Gavin Verhey's latest Reconstructed column (http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/reconstructed/red-remastered-2015-04-28) highlights an issue that I've been fascinated with but didn't put my finger on until now. Slight/Mono-Red has had amazing staying power as an archetype over the years of Magic. Cutting to the core of his article.
Here's a fun exercise: using David Price's deck above as a kind of model, pick any two blocks in the past ten years plus a core set ... and try and plug cards in that fit that model. Remember, you want 12-16 burn spells, 11-16 one-drops, and about 20 lands, a couple cards for the top end, and then rounding it out with top or very synergistic cards of the era.
I'm fairly confident you can build this kind of deck in basically any of them.
A question I've received a few times recently on my Tumblr is, "Why is a cheap, aggressive red deck almost always viable in Standard and not some other low-curve aggressive deck?"
The answer? Well, first of all, there have been plenty of times when Red has been a weaker overall choice than other aggressive decks. But to get at the question: it's because red usually has the lethal combination of cheap creatures and burn spells to put the game out of reach. The combination of those two is persistent throughout Magic-even all the way back to the Dwarven Traders days. It's just what red does. It's a tool red has.
Red always has these tools. It's what red does because low-curve, aggressive creatures, with burn spells IS Red. At a fundamental level that archetype is ALWAYS there.
Could you do this with any other archetype? Sometimes removal isn't as good in a set, and something like UB Control or Esper Control falters. But a general Control deck approach of lots of answers with a big finisher is usually an option, and it's an option in most colors (Not Green).
But I don't think UB Control or Esper Control approaches the simplistic staying power of Mono-Red. Does anything?
What are some other archetypes that are still common from the late 1990s? What archetypes today would we expect to continue ten years from now?
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----- "I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
I'm not 100% certain but I've been playing for a while and as far as I can remember there has been a "dredge" themed deck in every Standard I've played in
how long have you been playing? I don't remember dredge being a thing until Ravnica, and it didn't look anything like it does now.
I'm sure we'll keep seeing things like white weenie, and drawgo control decks. Or the boros deck wins rw burn weenie combo. There's always Bgx, whether it's the rock or azban, that pops up every once in a while.
I'm not 100% certain but I've been playing for a while and as far as I can remember there has been a "dredge" themed deck in every Standard I've played in
Do you mean "mill yourself in order to do something cool with your cards in your graveyard"? Or specifically dredge?
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----- "I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
Nothing has had the ubiquitousness of mono-red. Every format of magic, and every period of standard has had or does have some kind of mono-red competitive deck, or Red with a splash.
Hell last standard had several.
RDW, AIR, Big Red, Red Devotion, Boros Burn, and The Popular Domri Rade / Courser Deck (Monsters) would not have been nearly as good without key red spells. I can't think of any other color that kills as quickly or consistently as red. That is red's slice of the mana pie - aggression. If you can play around its week points you will often times succeed.
If you look back far enough, certain cards are the reason that we now have the 4 of rules. The best one I can think of that never got limited to a 1 of, or banned, is LB. My first tournament magic deck was 28 Lightning bolts 2 mox rubies, and 10 mountains. Why? Because I by turn 2, or even turn 1 I could blow up a creature if I needed too, and throw 3 to the face, or just do 6 to face.
Green Aggro, white Weenie, and blue based control decks, white or black seems to always get enough good spells to build around. Some sort of red deck is always good in standard.
I would say that no other archetype that specific has the same staying power in competitive standard.
There are other archetypes that can usually always be built as others have pointed out above me, but red deck wins/sligh is the only one I can think of that is also always competitively viable. It's certainly not always a top deck, but in any given standard season you can usually find a few of them up there in the rankings. Much more so than any other archetype that specific anyway.
Well, the obvious one is resource denial. Land destruction has become increasingly difficult over the years, and cards like winter orb or moat effects or whatever are less and less frequently printed. The reason is that "I can't do anything" is a very unfun gamestate for 50% of the players in the match, so it's destructive to Magic overall if there are viable decks that prevent your opponent from actually playing the game.
