For those of you who are unable to remember, today is the one-year anniversary of the release of the last dedicated Classic-format set – Visions.

Yes, that’s correct - it’s been a full year.

I thought I would take a retrospective look at Classic as a format, the rise of the Classic Quarter Clan, and the Eternal Struggle tournament series. A bit of a history lesson, I know, but at least I guarantee you that you will probably find something out about Classic or the clan you didn’t know already.

Prelude

Mirage had opened up with a bang some five months prior, but quickly fizzled out in terms of its’ popularity. With the Classic format not much more than the extended format without restrictions and with Dark Rituals, the few Premier Events that did fire off were full of mostly Extended decks like Affinity and Tooth and Nail (which were popular at the time), and a couple of Reanimator decks which gained a boost from the fast mana via Ritual.

Just before the Visions release, MTGO suddenly stopped the PE events for Classic. They were just not firing off, and when that happens (or doesn’t happen, as the case may be…) enough times, there is just no way MTGO will not fill the spot with something that will fire.

Quite quickly, MMM drafts stopped firing consistently, like a new set usually would. Soon, they would almost never fire altogether. I’m convinced, in fact, that if it wasn’t possible to get MMM for 7 tix back then, that they probably wouldn’t have fired at all. You would find two or maybe three games of Classic at most in the ‘Casual’ room. There were also a couple of people who were buying up everything Mirage at highly-discounted rates.

Also, at that time, the Classic Quarter didn’t even exist. There was a little bit of talk with myself and a couple of others, but nothing really went on until the release of Visions.

Release

Visions didn’t open with all that much enthusiasm. In fact, once VVV draft left the scene, MMV draft dropped off the radar almost as quickly as you could say “Desertion”. One of the things that was apparent from the Visions release was that people had wildly-varying ideas about how much cards were worth. It was very easy at that time to pick up the good uncommons from Visions (and still Mirage) for much less than they were worth. Many different bots had vacated all the MI and VI cards from their repertoire. Other people wouldn’t let you touch an MI or especially VI rare for twice what any sane person would reasonably pay (14 for Undiscovered Paradise? Pass…).

With no PEs likely to come back, this is actually the point where I started to get upset with the state of my pet format. I know Mirage didn’t really have any cards that screamed “Build around me!”, but Visions was different. Five cards in particular really should have affected the meta game (if there was one): Vampiric Tutor (for obvious reasons), Necromancy (making Worldgorger Dragon possible), Helm of Awakening (making Sensei Sensei possible and improving certain versions of Easter Tendrils), Goblin Recruiter (vastly improving goblins), and Fireblast (speeding up burn by at least a turn, and possibly two). There were all these great cards that could really help define the meta-game, but no sanctioned events to use them in! And when I get upset, I start to take action.

This is when the Classic Quarter was born. Two of the original members left pretty quickly; for a short while, the only two members were Tzaph4iel and I. And while Tzaph and I had some good times testing out decks (I distinctly recall having a Sensei, Sensei vs. Salvagers match; in the final game I laid Chalice Of The Void for “0”, and Tzaph laid Chalice for “1” & “2”, effectively shutting off all our spells, except for my Trinket Mage and his Auriok Salvagers. I ended up winning by beating with twin Trinket Mages... not the usual way to win with Sensei, Sensei!), there was still really not a lot of people interested in Classic - or so we thought...

PREs

The idea to run a PRE (Player-Run Event) was actually inspired by the PDC (Pauper Deck Challenge) community. You see, these poor guys are already in their 5th season (though they generally don’t skip weeks) of player-run events. They don’t even get any help from MTGO, in that their format is entirely…well…imaginary. That’s not a knock against them – it is a fact that MTGO does not even have a deck filter for Pauper Magic (a format utilizing nothing but commons). To boot, they even run restrictions. I figured that, since there was no way PEs were coming back to MTGO anytime soon, and these guys were running successful small tourneys with formats that MTGO didn’t even handle, surely we could run a PRE in a format that MTGO did handle. The cost to put on a PRE was basically next-to-nothing, so it really couldn’t hurt to run one (other than possibly doing a little damage to the pride of our format!)

