Subject: Re: Submission
Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 10:21:27 PST
From: "Alexander Murison"
To: webmaster@classicdojo.org

Here's my opinion on what you have on the Dojo. Aggro vs. control.

In the article you were stating what you felt about the mid-ranged decks. I have my own personal theory about these types of decks as it is a point which has been going through my mind recently (Note to self : Get a life :P ), it has in my opinion a lot to do with Sligh...

Firstly I'd like to say that I think the main problem with a particularly control oriented deck is that there is no such thing as particularly effective white "point" creature control card. Pacifism and Spirit Link are very poor vs. Mono-Blue decks w/ Ophies, Illusionists, MoWars and Biskelions and Wrath, Orim's Prayer, Humility and Winds of Rath are all too slow or "comboish" to beat the dedicated aggressive decks, yet without Gerrard's Wisdom it is very hard to evade being burned to death late game by a sligh deck. This is in my opinion the main shortcoming of Propaganda Orb, even once it gains control it has trouble staying alive. I feel that the presence of blue in control decks may become inadvisable. Red and Black can easily supplement White's poor creature control while gaining access to it's superior defensive options (Sorry I really am straying from the point here). but I digress, I feel that the main obstacle to control is that given enough time Sligh can often amass enough burn to achieve it's second route to victory - burn. CoP:Red is not the sort of main deck card you want, Greater Realm is a step in the right direction, and Gerrard's Wisdom is a temporary solution. secondly many of Sligh's creatures can be used as burn, increasing it's versatility exponentially. I find that the slow control deck gives Sligh far too much time to amass it's resources even after it's "burned" itself out, unless it can completely lock creatures and burn. (Once again this is PropaOrb's problem it shuts down critters, then gets fried to a crisp, or then again it often doesn't even get a good enough draw to shut off creatures. I'd like to hear your opinions on PropaOrb, to me it doesn't seem like a good deck for the general metagame. I'm not just making an idle statement at this point, I'd like it to work.. but when I tested it I couldn't get it to cut the mustard.)

OK, so now I'll get to the actual point of what I'm trying to say (must learn to think before I type, then I might not get carried away). Gerrard's Wisdom, Chill, Warmth, Honourable Passage, Countermagic. All of these are control cards, which require speed to be used to their fullest potential because the positive effects vs. Sligh that they generate are short lived. This is I think the strength of the "mid-range" decks, in short they can stall Sligh and then kill it before it has a chance to recover. While Sligh vs. Control is all about Sligh gets momentum, control stalls, sligh builds up, gets momentum, control stalls, repeat until one deck dies and generally it seems to me that the control deck would be the first one down.

So by what I've just said Sligh is the controlling factor for control decks. What about the other speedy decks? Stompy is very narrow and is easy prey to mass creature control. Black/White Weenie hordes lack the speed creatures of Green and red and hence are slow enough to get stalled by control decks and the same applies to blue weenie hordes (I always die to merfolk decks, for some reason my creature control disappears and is mysteriously replaced by lands. This has happened every time I play a deck which drops out a Merfolk of the Pearl Trident first turn - sigh - I hate to pin something on luck, but I cannot think what else I could be doing wrong :P). Prospy bloom has just one chance and a control deck can often simply disrupt thier one chance and Sandsipoise or other cluster decks are badly hurt by the denial aspect of a good control deck.The reason these mid ranged decks work is that they combine defence with speed, this is how to hurt sligh best IMO.

Now, lets see what happens when we remove Sligh from the equation. Control decks become a lot more effective, without the sheer speed of Sligh to contend with control decks can take a slightly more leisurely pace, relying upon slightly slower control methods to survive. This strengthens them enormously as without burn to worry about they can concentrate on shutting down the only other routes to victory available. More importantly however this utterly devastates the mid range decks, as the control decks are now easily able to take command of their game and lock them into a no win situation. Without Slighs multi-pronged attacks the environment would in my opinion shift...