Great quote from Marcus Brunstetter in his latest article.
Who would have thought that in the end it would be Red aggro against vs a Blue based control deck? That has been happening since the beginning and it will be happening for years to come.
History of Magic right there.
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The strength in mono red Is especially strong at rotations. It is a basic and affordable archetype that performs well until the rest of the meta catches up. It stays consistent after but rarely takes down big tourneys imho.
Well, the obvious one is resource denial. Land destruction has become increasingly difficult over the years, and cards like winter orb or moat effects or whatever are less and less frequently printed. The reason is that "I can't do anything" is a very unfun gamestate for 50% of the players in the match, so it's destructive to Magic overall if there are viable decks that prevent your opponent from actually playing the game.
Yeah, I like control decks, but I like using things like counters, wraths, etc. Spells that actually make me interact with the opponent and actively stop their game plan until I can enact my own. Not enchantments/artifacts that just sit there and stop them from doing anything. That was never fun.
As for the OP... not really. Mono Red is the only deck that comes to mind that is always viable in standard in nearly the same form. You can argue that there's always some sort of U-based control, but they can differ greatly and generally have to splash at least one other color. Which color(s) they splash can also change greatly between formats, which can actually pretty heavily change the way the deck plays. Black tends to make it more proactive with spot removal and discard, white tends to make it more reactive and generalized, relying more on counterspells and wraths, and red tends to make it a little more aggressive, with the option to burn the opponent down faster than the others. I don't remember a time when green was the favored splash for control, but I do remember at least a few T2 bant control decks, which tend to have some creature-based defenses and utilities (I remember caryatid and courser being a thing in RtR/Theros bant control).
Although on that note you can also say that there's always some sort of Green based midrange deck (well, not earlier in magics history, but for quite some time now). Those can vary quite a bit from format to format though. Even more so than all the U control variants.
But yes, Mono-Red/Sligh is the only deck that is always viable and always so... consistent. It always has the same tools available in standard, so the deck never really changes much at all. Just becomes more or less viable as the meta shifts.
Looping back to the OP user's question. I would probably group a few other regular archetypes:
Graveyard abuse - I think this is the easiest way to break this one down. This would cover dredge, reanimator, flashback, incarnations, delve, and some other odds and ends I might be forgetting
Mill - its generally speaking a thing to some extent in most blocks. Its usually a more casual tactic but its been arround since Millstone so its old.
Ramp - ramp to fatties is an old tactic. Birds of Paradise goes back to the creation of the game.
White Weenie - similarly to sly, white has always had some solid early game drops and it often crosses well with red for boros or other colors depending on the block. Its day old Crusade effects have started getting a bit slower but that is in part because they tried making them better for a while while also increasing the power of creatures which sort of backfired when they started doing better token production.
UX Control - I wont bother attaching any other specific color but it tends to be white and or black combined into the control shell. Adding spot removal and or wraths to counterspells and draw tends to be strong.
Suicide Black - generally speaking there are some black cards with strong stats on them that require sacrificing resources and or life to use.
Blue based control (either UW, UB or Esper) does. Those two and some green/x beatdown (normally GR, GB or GW) are the staple decks of mtg. The green deck however needs more pieces to work so here and there it doesn't appear.
Red aggro is almost always around, but the purest form is not always the strongest version of it. For example, almost all the competitive red aggro archetypes last season splashed white for Boros Charm and Chain To The Rocks.
Graveyard decks really come in and go our depending on the set. There was a recent gap in between Unburial Rites rotating out and all the Sultai goodies of Khans coming in, where most of the graveyard decks were a bit weak.
White weenie has usually been around in some form, though I can't think of when it was last a top deck in its pure mono white form. Currently it's heavily linked with Red, in the past season it splashed black; sometimes blue; in the season before it was around more in spirit than in reality, with stuff like Aristocrats and Naya Blitz having some elements that were a lot like white weenie without quite being that.
G/x ramp strategies are almost always around, though where they go with that ramp is another thing.