The first few PREs were something. With only ten players each, some of whom were playing pauper decks, there was an obvious mismatch. (You try stopping Salvagers from going off with nothing but commons!) For that first month, I really feared that we were going to be stuck with just these ten people playing this format, and that we’d never really develop a true meta-game (or a following for the tournament) if Tzaph4iel was just going to crush everyone. Thankfully, I found an ego-maniac by the name of Scorponok who also just happened to like Classic (and, clearly, Transformers). He went straight to the finals in his first tourney (no big feat, as there were only 10 players), but his second tourney proved to be not only the turning point for himself, but a turning point for the entire Classic scene.

On July 29th, we held what I thought might have been the last PRE we would do. I’d started to run DCI Reporter to handle things, and with the added work of moving info from DCI Reporter to the website, I discovered doing this for ten people was a major tax on my time. To boot, the caliber of decks that were showing up were still pretty poor – even the participants would admit their decks were not up to snuff, with several of them coming to the Classic PRE from the Pauper PRE, running “enhanced” pauper decks!

So, feeling that if the 3rd tourney was a bust along the lines of the first two, I’d probably give it all up, since it didn’t appear that there was that much interest. But the CQ spent some time hunting down people who were actually interested in the format, and that hard work paid off in spades as we went on to double our attendance.

Looking back on it, that tournament was the real start of the Classic meta-game. Scorponok walked in and won without a combo deck, which I think really showed people that Classic wasn’t truly about broken, infinite decks. In fact, that win over Kane732 (who was playing Sensei, Sensei) turned the tables – combo wouldn’t finish 1st place again until ES 1.14, a full eleven tournaments later!

An UnConventional way to get the word out

After that tournament, Clan CQ started slowly picking up new members. One by one, we added to our ranks from those people who we felt could not only solidly contribute to the clan, but generally made the clan a lot of fun to be around. As we’ve added people in, there hasn’t been a single person I haven’t been happy to see online, and I’ve never had to kick a single member for anything other than complete inactivity. That says a lot to me – we are pretty selective.

After that tournament, we also purchased the domain www.classicquarter.com. Knowing things were now for real, it was time to take the state of things on in earnest. We renamed the Classic PRE the “Eternal Struggle”, a name chosen by the Wizo Kwai_Chang as the best of the given ideas in a thread on the magicthegethering.com forums. Several tournaments later, the release of Coldsnap, featuring Pre-Cons with cards that were only Classic-legal, caused quite a stir. Suddenly, people were actually talking about Classic and the importance of some of those releases; for example, would Force of Will be in the PreCons? That sort of buzz got interest up for quite some time. In the end, the PreCons didn’t give us Force of Will, but did help start to define the format by giving players access to Swords to Plowshares, Brainstorm, Ashen Ghoul, Gorilla Shaman, and a few others.

So, with the Classic format finally out from under a rock, I was contacted by the very same Wizo Kwai_Chang about UnCon – the WoTC sponsored online convention. KC was looking to have a premier tournament at the end of the UnCon on Magic Online, and asked if I could run a Classic tournament, with Wizards providing the prizes. You might think that I would jump at the chance (and I did… but I wasn’t sure I really wanted to), but Wizo KC was originally hoping to get an IPA booster pack set as top prize for the tourney. Now, think about the gravity of that … a free tournament with IPA as prizes. Yeah – every single person on Magic Online would be there. As it turned out, the prizes ended up being something a little less attractive, but certainly a little more intriguing. Wizards promised Time Spiral packs, to be delivered later that week on its release. With that in place, I agreed to run it.

One-hundred and twelve people showed up.

Handling that tournament was, I’m sure, every bit as harrowing as being in the pit of the New York Stock Exchange – and it lasted almost as long as a trading session as well. Now, twenty-four people showing up to a tournament is great, but one-hundred and twelve…well, that’s a little overboard. For one thing, one person can’t possibly enforce the rules and make sure people are doing the right things (like playing correctly-timed matches, etc...) I had a little help from some of the ES regulars, but let’s just say that by the time seven rounds were over and we had gotten to Top 8, I was completely exhausted. Nowadays, I have a system that would certainly make that UnCon event a little tamer. At the time I said I’d never do anything like that again, but now, I’m not so sure I don’t have the tools to handle it much better.

