Playing like its 2004

"You're still playing like its 2004."

A good friend of mine and I had been playing several rounds of Magic, and I was losing badly. I'd thrown together an old school combo deck that had looked neat and worked it enough to have a decent idea how to play it. Even with my rough knowledge of the deck, I'd supposed I would be able to put up a decent struggle even with a few play errors on my part. Instead, matters had become a slaughter.

It wasn't that the deck wasn't working. Even with my inexperience in playing it, it wasn't the most difficult of decks to play. Nor was it the fact the cards were bad or slow, it was loaded with known highly effective plays. But none of that mattered, because the deck just couldn't handle what it was up against - a modfied current Standard Deck.

He looked up at me after the last match and said: "You're still playing like its 2004."

I thought about it and realized he was right.

The early 2000's were my golden years for Magic. I had been playing Vintage, and had managed to build up a decent card pool. Back then Dual lands were around $10, Force of Wills $4 and Power 9 could still be gotten for around $100 is you were lucky - Yeah, it was a different era. The big thing was that most formats were not terribly fast (except Extended - at that time was the most degenerate format in Magic), and while Vintage could have some incredibly powerful combo's - there were plenty of options to control them.

The biggest difference back then was Standard. In those days, Wizards had been reducing the power sharply of new cards, largely thanks to the insanity of the Urza's Block which had led to so many bans that the Standard banned list had been at the longest it would ever be. The power differential between old and new was at its sharpest.

I make no secret I really dislike Standard. Part of the reason was the resentment over being unable to play with the cards I already had and the wildly shifting play styles. But a larger part at it was the cost to keep up. Having to spend $3 per pack for maybe one useful card, had little appeal. I'd watched others spends hundreds of dollars on packs, only to toss out about 90 percent of the cards. Heaven help you trying to pick stuff up on the secondary market, since the prices would be immense - only for the cards to plummet like a rock after rotation.

So I stopped playing competitively.

Honestly, I don't regret this decision. It wasn't like I'd stopped playing magic at all, so moving over the casual sphere didn't bother me in the least. The downside was that I would miss out on the some of the new stuff coming out, but historically - a lot of the new stuff had just been under-powered junk in the overall game. So I figured I'd just keep playing how I liked to play and keep an eye for any new thing that might help.

Of course, I was dead wrong about the power level. The last few sets have been stupid powerful, with some of the most idiotic cards ever printed. Devotion, Prowess, Miracle - just a few mechanics transformed into complete ridiculousness. Undercosted multicoloured creatures with so much colour fixing available as to hardly be a disadvantage, Planeswalkers with overpowered abilities, and the virtual elimination of land destruction, have created a game where if you go past turn 5 - you probably did something horribly wrong.

And so my old school deck, chock full of the victors of yesteryear, lost badly to a deck just fresh out of Standard. All because, I just wasn't playing the same game anymore.

In retrospect, beating that deck was not terribly challenging. I could build several combo or control decks that certainly would have dominated it with very little hope of recovery. But in my post game analysis something else really bothered me. It was 'how' I could go about winning, and almost how easy it really was to do.

See, modern Magic is basically dominated by creatures and planeswalkers. A few good Instants & Sorceries will creep in, but largely Magic is a creatures game now and those creatures are amazing. But this also means that creature control is really what matters now. If you can go anti-creature, you'll win.

It was this realization that brought me to another problem - how boring and lacking in strategy and versatility Magic has become. Now, Magic has gone through these phases before - the infamous Draw-Go strategies being among the most repetitive for a time - and I had often scoffed at those who said Magic was getting dumbed down and more boring.

But now I'm not so sure - because all the top 8 Standard decks look to operate basically the same. Sure the cards can be different, and there are a few variations, but all in all they share a lot of the same cards - and most run an incredibly high number of creatures. Now do a Google search for the decks to beat back in 2000, with the almost 12 different decks all with different styles and approaches. Some of those actually require you to play them a few times before you can really get your head wrapped around them.

Magic has certainly gotten a lot less diverse and in many ways a lot less interesting. Decks like Tinker and Trix were absolutely brilliant in their design and ingenuity. The Deck and Counterpost were defining strategies for how to control the board. But each of those was different, and while they shared similarities in ideas and maybe a few cards, they were interesting and diverse. Modern Magic just isn't that anymore.

This is not say the old days were always great - Academy was terrible for the game, Draw-Go was dull to play against, and Storm.. The less said about Storm the better. But is it better to have a game with diverse strong strategies, or a game with the same tired over and over repetitive plays just with a different name?

So I guess I'll keep on playing like its 2004, since while its not perfect - its certainly a lot more fun.