Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Shahrazad, We Hardly Cared About Thee

I realized today that I’ve let a B&R announcement come and go without saying anything about it. Usually, this is one of my favorite times. It’s like Christmas for Vintage players. You stay up late waiting for some big, fancy announcement (or sometimes waiting for no announcement at all), and when it comes, you find it’s not quite as glorious as you’d hoped it would be.

Maybe I’m putting far too much into these B&R announcements.

Anyway, this time I was expecting something. Gush is huge, Flash is powerful, Merchant Scroll seems like it’s at least on everyone’s radar, and there were a lot more grumblings about Brainstorm this time around than any other.

Instead, Shahrazad was banned.

Ooohh-kaaay…

When I first saw this, and only this, as the only change in the Vintage B&R list, I was surprised. Shahrazad just isn’t one of those cards that comes up very often, so what difference does it make if they ban, restrict, or allow four copies of it? Aaron Forsythe (in his farewell edition of “Latest Developments) said that Wizards’ Organized Play department requested the ban, and R&D went along with it.

Apparently Organized Play didn’t like even the possibility that players could abuse the Shahrazad mechanic to stall and take up more than their fair share of space at a tournament. There’s a relatively large amount of record keeping and maintenance that go into starting a sub-game, playing that out, and returning to the main game.

Seems reasonable enough, though there’s a host of people who are downright livid that Wizards changed their banning policy from “dexterity and ante cards” to “dexterity and ante cards and sub-game cards.”

I had no idea one card would have such a loyal, bloodthirsty following.

Like I said, there are only a couple of places I’ve ever seen Shahrazad used, and they never looked like they’d be all that effective.

Obviously, Shahrazad costs double white, and you want to be able to use it reliably relatively early, so you’re probably looking at a predominantly white deck. That likely means either White Weenie or a white-based control deck like Parfait.

In either of those cases, unless you really were looking to take advantage of the time involved in setting up and resolving Shahrazad, you wanted the card to read—
Shahrazad
WW
Sorcery
Target player loses half of his or her life, rounded up.
Theoretically your opponent would immediately concede the sub-game, taking the resultant penalties on the chin like a champ. Then you could get in with your little white guys or Exalted Angels and finish the job.

Unless of course your opponent took advantage of the fact that you were playing White Weenie or Parfait and just won the game anyway.

Of course, if your opponent was far enough behind when Shahrazad was played or had won game one and wanted to waste some time, they might actually decide to play it out. Then, what it might say is this:
Shahrazad
WW
Sorcery
Lose fifteen minutes and half your life rounded up because you were using Shahrazad in a Vintage game against an actual Vintage deck.
This makes for a lot of similarity between Shahrazad and something like Browbeat. If your opponent plays smart or calls your bluff, you probably don’t get the result you want out of the card.

Anyway, for the truly sadistic Magic player, you could create a deck intent on abusing Shahrazad’s time requirements to the fullest degree. For example, imprinting Shahrazad on Spellweaver Helix or Panoptic Mirror seems pretty diabolical. I imagine you’d get a lot of opponents disqualified for trying to cave your nads in.

The flaw in this plan (and the other Shahrazad plans, for that matter) is that having a scorecard full of draws doesn’t usually lead to a top eight performance, and because Shahrazad takes so long to fully resolve, you’re likely to go to time in a lot of matches.

So yeah, except for the truly rogue deckbuilder, is anyone really going to miss Shahrazad? My guess is no. If you are, though, please feel free to email Aaron Forsythe and complain to him a lot. I’m sure he’ll care. Personally, I felt like the B&R committee explained themselves pretty well, and Shahrazad isn’t a card I would have missed anyway.

For those of you who will miss Shahrazad, you’re a little weird, but I’m glad you play Magic. We’re all friends here. Sorry for your loss.

For the rest of us, surprisingly, nothing happened.

Gush was unrestricted in June to immediately become a format-defining card and to reinvigorate GAT, a deck widely touted if not universally recognized as the best deck in the format. The deck is also just a few cards different from its earlier, 2003 version.

