Classic: It's not quite a little brother to Legacy or Vintage, though they share some similarities. It's starting to grow into its own format, as it develops its own identity. However, it has a shadow looming over it, and one that can’t be broken by the omnipresence of Flash. It can’t be broken by the inclusion of the entire Mirage block. And finally, it can’t be broken by any of the promo cards or Ice Age block inclusions such as Brainstorm and Swords to Plowshares.

This is the shadow of Extended, and it won’t be broken until rotation hits in 2008. (Editor's Note: This was written just before the Master's Edition annoncement)

What does all of this mean for Classic? Almost a year and a half more of direct Extended decks and indirect Extended ports. In theory, you’d expect a format that allows turn 1 wins with Belcher and Flash to invalidate many of the strategies with Extended. You’d also expect that the inclusion of such efficient cards as Swords to Plowshares, Dark Ritual, Lion’s Eye Diamond, and Brainstorm to put Classic decks head-and-shoulders above your average Extended deck. You’d expect these things, and no matter how right you’d be, you’d be wrong.

Richard Feldman wrote about a concept called “Class Cannons”. There are people who are mostly unintentionally playing these types of decks, and a few that are doing it intentionally. Basically, there are a slew of archetypes in Extended that just plain have little to no hope against Flash. Those decks are showing up everywhere from the Tournament Practice room, to the 3x Premier Event, to Classic Quarters Eternal Struggle series.

My list of the top decks that people shouldn’t play, but do anyway and have some ripple effect is as follows:

Boros Deck Wins – It’s a great deck in Extended. I often love watching these matches because no matter how much finesse an opponents deck has, this deck just plain wins. However, in Classic its turn 3-5 clock has nothing on Combo.
How does it distort the Classic metagame? It’s usually beats the pants off of aggro-control variants while keeping a good game against the other Extended ports. A Boros deck that can avoid enough Combo match-ups is usually set to be a high-placing deck. In fact, I dare say that its best element is that not enough people are playing Flash.

Affinity – It’s not even a great deck in Extended. However, since Classic allows people to play with all of the cards that have been banned, it promotes an attraction that proves irresistible to many. Skullclamp and Disciple of the Vault allow for some really fast wins, but still fall short of the speed that combo decks have.
How does this distort the Classic metagame? It’s becoming less of an influence. It beats the unprepared as well as a narrow slice of the establish Classic field, but it loses to a lot of other strategies. Also, it has a hard time with anyone’s Kataki, which is very common in Fish decks as well as Flash. People are generally prepared for Affinity, and that reduces it’s chances of success quite dramatically.

Rock Variants – I personally love the deck, despite the insane cost of Pernicious Deed. However, its best hope against combo is to pack as much discard as possible and hope that sideboarding in Leyline of the Void works. Its biggest weakness is that it is a control deck that doesn’t run counterspells.
How does this distort the Classic metagame? It beats the snot out of Fish decks and most aggro decks via life-gain 4/4’s and Deed. This deck also shares in Boros’ best element in that not enough people are playing Flash. The biggest difference is that Rock is usually beating everything else including Boros.

Here is my list of decks you just shouldn’t play period.

Reanimator – This isn’t really an Extended port, but it’s a deck that just makes no sense currently. Graveyard hate is at an all time high, so this strategy is going to take a massive beating.

Dragon – Look at Reanimator and simply mirror the reasoning there. It’s bad as long as people use Leyline of the Void, and typically it’s very slow by combo standards.

Storm – I’ve found that the best version of Storm is usually only a few cards off from the Extended version. It suffers from two crucial problems in Classic, though. Firstly, it folds to Counterbalance. Secondly, it’s slower than Flash.

Elves – This deck is just awful. If you’re reading this, stop playing it! Why do I even mention elves? I see it everywhere and it doesn’t make any sense. The deck isn’t even good in extended, but the attraction (and affordability, something that matters far more in MTGO than in paper Magic) to run the elves from Onslaught block is there. It’s hopelessly linear and can never beat combo.

And finally, here is the list of decks to beat. Building a deck that can handle these decks and the metagame distortions above will be a huge step towards success.

Flash – It goes without saying. While the deck isn’t dominating the Classic scene, it’s establishing a benchmark for which all decks should live in Classic. I’ve seen some really good versions fail only to itself, since the inconsistency of the deck is often its own worse enemy.

A well-rounded Flash deck will be roughly 1/3 mana, 1/3 combo parts/search, and 1/3 disruption. This fails because you’re not always going to get hands with 1/3 mana, 1/3 combo parts/search, and 1/3 disruption. With a good share of hands, you’ll see 2/3 mana and 1/3 combo parts/search with no protection to go off or 1/3 mana and 2/3 disruption with no way to go off.

The most consistent Flash builds I’ve seen often mostly forgo disruption for additional search, which lets them go off more regularly but with very little backup. Alternatively, I’ve seen builds take the slow approach and minimize the speed to go off later with a stronger disruption backup.

The build that won the 3x Premier Event was similar to the Steve Sadin build that won the GP in Columbus. This is probably the strongest build since it rarely wants to go off early (unless it has the means), but would rather establish control until its combo is ready. It’s a deck that wins small, comparatively. I still expect to see little emulation of this build in favor of the more explosive wins. And while that remains true, expect Flash to be properly hated out at every turn.

For more information of mikeman29’s winning deck, see Dangerlinto's article on the recent Classic 3x event

Fish – Fish is a hard archetype to define. It’s like pornography in that it’s tough to pinpoint an exact definition*, but you know it when you see it. The makeup is usually pretty similar. You start with a full playset of Meddling Mages if you can afford them, and then fill in the rest of the creature slots with multi-purpose hate creatures like Samurai of the Pale Curtain, True Believer, and probably Jotun Grunt or Serra Avenger.

To see more, have a look at this prototypical Fish Deck

The main strength it has is running cheaper counters (such as Spell Snare and Stifle) to keep the opponent honest for the first turn, then starts dropping the hate-men. The archetype is so wide-spread that it usually bleeds into another archetype, which could be seen by some as a sub-archetype: Counterbalance.

Counterbalance - In Counterbalance, Fish-based or otherwise, the biggest obstacle is keeping control of the board position by fixing your hands with Brainstorm and Sensei’s Divining Top until you can drop a Counterbalance to serve as a soft lock. From there, you take your time and win at your leisure. As there is currently no reliable way for the enchantment to get removed in Classic**, it’s an annoying way to lose and one where there’s no easy solution.

To see more, have a look at this prototypical Countertop Deck with A Tog win.

I hope you enjoyed reading my interpretation of the Classic metagame as much as I enjoyed writing it. There are a lot of decks out there I didn’t cover, mainly because they haven’t made a significant enough impact to warrant discussing in the scope of this article. I also hope that this prompts more Extended ports to take more consideration of the Classic metagame and be more solid contenders, rather than just an annoying round for few.

* In Vintage, there’s a pretty clear evolution of the deck that originated with awkward blue men, using Curiousity, and Null Rod (the Phallic Superstar) which started as Curiously Gay Fish.

** In Masques block, sometime in the far future, we’ll get toys like Massacre and Reverent Silence.