U/x control is quite enduring too, no matter how much they nerf countermagic it's still keeps reforming itself into an archetype. That being said, it's had a lot of variety, from basically creatureless ones like the Azorius of last season and some Dimir decks earlier in this one, to ones where creatures are the core of the strategy like in Esper Dragons now or Bant Control of INN/RTR.
Any Standard where monored is a legitimate, Tier 1 strategy is a bad Standard. It's fine for it to exist around the fringes to let new players have something cheap to build, but Magic should never actually reward playing with such brainless, high variance, low skill decks.
I used to play monored. I had a lot of success with it, mainly because it's so damn easy to play. Games against it are never fun or interesting, you either get rolled over or they fold up and die after turn 3 when you're still at 15 life.
There's a reason it's always "baby's first deck".
So the current Standard is bad based on the merits of a single deck?
I happen to have been playing mono-red for a few months now. It's not the most difficult deck but I enjoy playing it because, well, it wins games for me. But I also like it because when I'm faced with a challenging decision (and the deck does come with those) I enjoy analyzing my lines of play and trying to determine the best option. You actually have a lot of moments like this because of the way games often play out. So yeah, I hardly think it's a "brainless, high variance, low skill" deck.
"The deck is easy to pick up and play at a reasonable level. Moreover, its game plan is similar in pretty much every matchup: kill them as quickly as possible. So, it is a fine choice if you're new to Standard.
Yet, it is surprisingly hard to master and play optimally. The deck involves tons of non-trivial decisions involving mulligans, combat math, determining outs, sequencing, whether to burn their life total or their creatures, when and how to play around Bile Blight or Drown in Sorrow, and how to use your dash creatures." -a relevant quote from PT Hall of Famer Frank Karsten
Abzan at the moment basically is GW but because the Abzan cards are so powerful the cost of splashing them is negligible.
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I like having a RDW around in Standard, with a bit of burn for reach and low cmc relatively good power creatures for aggro. It helps introduce new players to the aggro archetype and is usually cheap to build a version of for them.
I don't like that other 'base' strategies are more rarely seen, I wish we'd more often have viable mono-white weenie (w/anthems and various tricks to distinguish it from RDW), mono-blue tempo, mono-black midrange, and mono-green ramp or stompy.
Mono-blue tempo in particular tends to be poorly refined for constructed purposes in most Standard environments, and even many limited environments, due to mana curve issues and not having the right versatility for the metagame, while white weenie is usually lacking one or two essential pieces it needs to stabalize and properly compete against some of the higher end standard decks, mono-black midrange usually does better, although still usually not as reliable as RDW in having the cards it needs to do well in the meta, and mono-green can be unpredictable how good it is, usually depending on if it actually has both good ramp and good things to ramp into, or if it has good enough buffs and base creatures and ways to stop removal to make stompy strategies viable in comparison to RDW.
You can think what you like, but it is high variance and low skill compared to most other Magic decks. I can play the "I ran monored for months" card too if we're getting all anecdotal about it. I played it a lot, particularly as a newer player; Gruul Aggro in INN / RTR (monored splashing green for Flinthoof Boar) & Zemanjaski's PyroRed in RTR / THS.
It's not difficult to play, it's not difficult to build. 90% of the time you either roll your opponent over in five turns or you lose.
Also, do you really think "analyzing lines of play and trying to determine the best course of action" is unique to monored? Try playing Control. If anything, monored requires this the least of any deck, because it's just "vomit my hand onto the table, then hope I topdeck burn to finish them off before I run out of cards or they stabilise". There are far fewer relevent decisions in monored because you have so much redundancy in the deck and it's so focused on doing one thing - you rarely have scope to adopt a different gameplan because that's not how the deck is put together.
I don't think it's unique to mono-red, nor did I never really say that it was. At the competitive level, Magic is intrinsically a skill-based game and every deck will have lines of play that reward you for making the correct one, as you stated in your post. My statement was less about mono-red being uniquely difficult and more about it being along the same lines as other decks despite the (in my opinion strange) stigma it sometimes receives. Based on your own anecdotes I can tell you've been playing the game for longer than I have but I don't think that invalidates my opinion.
