Bruno Dias

Last time, we capped off the first year of Magic's existence with a look at the first World Championship. This time, we are speeding up and heading into 1995.

This gap from mid-1995 to early 1996 is in more ways than one Magic's dark age. The initial wave of excitement from the game's release had subsided a bit, and now everyone was wondering again if the game was destined to peter out after a couple of years. Several expansions had come out after Alpha: Arabian Nights, Legends, and Antiquities. All of them contain important cards in the competitive metagame, though many such cards won't really be major players in this story for a long time – Bazaar of Baghdad will wait twelve years to become the broken card it secretly was all along.

The Dark came out shortly before GenCon 1994. Shortly after GenCon, Wizards printed Fallen Empires. Fallen Empires was the first Magic card set to be overprinted, signaling a slowdown in the game's initial rapid growth. Its follow up, Ice Age, contains a lot of cards and mechanics that players are nostalgic for; it's also the first expansion to come in 15-card boosters.

Magic has been around so long that there are several products we can name as the 'beginning of modern Magic'. Ice Age, the first expansion to contain 15-card boosters and a cohesive mechanical theme with cards meant to be played with each other, is the first such watershed moment.

Immediately after Ice Age came Homelands, widely considered to be Magic's nadir. Almost universally hated for its underpowered cards and unenjoyable design, Homelands went on to sell worse than any product thus far.

This is the dark age: In the storyline, Urza just blew up the world and caused a magical nuclear winter. Business-wise, the game looks wobblier than it ever has since its explosive initial release. Even the tournament scene from this era is widely forgotten; the organized play system Magic would have over the following 20 years doesn't exist yet, and recollections of early competitive Magic often leave this era out.

This is an important moment because it's the first 'split' in Magic constructed formats. Before January of 1995, there was just Magic, with one set of tournament rules. Now there were two formats — Vintage and Standard (known as 'Type 1' and 'Type 2' back then). Vintage allowed cards going back to the beginning. Standard allowed the last couple years of cards – the exact timing of Standard 'rotation' has changed over the years. But initially, it included Revised (A revised reprinting of Alpha, with some cards from early expansions put in and the Power Nine and other 'problem cards' taken out), The Dark, and Fallen Empires.

Standard is, going forward, our focus. It'll become the most popular competitive Magic format. Others will challenge it in popularity and importance, but it'll always be present. And it's the format that'll change the most dramatically, with near-100% turnover in the card pool. Vintage will eventually become a niche format played only by those who can afford increasingly out-of-reach, never-reprinted cards.

True separation between Standard and Vintage won't really happen for a few months. For the first half-year of its life, Standard will be in a dark age of its own. It'll be dominated by the most rancid decks ever put into card sleeves. Well, not put into card sleeves – this was 1995, so more likely people just wrapped them in a rubber band and then shuffled them up raw. You see, at this time, Standard was locked up in a vise. Specifically, Black Vise.

The game plan of the dominant Black Vise decks was simple: Blow up all your opponent's lands and creatures and keep them from casting spells. Soon, with some help from Howling Mine, they'll start holding a bunch of cards in hand they can't cast. Black Vise acts as a win condition that is fast, cheap, and difficult to interact with.

In 1995, this was extremely widespread on the still-nascent tournament scene. Separation between Vintage and Standard had led to a slower Standard format without the broken artifact mana from Alpha, which allowed land destruction to become much more powerful.

However, this meta was not simply a wasteland of land destruction decks that planned to make all your cards rot in your hand. There was another contender, an equally competitive deck with a very different gameplan. Some might say the opposite gameplan. You will notice that the example Vise decklist I shared was only the runner-up at the second-ever Magic world championship. You might wonder – what hero took down the mighty Vise deck? Who won that tournament?

Well, reader, a specter was haunting Magic.

...yeah. The winning deck from 1995? Alexander Blumke's Rack Control.

The win condition here is, of course, The Rack – Black Vise's mirror image, an artifact that deals damage if an opponent has emptied their hand. Or if you'd emptied their hand for them. Black Lotus might be gone, but Dark Ritual does a convincing imitation, and casting Mind Twist or Hipnotic Specter on turn 1 tended to ruin most draws. These cards were joined by a newcomer from Fallen Empires: Hymn to Tourach, an extremely powerful discard spell that had not been restricted (unlike Mind Twist).

So yeah. That's the meta for a good chunk of 1995 leading into the second-ever Worlds: The deck that doesn't let you have any mana versus the deck that doesn't let you have any spells. Magic has been trying to recapture the joy of these child-like early years ever since.

Next time: Black Vise is restricted in Standard. This will surely lead to a diverse and enjoyable metagame.

Previously, I wrapped up the story of Magic's prehistory. Now, we approach the birth of a real tournament scene.

