they don't achieve the level of sustained success that we see with other archetypes.   For that they don't really fit my 'Schools' thesis well.  But a red hate decks were often very prominent in the format well until 2003 when they finally began to disappear.  I have at times considered adding sections on these decks, but ended up discarding them for space and other reasons. 

[Demagoguery]

I wouldn't really call unpowered decks a school, at least not until just recently and it's still yet to be seen if they can truly be one. The issue is that for an unpowered deck to be truly good it has to stand alone, and not simply be a novelty. This just wasn't a possibility in the past unfortunately, because while there were hate cards for Power, they didn't truly matter as a Mox Monkey or Karn doesn't hurt your Moxen, so there's no reason to not include it yourself. Even if other people play an excessive amount of Mox Monkeys, you can opt not to include Moxen, but it's only temporary until the meta shifts, so it becomes a meta call instead of School of Magic.

To have a true reason to go unpowered, a deck would have to not only create a hostile environment for opposing Moxen but for its own Moxen. Null Rod is an example of this, because it shuts off your own Moxen as much as theirs, and it takes a card from your hand, so playing less Moxen with it means you'll have less dead cards. The issue is Null Rod is an artifact and is easily stopped by popular cards in the format. Sphere of Resistance is another card that makes Moxen burdensome, but the decks that want to play it can cheat so heavily on mana that they don't mind paying a premium to play their Moxen. Obviously if you play Blue you play Ancestral Recall, there's no substitution for it, and for a while Blue was just way ahead of anything else in the format.

Times have changed though, and in the modern era we have seen a sort of "unpowered" School pop up. The reason I find the deck White Trash so interesting is because it started as a powered deck, it had all the Moxen and Lotus, but ended up cutting all of that for consistency, much like how we're seeing other decks cut explosive combos (Bomberman) in favor of consistent threats (Resto-Angel). The reason for it cutting the Moxen, the only power it could play being mono White, is that the Moxen are actually a liability in the deck rather than a benefit. With a main deck Stoney Silence, a card that has far fewer answers than Null Rod, Kataki War's Wage, and Thalia the Moxen it runs can easily just be dead land drops or worse. More so, it runs 8 Stripmine effects, meaning that its already stretching its colour sources rather thin when playing so many double White costed guys, and as such shutting off a white mana source is none beneficial. There are also other cards that can make Moxen feel like a negative, such as Grand Abolisher, Abolish (Alt cost), and even Phyrexian Revoker. As a whole it's amazing but we've finally come to an era where a deck that isn't Dredge simply doesn't want Moxen, and it even took Dredge some time to let go of its Power pieces.

It seems that the amount of symmetrical hate (Chalice, Stoney, Kataki, etc), in addition to alternate casting costs (Abolish, Snuff Out, etc) has made it possible to reconsider the benefit of the Mox. Not only that but more efficient hate, such as Mental Misstep has made the lack of an Ancestral Recall in your deck less detrimental. Recently a G/W deck has even done some serious work at the LCV event that hosted 40 players, and that shows another step towards the waning emphasis of Blue. It's very possible we might even see some kind of Zoo build that just has such heavy colour requirements that it can't afford to run Moxen because it needs the basic land times and fixing more than it needs the fast mana.

As a whole I don't know if this will be a School in itself, simply a part of another School(s), or some combination of the two, but as it stands now I believe we'll see drastic changes to the Vintage game in the near future.

[Smmenen]

To be completely candid, I gloss over some of the under-powered history in the format.  During the time period I have been investigating, there are examples of Burn, Sligh or Red Hate decks winning tournaments.  Yet, unlike the major archetypes I examine, those performances are not consistent or patterned in such a way as to suggest a trend, with the exception of the Pup decks I attend to in late 2000 – largely because they were played by so many greats on the Magic Invitational.

It’s difficult to write about the ‘hidden’ history of unpowered decks because they are so marginal and marginalizable.  In one sense, I want to describe the grandeur and evolution of the game’s greatest format.  Yet, delving into the fact that many players were unpowered or played unpowered decks is difficult to do in a story that – in the last 10 years at least – is defined by proxy environments.  

As one anecdote, which I’m sure will come up, Burn/red hate decks were tied for the most popular archetype in the 2003 Vintage Championship, yet have rarely been played since.   If there is an unpowered school, I would be hard pressed to identify its elements.  That’s because even partially powered decks or decks with cards like Null Rod or Stoney Silence almost always run one or more pieces of power.  

Another practical problem is simply space.  I have to strike a balance between crafting a compelling narrative and being historically accurate and complete.  If I highlighted every relevant fact of the format, each chapter would be 50-80 pages instead of 20-30, and this would be an untenable project.  

As we cross Magic’s 20th anniversary this month, I’m hoping that folks find this work to be a revealing and yet engaging history and analysis.  

As always, please let me know what you think...