Multi Pronged attacks. Is this what makes sligh so powerful? (OK, so now I've totally strayed from the point, I don't even want to count the number of times I've mentioned the word Sligh, aargh I rue the day someone uttered the words mana curve and Sligh was born). In my opinion this is the most critical aspect of Sligh, if you look at the pre-"bolt overload" Sligh decks, their burn was limited to Bolts, Incinerates, Death Sparks and a few X spells. Now WOTC have bombarded us with Kindles, Fireblasts, Hammers, Lightning Blasts, Rolling Thunders and Thunderbolts. The strength of burn has increased, because it has become faster and damage efficient. It may not be card efficient, but now with Jackal Pups and Moggs, Stalkers and Balls, Sligh can get it's opponent down so low so fast that no matter how much defence you have it's not enough, you can take out the creatures, sure, but then you die to burn. CoP : Red is a good solution, but WOTC though, naah! we'll make it amazingly easy to splash colours into decks so it's just Disenchant fodder *sigh*. I'm sorry I've digressed into a report on "What I hate most about Sligh." Sometimes I long for the days when I was learning magic, when Rabid Wombat seemed broken and Reclamation was a good sideboard card. It was soo much simpler then...

And now, card disadvantage + Burn. OK so it's simple Burn = card disadvantage. So hammer, Death Spark and Searing touch break this rule, but still.Fireblast and co. are major card disadvantage, and that's a bad thing. Does it matter? The reason burn is so deadly is that it's cheap. Much cheaper than countermagic and much easier to supplement. You get your opponent down far enough, then make them suffer. If timed rightly in accordance to a blue decks mana then you can ensure there is no chance of survival. It's so simple. Yet so deadly. The primary thing to remember is that the answers to burn are far too narrow to be remotely good vs. other decks (countermagic + Gerrard's excepted). and this is what contributes to the potency of Sligh's second wave of offence. (I think you probably know what i'm saying here.)

Now back to those mid range decks (I am so disorganised, and I'm also very informal as you can see by all these brackets) and in particular their use of buyback and also burn and boil. Buyback has I feel had a very positive effect upon mid-range control decks. Those slower more dedicated control decks cannot really afford to tap out a lot of the time (especially with Boil and instant speed burn threatening them) and this makes buyback far weaker in them, where in the mid range decks, where you have offensive threats for your opponent to worry about as well as a defensive barrier to break through, I feel that they will use buyback far better. Think about while your opponent is being beaten down by a few nasties, they'll have to burn them and that makes it far safer to tap out. A final word on buyback, I don't see much Whispers of the Muse, yet IMO it's the strongest of the buyback spells, what's your opinion on WotM?

Finally (if you have got this far, thank you, I must be more interesting than I thought :P) I think some exact clarification needs to be made on the offensiveness of decks. An aggression scale, hears my attempt - I shall call it the Murison's Pacifism Scale :

{10} Utter defence, devoted entirely to controlling opponent's strategies. e.g. T-Stasis
{9} Mostly defence, victory via defensive cards. e.g. The Deck
{8} Mostly defence, victory via more conventional offensive cards, e.g. Tax-Edge
{7} Mid range defensive deck, victory via defensive offence, e.g. Counterhammer
{6} Mid Range defensive deck, victory via direct offence, e.g. Big Blue
{5} Mid Range aggressive deck, substantial defence, e.g. Ehrnamgeddon
{4} Mid Range aggressive deck, indirect defence, e.g. Necro
{3} Mostly aggressive, defence via offensive means, e.g. Sligh
{2} Mostly Aggressive, few defences, all with a mostly aggressive stance, e.g. Stompy
{1} Utter Aggression, screw defence, I'm gonna kill you, e.g. The Engine

OK, so thanks for reading what I've written (if you have that is). I'd appreciate any feedback you have on what I've written, as I feel I could very much benefit from your insight. So you can e-mail me (Alex Murison) at alexmurison@hotmail.com