The Top 8 of UnCon were essentially all Extended decks. Powerful extended decks to be sure, but Extended decks nonetheless. The only deck I can recall in the Top 8 being based on a Classic card was Largebrandon’s Natural Order deck. As a Classic enthusiast, I was certainly hoping for a little more in the way of decks that would make people say “Hey, that’s neat!” Most of those decks finished with respectable 5-2 or 4-2 (drop) finishes, but none made the cut. Instead, the highlight of the tourney was how unprepared people were for decks like Sensei, Sensei and Worldgorger Dragon combo. An incident occurred with one entrant who didn’t understand why I called a draw in a player-run event when a player entered into a Worldgorger Dragon loop. He had to be reminded that we were, in fact, following the rules of Magic. That, I think, is the one time where I really had to put my foot down as head judge of an event and just tell someone to shut their yap. This guy just didn’t get it, but there was no higher authority they could go to. I really didn’t enjoy doing it, but it had to be done to keep the tournament moving. We have since put into place an in-house rule to avoid this particular problem from happening; if you can’t cause the match to crash if you both hit F6, the player with priority (the person who started the loop) loses the game, because of all the problems it causes.

That one tournament caused multiple conversations to spring up. One involved how poorly MTGO handles loops, and the other involved how well graveyard decks were being hosed by the efficient hate Online (namely Leyline of the Void.) The problem with the latter is that practically all the good combo in Classic were graveyard based, nearly wiping combo out of the format. Aggro decks are still de rigeur in the ES, though thankfully Storm combo has since helped a little in alleviating the drudgery of “pick your aggro attack and play Leyline/Tormod’s Crypt”. At the time, however, people were calling for the restriction of Leyline, since it so efficiently removed almost every form of combo from the format.

With UnCon out of the way, we really hoped we’d see a lot of increased attendance at the Eternal Struggle series. After all, there were dozens of people at that tourney that had never come before, and some of them were bound to stay. Looking back, I think the problem with that assumption was that the UnCon crowd was essentially there for the draw of the Time Spiral packs that had yet to be released. Almost none of the people who were at that tournament ever came back to participate in an Eternal Struggle.

World Class

The Eternal Stuggles after this point my not have increased in participation, but they did make significant headway in not only the caliber of decks, but also the metagaming options available. While aggro or aggro/control decks still lead the way, the format dealt less and less in Affinity and Boros Deck Wins, the two decks that had owned the tournament to this point. Again, Scorponok made a huge dent in that decks armour by presenting Haterade, a deck filled with nothing but green beats (like Troll Ascetic and Loxodon Hierarch), white control cards and basically enough artifact destruction to negate any advantage an Affinity or Boros could possibly gain. From that point on, combo took less of a back seat, propped by the inclusion of storm-based decks – no longer was it possible to take combo out by simply hating the graveyard.

Later in the season, the ES finally found a regular sponsor in MTGOTRADERS. While everyone loves getting cards as prizes, up to this point we relied entirely on donations – especially from the CQ members, and those were getting harder and harder to come by. I think we had done pretty well with donations, but it was a major headache to be worried about what we were giving away each week. While everyone, I’m sure, like the gift certificates, the setup was much more benefit to me than to any of the winners – our prizes were about 20 tix anyway, but now I wouldn't have to worry where they were coming from.

As we made our way towards worlds, the CQ clan felt we really needed to get the worlds some HUGE prizes – something to reward those faithful who’d participated and helped classic grow through the first year. In order to do this, we knew we’d need to actually charge tix entry to the tournament. In a way, this is backwards from the way most tournament seasons work – you usually pay for the regular tournaments and if you make the championships you get in for free. The problem with that set-up is that it’s very hard to get anyone who doesn’t know you to just hand over a tix, but it’s not quite so hard to get people to hand over a couple of tix when they’ve already participated in 5 of your tournaments and maybe won a prize or two. Since MTGOTRADERS has a standing policy not to support any tournament with an entry fee (which we fully support), we figured we’d simply use the tix entry for donations. In the end, that worked out very well as our very own Stok3d came through with the largest donation ever – a foil Vampiric Tutor, which sells (at the time this was written) for somewhere between 100 and 125 tix.

