All legacy decks can be divided into two overarching categories: Fair Decks and Unfair Decks.
The terms "fair" and "unfair" have nothing to do with the power of the deck, but rather the playstyle. As I understand it, a fair deck plays magic the way it was intended to be played. You play one land per turn, you (mostly) pay mana for your spells, you cast creatures, you attack with creatures, and you win by reducing your opponent from 20 life to 0. In a word, fair decks are interactive.
Example 1: RUG delver. RUG is a tempo deck. It wins by casting efficient creatures (Delver of Secrets, Nimble Mongoose, and Tarmogoyf), then killing opposing creatures (Lightning Bolt, Forked Bolt, Fire/Ice) and countering opposing spells (Daze, Force of Will, Spell Pierce) to generate temporary advantage, AKA "tempo." RUG makes sure it has the cards it needs to do this by running a full suite of Ponder and Brainstorm. I like to envision RUG's playstyle as a Mr. Miyagi sort of thing. You throw your opponent off balance, create brief openings, and strike where you can. You don't go all out aggro, and often times you hold your threats in your hand and don't play them until you need them.
Example 2: Zoo. Zoo plays creatures. It plays fast creatures, like Wild Nacatl, Tarmogoyf, and Goblin Guide, and sometimes Experiment One. It can also play big creatures, like Loxodon Smiter and Knight of the Reliquary. Zoo doesn't hold threats in its hand (except against a deck that runs board wipes). Zoo doesn't care about tempo. Zoo plays creatures, then it turns the sideways. If RUG is Mr. Miyagi, Zoo is Robocop. You run in guns out and kill everything. Fun! But zoo also runs Bolt, Swords to Plowshares/Path to Exile, and occasionally Lightning Helix (I've even seen Fireblast).
So despite vastly different playstyles, they share a key element: they interact. You make plays based on what your opponent is doing, you give your opponent options, all that jazz.
Unfair decks are large non-interactive. Unfair decks don't play by the conventions. They don't care about their mana curve, they don't care about the board state, and they usually win very quickly and all at once. The best example of an unfair deck is Dredge.
Dredge doesn't play normal magic. Everything a normal deck does, dredge does the opposite. See, a normal magic deck wants to draw cards into their hand, but dredge wants to mill cards into its graveyard, which it accomplishes via cards with the dredge ability (Golgari Grave Troll). (No, it does not run the card dredge.) A normal deck wants to keep your creatures alive and kill your opponent's creatures, but not dredge! Dredge wants put Bridge from Below in its graveyard, then sacrifice its own creatures without ever killing its opponent's! Now here's the kicker: Dredge barely even casts spells! Since you don't need to cast a spell to discard a card (you can just draw past 7 cards and discard on end step), dredge can feasibly dump its whole library into its yard without spending a single mana. In fact, the only spell it needs to cast is Dread Return (targetting a big creature in the graveyard), which it flashes back by sacrificing three Narcomebas, which, by the way, it doesn't ever need to cast. Dredge is an unfair deck because it doesn't play normal magic, so normal decks have trouble interacting with it.
Dredge isn't the best deck in legacy. It's not even a tier 1 deck. But it is an unfair deck.
You can then subdivide fair and unfair decks into more categories.
No comments:
Post a Comment