Summer of 1994. GenCon in Milwaukee. Zak Dolan is about to be the first person on earth to win a Magic world championship. His deck is... well it's a pile.

Thus far, early Magic has been a lot like watching footage of the earliest days of basketball – back when dribbling hadn't really been invented. Back when the refs would call a carry if you so much as looked at the ball funny. Guys would just stand around and pass the ball back and forth. The idea of moving with the ball was latent, but not present.

Thus it was in 1994 Magic: there's a beautiful, brutal game lurking under the surface, waiting to be born.

This is the dawn of competitive, high-level Magic. But a lot of the principles of deckbuilding haven't been established yet. It's worth looking at the winning deck from the very first Magic world championship to get an illustration of what has and hasn't been figured out.

Zak's deck was blue, white, and green. In modern Magic talk, color pairs and triads have proper names – UWG is 'Bant' – but this was two decades off back then. Still, to help highlight the historical continuity between decks, I am giving historical decks the names they would have in modern terminology. Period names will appear in (brackets), if any.

What the hell is going on here, seriously?

Dolan's deck is a control deck, and its appearance heralds one of the three traditional archetypes of Magic decks:

• Aggro decks play efficient creatures and attack the opponent for damage.
• Control decks trade resources with the opponent, gaining incremental advantages until they are far ahead on cards or mana, at which point actually winning the game is an afterthought.
• Combo decks draw a critical mass of their cards (either to find a specific two- or three-card combination, or to add together enough synergistic effects) and then win on the spot without caring about what the opponent is doing.

Beginners are often taught that combo beats aggro because it goes off before the 'fair' aggro deck can win; that control beats combo because the combo can't survive through a lot of interaction and counterspells; and that aggro beats control because it will typically play more threats than the control player can efficiently answer. This picture is neat, easy to understand, and entirely wrong.

Almost every Magic format is missing at least one leg of this supposed three-legged stool, and many are dominated by hybrid decks. Control-combo is a very common archetype. And in the future. we'll meet tempo and midrange – the missing two other deck archetypes.

In the metagame that Zak Dolan was facing, the opposition was actually often combo-aggro. These were aggressive red-green decks that played cheap creatures and attacked, but which carried the dreaded Channel Fireball combo.

Channel-Fireball works simply: You cast Channel. Then you spend all but 1 of your life to fuel a Fireball for lethal damage, killing your opponent for a mere 1GGR. The nature of the combo is that it only works if you're ahead on life, or close enough that you can make up the difference with real mana; this means that Channel Fireball doesn't really work as a pure combo. Pure combo decks plan to sit and draw cards, using their life total as a resource, until they're ready to go off; if you're sitting and hoping to draw into a lethal Channel, you're likely going to fall behind on life.

However, in an aggressive deck, Fireball (and the channel-fireball combo) provided critically important reach. Reach is the concept of cards that can be used to finish off an opponent after they've stabilized the battlefield; an aggro deck plays cheap creatures that are, in the long run, small and underwhelming. Eventually, you'll not be able to get through for damage – either because your opponent has played bigger creatures to block with, or because they've simply wiped the board away with creature removal. At that point, you turn to reach. Our old friend Lightning Bolt is the classic form of reach, a way of finishing off opponents who managed to stabilize at low life totals.

Historically, aggro decks without reach have been either unplayable or momentary flashes in the pan. Reach is what separates good aggro decks (typically, red ones) from bad aggro decks. Aggro decks without reach have tended to instead become more like midrange decks... but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Dolan's deck beat several of these Channel Fireball decks on its way to the top, but it's still filled with baffling deck construction choices. It contains a single Birds of Paradise, for example; its presence can't be explained. Was it there just to be the nth 'mana rock' given that the deck (correctly) plays one of all the restricted ones?

Why couldn't Dolan make up his mind as to whether Clone or Vesuvan Shapeshifter was better? (It's Clone). Isn't it incredibly marginal to play Ley Druid just to untap Library of Alexandria?

It's normal for control decks to play one-ofs – having specialized silver bullets in your deck makes sense when you plan for games to run long and to draw a lot of cards. But Dolan's deck goes absolutely hog wild with them, making precious few concessions to consistency. The four Swords to Plowshares are a testament to the relatively aggressive, creature-centric meta this deck was meant to battle in. It's interesting to note that while blue control decks would become infamous for a "draw-go" style of play that leans heavily on counterspells, Dolan ran only one copy of Mana Drain – though clearly he planned to use Recall, Regrowth, and Timetwister to repeatedly recur that single copy, eventually allowing him to answer the few cards in an opponent's deck that would matter.

Probably the most iconic feature of this deck is its finisher, Serra Angel. For a control deck, winning is an afterthought – you just play some large creature at a point in the game where your opponent has absolutely no exit. Some later control decks would find 'creative' win conditions that don't require putting actual threats in your deck, but we'll get to those in time.