Still, though Gush has forced itself to the upper echelons of Vintage deckbuilding, it has also slowed the format down somewhat. Since Dark Ritual and its ilk have fallen by the wayside, people aren’t running as much acceleration. Gush generally has to wait until turn two to be fully powered up, and GAT doesn’t win the game until turn four or so. Of course the huge mass of card drawing also means that by turn two or so, GAT has already taken control and is well on its way to victory.

Where Gush slows things down, Flash speeds things up. Flash is a deck that wins the game with a two-card combo. For this reason, people are drawing parallels from four Flash days to those of four Trinisphere except, instead of Workshop and Threeball, it’s Flash and Protean Hulk. Plus, Flash can easily be cast off of a land and a mox to win the game right there. Back that up with a Force of Will, maybe a Pact, and you’re nigh unstoppable.

This little blue instant has caused far more adjustment in deckbuilding and sideboarding than Gush has. Leylines of the Void and of Singularity are everywhere, including some people playing a combination of up to six of them in their boards. Decks have to play turn one answers to this card, just for the hope that they survive to turn two or three and can start playing more substantial hate.

The brains behind all this newfound brawn is Merchant Scroll. It’s a tutor, it’s cheap, and it’s from Homelands. Call it Ulgrotha’s Revenge, but Merchant Scroll has gotten more and more popular in the past couple of years as people realized it found Ancestral Recall, then Gifts Ungiven, then Gush or Flash. Plus, unlike Mystical Tutor or Imperial Seal, it puts the card directly in hand.

If anything got restricted this time around, it was going to be Merchant Scroll. It could hinder Flash and Gush-based decks without hitting either of those cards directly (though they’d probably still have to be watched), and Wizards could probably find enough reason to restrict it just for being a cheap tutor for good cards.

Guess not, though.

Wizards actually may have made a fairly canny decision: Rather than ham-handedly trying to fix everything for us, they wait another three months and see how things look then.

Right now, the Vintage metagame is surprisingly varied and certainly original. Though the present decks are GAT, Flash, Stax, and “Other,” the fourth category is wide open and has included things like Goblins, Fish, fast combo, and heavy control. Decks have and still are adjusting to the major threats, and they’re not doing a terrible job. Once they get their footing, they might just be okay.

As an extreme example of this, look at the last RIW tournament, where GAT and Flash were nearly wiped from the scene. The top eight was workshops, red, and green primarily. It’s weird, but it seems to be working.

And if it doesn’t work, no big deal. Three months isn’t that long to wait, and between now and December 1, there will be enough major tournaments that Wizards will be able to make a much better judgment on how things are working out and what, if anything, needs to be dealt with. Star City is coming to Indianapolis in September and is rumored to be heading to Chicago for a weekend in November.

Plus, they won’t have so much egg on their face if they wait a while on Gush, rather than restricting it again three months after opening the floodgates.

So as much as I wish they would have done something with Gush just because I’m so tired of planning for it and playing against it, it’s wise and understandable that nothing changed. Until December, I’ll likely be planting myself firmly in the category of “Other” when deckbuilding.

When I’m not playing Belcher, that is. Baooom!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Deheng! My mono white deck just got worse. :(

I don't think we should get upset about Gush being every where. Remember when Gifts Ungiven was at its peak. People where going nutz. Everyone I talked to was sick of seeing Gifts everywhere. Then the metagame changed and gifts lost its uber hold it had on the game. Its only a matter of time before GAT gets powned by the meta.

Nat said...

Oh, I know. Metagames ebb and flow. This just isn't the Vintage I signed up for, so to speak. My spirits were greatly buoyed by performing well in Michigan, and this is still the best format.

Things are pretty wide open right now between Gush and Moonman and Goblins(!). It's exciting, and I'm eager to see where things settle out. I still expect to see changes come December, but I'm a bit of an alarmist, and when nothing happens I'm secretly relieved.

Did you really have a 4x 'Zad mono-white deck?

Juniper said...

I played red and white with Shahrazad. That way, if I was lucky and no one else was, I could Fork it. The double sub-game did seem to irritate some, though. However, they banned Shahrazad in tournament play more than 10 years ago, so I'm not sure why everyone's so upset about it now.