Bruno Dias

Remember Storm?

The goofy-seeming but inherently very broken mechanic from Scourge?

In that chapter of our story, I wrote about what Storm did in formats other than Standard. But Storm, then, was never able to do much of anything in Magic's primary competitive format. A dedicated Storm deck has to cast a lot of spells in a single turn. To do that, it needs to draw lots of cards and generate lots of mana, and the supporting cards for that didn't really exist in Scourge-era Standard.

But then, in 2006, along came Time Spiral. The set had a nostalgia theme, and one of the main facets of that was bringing back old, beloved mechanics. Time Spiral had more named keywords than any set up to that point, including fan favorites like Cycling, Flashback, and Morph. It also featured a smattering of new Storm cards... and one old Storm card, hidden in Time Spiral's 'timeshifted' sheet of retro-border reprints.

Nowadays, this style of 'bonus sheet' is done all the time, and those bonus cards are usually not legal in Standard; it adds chase cards for collectors, wanted reprints for Eternal formats, and spice to the Limited environment. But Time Spiral's timeshifted cards were the first version of this idea, and they were very much legal in Standard. adding dozens of additional cards to what would become one of the most overstuffed Standard formats of all time.

The reprinted card in question is Dragonstorm – a goofy Storm card from Scourge that married that set's dragon theme to its Storm mechanic. Dragonstorm looks very much like the kind of card that doesn't do anything, a fun janky thing to make work. It costs a whopping nine mana.

Nine mana ended up being very castable in the right deck. Every Storm card has, essentially, a 'kill number.' How many copies of the Storm spell is enough to kill your opponent? Tendrils of Agony kills with 9 Storm. Brain Freeze tends to need about 15 Storm.

Dragonstorm only needs three, thanks to the printing of Bogardan Hellkite; you put four Bogardan Hellkites into play and they immediately burn your opponent for 20 damage. And of course, that's in order to kill instantly. Three is typically going to be enough, if you think you'll get to take your next turn and attack with at least one dragon.

You do need nine mana, but Seething Song is right there in the core set, getting reprinted over and over; Coldsnap includes Rite of Flame, an even better ritual. And Time Spiral contains Lotus Bloom, a riff on Black Lotus that was perfectly suited to the Dragonstorm deck.

To round out the strategy, Storm had some strong card selection and a few key pieces of interaction: Gigadrowse is an inspired inclusion, used to force interactive decks to tap out at the end of their turn or to essentially gain an extra turn against attacking decks.

In many cases, the Storm player would simply cast rituals into Bogardan Hellkite itself; depending on what the opponent was doing, a 5/5 dragon that came down at instant speed and immediately sent 5 points of damage at the opponent could be enough to win the game by itself. In post-sideboard games, one would typically board out all of one's creature removal against the Storm deck, after all.

Storm would be a, uh, scourge of Standard for a whole two years, until Time Spiral rotated. But miraculously, in a very deep and complex Standard environment, Storm turned out to be good, if not broken. This is a classic version that Makahito Mihara piloted to a World Championship in 2006:

This archetype had a surprising degree of longevity, though, seeing play in tournaments all through the 2006 and 2007 seasons. It very nearly won back to back Worlds – Patrick Chapin made it to the 2007 finals with a one-year-later, mono-red version of the deck that still featured the Dragonstorm combo but had a much more flexible game plan. Instead of card drawing, it used burn spells and Pyromancer's Swath to tear down the opponent's life total, sometimes winning by playing a big spell out of Spinerock Knoll.

This version of the deck played Ignite Memories out of the sideboard as a faster (if unreliable) kill in the mirror match – it doesn't take many copies of Ignite Memories to kill if you have a Dragonstorm or Bogardan Hellkite stuck in your hand, especially after the opponent has pitched a couple Shocks at your head.

This version of the deck is (in)famous for one of the most exciting finished in Pro Tour history, the Worlds 2007 semifinal match between Chapin and Gabriel Nassif. A high-stakes Dragonstorm mirror match meant that multiple games in this match were decided by Ignite Memories rolls.

Dragonstorm was the rare archetype that was never completely broken, but was very effective in Standard for the entire lifespan of the set that spawned it. But this era of Standard is remembered as one of the most diverse and exciting times; Standard had a big card pool, the cards were complex and nuanced and skill-testing, and a lot of different archetypes were viable. It was also rife with complex interactions, unintuitively powerful cards, and a shifting, bewildering metagame. For a certain type of player, this is the golden age of Standard play.

