That word often sends shivers down magic players spines.....
Okay not really. Mostly, it elicits groans and eye-rolls that the game you are about to play is going to take a billion years.
It also indicates in many cases a non-threat - There is no guarantee the person playing Stasis has any idea how to win with it. This transforms the game into an endless series of turns in which nothing happens till stasis blows up and you get to wreck the poor Stasis player since you've had plenty of time to craft your hand and play lands.
Lets take a look at Stasis shall we? Here it is:
Yeah, its pretty self explanatory - Players skip their Untap phases, and the controlling player has to pay one blue during their upkeep or it goes away. Simple, elegant and definitely undercosted for its effect.
But there are some interesting factors to consider in its play:
- Just playing it is automatic mana disadvantage as you don't untap the lands used to play it and have to pay an additional blue before your next main phase.
- Its tempo disadvantage (ie. your ability to play cards is completely hampered by its effect.), but your opponent gets a long-term mana advantage.
- If you let it blow up on your turn, you effectively skip your current turn while your opponent gets a turn at full strength.
- Both players get card advantage since many turns will usually be 'Draw. Go.' It is very possible you will both be sitting there with a full grip.
It would seem at first glance that there is little point to playing Stasis, since its con's rapidly outweigh its strengths. And watching some stasis decks in action you rapidly see that their strategy is to 'Stall the game to lose it'. Not a glowing endorsement right?
Except of course that it breaks the game. Completely.
How you ask? Well first off, the Untap phase is the most essential phase of the game. Without it, we get no land back, or creatures, or anything that you had to tap. The most important part is land though, as no land leaves you with no mana to cast spells.
This means that unless you built your deck around the idea it doesn't need mana to play - you are pretty much unable to do anything. Since 99 percent of decks rely on continuous mana production, this shuts down pretty much any deck you are likely to play against.
Pretty cool huh? Cool enough that Wizards decided to stop reprinting the card after 5th edition and to kinda admit that it probably should not have been printed in the first place.
(Author's Note: I do know that there are decks that can play without mana, or who don't care about being locked down long-term since all they need is a turn to go off and win the game. These decks are not likely to be played against by most people and are breaking the game in their own way.)
Now before you run out and buy that playset of Stasis keep in mind this: While Stasis's effect is game-breaking, Stasis itself is not. It's symmetrical effect and upkeep cost give your opponent the advantage long-term, and its easy enough to play around and vulnerable to the usual removal, so that when its effect ends your opponent will be in perfect striking condition while you will be struggling to recover.
But this is Magic - and you are not going to be so completely vulnerable right? You are going to plan around Stasis's weaknesses and turn them into strengths.
Strategy time!
Classical Stasis Strategies
First, lets look at the most Classic Stasis combination that goes all the way back to Alpha:
Now the synergy between these two cards is quite obvious.You can untap your Birds of Paradise with Instill Energy and pay for Stasis's cost indefinitely!
Instant Perma-lock!
But if this is so easy, why are people not doing this already?
Part of the problem is that you are effectively slowing yourself way down. You need at LEAST two green mana to pull this off on top of the two mana for Stasis, one of which must be blue. Also, since this is a combo you need all of them in play for this to work and as 3-card combo's go, this is very fragile. Creatures as a whole are the most vulnerable to removal and non-black ones are especially easy to hit. Given that Bird's toughness is a measly one, the number of low cost spells that can blow it up amongst all colours is very high.
Also you still have the problem that all your lands are a one shot deal. You are still trapped by your own Stasis with no escape.
Now, back when Stasis was legal in Standard (what was then called Type 2) many players were puzzling out how to make this card a real winner. Till then, Stasis had been using the Bird's/Instill Energy combo, backed by a Time Elemental to bounce it. The kill was a couple of creatures that could attack without tapping, It was altogether, too slow, too cumbersome, and too easy to disrupt. The card pool was also MUCH, MUCH smaller with fewer options available for support.
Then a few players came up with the idea, that instead of stalling you should in fact speed it up.. This led to Turbo-Stasis!
Turbo Stasis - '96 (Deck list from classicdojo.org - The Magic Dojo Archive)
Lands:
4x City of Brass
4x Underground River
4x Adarkar Wastes
13x Island
Enchantments & Artifacts:
4x Stasis
2x Kismit
1x Land Tax
4x Howling Mine
3x Despotic Scepter
1x Zuran Orb
1x Ivory Tower
1x Feldon's Cane
Instants & Sorceries:
4x Boomerang
4x Arcane Denial
4x Force of Will
2x Recall
4x Lim-Dul's Vault
Basically the strategy was put down a Howling Mine, then find a Stasis with Lim-Dul's Vault, and since you are running well over 20 lands you will always be drawing a land. Then drop Kismet to lock the opponent down and use Feldon's Cane to reshuffle your graveyard into your library and they will eventually deck.
Simple, elegant, and dangerously effective. With the introduction of Mirage Block and Enlightened Tutor, the need for black was removed completely and made it even more dependable.
It does however have some dangerous flaws, most importantly the premise: The idea of over-acceleration.
The concept basically involves speeding up draws so much that your opponent's hand is flooded with cards he can't cast and therefore has to discard instead of playing. It's great in theory, lousy in actual practice.
It's true that, in certain circumstances, this strategy will work. But in most cases you are handing your opponent free cards. A fast weenie deck is going to run with this all the way to the bank and you will go down in a blaze of lightning bolts.
