Subject: The Dojo/Boring Decks Discussion Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 14:25:19 +0200 From: Karsten Dürotin Hello People, just wanted to throw an idea of mine before you to tear it apart: I am not a "Dojo Drone". I surely am not; I have been playing Magic for longer than some of the people who use this term to belittle other players. I have always made my own decks, never seen a need to copy other people's whole decks, and was happy with it. But when creating a full-defense deck like the ones I liked to use back in '94, after some very long nights of playtesting, I went to the Dojo smiling, knowing I had my own deck - I had seen T1 listings for full-defense, a.k.a. Weissman-decks, but never a T2 listing, and T1 and T2 were very different. But my smile froze when I spotted "The Type 2 Deck", by Weissman/Nicoloff. Apart from a very few cards which differed between mine and Weissman/Nicoloffs (10, to name it, and 6 of them only different counterspells), the two decks were exactly the same - even sideboards. And comparing my friend's decks, which were created on the same evenings, to other dojo decks, we found out that they shared similarities as great, if not greater, than mine and Weissman/Nicoloffs. So, I don't believe in that "great deckbuilder and hordes of people copying his cool decks" stuff anymore. It's complete nonsense. The situation is, that, out of 1500 or so cards in T2, only 200 cards can actually be played in a tournament deck. All the others are loads of crap. So, there is no reason to actually have those 1500 cards. Why can't every card be tournament-viable? I mean, Wizards, you always pride yourself in producing better games than Decipher, just because the Rares aren't the only good cards in your game. But as I see it, the good cards are evenly split among all rarities, but are rare for the simple reason that only around 10% are really playable at all. This gives us all the feeling that we can do so much with easy-to-get common cards, while we still have to go on frenetic hunts for, and spend loads of money on, cards as Cursed Scroll, Sarcomancy or Hatred. I don't know if - and I don't believe that - it is WOTC policy just to squeeze money even from our dead carcasses, but the facts are this, and they are really decreasing fun for me and many others. I don't want Power9 rule, not even Taiga and her friends neccessary for entering a tournament, so I don't play Classic nor Extended tournaments, but Standard is getting problems all of its own. We should try to find a level playing field which allows for the maximum number of possible - and interesting - decks and for the least number of must-have cards at the same time. Does anyone on the list have any ideas for this? I'm sorry that this is more a stream of thoughts than a really coherent posting, but I hope someone gets interested in something I wrote and answers it or uses something of this. Bye, Karsten Team Glass Elephants