That 2006 World top 8, for example, features a few exemplar decks from this era:

• The red-green beats deck, a 'small midrange' deck built around beating down with Kird Ape, but which also featured Llanowar Elves to accelerate itself and Call of the Herd as a source of card advantage.
• Boros (Red-White) deck, a simple aggro deck featuring efficient small white creatures and powerful red burn spells.
• The 'Urzatron' deck, an archetype that used the 'Tron' lands (Urza's Mine, Power Plant, and Tower) to generate big mana as fuel for a control gameplan. Tron decks had been around on and off for a long time – the Urza lands had been reprinted in core sets repeatedly – but this version broke through by using a package of strong blue control cards.

This is the prototypical balance for a Standard metagame – aggro, midrange, control, and combo are all relatively viable and playable.

Next time

I've glossed over the other archetypes and events of that 2007 season, but Lorwyn block either enacts or prefigures many big changes for Magic. The era of the planeswalker is about to start – quietly, at first.

2006 would see, quietly, the start of a major transformation in Magic. For ten years, the game had been built on the block model: Every year of Magic consisted of one large set, and then two thematically-connected small sets. Ravnica, City of Guilds came out in the fall of 2005, and was followed by the small sets Guildpact and Dissension, which all worked together, narratively and mechanically, as one unit.

But the block model had three big holes in it.

• If a large set was a miss, guess what: the next two sets are also in that same world, using those same mechanics. There was a yearlong commitment to a specific take on Magic.
• Small sets in general were problematic from a design standpoint. They invariably sold fewer packs than a large set, because there were fewer cards to get. Limited play also skewed this; a large set would be drafted by itself, while small sets were only drafted as one pack alongside other sets in the block.
• In addition to the block expansions, Wizards was putting out a core set every other year. This meant that one year they'd do four major products, then next year they'd do three.

This entire system was arrived at from reasonable design choices, but it makes no business sense. Why are you going back and forth on how many products you put out every year. Why are you making these small sets with noticeably worse returns. Why are you putting a whole year's worth of eggs all in the same creative basket.

Wizards would eventually abandon the block model entirely, but that's still years away. First, they're going to experiment with multiple different solutions to these various problems. This era of experimentation is going to start, in 2006, with the release of one of the most unique sets ever put into Standard: Coldsnap.

Coldsnap is not a normal set. It's a small set, released in the middle of the year, between Dissension (the final set of Ravnica block) and the next large Fall expansion, Time Spiral. It basically takes up the slot that, in an odd year, would be occupied by the core set; the first of many "fourth sets" that would fill this slot.

The framing of what Coldsnap is would be almost like a portent of what was coming in the 2010s, an act of corporate brand revisionism that prefigures every time in the last 20 years a story seemed written just to be put directly into a fan wiki.

Coldsnap is, supposedly, the third set of Ice Age block. If you don't remember Ice Age, it's the large set that came out in 1995, followed by Alliances and Homelands. That last one was really a standalone, thematically unconnected to Ice Age. So, retroactively, Wizards replaced it with Coldsnap. If you go on the Magic fan wiki, it'll describe Ice Age block as consisting of:

the large expansion Ice Age in June 1995 and two small expansions, Alliances in June 1996 and Coldsnap in July 2006.

Which makes it seem like Wizards just took a ten year break from printing Magic cards. But we're not here just to talk about the idea behind Coldsnap. We're here to talk about the cards, and what the cards did in Standard. We're here to talk about one of the most egregious short-lived decks in Standard history. We're here to talk about CounterTop.

It's an odd choice to play only two copies of Counterbalance and only three copies of Sensei's Divining Top – perhaps Mori wasn't so sure of the combo itself, or this is a nod to the fact that the second Counterbalance is just a dead card. The two copies of Muddle the Mixture in the deck can, either way, be used to search for Counterbalance, helping with consistency without the greater possibility of drawing a dead card. In truth, the Countertop combo is used to lock the game away once you're already a little ahead.

Here's how Countertop works. With Counterbalance and Sensei's Divining Top in play, one can repeatedly manipulate the top of one's library to keep hitting counterbalance, countering the opponent's spells for free. In a pinch, top can put itself on top of the library, which guarantees it can always counter 1-mana spells; that by itself can be backbreaking against certain decks. But Counterbalance isn't meant to be an ironclad defense so much as just a source of incredible advantage – randomly zapping the opponent's one, two, and three-mana spells and allowing the Counterbalance player to save their real counterspells for other threats.

