I suppose first of all I should say hello and welcome to what I hope will be a the first in a long line of articles.

My intention with the article section of Classic Quarter is to inform, pontificate, dream and possibly rant about anything and everything classic. I can tell you right off the bat that articles here will always have something to do with classic - articles about MTGO in general are for elsewhere, I believe

Enough introduction, let's get to the nitty-gritty.

Where is Classic? And by that, I mean, as a metagame and a format, where does it stand? My thoughts right now on classic are a mixed bag. After seeing so many people come out to the UnCon 2006 Classic event (112 registered people - probably the largest player-run event ever), I was both highly pleased and worried about what that tournament meant to the classic scene. It got excellent coverage on Frank Karsten's article online, which was very nice - I'm not all that sure a lot of people really know what classic is other than that you can play Mirage and Visions in it. But that got me all the more worried in that the decks that ended up winning that event were essentially Extended decks. In a format struggling to find it's identity, having 4 of the top 8 be nothing but the same deck that had been beating on Extended for over a year until it was finally hosed via bannings, only to rear up it's ugly head and dominate that tournament made classic once again look like "the format where you can play unrestricted affinity." Of this I'm pretty sure - the people who are interested in seeing classic grow are definitely not interested in seeing the format ruled by a deck that everyone has seen more than enough of.

Now, a little more poking into the event would show that affinity was far and away the most played deck. A rough count (and this was tough with how big the event was) put Affinity at about 24 decks, or about 25% of the field (14 players were no shows in the first round). With numbers like that on a fairly powerful deck, of COURSE it's going to end up top 8. Especially when there were a number of players who were, shall we say, "less than prepared" to play in a tourney setting. It's just pure pairing that will send some of the affinity decks through - with the better players rising to the top, usually. What didn't end up showing through was the number of combo decks and alternate aggro/combo that ended up going 5-2, or 4-2 and just missing the cut. Still...affinity is a good deck. How then, to get classic away from the image of "Play unrestricted Affinity"

Well one way is to play an aggro-control build made to squash affinity (Hi, Kataki) and have a good chance against combo and the other decks. In fact, in the Eternal Struggle series hosted by Classic Quarter, this is exactly what has happened. Kataki is a main deck card in a lot of aggro and aggro/control decks - why waste your time waiting until game 2 to beat affinity when you can beat it right now? You can also hose any other artifacts while you are at it... I mean, when your deck is nothing but 2/x and utility spells, you have very little need for artifacts. In fact this strategy has worked so well in ES that I still can't believe people aren't running things like Infest and Sickening Dreams just to wipe the board clear of 2/x weenies which also happen to serve as control elements (Meddling Mage, Kataki, Samurai of the Pale Curtain, True Believer.). In ES, the tendency toward aggro/control is another problem. Why? Once again, in order to play Aggro/Control (UW Fish, Boros Deck) you really don't need to run anything you couldn't run in extended.

Finding something that beats both affinity and something aggro like Boros is very difficult. Not because you can't beat aggro with a good classic combo, but because once the sideboard becomes involved - the ability to hose combo, even in an aggro deck, becomes much higher than combo's ability to deal with hate. This probably stems from the fact that most of the good combo hate are post-IPA (Mage, Needle, Leyline of the Void, Chalice of the Void, True Believer, Samurai of the Pale Curtain, Stifle, Trickbind... the list goes on) while most of the most devastating combo pieces are printed pre-IPA (Yawgmoth's Will, Tinker, Intuition, Blue Draw 7s, Memory Jar). Also, most of the best mana acceleration is also absent - we have just Dark Ritual and Chrome Mox, and Chrome Mox, most people will tell you, is not as conducive to combo when you need a lot of combo pieces to go off. Since all the best combo in classic involves cards that are classic-only (Dark Ritual, Vampiric/Mystical/Enlightened Tutor, Helm of Awakening) and the average win for aggro and aggro/control is only about turn or two behind the average win for combo - essentially what is happening is extended aggro/control is beating classic combo, and keeping the classic cards from being a part of the picture.

So, here is the quandary - how do we deal with the fact that the decks that can win in classic are basically just extended decks?

One line of thought is to take away on of the main pieces of hate for the vast majority of combo decks - Leyline of the Void. This single card can be so hard for graveyard combo - which represents most of the combo fast enough to deal with an aggro deck - to deal with that it is often a game over card. It often comes down uncounterable on turn 0, and is an enchantment to boot, the second hardest type to deal with next to lands. Decks even with little to no way to even play it if they don't draw it with their opening hand run this card in their sideboard.

The problem with this line of thinking is two-fold. One, it is short-sighted. As more cards come online, it is easily possible that other combos - not graveyard based - will become viable in racing aggro. Or that graveyard combo will gain the speed it needs to both deal with Leyline and still win. Should that happen, restricting something like Leyline will appear a foolish and rash decision. The other problem is precedent. The DCI just doesn't ban/restrict answers, with the sole exception of Trinisphere in Vintage. And that card so effectively made each an every game a coin flip "Land, Mox, Mox Trinishpere - got Force of Will? Me too - you lose) that it became necessary to deal with it. Waiting three turns to be able to play your moxes is just too much in Vintage.

And so, here we are, seven paragraphs and change later, and I'll I've shown you is to win at classic all you need is extended, plus maybe cards that were banned in extended. And I'm sorry to say you are probably not going to like my answer to what will get classic out of this situation.

Patience.

If you are waiting for the day when Affinity is not making top 8s, when Boros Decks Wins is laughably woeful at handling combo because it can't just race it, you need look no further than to wait for the next couple of classic releases from WoTC. By the time we get Tempest online, the number of options increases by such a large margin (mostly due to Tempest's power), we will look back on these days with little more than a laugh.

Have you ever seen what Affinity looks like when it is playing under a Null Rod? Or, for even more fun - a Null Rod and a single Kataki? Yeah - you can't even TAP for the mana to keep your beaters around. Or forget Kataki - how about we just destroy all artifacts on turn 3? Have you even seen how much fun it is to try and burn an bash your way to victory when most of your cards cost 2 more to play? Or try and do 2, 4, 4, 6, 4 damage when your opponent has, on the first turn, selected their next 5 cards? Or when combo plays out 2 Lotus Petals on Turn 1 and simply wins?

Even aggro gains the mighty Scroll of "I don't care what color you have protection from".

There will be a time where the classic format will belong solely to classic. We only need to show WoTC that we are willing to walk through the murky, extended-infested shore waters of classic right now for the ocean of eternal goodness up ahead.