I have a confession to make.

Despite being a Canadian, my first love affair with any sport was baseball. Can you blame me? Growing up in the Toronto area in the 1980s, it was easy to like baseball over hockey for two reasons; the ‘Leafs stunk, and the Jays were the best team of that decade, stretching their World Series runs into the early 1990’s. I still love baseball, and I can even watch a game without a beer in my hand. It’s all about the intricacy for me.

When a 6’ 4” man standing on a mound of earth sixty-feet six inches away launches a ball at ninety miles and hour (in sports, the metric system is persona non-grata), as the batter you’re left with just a split second to decide what to do. Swing or not swing? And from there, the difference between grounding out, and being the goat and hitting a walk-off grand slam, is one-quarter of an inch. One-quarter of an inch!! Thinking about that sort of thing can absolutely drive you nuts if you are a professional baseball player. For the baseball watchers, it’s merely to be marveled at.

Classic is also a game of inches. Unlike less-powered formats, where the game does not swing so violently on each and every play but rather gradually builds to a crescendo, Classic measures its’ power far closer than any other Online format. Much like other Eternal formats, while the card pool is far larger, the number of playable cards is comparably smaller, since the cards that are either strictly better or offer a more efficient solution push out all those that are inferior. In a way, all of the past mistakes or misjudgments of Wizards R&D serve to make light of a vast number of cards and strategies.

Generally, one can look at a given card’s competition to gauge whether or not a card is Classically viable. For example, take mass destruction. Which would you rather have - Engineered Explosives, Pernicious Deed, Oblivion Stone, Akroma’s Vengeance, Plague Boiler, or the Master’s Edition Preview card below?

KABOOM!

Yup, that’s good ‘ol Larry Niven’s Disk that we will be seeing on September 10th. Many of you probably fondly remember the game’s only method for many of Magic’s early years of blowing everything up. In fact, as far as artifacts go, Nevinyrral’s Disk is one of a very short list of artifacts that can destroy artifacts, creatures and enchantments all at the same time. (Plague Boiler, Oblivion Stone, and Engineered Explosives are the only others).

So which is the best “blow ‘em up good” card?

Well, it’s really a matter of inches, isn’t it? Engineered Explosives is really good against decks like Fish that tend to run between sixteen and twenty-four cards at a converted mana cost of two, and can usually be activated right away for the cost of four mana. However, it’s not so hot against Affinity. Pernicious Deed, on the other hand, is great against pretty much everything, except perhaps cheap reanimation. The downside of Deed is that it can cost you a bunch of mana on the turn you blow everything up, which makes it slightly harder to use to get ahead in momentum. Also, you generally have to be playing one particular deck archetype to handle its’ color combination – Rock. Oblivion Stone is simply far more costly than any other option, making it much too slow for Classic. Your chances of getting the mana to activate Oblivion Stone while keeping the beat-down deck at bay are slim to none in a format that sports Goblins, Affinity, and Zoo decks, all agro decks that win on average on turns four or five. Sadly, the same goes for Plague Boiler. You simply will not have the time to reach three tokens. Akroma’s Vengeance is not playable at turn six by any means. In Classic, you simply have to find the most efficient means of doing what it is you need to do – it is often the difference between winning and losing. If there isn’t a way to do something efficiently, you really cannot do it all.

Simply put, resetting the board has always been impossible in Classic for most decks. Up until now.

Putting Nevinyrral’s Disk up against its main competitors, Explosives and Deed, becomes a game of inches. Disk obviously starts at a major disadvantage, since it costs more to play at four than either of the other two (unless you are using Explosives to hit a converted mana cost of four, which is very unlikely), and it also comes into play tapped. It does activate the turn after you play it, though, and for much less. It also has the advantage of blowing up everything but lands, including artifact lands! This means that you have to keep yourself alive through to turn four at minimum, which is no mean trick in Classic; as I said before, several aggro strategies will have you dead or pretty close to buying the farm by then. With the metagame consisting (for the time being) of Flash and things that beat Flash (and a few things that don’t beat Flash but sure beat the hell out of those decks that do beat Flash), it seems the best place for Disk would be in the sideboard of a deck like Fish, where you might need to even out the field by taking down a number of beaters that are just plain bigger than yours. From there, lay down a Counterbalance and Sensei’s Divining Top, and put the game under your control. Against Fish, Explosives is probably the better choice, as playing it for two will remove most of Fish’s threats. Deed is probably still much better in the single deck it can be comfortably played in, so there is little doubt it won’t replace it there. It’s very much a close call as to the superior choice.

Another deck that can really use a healthy dose of “Kaboom!” is Mono-Black or Black/White Hand Aggro-Control. These decks often find themselves in unrecoverable positions mid-game, where an opponent has managed to survive the early onslaught of discard and Dark Confidant-drawn beaters, leaving the deck exhausted and in top-deck mode. The ability to launch a turn two or three Disk into play via Dark Ritual will allow this deck archetype to put pressure on strategies like Counterbalance and Zoo, to force those decks to deal directly with the issue, or else keep them from getting too far ahead in the creature race.

In the end however, while Nevinyrral’s Disk is the most iconic and most effective board sweeper of all time, its cost of four and comes-into-play tapped drawback may even keep this card from seeing play in tournament Classic, due to the speed of the format. If Flash is taken out of the picture at some point, Disk will have certainly gained some of those inches back that it needs to possibly squeeze into service in several different decks. It might seem odd to think that a card that is far too powerful to ever see print again outside of Master’s Edition might not be able to make the cut in Classic; it is absolutely that close of a call.

In this format, that’s just the game of inches that you have to play.