Permission decks have long been a feature in Standard, but this is the permission-est deck of all time. A control deck is defined by its interaction, and this deck's interaction consists of 3 Condemn, spending counters from one of its two copies of Umezawa's Jitte, or 14 counterspells. All this is fueled by Dark Confidant, one of the greatest card advantage engines ever printed. 'Bob', as it's known (after Invitational winner Bob Maher, whose likeness is on the card) even has extra synergy with top, which can mitigate the card's drawback.

Countertop would go on to become a fixture in Extended, but its reign of terror in Standard was short-lived – Kamigawa block, which Top comes from, was only legal with Coldsnap for a brief four-month window before the release of Time Spiral. As such, Countertop receded into the mists of history. But Coldsnap cards still had a broken part to play in the ongoing drama of the Standard metagame.

Elsewhere in Magic

The other deck from this era that is remembered as a classic archetype is Solar Flare, so named after the art on Angel of Despair. This blue-white-black control deck had access to an extensive suite of interaction, that it used to prolong the game to cast Zombify and return a powerful creature from the graveyard. It exists in a bit of a funny low-powered era of Magic where the reanimation spells have been nerfed (compare Zombify to 2-mana Animate Dead) but the reanimation targets are far from the peak of power that they would have years later.

Next time

Is Ignite Memories lethal?

Last time, I explored the history of three powerful cards from Kamigawa block.

We've reached probably the strangest part of this history, and the most perverse deck archetype of all time.

Dredge

Dredge is a mechanic from Ravnica block, released in late 2005 following Kamigawa block. What it does: Whenever you would draw a card, instead you may return a card with Dredge from the graveyard to your hand. If you do, you mill some cards; that is, you put them from the top of your library directly into your graveyard. Each dredge card says how many, ranging from Dredge 1 through Dredge 6.

Essentially, you forgo a normal draw to recover a card from your graveyard, with the added bonus of dumping more cards into your graveyard. This is a fairly powerful ability, so dredge cards are usually balanced around that by being fairly weak; the original 12 Dredge cards in Ravnica are all pretty below curve for the expected power level of a card.

This pretty much made dredge cards non-starters in any kind of normal deck. If you browse the decklists of Worlds 2005, or Pro Tour Honolulu in 2006, you will only find Dredge cards hanging out in sideboards – Darkblast, specifically, had a role in fighting some very specific strategies. In Extended, a few people tried Golgari Grave-Troll in Psychatog lists, using the troll both to fuel Psychatog, and as an annoying recurring threat in itself.

But Dredge would not reach its full potential until Time Spiral block printed three cards that worked perfectly with it.

Time Spiral Breaks Magic

Time Spiral is the wildest block in Magic's history. Considered by many to be the apex of the game's design, it was widely regarded as a mistake by Wizards due to its high complexity and unapproachable theme. Established players loved it; newcomers were bewildered.

Time Spiral's theme was nostalgia – nostalgia, specifically, for Magic's own past. Its three sets were themed after the past, present, and future:

• Time Spiral was full of popular mechanics from old sets returning – including Flashback, notably – as well as riffs on old cards, mashups of old mechanics that never existed together in the same set before, and numerous references to the early days of Magic. It has a 'timeshited' bonus sheet of cards from the game's past, reprinted in the old border.
• Planar Chaos was about an alternate present. It featured 'planeshifted' cards that were exact reprints of existing cards, but shifted to a different color.
• Future Sight's gimmick were the 'futureshifted' cards – cards printed with a new 'futuristic' card border (only ever used in this set), which represented Magic's possible futures; each one had an unusual mechanic that had never been done before.

Between Time Spiral and Future Sight, Wizards printed three cards that made Dredge a real, menacing deck:

• Dread Return plays on the idea of alternate flashback costs, previously seen in Cabal Therapy (itself a staple of Dredge decks in formats where it is legal). It gave Dredge a big payoff.
• Narcomoeba cheats itself into play when it is milled, giving Dredge the toehold of value that it needs to justify itself. Sacrificing three Narcomoeba to Dread Return is a classic play.
• Bridge from Below is one of the strangest cards from Future Sight; an enchantment that does absolutely nothing in play, but which has a very powerful effect when in the graveyard. By milling multiple Bridges from Below, dredge decks are able to multiply their creatures, creating either a huge board presence or the necessary fodder to flash back Dread Return.