Also, mono-red decks this Standard and undoubtedly previous ones do have post-board options that change their game plan, unless you're strictly referring to the original 60-card deck, in which case there actually still have been successful decks that attack from a different angle by going bigger (Thunderbreak Regent, etc.) You could argue that it's the same idea but we can respectfully agree to disagree.
Yes, monored requires skill to play at a high level, but due to its nature it gives a talented pilot far less chance to leverage that skill than other decks do. You can be as good as you like, but if you mulligan badly and draw the wrong mix of spells and creatures there's nothing you can do, and similarly if you get a good hand there's very few decisions that actually require you to go in the tank because the deck's gameplan is so straightforward. You can even compare this to other aggro decks like Abzan Aggro, which has far more scope to adapt and mix it up, requiring far more thought for each play. It's no surprise that even the supplier of your quote, Frank Karsten (a fan of aggro), avoids Burn in Modern in favour of Affinity. There are far more complex decisions in Affinity, but the payoff for leveraging skill is much higher.
The bolded portion of this quote can apply to a lot of if not all decks in standard. I've seen different pro players admit that decks from Abzan to Esper Dragons aren't particularly skill-intensive as you can play many of your hands on autopilot.
I'm starting to get the impression that we're debating about something we mostly agree on, which is that every deck requires skill to play proficiently. I was compelled to respond to your post because from my own personal experience I found it untrue and, initially, a little insulting - not to mention silly (like the idea that the deck "shouldn't be Tier 1").
There's a reason that the top pros tend to avoid RDW. It can't be due to powerlevel, because it just won the last Pro Tour and no one is arguing that it's not currently "tier 1"; it's because it rewards variance, not skill, and they prefer to play decks that let them leverage the advantages of their talent. Monored is not one of those.
Again, I'll just agree to disagree. Maybe I'm deluding myself because I've played the deck for so long but I've found plenty of times in my games where a critical play can make or break it.
Mono red is so good because people want to play dragons. If you do that, you'll have a bad time game 1. You have to strike a balance between big dragons and early game interaction to make people think twice about playing red.
The reason why people here are so tilted against red and because when you lose, it's a 5-minute match. You didn't get to play magic that round and now you're left with 40 mins to think about how much you hate the deck, how stupid people are for playing it and why you can't just play your deck against a normal deck.
Look, if you want to be competitive playing with dragons, rdw is going to give you trouble since in preparing for those match ups, you just can't find MB room for early interaction the likes of which will stymie rdw.
"Dragon decks" describes such a wide range of the field that there are many different playstyles encompassing that description, from aggressive to controlling. I do think red decks have a good matchup against some of these but a deck like GR Dragons is a nightmare for mono-red actually.
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Red always has these tools. It's what red does because low-curve, aggressive creatures, with burn spells IS Red. At a fundamental level that archetype is ALWAYS there.
Could you do this with any other archetype? Sometimes removal isn't as good in a set, and something like UB Control or Esper Control falters. But a general Control deck approach of lots of answers with a big finisher is usually an option, and it's an option in most colors (Not Green).
But I don't think UB Control or Esper Control approaches the simplistic staying power of Mono-Red. Does anything?
What are some other archetypes that are still common from the late 1990s? What archetypes today would we expect to continue ten years from now?
"I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
how long have you been playing? I don't remember dredge being a thing until Ravnica, and it didn't look anything like it does now.
I'm sure we'll keep seeing things like white weenie, and drawgo control decks. Or the boros deck wins rw burn weenie combo. There's always Bgx, whether it's the rock or azban, that pops up every once in a while.
Do you mean "mill yourself in order to do something cool with your cards in your graveyard"? Or specifically dredge?
"I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
Hell last standard had several.
RDW, AIR, Big Red, Red Devotion, Boros Burn, and The Popular Domri Rade / Courser Deck (Monsters) would not have been nearly as good without key red spells. I can't think of any other color that kills as quickly or consistently as red. That is red's slice of the mana pie - aggression. If you can play around its week points you will often times succeed.