Serra Angel is not regarded as a Constructed card nowadays. Back then, however, it was a big body that was still only five mana – cheap enough that Dolan could turbo it out on turn 1 or 2 with Black Lotus. Many similar decks of this era played Sengir Vampire instead, but the Angel is probably the better one. It attacks without tapping (an ability later keyworded as Vigilance), which gets around Stasis and Meekstone; Dolan would often be aiming to resolve a Serra Angel that could dominate the battlefield both offensively and defensively, then lock things down with Armageddon or Stasis.

In many ways, 'control' is a misnomer for this deck. Dolan wasn't aiming to exchange resources with the opponent; he wanted to get ahead then grind the game to a halt. This kind of strategy would, in later years, be called something else. But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

Next time: A specter is haunting Magic.

Last time, I discussed the metagame during the very earliest phases of Magic. The peace of that idyllic time was disturbed by the arrival of the Plague Rats.

Well, it wasn't just Plague Rats, but Plague Rats figured heavily in this story. The original rules for Magic specified a very simple, and very inadequate, deck construction rule: Your deck had to be at least forty cards. That's it.

It's worth noting that the (now widespread) idea that having fewer cards in your deck makes you draw the best ones more often was, at this time, largely still lost on the playerbase. This deck construction rule is actually still used to this day – in Limited play, where you open a few packs of random cards and are only allowed to play with the cards you open. But most Magic play is Constructed – where you just use any cards you own, as long as they're legal in the specific format you're playing. And in Constructed, the rules quickly evolved to require at least sixty cards, and at most four of any one card.

There are many reasons for this rule change. It lessened the impact of individually very powerful cards, of course. It made it so a greater diversity of cards saw play. But also: In the very early days, there was a rat plague.

Here's the thing: If you can play as many copies of a card as you have in your deck, some cards... scale. Obviously Plague Rats, a seemingly innocuous Alpha common, is a prime candidate for this. Typical Plague Rats decks also mixed in some amount of Sinkholes. Early Rat-Hole decks were some of the first recorded attempts at truly optimizing Magic. Destroy your opponent's lands so they can't cast spells, then start playing Plague Rats until you have an overwhelming board. Remember Circle of Protection: Black? You'll notice that the earliest printing of this card is actually from Beta, the first limited-run reprint of Alpha. That's because it was mistakenly left off the file in Alpha. For the first few months of Magic's existence, there was no Circle of Protection: Black, and the rats could not be stopped.

There were other degenerate 20-20 decks at the time, of course. One made use of Psychic Venom and Twiddle to lock down the opponent's lands while dealing damage. Apparently, this actually worked, at least enough that early Magic usenet posters were mad about it!

But one of these decks stands above all others as the progenitor of an actual archetype.

The 'boon cycle' in Alpha contained five instants (ignore the word 'interrupt' on Dark Ritual – that's just old-timey rule-speak for 'instant that counters spells or makes mana'). Each costs one mana and does three of something. Like many cards in Alpha, they are important points in defining the identity of the five colors – their share of the 'color pie', the mechanical and thematic space of Magic as divided among the five colors. They form a perfect gradient of power level.

• Ancestral Recall is broken, one of the Power Nine, arguably the most powerful non-artifact spell in all of Magic. It's the only Boon that's rare; all the others are commons.
• Dark Ritual is mildly broken; a powerful card and a major part of many a tournament deck, but still not so catastrophic that it wasn't reprinted several times. Notably, rituals that make fast mana would eventually move over to Red's slice of the color pie.
• Giant Growth is a staple of Limited, and almost all Limited formats have their own Giant Growth-with-this-set's-mechanics variant. It's one of the most riffed-on cards in all of Magic. And, very occasionally, one of those variants has seen Constructed play. We'll meet some of them about 20 years down the line when Infect shows up.
• Healing Salve isn't worth the cardboard it's printed on. Widely considered one of the worst cards in Magic, it exists mainly to teach players a lesson about the true value of your life total – that is, the only life point that matters is the last one.

And then there's Lightning Bolt, which sits squarely in the middle. Lightning Bolt is a powerful card that meaningfully impacts every Constructed format it exists in, but it's not broken, and Wizards has seen fit to reprint it into several modern formats, though it's much more common for sets to contain a card that's somewhere between Lightning Bolt and Shock in power level.

The problems begin, however, when players start jamming 20 of them into a deck.

Here, let's play a game of Magic to illustrate this. I'll be Red. You be, I don't know, White.

Turn one: Mountain, Lightning Bolt. You go to 17. Your go.
You play a Plains or whatever.

Turn two: Mountain, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt. You're at 11. Your go.
You: Plains, White Knight.

Turn three: Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt. You're at 4. Your go.
You: Plains, attack with White Knight (I'm at 18), cast something or other.

Turn four: Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt. You're dead. I show you the Lightning Bolt I still have in my hand.