Dredge, perhaps for the best, never really got time in the sun in Standard. For the deck to exist at all, it needs both the actual dredgers in Ravnica and the enablers in Future Sight; in Standard, this only happened for a four-month window in the summer of 2007; not enough time for a deck archetype as weird as Dredge to really find its footing in the metagame. Out of all the decklists that did well at US Nationals in 2007, for example, you will only find four copies of Golgari Grave-Troll.

As far as I can surmise from surviving records of old tournaments, the best result anyone ever had with Dredge in Standard was this list from Stuart Wright, who came in second at UK Nationals:

This list still resembles a normal Magic deck a lot more than anything that's to come in this chapter, but it's already (like various graveyard decks before it) turning the idea of card advantage on its head. The deck plays 13 discard outlets of various kinds, which it uses to put an initial dredger in the graveyard. Once it does, it starts dredging, looking for Narcomoebas, Dread Returns, and Bridges from Below.

Once there's enough of that in play, it brings back Flame-Kin Zealot. Bridge from Below, usually multiple copies of it, creates an instant army that the Zealot gives haste to, allowing for an immediate attack for lethal. Drowned Rusalka ties the room together by both sacrificing creatures to trigger Bridge and by being another 'looting' effect that draws and discards cards.

Dredging is a replacement effect – you can replace any normal card draw with a dredge. So effects that draw cards are very powerful in dredge decks, and the dredge player doesn't really care about where those cards go. It's fun to see this early dredge deck use Magus of the Bazaar as its best 'looter.' The magi were a mega-cycle of creatures that all had abilities taken from old cards from Magic's past; Magus of the Bazaar, of course, references Bazaar of Baghdad, which itself would become the most important card in Vintage Dredge.

Eternal Dredge

Where Dredge really became a factor was in Legacy and other larger formats, where it would have both the time to carve a niche in the metagame and access to even more graveyard cards.

Dredge really thrives in a deeper card pool, because 99% of cards are simply not relevant to its absurdist gameplan. Dredge isn't interested in normal card advantage or in normal efficient cards that other decks play. None of its cards matter for the normal reasons that make Magic cards matter.

As a case in point, the quality of a card with the Dredge mechanic is, to the Dredge deck, simply correlated to the number after the Dredge keyword. Golgari Grave-Troll is the best dredger because it has Dredge 6. Stinkweed Imp is second place because it has Dredge 5. The other properties of the card matter basically not at all; actually casting those cards is a plan C at best, and many Dredge lists don't actually run the mana needed to do so.

In all its other cards, Dredge cares purely about text that does things out of the graveyard. When you play Dredge, the graveyard is your hand and your hand doesn't really matter. The entire premise of the deck, the whole point of playing it, is to make "Dredge 6" as close as it can get to "draw 6 cards".

While Dredge would become a staple of Constructed tournaments to this day, it has had ups and downs in high-level play. It is the most polarizing deck archetype of all time, in more ways than one.

Part of the appeal of Dredge is that its game plan is just totally orthogonal to what a typical opponent is doing. Dredge doesn't care about most removal spells. Counterspells can stop Dread Return from resolving, but they can't stop Bridge from Below triggers. Targeting Thoughtseize at a Dredge opponent can if anything actively help them. Dredge is simply not playing the same game as a normal deck; it's as close as "not Magic" as any competitive archetype has ever gotten.

This, of course, makes Dredge both loved and hated. But the flipside of how Dredge blanks most normal interaction is that Dredge is also punished extremely hard by graveyard hate.

"Exile target player's graveyard" is an ability that Magic simply doesn't consider to be worth much. As an example, Leyline of the Void was printed in Guildpact, right after Dredge was introduced and not even really as a response to it. It's possible to completely erase Dredge's game plan without spending any mana, with a card that anyone can put into their deck, from turn 0.

Consequently, the adage is that Dredge is good when it's not – that is, it thrives whenever people aren't afraid of it. If there aren't that many pieces of graveyard hate floating around in sideboards, Dredge becomes a good option. Any match where your opponent didn't come prepared to crush you in games 2 and 3 (that is, the games played after sideboarding) is almost a free win.

Here's an early 'eternal' Dredge list:

While this is an Extended list, it closely resembles the basic template of Legacy Dredge as it would exist for the next several years. It's not that different from the Standard list we saw before, but the deeper card pool gives it a number of upgrades.