If you look back far enough, certain cards are the reason that we now have the 4 of rules. The best one I can think of that never got limited to a 1 of, or banned, is LB. My first tournament magic deck was 28 Lightning bolts 2 mox rubies, and 10 mountains. Why? Because I by turn 2, or even turn 1 I could blow up a creature if I needed too, and throw 3 to the face, or just do 6 to face.
BEEEES!
Rabble Red
Modern
Burn
Infect
Red-(and splash) burn ...
Some sort of Blue-based control ...
Green aggro ...
White weenie ...
You've got the vast majority of Standard decks covered, and everything else is just a niche response to the cards being printed, right?
"I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
Hello Lifebane Zombie.
Abzan at the moment basically is GW but because the Abzan cards are so powerful the cost of splashing them is negligible.
There are other archetypes that can usually always be built as others have pointed out above me, but red deck wins/sligh is the only one I can think of that is also always competitively viable. It's certainly not always a top deck, but in any given standard season you can usually find a few of them up there in the rankings. Much more so than any other archetype that specific anyway.
I really miss this guy
Alternatively, what archetypes does Wizards appear to be making the cards for that appear more buildable in recent sets than previously?
"I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
History of Magic right there.
"I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre, but I know how to make a small city great." - Themistocles
Yeah, I like control decks, but I like using things like counters, wraths, etc. Spells that actually make me interact with the opponent and actively stop their game plan until I can enact my own. Not enchantments/artifacts that just sit there and stop them from doing anything. That was never fun.
As for the OP... not really. Mono Red is the only deck that comes to mind that is always viable in standard in nearly the same form. You can argue that there's always some sort of U-based control, but they can differ greatly and generally have to splash at least one other color. Which color(s) they splash can also change greatly between formats, which can actually pretty heavily change the way the deck plays. Black tends to make it more proactive with spot removal and discard, white tends to make it more reactive and generalized, relying more on counterspells and wraths, and red tends to make it a little more aggressive, with the option to burn the opponent down faster than the others. I don't remember a time when green was the favored splash for control, but I do remember at least a few T2 bant control decks, which tend to have some creature-based defenses and utilities (I remember caryatid and courser being a thing in RtR/Theros bant control).
Although on that note you can also say that there's always some sort of Green based midrange deck (well, not earlier in magics history, but for quite some time now). Those can vary quite a bit from format to format though. Even more so than all the U control variants.
But yes, Mono-Red/Sligh is the only deck that is always viable and always so... consistent. It always has the same tools available in standard, so the deck never really changes much at all. Just becomes more or less viable as the meta shifts.
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Red aggro is almost always around, but the purest form is not always the strongest version of it. For example, almost all the competitive red aggro archetypes last season splashed white for Boros Charm and Chain To The Rocks.
Graveyard decks really come in and go our depending on the set. There was a recent gap in between Unburial Rites rotating out and all the Sultai goodies of Khans coming in, where most of the graveyard decks were a bit weak.
White weenie has usually been around in some form, though I can't think of when it was last a top deck in its pure mono white form. Currently it's heavily linked with Red, in the past season it splashed black; sometimes blue; in the season before it was around more in spirit than in reality, with stuff like Aristocrats and Naya Blitz having some elements that were a lot like white weenie without quite being that.
G/x ramp strategies are almost always around, though where they go with that ramp is another thing.
U/x control is quite enduring too, no matter how much they nerf countermagic it's still keeps reforming itself into an archetype. That being said, it's had a lot of variety, from basically creatureless ones like the Azorius of last season and some Dimir decks earlier in this one, to ones where creatures are the core of the strategy like in Esper Dragons now or Bant Control of INN/RTR.
UTeferi, Temporal ArchmageU's prison: blue is the new orange is the new black.
Mizzix Of The Izmagnus : wheels on fire... rolling down the road...
