Classic Quarter Article

Hindsight is 20/30 - by Dangerlinto

Come on. Totally better than a dual, right?

I can still vividly remember the conversation with my older brother, back in the days when we were buying piles of Unlimited cards. He had recently found out on a trip to the comic shop that they were buying the Bayou he had for $8. Back in those days, that was a lot of money for a single card. And heck, you could buy a Shivan Dragon for $8. I convinced him that there was no point to holding onto a stupid Land just because it could tap for 2 colors when he could get a card as powerful as Shivan Dragon for it. Of course, I was probably correct, considering we used to play by taking his huge stack of cards (like 500 or more) splitting the deck in half and then playing. One Bayou wasn’t going to make a difference, but Shivan definitely was, since it would be a game breaking card. Most of our games ended up with 20+ lands in play in homogenous 5 colour decks. You were pretty sure to get a Swamp and a Forest anyway.

Looking back – not the smartest of moves. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. Bayou is quite obviously more useful than Shivan Dragon in a properly constructed deck, even back in those heady days where restricted lists weren't even invented and people thought the game might not last longer than Pogs did. (You know, my brother might read this. If you are, bro. Really sorry. I'll make it up to you by getting you a Bayou from MED3, ok?). But sometimes there were cards that quite simply were NOT all that good back then. I can also remember discussing with a player (the only one I knew who owned one) as to what possible use the following card could have. And this card is no Necropotence, which people dismissed and then later figured out how to abuse – there simply wasn’t a good way to abuse this card:

Mr. Card Advantage

It’s seems odd to think that a card as powerful as Bazaar of Baghdad wasn’t easy to abuse in the early days of magic, but quite honestly there were so few useful ways to interact with your graveyard. You were drawing 2 and discarding three. 10 taps of the card and the ratio was 20/30, and if you were playing a 60 card deck, your library was depleted, and you weren’t any further ahead. In fact, you were behind – usually with no cards in hand, and without mana resources since Bazaar doesn’t tap for mana. Heck, even with Yawgmoth’s Will, the card wan’t used, and Will abuses the graveyard more than any other card in existence. No, it wasn’t until Worldgorger Dragon and the Madness mechanic came out that people started to abuse the card advantage power of Bazaar. If you have a card with Madness in your hand, and you tap Bazaar, suddenly, it’s no longer draw two and discard three – it’s much more like draw three and discard two. And if one of the cards you discarded had flashback, well then it was much more like draw 4 and discard 1. For free. I think you can see how that would be extremely powerful. That being said, there are other ways to abuse the drawing power of Bazaar. Namely Squee, Goblin Nabob. With a Squee in hand, you can turn Bazaar into a free Catalog (even card advantage). With two in hand, it becomes card advantage on par with Library of Alexandria. And with three finally in hand, you are drawing two cards every turn, which is Ancestral Recall type card advantage – for free.

And yet, drawing two cards for free every turn isn’t even the best use of Bazaar of Baghdad. Because, a few years later WoTC would go on to invent the Dredge mechanic. Dredge and Bazaar of Baghdad go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Apart – not bad. But together? Mmmmmmm. Together they essentially change the rules of Magic. With current Classic Dredge lists, you generally have to play a spell of some sort to start discarding cards. Like Breakthrough or Putrid Imp or even Lion’s Eye Diamond. With Bazaar of Baghdad, you don’t need to bother with those cards. Heck, with Bazaar of Baghdad in a dredge deck, you don’t need to even bother with playing spells at all. Heck, with Bazaar of Baghdad in a dredge deck, you don’t need to even bother using mana!