First, instead of all the mediocre looters, most of the discard outlets here are much more powerful one-off effects like Careful Study and Breakthrough. Breakthrough is, of course, normally cast for 0 – turns out One with Nothing can be good, if only it says "draw four cards" first. Turn-1 Breakthrough for 0 is a perfectly good way to start the game for this deck – essentially, it dumps the top 9 cards of the deck into the graveyard – but the real power comes when you cast a Breakthrough with a dredger already in the graveyard, at which point the draws become dredges and it's very easy to mill 20 cards or more.

This is what makes these Eternal iterations of Dredge so powerful and consistent – they have a very easy time throwing half their library into the graveyard, which makes it very likely that they'll hit multiple times on their payoff cards.

This deck also has a higher density of payoff cards. Cabal Therapy is a crucial addition – it gives the deck another sacrifice outlet to trigger Bridge from Below. Ichorid is another card that ties the room together perfectly; not only does it very easily come back from the graveyard by itself, it can then be sacrificed to Cabal Therapy or Dread Return; and if neither of those cards are in the graveyard, it still sacrifices itself to, again, trigger Bridge from Below. Like many of the best decks throughout Magic's history, Dredge is capable of blazing fast draws that lead to very quick wins; but when those fail, it can accrue gradual advantages, slowly accumulating an army of Bridge from Below tokens and eventually overwhelming the opponent or chipping away at them by attacking with Ichorid over and over again.

What if I didn't cast any spells?

However, these versions of dredge are still relatively normal. The ultimate mutation of Dredge is, of course, Manaless Dredge:

Here's a Magic deck with no mana sources. It only ever casts spells from the graveyard, and only for alternate costs. Rather than play a discard outlet, the player simply chooses to be on the draw and discards a card to hand size.

This newer list includes some additions from more recent sets. Prized Amalgam seems tailor-made for Dredge; whenever the deck returns another creature from the graveyard, it comes along for the ride. This iteration of the deck is totally capable of winning without casting spells, simply by returning Ichorid to trigger Bridge from Below and Prized Amalgam.

Manaless Dredge really has to be seen in action to be understood, so here's some video of Andrea Mengucci executing its game plan – timestamped to one of the games he actually won; he had terrible luck in this video.

In truth, Manaless Dredge has never been a big factor in Legacy; it is simply too weird and too fragile to really survive the gauntlet of a high-level tournament. More conventional versions are slower, but more consistent, and they're the ones that do occasionally show up in a top 8.

In Vintage, it's a different story.

Some Vintage Dredge builds do run actual mana sources, but the manaless versions are very common. The difference is Bazaar of Baghdad – a card that was banned in Legacy from day one, but which was never restricted in Vintage. Bazaar is so important to this deck that it actually plays Serum Powder, a card that does nothing other than allow it to mulligan more to find Bazaar. All hands with Bazaar are keeps, and all hands without are mulligans.

This is a very modern Dredge list – Dread Return and Bridge from Below have been cut in favor of simply playing more threats that come into play for free; it plays more like an aggro deck that just puts threats into play than like a combo deck with a win-on-the-spot finish, though of course it's really neither of those things. It's just Dredge – a deck that defies categorization and that cannot be understood in the bounds of 'normal Magic'.

Elsewhere in Magic

• The 'other deck with dredge cards' that existed in Ravnica-era Standard is Assault Loam, built around the combination of Seismic Assault and Life from the Loam. The game plan here is pretty obvious – recur lands from the graveyard over and over again, using Seismic Assault to control the board and eventually kill the opponent through direct damage.

Next Time

Oh yeah, there was another card set in between Ravnica and Time Spiral. It probably didn't have any important cards in it, right?

Last time: I wrote a short history of Affinity, the most broken deck since Urza's Saga.

Wizards followed up Mirrodin block with Kamigawa block – Champions of Kamigawa, Betrayers of Kamigawa, and Saviors of Kamigawa.

This block is near and dear to the hearts of most people who care intensely about Magic. It sold poorly due to a combination of the hangover from the broken Mirrodin environment and Kamigawa itself having serious design flaws – many point to Saviors as the worst-designed Magic set of all time. It did, indeed, have its share of bad mechanics and bad cards. But while Kamigawa block is often compared to Masques – the underpowered follow-up to a broken block – in reality it contained some very powerful cards. This is the story of the three most powerful cards in each of these sets: Gifts Ungiven, Umezawa's Jitte, and One With Nothing.

Failure to find

A few chapters back I wrote a whole chapter about Fact or Fiction.

