I had a very humbling experience the other day playing against one of my clanmates. In the search to put an end to the horrible atrocity that is laying down creatures and beating with them for the win (what format are you playing anyway?), I sought out to turn the tables on the aggro-control market that so far, had dominated most of the classic scene in the Eternal S truggle series. The idea was simple - pack your decks full of Infests and only run creatures that don't die to infest. Then run a control suite. On the heart of it, it seems like a good plan - here is a look at the decklist:

Now the idea, I think, was sound. Counter, Counter, Infest, Counter, Lay down Fatty, Infest, Win.

Good ideas however, don't always turn into good decks. Now, I will add that there were some conspicuously poor draws in here. In 5 games (2 matches), I never once had an opening hand with a Disrupting Shoal in it. This is fairly important as Shoal give's me the option to counter the aggro 2 drop on my turn one while still tapping out for brainstorm.. In fact, twice I brainstormed and STILL never achieved a disrupting shoal on the two drop. Other crazy things were happening, such as Fact or Fictioning into 4 lands and a completely unnecessary card at the time, and drawing 13 lands in the first 18 cards - stuff that normally makes your want to tear your hair out of your head. Quite possibly the most frustrating games I ever played. The one game I did win, I had dropped a Morphling after infesting the turn earlier and flew in for the win. Conspicuously absent were the tutors in the deck, which would have been especially nice against aggro, since I could tutor for the sideboarded shackles which I also never got to see. So I quickly cursed the opponent's deck for obviously jinxing mine, and asked if he'd switch to something else.

Now, the something else the opponent had was also an aggro deck, but one a LOT more resistant to infest. Which was fine. Really I'd built this deck to battle Boros and Black hand and fish-style decks I'd seen in Classic tournaments, and this definitely wasn't one of those decks. It however, pounded on my deck. Badly. In the end though, I actually ended up quite happy.

Why?

Because, really, I was trying to do something I shouldn't have been able to do . I was playing control, they were playing aggro, and they won. Aggro beats control. This is the way things should be. That being said, I went back to the original purpose of the deck and reconsidered the whole strategy of building it. If I wanted to beat aggro, why didn't I just play a combo deck?

If you've been following the Eternal Struggle series, I think you know the answer to this question - because in Classic, Aggro can beat Combo as well - right?

Wrong

Finally, it seems that Classic is finally moving to the place where it should be - where the triumvirate of Aggro > Control, Control > Combo, Combo > Aggro rules Supreme. And it's mostly thanks to the fact that combo no longer has to hunt through it's graveyard to race the aggro plan.

In ES 1.12, Fran1 placed in a prize spot with this Storm deck.

Now, I'll not shy away from telling you that this is not at all the most tuned of storm decks. I'm not going to quite go into the details of how to tune this deck, but it's worth noting that with MTGO currently bugged (cards without mana costs still can't be played off a Desire or Sins of the past) this deck managed to defeat a sea of aggro. And that's without the power of being able to drop Lotus Bloom for free. The 6th round (Top 4 Semi) loss to essentially an aggro deck was a mixture of some good choices by his opponent, a little luck for that opponent drawing into one of his 2 True Believers making the Tendrils kill impossible, and simply a deck that ran into the tuning problems it had (namely having only 1 card that can deal with fish disruptors - pyroclasm. But never-the-less, the simple running of 4x Leyline of the Void or Tormod's crypt can no longer be seen as the means to defeating almost all classic combo, everywhere.

And it gets better.

By now, you've seen the spoilers of Planar Chaos or been at the prerelease itself, so It's no big deal to talk about Simian Spirit Guide. And I'm not talking about putting Simian Spirit guide in the above deck, although that certainly could be an option. Simian Spirit Guide makes it much easier to run another type of no-graveyard combo that packs a tonne of punch. Have a look a this decklist:

The idea is easy - if I can run just 1 land, the odd's me me getting a turn 1 or turn 2 Charbelcher increase dramatically - and since the spirit guide effectively acts as a land - well, you get the idea.

So, let's say both these combos are viable. Now you really need to pack things like Meddling Mage (naming tendrils or Empty the Warrens or Charbelcher) or True Believer (which doesn't stop the Empty the Warrens Plan), or Arcane Lab to stop storm, or Pithing Needle to stop charbelcher. There are lots of card you can use to stop these combos. But the wonderful, glorious thing about all the cards that stop these combos is that they are conveniently NOT the cards that stop the graveyard combos. The leylines and crypts and the brand new Extirpate are the cards for that job. And you can't possibly bring them all in your sideboard. You'll have to pick and choose, or not be able to focus heavily on one stategy. And I think that's all the people who are into to combo (and really, healthy formats) have been waiting for.

Now, if we could show enough patience to have combo a part of the meta again, maybe we have just enough left to wait for version 3.0 and the continuing releases of classic sets.