When I bought my first ever packs of Magic: The Gathering, my first cool rares mandate that my first color be green. I slowly learned the game (with my friends kindly thrashing me for months) and eventually I became a fairly good player. I won’t claim to be the best, but I can without question hold my own.
And it is with great sadness that I report that currently, green is the weakest color in type II. My friends and I play in the locally sanctioned Friday Night Magic events so we encounter a wide variety of potent decks weekly, and the one noted absence from the scene is green.
As long as Mirrodin is legal, I feel blue will rule the day. There are no fewer than lethal builds we run into over and over that are mono blue with a splash of artifact. The first build involves Stalking Stones, Vedalkin Shackles and counter spells a plenty. The second uses the Oblivion Stone, Stalking Stones and counter spells (both also use Spire Golems) and the third is affinity, which was already brutal but when you factor in Erayo, Soratami Ascendant flipped on turn two becomes almost unstoppable.
There are other successful deck builds out there mind you. There are several black decks that are doing fairly well, and a black/red deck featuring Nekratal and Kiki Jiki that is especially nasty. White weenie is always a threat (I built a mono Mirrodin version a few weeks back that was averaging turn 6 kills) and there is even room for a variations on blue/white and red/blue.
The one glaring absence is green. Myroommate and I were feeling experimental last week and pooled our green cards and tried to build a green deck we felt couldcompete in our local meta game, and at the height of its power, our build was stoppable at best. I even built a 100% artifact deck that could take down any green deck we could throw together, including the deck we built around pro-artifacts.
With Mirrodin about to rotate out and Ravnica on the upswing, my hope is that green makes a mighty comeback. Ninth edition was a step in the right direction, but I hope Ravnice smiles on green.
Have you looked at Kamigawa? Green could be pretty nasty there. Some of the tricks were best done by mulicolored decks, but there was a lot of flexibility when playing green with anything.
Well, Tooth and Nail is a very successful “mono green” deck (I use quotes because while the land is green, many of the creatures are different colors, and can only be cast via tooth and nail).
My little brother also played a somewhat successful monogreen deck, with Iwamoris, jitte’s, Troll ascetics, blanchwood armor, and a bunch of weenie 1/1’s and 2/1 forestwalkers (he was expecting a lot of tooth and nail.)
Yeah, I completely forgot about tooth and nail, but in my defense, I have yet to actually experience that deck in a tournament.
As for Kamigawa, my friend built a red/green splice deck (I instsed he call it Duct Tape, for obvious reasons) based around the Soilshaper. It is fairly nasty, but he was coutning on most of the damage from his red spells and lands becoming creatures, although technically it does have green.
The problem with the green weenie strategy, at least around here, is that people play with a lot of bounce. The second you get your Elvish Warriors with Blanchwood Armor, the elves get bounced back to your hand. My current deck features the isochron scepter and boomerang and echoing truth, as well as a ton of two mana burn, including guerilla tactics (since black is all about card discard these days).
I’d love to get into tyoe I, but I got into the game a bit late and I don’t have the huge stockpile of cards to draw from, and I currently do not have the resources to both stay current and acquire older cards. The tie breaker for me is that I’m a sucker for that new card smell.
I can’t believe they actually brought back Hypnotic Specter and Will O’ The Wisp in Ninth. I haven’t played for a while, but I’ll try to hit the next prerelease.
The thing I can’t believe is that as of a few days ago on findmagiccards.com, Hypnotic Specter was the number one overall card. Yeah a 2/2 flyer is nice, especially for three mana (for black, that is even cooler) and yes, random discard is nice, but it really shouldn’t be too hard to get rid of him (be it burn, kill spells, flyers of your own, counter spells…)
To be fair though, his new art is amazingly cool - I just find it strange that Hasbro is marketing Hypnotic Specter on par with Serra Angel…that seems like blasphemy to me.
Sadly, Blood Pet has not been reprinted since 7th edition, so it doesn’t help out in type II formats. I personally would love to see dark rituals brought back, I know it is powerful, but I don’t see it as nything a good player shouldn’t be able to overcome.
Are you playing the same type 2 that everyone else is playing? The one in which sakura tribe elders and eternal witnesses are EVERYWHERE? The one in which affinity got all its cards banned?
There are lots of good TII competitive green decks. Besides the aformentioned Tooth and Nail and Aggro Green with Trolls, etc, there’s BG Deathcloud, UG with Witness/bounce that wins with… that card that makes all your lands creatures and untaps them, and Beacon of Creation combo.
A month or two ago at Regionals, I played against seven decks that had green in them. In seven rounds. Three of them were monogreen.
IIRC, it’s Blood Pet; a thrull that could be sacrificed to gain black mana. I’m thinking it was a fallen empires card.
And I’m right there with ya in the old timers category. I can’t believe you can’t just drop a swamp and use a dark ritual to bring out a hypnotic specter anymore. That was the shiznit. Nowadays, I don’t even know what the kids are talking about.
Blood Pet was first printed in Tempest, actually. I suspect you’re thinking of Basal Thrull.
I can’t believe that Dark Ritual has been out of print for six years now. I’m also amazed at how much slower the game is now; most of my decks are from a time when “late-game” meant turn 5, and people I play online think I’m nuts when I say I don’t have any cards with a casting cost over four in most of my decks.
On the bright side, Ravnica looks like it’s going to kick all kinds of ass. At the very least, they’re getting as close to reprinting the dual lands as we’ll ever see.
I can’t speak for the really olddays, but I do know that currently, I think it is a mistake to not keep your average mana cost at three, if not slightly less. I am also with you on the low mana cost of spells, as speed will almost always win in Magic.
The old saying still holdstrue…for every $15 card there is a ten cent common that shuts it down - I know the same is true of mana cost. I don’t care how big your Craw Wurn with Blanchwood Armor gets, it just takes one Terror to bring it to its knees.
As for the speed of the current game, speddecks are still nasty and still possible. They are just a bit harder to run. In my experience, deliberate decks seem to be the current style of choice which means even while dueling, it might take 3 rounds for something to happen.
I threw together a white weenie a few weeks back that was averaging an attacking 4/2 first striker (type II legal too ^_^) on my second turn, and most people had no answer for it.
The Magic folks are aiming for a somewhat slower play experience. Whe the turns start getting to the point where it’s either a perfect draw or instant death, they figure the game’s just not very competitive; it’s just a flip of the dice, all the work done when you made it and it’s automatic from then on.
That saying never was true, and it’s not true today. Which doesn’t always mean that an expensive deck will beat a cheap deck, but almost no matter what deck you’re playing, it will be better if you have more money. Playing white weenie? You should have Isamorus, Hokoris and Jittes. Playing red burn? You should have, I dunno, arc sloggers or something. And there are some rare cards that no single common card can deal with.
What if it’s a morphling? What if it’s Akroma?
AVERAGING? You mean, sometimes it was better than that, and sometimes worse? I’m skeptical.
He may simply have meant that he was able to get the creature out quickly more often than not, rather than meaning that he could sometimes drop an even larger creature or something. An Auriok Glaivemaster equipped with a Bonesplitter is what I suspect to be the 4/2 first striker in question; it’s certainly not guaranteed that you’ll get those cards in your opening hand every time, but there are enough similar cards that you can regularly field something nasty within the first few turns.
As for that saying, there aren’t many cards that aren’t shut down by good ol’ Counterspell, but, like most of what I consider staple cards, it’s long out of print.