Every important card in the history of Magic spawns descendants, imitations, riffs, variants; the game is constantly recycling itself for more content. Gifts Ungiven is one of Fact or Fiction's descendants – probably the greatest one. It's also descended from a Tempest card you might remember from earlier, Intuition.

The text of Gifts Ungiven is almost identical to Intuition:

Search your library for up to four cards with different names and reveal them. Target opponent chooses two of those cards. Put the chosen cards into your graveyard and the rest into your hand. Then shuffle.

Intuition was a rather disappointing card – powerful, but uninteresting. It was used to get three copies of the same card, rendering the opponent's choice a non-choice. Gifts is a correction to this mistake; in exchange for giving you card advantage – letting you keep two cards out of the pile, rather than just one – it forces you to pick four different cards.

This makes Gifts one of the most beautiful deckbuilding restrictions in the game. Like Fact or Fiction, Gifts is a spike-y skill-testing card. Unlike Fact or Fiction, it's skill-testing during deckbuilding. Gifts encourages building decks with lots of one-ofs and cards with dual or overlapping functions.

There's a science to building Gifts piles; with the correct cards in the deck stacked correctly, you can completely deny the opponent's choice. You can go for redundancy, picking up three or four of the same kind of effect – thus ensuring you'll get one. You can go for value, picking up piles of cards that are as good from the graveyard as they are from your hand, such as ones with the Flashback mechanic. You can go for surety, including some kind of Regrowth effect in your pile to have the option to pick up the cards your opponent put into the graveyard.

Gifts did not immediately take the Magic world by storm. Like other Kamigawa cards, it was initially overshadowed by the broken Affinity metagame; even after that, it was overshadowed by Umezawa's Jitte. But Gifts would become a perennial lurker, a card that does something utterly unique which would be leveraged, again and again, in formats that it was legal in. It quickly became a staple of Vintage; when the Modern format came into being, it would find a home there too, for a time.

In Standard, though, the furthest someone ever got registering a Gifts decklist was Frank Karsten:

This is a very unusual deck that Karsten himself designed. The basic game plan is:

• Get Yosei into play, either by casting it from the hand or by reanimating it with Goryo's Vengeance.
• Sacrifice Yosei to Greater Good, drawing cards to dig towards another Goryo's Vengeance or Yosei.

To survive to cast its combo, this deck uses powerful mana acceleration that was available at the time – which is why the base color here is green – and Wrath of God; aggressive creature strategies were everywhere in this metagame.

What's impressive is that while this is basically the first really successful Gifts deck in premier play, it's also a very advanced one; it squeezes every bit of juice out of that card.

• You can gifts for pure card advantage to further the control plan: Get Putrefy, Last Gasp, Kagemaro, and Wrath of God.
• You can use Reclaim and Recollect to fill out Gifts piles and ensure you get what you want; a very common pile would be Reclaim, Recollect, Yosei, Goryo's Vengeance – which guarantees you can either cast Yosei or Goryo's it back.
• Finally, in certain situations, you can fail to find.

I have to call out failing to find because it's one of the most famous rules interactions in the history of the game.

Magic's rules need an escape valve for when you search for a card with a specific quality but there's no card to go get; like cracking a Flooded Strand with no Plains or Islands left in your deck. It would be a waste of time to have to prove that there's no card left in your deck to go get; for the sake of expediency, a player always has the option to fail to find – to get nothing rather than something.

With Gifts, 'four cards with different names' is a specific quality of a card that you can fail to find – after all, maybe the rest of your library is all Islands. The rules don't care about whether that's actually true; you always have the option of 'failing' to find. So, much like a pitcher intentionally walking a power hitter, or a basketball team intentionally fouling at the end of a game, a Magic player can Gifts and find only one or two cards. Because of how Gifts is worded, those two cards then immediately go to the graveyard. In essence, you can cast Gifts as a double Entomb.

The Greater Gifts deck does this to get a dragon in the graveyard to reanimate with Goryo's Vengeance, in situations where it's either unable to cast the dragon, or casting the dragon wouldn't be winning.

This interaction leads to one of the greatest tournament moments in the history of the game: Frank Karsten winning the semi-finals at Worlds 2005.

Karsten's opponent Akira Asahara has just resolved the centerpiece of their deck, Enduring Ideal. For the rest of the game, they're going to search their library for an enchantment and put it into play; Yosei's death trigger can't do anything to them. Karsten has a Yosei in hand, but if he just casts it, Asahara will then go get Confiscate and take it. Karsten needs a dragon in his graveyard – so, on the highest stage possible, he fails to find and introduces this obscure rules interaction to the entire Magic world.

