Classic, The Guinea Pig - by Dangerlinto

Meet Classy, the Classic Guinea Pig
Meet Classy, the Classic Guinea Pig
Most people equate being the guinea pig with being subject to unmitigated torture or wild research which may or may not be beneficial. However, generally, the life of a guinea pig in the lab is probably pretty good. Much like being an animal in a zoo – sure people gawk at you all day, but you get fed, you generally have nothing to fear, and and sometimes the experiments are beneficial. I mean, what if you were a guinea pig who was being experimented on to find out how many times you could mate in a month? Not all bad, right?

In fact, Classic itself owes its existence to experimentation. Essentially, Classic’s humble beginnings start with a little experiment in releasing Mirage online which was a precursor to releasing all the “proper” blocks to MTGO. If the Mirage experiment was successful, they’d continue. They same logic applied to the Master’s edition sets which have really come to define classic – the first was a “Let’s see how this one goes” experiment that simply kept going.

So that is why it doesn’t bother me in the slightest that R&D and the DCI essentially recently confirmed that they are using classic as a sort of guinea pig. Tom LaPille's column on the recent unbanning of Dream Halls and Entomb (and Metalworker though that’s not online yet) were essentially due to the fact that they’ve been allowed to run free unrestricted in Classic.

Wisdom from the Jedi Master
Wisdom from the Jedi Master
While several people had postulated over the past years that this was happening for some time, in many ways having Tom come right out and say it sent some message to the magic community. In fact, depending on your own personal point of view, it sends a variety of messages. As Obi-wan said: “You’re going to find many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view”.

The first message that I think gets sent by saying so is that, yes, R&D and the DCI are aware of what’s going on in Classic. If perhaps you were of the opinion that Classic was a curiosity only to Wizards of the Coast in much the same way that, say, Vanguard was treated by Wizards (the format was recently discontinued), and followed radically but exclusively by it’s die hard fans, it’s hardly possible now to hold that opinion. In this particular matter, good old-fashioned facts make it hard to argue with this. In the past year, Entomb and Dream Halls have combined for a whopping total of 3 placing decks in tournaments. One Dream Halls aberration managed a 7th place finish, one early Dredge deck made use of a full compliment of Entomb back in January and recently a Sutured Ghoul combo deck made use of a singleton Entomb. In other words, they weren’t just grasping at straws with the underuse of those cards – the facts show they are correct. And if they are correct, you’d have to think that they’d done their research. And if they’ve done their research on classic, it’s very likely they follow it as more than just a curiosity.

Further to that point, if R&D are using classic as a gauge for Legacy’s B&R list, that sends a small message out to the Legacy community as well. Too long have I witnessed people coming to Classic armed with the knowledge they’ve attained from following Legacy and Vintage, and yet so little going in the opposite direction. And while I don’t have stats in front of me for the number of sanctioned Legacy and Vintage events that have taken place worldwide, I doubt that the number so vastly outnumbers Classic events that the disparity of information flow shouldn't occur in one direction. Do any of you reading this article limit your information intake to just Classic? Do you not also visit other sites like The Source, Star City Games, or The Mana Drain amongst others? I’m willing to bet a large number of you do. Now how many of the people you see visiting those sites do you think visit this site, or PureMTGO and read up on Classic? Even if the meta game information for Legacy and Vintage are very different from Classic, many of the applicable decisions you need to make for deck designing and game play are very, very similar. So in that respect – message sent. Legacy folk – better check out what’s going on in Classic, because it’s making decisions for your format. Who knows, Vintage – you may be next.

Some of the messages, of course, are mixed. I think there is another message in there that is specific to the 3 cards they unbanned – namely that these three cards are generally combo pieces (engines and a tutor) and that, if Classic can’t make these cards work, probably Legacy can’t either. Classic has available to it more powerful combo enablers than Legacy – see Vampiric and Demonic Tutor, Mana Crypt and Mind’s Desire... in some ways it makes sense to say “if they can’t make Entomb and Dream Halls work in classic, they probably can’t make them work in Legacy”. But then, it might just as much sense to say “Of course they can’t make Entomb and Dream Halls work in Classic – they have better combos to play with, like Flash (Flash) and Elves (Skullclamp, Earthcraft) and Ad Nauseam (Mana Crypt, Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, Demonic Consultation). Depending on how much you think of the DCI’s ability to understand the differences between Classic and Legacy, you might think the message sent was totally wrong. It depends greatly on how you view the two formats. Personally, I would be upset if I played Legacy and was only offered the “well it’s not busted in classic, so we’ll unban it in Legacy” – not because of any misguided notions about Classic, but because it doesn’t explicitly say that they considered Legacy’s metagame. I don’t think the two are all that similar. But they also added that they think it will “create new decks in Legacy". If you are the type who sees the B&R list as something that should be reinvented once and a while when possible for experimentation purposes, you could be very happy about the move. Personally, I think R&D generally assumes people know that if they cause problems with unbanning/unrestriction, that they can change their minds. They did with Gush in Vintage. Some people just like the clarity of being told that each and every time.

MED Juzam Djinn
People were actually worried this would cause problems
For Classic enthusiasts, I think messages were sent quite some time ago when Master’s Edition 2 was released and Necropotence wasn’t immediately restricted. They were definitely, at that point at least, willing to use Classic as a guinea pig to see what they could get away with in terms of not restricting. Demonic Consultation and Necropotence definitely needed restriction, but they were willing to give them a shot, and lo and behold they proved too much for Classic. In many ways, they are still using the format as a guinea pig. We still have 4x Mystical Tutor, 4x Lion’s Eye Diamond, 4x Lotus Petal and 4x Mind’s Desire and yet we still haven’t made a Desire deck work. And yet, if the B&R list removed those 4 cards off the Vintage restricted list, I guarantee you uproar of epic proportions (good or bad) from the Vintage community. We still have 4x Skullclamp and the card is hardly ubiquitous – in fact, it appears in a single deck archetype. And yet, if the Legacy update had have unbanned Skullclamp, the Legacy community would probably have thought R&D had lost their marbles.

It feels like Classic is the format where R&D sees what they can get away with – and for the most part, that’s a good thing. They released Necropotence and Demonic Consultation and they found out they couldn’t get away with leaving cards at that power off the restricted list. On the negative side, we did have to deal with a fair bit of Necropotence dominance. On the positive side, classic didn’t suffer all that much, and look what’s happened since then - Demonic Tutor, Balance, Channel, Strip Mine and Tinker all immediately hit the restricted list. I doubt they’ll ever take such a chance again. You can go back even further than that – in the first Master’s Edition, yes they released Force of Will, but in many respects that was an easy decision. Much harder might have been the decision to release Moat or Juzam Djinn - cards that sold for quite a fair chunk of change offline. And look at the effect that had on the paper world – none. In Master’s Edition 2 they tried again with even more relevant and just as (or more) expensive paper cards, like Mana Crypt and Imperial Seal. Their effect was the same. Master’s Edition 3 took it a step further in terms of relevance and price – Mana Drain and Bazaar of Baghdad. These are two of the big three money engines that run Vintage (Workshop being the 3rd, and Dark Ritual is cheap). And yet, not a blip on the price of those cards in the cardboard bending world. I wonder what the next step for Master’s Edition 4 might be.

Maybe it’s not so bad being a guinea pig.