What? No Mana?! That’s crazy! Well yes. Yes it is crazy – and here is an example of how it works

Main Deck 60 cards
4 Bazaar of Baghdad 4 Dryad Arbor 8 lands 1 Angel of Despair 1 Cephalid Sage 2 Flame-Kin Zealot 4 Golgari Grave-Troll 4 Golgari Thug 4 Ichorid 4 Narcomoeba 4 Stinkweed Imp 4 Street Wraith 28 creatures	4 Bridge from Below 4 Cabal Therapy 4 Chalice of the Void 4 Contagion 4 Dread Return 4 Serum Powder 24 other spells

The concept is simple. Fill your graveyard really, really fast by using the combination of Bazaar of Baghdad and the dredge cards to get as many Bridge from Belows into your graveyard and Narcomoeba’s into play, and start using your Dread Returns and Ichorids to make an insane amount of Zombie tokens, all while returning Flame-Kin Zealot into play to pump all the tokens and give them haste. If you get in trouble or feel you need to stop combo, you have an Angel of Despair to get rid of a pesky permanent (like Propaganda) and Cabal Therapies to slow down combo. And the amount of mana used to do all that? 0.

I suppose it’s not quite fair to call it manaless when there are Dryad Arbor (who tap for mana) and cards in the sideboard that require mana, but sufficed to say you can win entire matches without ever putting mana in your mana pool.

Now, Bazaar of Baghdad is a pretty darn rare card if you have to wear pants. So much so that it’s prevalence in Vintage magic has caused it to shoot up into the upper stratosphere of card prices, fetching well over $200 in paper prices. It is the most expensive card in paper to ever appear online short of Imperial Seal, which was part of the Portal Three Kingdoms Set and sells for slightly more in paper. But to help illustrate my point, I’m going to ignore Seal. Bazaar is only a small hop in pricing away from the next level of ultra-rare Magic Cards – yes, I’m talking about Moxes, Ancestral Recall and Time Walk. It is, in fact, the same price as Timetwister. Why is any of this important? Its important because I feel it represents a new willingness to print cards that people thought we might never see online. Cards that define meta games (as Mana Drain, Bazaar of Baghdad and Mishra’s Workshop do). Some people felt WoTC would never put anything as powerful as Bazaar online, though I think most felt it would eventually come. In the In or Out contest, 194 people thought Library of Alexandria would be out. Here are some sample comments that relate to Bazaar:

Not even as good as Bazaar

“This is a very interesting litmus test card. I think if we see this in ME3, we may well see moxen or other P9 cards in ME4. If we don't see it in ME3, I think it means we won't see P9 cards in ME4 (or perhaps ever) and will see this in ME4 instead as they will need *something* to push sales with no dual lands.”

“I see MED4 being Workshop, Bazaar, Library, and tons of extra support cards that won't be included in MED3.”

“Out. Classic is imho more super legacy than weak t1.
Also tolarian,bazaar&workshop> this land.”

I picked those comments because they illustrate a couple of points.

First - that most people felt about Library the same way they felt about Bazaar. That it was in the same category as Library (even though it isn’t – Library is restricted and not used as the basis for several decks and slightly less expensive in paper) and wouldn’t be out until MED3 because WoTC would wait for MED4 to print.

Well, now that it’s here, I think there are two points to make related to that thought. 1) That since there is only one step up from Bazaar in terms of powering up the format, that Power 9 is the only way to go with MED4. 2) That since there is no level above Power 9, that there will NOT be an MED5. I can’t draw any other conclusions, save of course that they never print Power 9 cards… but I remain optimistic.

Secondly – and this has mostly to do with the last comment – Classic is not “super-Legacy” and you had better adjust to that fact very quickly. Mana Drain and now Bazaar of Baghdad are here to stay online, and Classic isn’t going to keep it’s Legacy “leanings” with the cards we’ve already seen in the past couple of days. If that fact bothers you because you enjoy a Legacy-style format, what you need now is a good dose of patience. With Mana Drain and Bazaar of Baghdad and Tinker and Balance and Oath of Druids in 4 months and Tolarian Academy and Yawgmoth’s Will shortly after that, I think you’ll find the time to split the format, if WoTC decides that they still want to do so, is quickly approaching.

Now if someone would just spoil Mishra’s Workshop… please?

(PS - Check out myMTGO.com's Preview)