Equip Jitte, attack

When Umezawa's Jitte was previewed, it was largely ignored by the Magic world at large. People were used to evaluating equipment in a world of Skullclamp and Cranial Plating.

Jitte is one of the more deceptive cards in Magic; it reads like it should be fine. In the abstract none of the abilities seem that powerful, and it needs a lot of setup – what do you mean I need to equip this on a creature and attack with it before I get value from this card?

In reality, Jitte might as well read 'win every combat step, forever.' It is one of the most game-warping cards in Magic. If Jitte is in play, every decision is now about Jitte. When people played with Jitte during Betrayers of Kamigawa prerelease events, they quickly realized that the card was a lot more powerful than it seemed when you were just casually reading it.

Part of what allowed Jitte to fly somewhat under the radar initially is that players were a little late to realize how much creature combat actually mattered. In Magic's early days, creatures were very bad, and only a handful of true aggro decks were really interested in attacking with creatures. As a result, blocking didn't happen all that much in Constructed.

But Wizards always considered creatures the fundamental core of the game, and so they gradually pushed them to fit that level of importance. Creatures got better, and better, and better, undergoing noticeable power creep. Consider the history of 3/3 creatures for 2 mana:

• In the early days, those creatures had brutal drawbacks to 'balance' being undercosted relative to the benchmark of a 2/2 for 2. Spectral Bears, from Homelands, can usually only attack every other turn.
• Compare its drawback to Mogg Flunkies, from Stronghold. The drawback is tuned so that the undercosted body is a reward for playing a certain strategy (attacking with lots of small creatures).
• And then, in Ravnica, the set right after Kamigawa block, there's Watchwolf. Just a straight-up 3/3 for 2 mana, no text. Yes, being a multicolored card is something of a drawback, but a very small one.

Creatures have gotten even better since then, and Watchwolf isn't playable in any format it's legal in. But this time, around 2005, was an era where creature strategies were becoming the norm, and creature interaction was becoming very important, but players hadn't quite caught on to all the implications of that. Hence, the slight slowness in figuring out how powerful Jitte was.

Of course, when Jitte's power became clear, it put the format in a headlock. That tournament Frank Karsten went second in with his Gifts deck? He had the only three copies of Gifts. Akira Asahara had the only four copies of Enduring Ideal. Marcio Carvalho was playing a blue control deck. The other players in the top 8? 17 copies of Jitte among the five of them. Including, of course, the winner.

Glare of Subdual is no Opposition, but as creatures become more and more important, it gets closer and closer to being just as good. This is a creature deck that's trying to dominate the board by using Glare to control other creature decks; against the few non-creature strategies, it can lean on an aggressive game plan or on disruption through Seed Spark.

Part of what's notable about this as a 'Jitte deck' is how really, it's just a deck with lots of creatures and Jitte is an automatic include. It doesn't have to do anything to make Jitte good, and it has no particular Jitte synergies. The synergy is that if you have Jitte, you win every combat step.

Jitte's other role in this deck was to counter opposing Jittes.

Magic has had several version of what 'legendary' means over the years. Originally, if a legendary card was in play, you couldn't play another copy at all. This exactly fit the fiction that the card represented a specific person or thing, but it was incredibly frustrating in actual play.

Kamigawa block had legendary creatures as one of its themes, and so it prompted an update to the rule. Now, if two legendary cards with the same name are in play, they both immediately get sent to the graveyard. This essentially meant that legendary cards could act as a removal spell for opposing copies of themselves; and so, one way to deal with opposing Jittes was to play your own Jitte.

This, of course, only made the card even more centralizing, leading to even more Jittes being played, leading to more Jittes being played to destroy opposing Jittes.

"Print this bad boy"

One with Nothing is an instant for one black mana. It reads:

Discard your hand.

There's not trick or secret to it; that's just what the card does. It's widely regarded as one of the worst cards in Magic's history. Finding this as the rare in your booster pack surely soured many players' opinions of Saviors of Kamigawa.

But but few cards have wormed their way into player's heads as much as One with Nothing. One with Nothing is not powerful as a game piece, but it is immensely powerful as a shitpost. Almost every rare from Saviors is forgettable. One with Nothing is anything but forgettable.

There's a perverse, desperate desire to make One With Nothing good. Maybe you can discard a bunch of cards with Madness. Maybe you use it to get yourself Hellbent in a flash.