BSidisi, Undead VizierB: Bis zum Erbrechen
GTitiania, Protector Of ArgothG: Protecting Argoth, by blowing it up!
GYisan, The Wanderer BardG: Gradus Ad Elfball.
Duel EDH: Yisan & Titania.
In Progress: Grand Arbiter Augustin IV duel; Grenzo, Dungeon Warden Doomsday.
So the current Standard is bad based on the merits of a single deck?
I happen to have been playing mono-red for a few months now. It's not the most difficult deck but I enjoy playing it because, well, it wins games for me. But I also like it because when I'm faced with a challenging decision (and the deck does come with those) I enjoy analyzing my lines of play and trying to determine the best option. You actually have a lot of moments like this because of the way games often play out. So yeah, I hardly think it's a "brainless, high variance, low skill" deck.
"The deck is easy to pick up and play at a reasonable level. Moreover, its game plan is similar in pretty much every matchup: kill them as quickly as possible. So, it is a fine choice if you're new to Standard.
Yet, it is surprisingly hard to master and play optimally. The deck involves tons of non-trivial decisions involving mulligans, combat math, determining outs, sequencing, whether to burn their life total or their creatures, when and how to play around Bile Blight or Drown in Sorrow, and how to use your dash creatures." -a relevant quote from PT Hall of Famer Frank Karsten
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/deck-guide-standard-mono-red-aggro/
You monster! Leave life alone! Dirty zombie lover!
I like having a RDW around in Standard, with a bit of burn for reach and low cmc relatively good power creatures for aggro. It helps introduce new players to the aggro archetype and is usually cheap to build a version of for them.
I don't like that other 'base' strategies are more rarely seen, I wish we'd more often have viable mono-white weenie (w/anthems and various tricks to distinguish it from RDW), mono-blue tempo, mono-black midrange, and mono-green ramp or stompy.
Mono-blue tempo in particular tends to be poorly refined for constructed purposes in most Standard environments, and even many limited environments, due to mana curve issues and not having the right versatility for the metagame, while white weenie is usually lacking one or two essential pieces it needs to stabalize and properly compete against some of the higher end standard decks, mono-black midrange usually does better, although still usually not as reliable as RDW in having the cards it needs to do well in the meta, and mono-green can be unpredictable how good it is, usually depending on if it actually has both good ramp and good things to ramp into, or if it has good enough buffs and base creatures and ways to stop removal to make stompy strategies viable in comparison to RDW.
I don't think it's unique to mono-red, nor did I never really say that it was. At the competitive level, Magic is intrinsically a skill-based game and every deck will have lines of play that reward you for making the correct one, as you stated in your post. My statement was less about mono-red being uniquely difficult and more about it being along the same lines as other decks despite the (in my opinion strange) stigma it sometimes receives. Based on your own anecdotes I can tell you've been playing the game for longer than I have but I don't think that invalidates my opinion.
Also, mono-red decks this Standard and undoubtedly previous ones do have post-board options that change their game plan, unless you're strictly referring to the original 60-card deck, in which case there actually still have been successful decks that attack from a different angle by going bigger (Thunderbreak Regent, etc.) You could argue that it's the same idea but we can respectfully agree to disagree.
The bolded portion of this quote can apply to a lot of if not all decks in standard. I've seen different pro players admit that decks from Abzan to Esper Dragons aren't particularly skill-intensive as you can play many of your hands on autopilot.
I'm starting to get the impression that we're debating about something we mostly agree on, which is that every deck requires skill to play proficiently. I was compelled to respond to your post because from my own personal experience I found it untrue and, initially, a little insulting - not to mention silly (like the idea that the deck "shouldn't be Tier 1").
Again, I'll just agree to disagree. Maybe I'm deluding myself because I've played the deck for so long but I've found plenty of times in my games where a critical play can make or break it.
The reason why people here are so tilted against red and because when you lose, it's a 5-minute match. You didn't get to play magic that round and now you're left with 40 mins to think about how much you hate the deck, how stupid people are for playing it and why you can't just play your deck against a normal deck.