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The Planar Chaos Timeshift That Changed MagicBy Sean DeCoursey on April 6th, 2007 · Filed in Casual · 12 CommentsPlanar Chaos introduced a new twist on the timeshift concept by reprinting cards (some old, some not so old) in different colors. Some truly iconic and powerful cards were moved: Ball Lightning, Serra Angel, and Healing Salve (ok, just kidding about the Salve). However, there is one timeshifted sorcery, that costs four mana, that is fundamentally going to change the way Magic is played in Standard, Extended, and possibly Legacy. That card?
That's not an exact list, but it’s a pretty close approximation. The deck ran big (or potentially big) resilient creatures combined with cheap discard and mass and spot removal. Notice what's missing, and is generally always missing from Rock style decks? Pure draw, which is usually the deck’s Achilles heel when they run out of steam. Let's revise that deck today in a much more limited format (Time Spiral Block).
These two decks were made to largely mirror each other, and they mostly do. This is to make them easier to compare. The first deck can quickly play out its hand, disrupting the opponent and then beating face with Calls and Shades. The second deck does essentially the same thing, albeit slightly slower. So what happens if that initial onslaught isn't quite enough? That's when deck #2 casts Harmonize and pulls ahead in the "win the game" race by virtue of drawing extra cards. The Rock has always been a bad deck full of great cards. One of the key reasons it’s been bad is that the card advantage engines available to G/B aggro-control just aren't very good, or cost life which distorts the aggro matchup. If you're relying on Dark Confidant, Night's Whisper, and Phyrexian Arena for cards, you've essentially played a more expensive Howling Mine that draws and casts burn spells for your opponent if they're running any form of aggro. Combined with the damage you're probably already taking from your manabase, it’s kind of a big deal. Harmonize changes this. With access to non life costing, good card drawing, Rock-style decks significantly improve in all matchups. Let's take a currently discredited archetype, control Rock, and update it with Harmonize.
This has a lot in common with other disruption based green/black decks, except that it has a lot of raw draw power included in it. Drawing cards, or having access to cheap card selection is exceptionally important to generalized control decks because they have lots of cards that are more, and less effective vs. all opponents, and winning or losing often comes down to drawing the particular cards necessary to beating the specific opponent you're playing. For example, lots of Duress and Therapies are great against TEPS, but less than hot against Affinity. Harmonize means that you can now draw enough cards to find your good ones in any given match. Or at least have a much better chance of doing so. Finally, there's one last point I'd like to make about the effect of switching Concentrate from Blue to Green. It got cheaper. Seriously, the mana cost of 2GG is less than 2UU. I would argue that in most cases, 2GG is about equal to 2U. Sakura-Tribe Elder, Birds of Paradise, Search for Tomorrow, Farseek, Wall of Roots, and Llanowar Elves all agree with me on this point. I have a basic, undeveloped theory that mana acceleration lowers the cost of spells in your deck for the first few, relevant turns of the game. Even though a game can theoretically last 20 turns, most games of Magic are decided by turn 10 at the latest. So the first 3-5 turns are generally when anything you do has the greatest effect. Mana acceleration makes spells cheaper during this critical time period, thus making them more powerful. This means that Harmonize and Compulsive Research cost the same amount of mana. The Blue one lets you draw three cards, then discard one or two of them. The Green one just gives you three cards. I think that, more than anything else, sums up just what is so game changing about Harmonize. Green now has better draw spells than Blue, both in recursive forms (Life from the Loam + lands) and in terms of pure card advantage (Harmonize). That's a big change. Like many massive changes, it'll take awhile for everyone to realize just what a big impact it's creating because most of the effects are small and gradual. But just like a Glacier carves out a river over thousands of years, so does one timeshift rewrite the rules of deck construction. By Sean DeCoursey on April 6th, 2007 · Filed in Casual · 12 Comments |
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