Of course, none of those use cases are actually playable. One with Nothing is utterly, completely unplayable. To have an excuse to play One with Nothing, you'd need some kind of utterly bizarre corner case, a true black swan event of a situation.

This deck, known as 'Owling Mine', is one of the most notorious rogue decks in Magic history. A rogue deck is a deck that aims to win not by playing the best cards available, but by finding some strategy that specifically attacks whatever's popular in a metagame. In 2006, when Kamigawa block and its successor Ravnica block were in standard, the metagame was chock full of bouncelands.

Ravnica block, composed of the sets Ravnica: City of Guilds, Guildpact, and Dissension had a multicolor theme similar to Invasion. To support that, it needed a lot of dual lands that could enable decks that played lots of colors. At rare, they had the 'shocklands' – lands that come into play tapped unless you pay 2 life. To this day, the shocklands are a staple in every format they're legal in where the Alpha dual lands aren't available.

Because they have the basic land types, like the original duals – that is, Hallowed Fountain is an actual Plains Island – they interact with a lot of cards that other dual lands over the years don't interact with.

But Ravnica block also needed a cycle of dual lands at common, for Limited play and casual players. This cycle was known as the Bouncelands.

Like other common duals, the bouncelands can never come into play untapped. Unlike other common duals like the cycle of dual taplands printed recently, the bouncelands provide a huge advantage in other ways.

You see, because a bounceland taps for two mana (but returns one other land to your hand), a starting hand with a bounceland and another land is kind of like a hand with three lands. They provide a sort of virtual card advantage that greatly smoothes over the mana variance of the game. This made them perennially popular with casual players, and it also made them very relevant in Constructed. This was aided by a general tendency, in this particular Standard, towards somewhat slower decks.

And thus, Owling Mine was born. This is essentially the same strategy as the Black Vise decks that were popular 10 years prior. Ebony Owl Netsuke is no Black Vise, but that's fine – opponents don't have access to Force of Will or Necropotence either.

Boomerang and Eye of Nowhere can bounce opposing lands, setting the opponent back a turn; against any deck that's not playing cheap threats, this disruption allows the Owling Mine player to play Howling Mines, clogging both players' hands with cards. Remand, a multi-format all-star, prevents the opponent from even resolving permanents that might do something before being sent back to the hand. Like the classic Vise deck, this deck turns card advantage on its head, weaponizing the opponent's cards in hand against them.

But... what if you could just discard your hand. Maybe at instant speed, in response to a Sudden Impact. What if you could let them just run out of Boomerang effects, claw back some kind of board presence, and eventually play a threat and win. Maybe One with Nothing out of the sideboard could be a way to beat Owling Mine?

And so, the legend goes that One with Nothing heroically strode into Pro Tour Honolulu as secret, powerful sideboard tech against specifically this deck. This is... something of an exaggeration.

Exactly three copies of One with Nothing were registered during that Pro Tour; two by Stephan Meyer and one by Tobias Henke. So while the sideboard tech story is true, this was never widespread even at the peak of Owling Mine's popularity, and it is unclear (without doing a lot of further research) whether any Ones with Nothing were actually cast during the tournament, or whether they helped. Neither player made the top 8; in fact, neither player had a good enough record to cash out at the tournament.

But One with Nothing, Magic's 'best worst card,' lives on rent-free in players' heads. Brian Tinsman, one of Magic's (then) developers, famously tried to kill it. In the development notes for the card set, he went as far as:

If this sees print as is, I'm going to pound my forehead against a cement wall until I get a little scab.

Obviously he didn't get his wish. Aaron Forsythe, who'd go on to be head of Magic development, responded with:

Print this bad boy.

Elsewhere in Magic

• By necessity, I jumped ahead a bit into Ravnica-era Standard with this post, but I will talk more properly about Ravnica and its cards in the next installment.
• That Enduring Ideal deck was absolutely wild; you can see the full list along with other top 8 decks from Worlds 2005.
• Magic youtuber Rhystic Studies did some really good essays on both Gifts Ungiven and One with Nothing. Kamigawa really is a fan favorite among a certain kind of player.
• I haven't touched much on Vintage, but that's really the format where Gifts Ungiven had the most impact. Here's some 2015 video of pro player Luis Scott-Vargas playing a Vintage Gifts deck to give you a sense of how the card plays. When the Modern format came out, it was also tried in many different shells in that format – here's LSV again with a quirky variant.

Next time

What if I didn't cast any spells?