The logic of the burn deck is as perfect as it is brutal. One lightning bolt is three damage. Seven lightning bolts is twenty-one damage; lethal. If you play first, over the course of a four-turn game you will draw ten cards – your starting seven plus three. If your deck is 70% Lightning Bolts, you will, on average, end your opponent on turn four. Pristine. Inevitable.

Nothing so pure could be allowed to exist in a tournament format. And so, the four-of card restriction was born, thus putting the rat plagues, snakes, and lightning to rest. Of course, the burn deck would return – Wizards would eventually print enough Lightning Bolt variants. But for the time being, Magic was safe, and a formal tournament scene was being born.

Next time: The first Magic World Championship, at last.

Magic is a weird game. It's been around for 30 years, there are thousands of unique cards, it's gone through several mechanical re-inventions and transformations. The history of the game is littered with every assumption being upturned: what if you didn't win by dealing damage. What if you sideboarded in One with Nothing. What if you won on turn zero, before the starting player's first main phase. What if you won without casting spells.

But, before we get to the truly depraved stuff, we need to go back to the very beginning and establish the template.

Magic: the Gathering launched originally at GenCon in 1993. A year later, when the very first 'world championship' was held at GenCon 1994, the original card set already had multiple printings, three expansions were out, and Black Lotus was just about hitting $50 on the secondary market. The game exploded like a bolt out of the blue.

Magic is, at its heart, a simple game. You put lands and spells in your deck. Play one land each turn. Turn the lands you have sideways to make mana. Spend that mana to cast spells. Most spells are creatures. Turn creatures sideways to attack your opponent. Get them from 20 life to 0 to win the game.

Most later-day CCGs would, of course, have an even simpler set of basic rules. But even given its baseline higher complexity, Magic was already full of complicated and unintuitive cards from the get go. It is notoriously almost impossible to evaluate Magic cards in a vacuum, so cards that seem powerful at first glance can actually turn out to be worthless – and cards that seem unplayable can turn out to be broken.

The first printing, known as Alpha, contains the template for basically all of Magic. Every card in Alpha is either a one-off failed experiment or the progenitor of a whole lineage of related cards: riffs, reinventions, nerfed or buffed versions, and assorted descendants. Black Lotus gives rise to Lotus Vale, Lotus Petal, Blacker Lotus, Gilded Lotus, and so on and so on.

People will tell you that the most important cards in Alpha, or at least the most powerful, are the power nine. Traditionally, those are the best cards in Magic – though some might contend around the edges that other cards, like Sol Ring, belongs on that list. This is, from the long view of 10 or 20 or 30 years on, true. But it's also missing the reality of early Magic.

The Power Nine are mostly mana rocks that seem, to a totally naive player, indistinguishable from basic land. Time Walk is obviously powerful; Ancestral Recall a little less so. Timetwister's symmetrical effect might not even seem broken at first glance – the trick, as with all symmetrical cards, is that you get to choose when you cast it. More importantly, the Power Nine are all rares. In the early days of Magic, your entire playgroup might have seen one of the Power nine.

No, early Magic revolved around these bad boys:

These cards are so bad, and yet so good! The very early days of Magic were dominated by this nonsense. They were commons, so everyone who wanted them could get them. Modern players would balk; why waste mana turn after turn to blank your opponent's creatures when you can just kill them outright?

But in this early era of Magic, decks were slow and inefficient. Players often didn't have enough good cards (as opposed to terrible ones) to assemble a one- or two-color deck. Most turns were spent in the condition Magic players would come to describe as 'mana screw': Not enough lands to cast your spells, or mana of the wrong color.

In these conditions, players would draw large portions of their decks. Using one of the many, many creature removal spells was clearly not as good – why trade one for one when you can invalidate half your opponent's creatures?

If you want evidence that this early "kitchen table" metagame revolved around the circles of protection, look no further than the very first piece of officially-sanctioned strategy writing about Magic, in Duelist #1: an article about how to use the Circles of Protection.

It ends with a list of ways to deal with the Circles, ranging from the obvious (blow them up with Tranquility) to the ridiculous (use Sleight of Mind) to change your opponent's CoP to the wrong color.

This is, pretty much, the shape of the early 'naive' Magic metagame. The level zero strategy was attacking with plentiful, inefficient common red and green creatures. The level one strategy was putting Circles of Protection in your deck. The level two strategy was putting Tranquility or Disenchant in your deck.

But this equilibrium wouldn't last. Magic was headed for a second limited-run printing (Beta), and eventually an 'Unlimited' printing. The amount of packs people were willing to open and cards people were willing to collect was orders of magnitude bigger than the expectations of the game's designers. There were much more optimal things to do with the original Magic card pool, and players were going to find it.

Next chapter: Magic breaks. Then it breaks again. This all happens before it's a year old.