[brianpk80]

Sorry to Necro a semi-old thread but since this is the latest in the series, I wanted to let you know I'm caught up and the writing quality in the last three installments 1999-2001 was paramount.  Nice work.  I did see the surreptitious part where you attempted to infer a change in philosophy regarding the use of the ban list when Channel and Mind Twist were restricted.  IMO, this is ambiguous and indicates simply that Channel and Mind Twist were not threatening enough in the post-Combo environment to justify banning while Yawgmoth's Will, Tinker, and Tolarian Academy did not.  Considering Time Vault was still effectively banned via errata, I don't think one could say it indicated a sweeping change in philosophy; rather, it seemed to reflect the relative impotence of Channel and Mind Twist vis-a-vis the Urza's printings.  The DCI obviously could clear up this matter with a simple statement of clarity on the topic.

Since I sold out for the third time after the Urza debacle and most poignantly, the completely unnecessary neutering of Mirror Universe (it seemed like such a gratuitous insult and was indeed the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back in my case), reading about this era was enlightening rather than nostalgic.  I look forward to the future installments and am curious how the epicenter of Vintage was transferred from Beyond Dominia to The Mana Drain, which I first discovered when I started getting interested in the game again years after quitting.  

Thanks for all the effort and enthusiasm you put into chronicling the format's history.  Cheers!  -Brian

[Smmenen]

It's ironic you ask about the shift from Bdominia to Themanadrain.com as that was the section of the 2002 Chapter I was just working on.  

Your point about the meaning/significance of the unbanning of Channel and Mind Twist is well noted, but I seem to recall coterminous statements that imputed, at least in retrospect, precisely that interpretation.  

I appreciate the feedback on the writing quality.  I think you may find 2002 the strongest entry yet!

EDIT:

I might as well have a tease.   The final section of 2002 will have an updated Table of the Schools of Magic as was seen in Chapter 5: 1997. 

Here's the text before the updated table:

The Schools of Vintage, Revisited

Robert Hahn’s metaphorical “Schools of Magic” is the star that guides our journey through the history of Magic’s grandest format.   Writing in 1995, Hahn surveyed the landscape of strategies in the budding game of Magic and attempted to distill them into their most distinct and fundamental principles.   As described earlier in this series, these ‘Schools” represent coherent bodies of knowledge and a stable set of principles that are uniformly applied over and over again in different environments and across archetypes. The win conditions, tactics, and even colors of these schools may change, but the concepts that underpin them remain the same.

The thesis of this series is that the Schools of Magic that emerged in the early years of the game continue unabated today.  Hahn’s work is what gives this series on this History of Vintage both a narrative arc and coherence.  It is the lens by which the evolution of the decks and strategies -- which are the focus of this series – is rendered intelligible.  Without Hahn’s work, this would simply be a chronology of events for history’s sake rather than an attempt to instill a deeper appreciation for the game that exists today.  I believe that the history of the format allows us to better understand the strategies of the moment, since every deck in the format is threaded by an invisible umbilicus to its antecedents and indebted to the designers and innovators of the past.

Although a few of the so-called “Schools” identified by Hahn exist today, with the benefit of historical hindsight, others he described are better understood as fundamental, broadly applicable deck building principles than actually philosophies of design or game play.   Similarly, decks anchored by a singularly unique tactic or card do not constitute a “School,” since it cannot exist without that card.  A School exists independent of any card or tactic.   Perhaps the most salient example of this fact in the history recently covered is the rise and eventual restriction of Necropotence decks. 

Hahn foreshadowed the rise of Necro in 1996, and struggled to define and understand Necropotence in the context of his Schools analogy.  Necro decks may have appeared to be a School because rendered simple, black aggro based strategies viable through overwhelming card advantage.  When this was the primary use for Necropotence, neither players nor the DCI much cared.  In fact, they encouraged and even tended to Necro’s existence, by reprinting it in 5th edition.  Yet, when Necropotence started to fuel combo decks, first in Extended, and soon after in Type I, Necropotence was recognized less as an anchor to black aggro, and more as a card advantage engine that could be grafted into whatever combo was most efficient and available at the time.  It is with this recognition that the DCI finally brought an end to Necro’s reign.   The restriction of Necropotence removed any lingering pretension that Necro constituted a school.     

Building upon Hahn’s work, I have identified the six Schools of Vintage that satisfy the notion of a coherent philosophy – a set of complementary principles applied across contexts.   By 1997, all of the Schools of Vintage had been conceptualized, although not all had been yet constituted in tournament level decks.  By 2002, all of them had emerged.   

[brianpk80]

It looks superb.  Let me know when it's available for download. 

[Smmenen]

Thanks Brian.  It's fully drafted, just being edited right now.  Hopefully will be up and live by this weekend.  

I'm sad to say that I'm taking a hiatus from this project after Chapter 10 comes out to give myself time to finish the 3rd Edition of my Gush book and to start up another writing project on Old School Magic.  I do promise to return to this in a few months with my batteries completely recharged.   2003 is probably my favorite year in the history of the format, so I will be excited to get to that.

Once Chapter 10 is out, I've asked Jaco to compile the first ten Chapters into one large item people can buy (it will cost the sum of the individual chapters, but offer the convenience of getting them all in one download), "Schools of Magic: The History of Vintage -- The First Ten Years: 1993-2002."  

Folks like yourself who have already read the first 9 chapters won't lose out at all, but it will also be a great opportunity for folks who haven't been reading this series to jump on board!