Time Spiraled

As we entered the Time Spiral era, those of us in Classic Quarter were giddy with the excitement of the reprints. It was obvious by this point that Weatherlight was not coming soon, but we had stopped caring about that in lieu of caring about what cards would eventually be put into the Time Spiral ‘Time-shifted’ set. One of the biggest problems we’d had so far is that some of the good Classic cards, most especially Orim’s Chant, Vindicate and especially Meddling Mage were still very expensive. The thought that Meddling Mage might make a comeback had some of us (and I’ll not lie, I was especially longing for its’ return) thinking we might be able to finally get a hold of those cards on the cheap. Ultimately, the Time-Spiraled cards proved to be a bit of let down, with the only really highly-used cards from the set being Tormod’s Crypt and Gemstone Mine. Heck, we knew we were going to get Gemstone Mine anyway – and as an uncommon. – in Weatherlight

Really, we are still in the Time-Spiraled era. For the most part, the block has been a bit of a disappointment, in that there could have been so many good reprints, but there just weren’t. The cards themselves are actually quite good, but the whole nostalgia theme of the set has, I think, had a tangent effect on the CQ members (and those interested in Classic). Whereas I think the set was meant to hearken back to the old days of Magic, all it has done for those of us who like to play in the most powerful of formats is simply to remind us how watered-down Magic has become.

Future Sight

One year has come and gone; no sign of the last part of the Mirage block has left us pining for Weatherlight, as Time Spiral has, so far, failed to provide a lot that we didn’t already have. We’d all love to hate Affinity right out of the format (primarily because it is a poster boy for Extended – and to get Classic really going, it has to be a less hazy line between the two), but Weatherlight is still hanging out there in the shadows. We do know it is coming, and I don’t think that it’s too difficult to see what Serenity and Null Rod can do to that deck. Tempest has been also dangled in front of us, and with its’ format-defining cards (Lotus Petal, Wasteland, Intuition... the list goes on and on), we are finally looking at a totally different format than Extended. And of course, the Extended rotation of 2008 is about eighteen months away, which should send a shockwave effect through not only the Extended scene online, but also serve to prop up the Classic scene while simultaneously rearranging the current marketplace.

I suppose this is the part where I should try to prognosticate, but I’ve been 50/50 with most of my guesses so far. Here is what I see happening in the next year for Classic:

1. The release of Weatherlight. With access to Null Rod, aggro and combo decks get a boost, in that they no longer have to race Affinity. Note that doesn’t make combo decks any faster; combo will still have to race decks like Boros, Haterade, Goblins and Zoo.
2. The release of 10th will have little-to-no effect on the Classic meta-game. I can’t see anything going in here that MTGO doesn’t already have, and IPA stuff almost never makes it way in there (since WotC has a policy allowing no multicolor cards in the Core sets) so nothing from there gets any cheaper.
3. There will still be no Classic PEs until Tempest. Weatherlight simply isn’t enough of a reason to bring them back. Only if the MTGO people seriously start pumping out old promos that are worthwhile (I really think it would be great if they put out something classic and simple like Sol Ring) do I see this as an option.
4. Tempest will get released – but not until April of 2008. If we get past more than a couple of months with Tempest, though, I have a feeling we might need to start looking at restrictions. But then, I’ve always been thinking something like that is going to happen anyway.
5. The Classic Quarter will have at least 25 members by the end of the year. Maybe more, but the imminent reduction of Extended to wipe out the first eleven sets released on MTGO will have a huge effect on some people. They will have three choices – join classic, sell their now non-Extended cards, or sell out altogether. I see all three choices as a win for classic. IPA should get cheaper, and more players should be in the format.
6. Other PREs will start to use the system developed for the CQ website. As a matter of fact, some of the PDC clan has already tried it out and loved it. So this particular prognostication isn’t really much more than fact – I simply have to ship the code off to them in a form they can use.

I hope you enjoyed the small trip down my memory lane. I hope to see some of those predictions come true, and as for some of the others... well, I hope they are wrong for the better of the format. Either way, I’ll be here doing my best to make sure the Classic flag is still on the pole, flying as high as it can.