Hail to the Bus Driver - by Dangerlinto

Sometimes, mistakes are mistakes. For example, having a planned “wardrobe malfunction” during a superbowl halftime? Yeah – that’s a mistake. Green-lighting Pluto Nash? Mistake.

Tugging on Superman’s cape.
Spitting into the wind.
Pulling the mask of the ol’ Lone Ranger.
Messing around with Jim.

You betcha – all mistakes.

But some mistakes turn out all right. As a matter of fact, some of the more poignant points in human history happened by mistake. For example, Chris Columbus tries to map a route to east Asia by sea, lands in the Florida Keys. Not too shabby for the Spaniard. The Phonograph was said to be a mistake too – but then I have the feeling if you invented as many things as Edison did, you're bound to bump into a few mistakes on the way. And some mistakes, while not so poignant, are simply embedded into the public conscious. I mean, can you imagine “Monkey Kong”? (BTW – this is actually a false legend – see Snopes.com)

And there’s also this mistake:

Yup. How else can you explain it? It’s an uber-Counterspell. And it’s not like the guys who made the set didn’t know about Counterspell. Maybe what they really meant was to give the mana to the person who casted the countered spell. Or maybe they forgot to tag an X onto the casting cost of the spell. Or maybe they just really, really liked counterspells and were completely clueless as to how powerful this spell is. Whatever mistakes happened, it lead Wizards of the Coast to quip that the entire R&D department would have to be run over by a bus before they’d reprint Mana Drain. Well, thankfully for those who are fans of Vintage play, that bus hasn’t run over R&D, but it seems like they all hoped on for a trip to MTGO with two stops on the way.

Counterspell
Hello? Anyone? I'm still playable... really!
How powerful is the spell? I suppose that it goes without saying that Mana Drain is an extremely powerful control tool, but the audaciousness of the spell itself isn’t quite as bad as it’s reputation. Probably that reputation was earned as the first ever “Well, duh” overpowered card that wasn’t in the original set. You can forgive Black Lotus and Blue Power and Balance and all the rest since they were first tries – Richard Garfield didn’t quite expect those cards to overpower a lot of games since he expected the rarity of the cards to be more effective in controlling their apperance. Other cards from subsequent releases of the era weren’t nearly so obviously overpowered (with props to Library of Alexandria… but hey – first try at an expansion, right?) But Mana Drain? Counterspell was squeamishly sitting in the corner wondering what it did to deserve to be so obviously overshadowed in the 3rd add-on to the burgeoning game that was Magic: The Gathering at the time. However, that being said, Mana Drain is still an answer. The other player has to “walk into” your Mana Drain. It’s probably bad news if you are playing 5 and 6 mana spells that allow your Mana Drain playing opponent to do ridiculous things on his or her next turn, but in the world of eternal play, the average casting cost of a spell is generally not that high. On average, they’ll get two mana, which is advantage enough, if you have built your Drain deck properly.

In a lot of previews, I’d be talking about all the ways to use this card in certain decks, or how the card can be best employed. For instance, it certainly doesn’t hurt that FTV:Exiled gave us Tinker to play with, which has often been employed with Mana Drain decks since Drain has good synergy with artifacts and with Tinker’s mainly colourless casting cost. It also seems like a really bad idea to play a Tombstalker into a deck that is sporting Drain and two untapped islands.

But honestly, to continue talking about such things I think would be insulting to practically anyone reading this article. If you are not aware of the myriad of ways to use Mana Drain, may I suggest a crash course in Vintage play by having a gander at vintage sites like www.themanadrain.com and www.starcitygames.com

I’d much rather talk about what Mana Drain means to Classic, the format.

First of all, let’s actually talk casual here for a moment. If Mana Drain is a highly accessible card in your format, does that mean Counterspell is now casual? (I hear the chorus of boos already) I mean, in Vintage, nobody plays counterspell anymore. Mana Drain, Force of Will, and other options like Negate normally outshine it. For those of you griefers who’ll quit at the first sign of Counterspell – isn’t it far enough down the list now that it’s acceptable casually? Just a thought.

Fact or Fiction
All that colorless mana isn't such a bad thing
As for the Classic tournament scene, it seems inevitable there will be a tilt toward control decks to take advantage of Mana Drain’s power. The only question is whether or not decks running Drain will be able to consistently fire off the larger spells Drain decks normally employs, like Fact or Fiction and Gifts Ungiven. After all, it’s not like we also have Sol Ring or Mana Vault or other artifact acceleration normally associated with abusing those cards such as they do in Vintage. However, consistency aside, I think raw power might win out in favour of playing Drain decks.

Also, I have to wonder what the Vintage crowd thinks about this. Force of Wills and some Duals were nice in MED1 and MED2, but they have never been the face of Vintage to the extent that Drain (and other cards) are. It’s practically a Vintage commandment: “Thou shalt not touch our Drains”. I mean, heck, one the most prevalent Vintage forums are named after the card. A die hard Vintage fan probably isn’t going to give it all up just because Classic has Mana Drain, but then, maybe there might be some people who look at the cost of paper Drains and the cost of digital Drains, and the cost of playing in Vintage and the cost of playing classic and say “It’s close enough for me – and it’s sanctioned”. That might be only a few people, but it’s certainly worth mentioning. It might even be disturbing to those who own paper drains, which frequently sell for close to $100.

But most importantly, the appearance of Mana Drain means the big boys are here to play in Classic. One can hardly be complaining about how “degenerate” some deck or another is when we are looking at a card pool including Mana Drain. While I’m not advocating that Flash and Necropotence shouldn’t have been restricted, I think a good deal of some of those two decks restriction came from a desire to see the classic format remain more “pure”. Surely, many meta games have been dominated in the same way Necropotence and Flash dominated their respective meta games. But Drain is different – if it should achieve a similar level of dominance, the card itself is so beloved by it’s users that the evidence would have to be overwhelming – far more so than it was for Flash and Necro - to restrict Drain. Essentially, it will be one of those cards that will define the format – as long as Classic remains a format.

And while it might not be the most important factor of it’s appearance, it’s interesting to note that WoTC is releasing Mana Drain, and we have one more MED to go – well there are hardly any other cards that can possibly headline what I expect will be the final installation of Master Edition’s. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

However, if you might feel that Mana Drain isn’t quite enough of what you were looking for to fulfill your craving for powerful Magic cards from the games ancient past – or that Mana Drain in and of itself isn’t enough of a tease...

...wait until you see tomorrow’s preview card.

(Also, check out PureMTGO's preview at http://puremtgo.com/articles/med-3-preview-card)