A good modern example is Owling Mine, a fun deck that peaked for about 5 minutes during the Kamigawa/Ravnica standard season, showed how bad this strategy of letting your opponent draw every utility spell in his library actually is. Stasis at least had the benefit of slowing them down, without it all you were doing was helping them win.
The other problem is of course the absolute dependence on that over-acceleration via Howling Mine. Blow it up, the game is over.
Another variation on this theme was "Squandered-Stasis", that was basically the same deck, with Squandered Resources to help keep the lock going. Same idea, slightly different tools, and played almost the same.
Post-Classic Stasis Strategies
Stasis dropped to being little more then a casual deck for a while. Too many other nasty decks were coming out, and it was just too slow to be practical. It rotated out of Standard with 5th Edition, and honestly no one was really sorry to see it go. Then came the legendary Extended season of the early 2000's and Stasis was back with a vengeance - courtesy of Mercadian Masks.
Stasis - by Gary Wise (Deck list from StarCityGames.com)
Land:
23x Island
Enchantments & Artifacts:
4x Stasis
4x Powder Keg
2x Claws of Gix
1x Spellbook
1x Feldon's Cane
Instants & Sorceries
4x Gush
4x Impulse
4x Thwart
4x Force of Will
2x Boomerang
2x Daze
2x Foil
2x CounterspellCreatures
1x Morphling
This style of Stasis deck was a departure from the old Turbo-Stasis days. Gone was the idea of mutual acceleration. In was the idea of heavy control and denial.
All of this was thanks to the 2nd greatest draw spell ever made:
This spell has gone down in history as one of the best combo and engine cards ever. Combine it with Fastbond, and its free mana. Use it with true dual lands, and you can splash any color in for draw and avoid land destruction.
Use it with stasis, and you ALWAYS have a land to play to keep the stasis going. Its incredibly powerful and is banned in Legacy for that very reason. It's just never, ever bad.
Sorry to Gush about Gush, but it remains a favourite draw spell of mine.. anyway.. How to play this version? Pretty simple.
1. Drop Stasis.
2. Keep Stasis going.
3. Kill with Morphling.
4. If Morphling fails deck them after 50 billion turns.
5. Drink fine Champagne celebrating a game that went on for 8 hours.
Modern Stasis
Now you may be wondering what the hell is this all about? Why are we talking about decks from yesteryear and what do they have to do with Magic today?. Stasis is a card now relegated to the scrubs corner - a dinky spell that you can't win with... right?
To be fair, nobody WANTS Stasis to be a game winner. Its painfully slow and tedious. Many players are likely just to quit in frustration then play a best of three against it. It's a card and strategy that is completely unfun and boring.
But Stasis can win games. In fact, it has the potential to win lots of them.
I have a story about this, from my days as a Vintage player. It goes like this:
I was testing out a Gro-Atog deck (post Gush Restriction alas) and a guy who I knew said he wanted to try out his Vintage deck. It was Stasis. and he lost completely.
BUT, I could nothing about it. Stasis was too fast, and while he kept me locked down with no land and no way to win I realized that there was nothing I could actually do about it.
I honestly and truly could not win.
Fortunately, neither could he. He had no way to completely lock me, and I was able to blow up his Stasis and untap and smash him with Psychatog... Ahh fun memories.
The point of this is that we are just not prepared for Stasis. Its cheap, its good, and it works.
So to prove the point, I came up with a concept deck under Legacy rules. Drawing upon the lessons of those past decks, I was able to illustrate how good Stasis actually is. Its Mono-blue and it has been tested against a variety of casual decks, some quite strong by casual standards. Its win ratio has been quite high.
It has NOT been tested or tuned against the current Top-Tier Legacy decks. Most likely it would do poorly - but its a concept deck with no sideboard and no metagame tuning. Its built to do exactly what it does and nothing else.
Here is the list as it currently stands...
Legacy Stasis (By Mythrian)
Lands:
20x Island
3x Forsaken City
Artifacts & Enchantments
4x Stasis
3x Frozen Aether
1x Spellbook
1x Elixir of Immortality
Instants & Sorceries:
4x Brainstorm
4x Meditate
3x Perilous Research
3x Reset
4x Force of Will
3x Daze
3x Thwart
3x Boomerang
Creatures
1x Serra Sphinx
Playing this thing is somewhat tricky - mostly its about trying to figure out whats the best to hold onto and what to discard. Or what to pitch to Forsaken City and what to keep.
The other problem is: Its far too fragile early on. It needs 4-5 lands on the field to work effectively and requires you to be able to keep at least 2 lands available every turn. Once the soft part of the lock is working, you just sit back and draw cards and play land for a while. Then to play cards you either: A) Bounce Stasis back to your hand with Boomerang, or B) Blow Stasis up Perilous Research and draw 2 cards.
Reset is a great setup card, allowing you to play Meditate or another spell to continue to gain advantage. Once the Frozen Aether comes down, thats it. The game is over for them unless they can pull some last minute trick out, but you'll have so much counter magic that it won't matter.
The kill is the lonely Serra Sphinx - which will bury them pretty quickly. Also with Elixir of Immortality you can reshuffle and let them deck after a looooong time.
So take a look and give it try.
Does Stasis have s hot to come back? Or is it still lumbering in its grave?
What do you think?
