I thought nothing would get published here this week. My ISP crapped on me at the worst possible moment : the moment when you’re trying to do a deal to get a Black Lotus from afar, and the vendor doesn’t seem very keen on giving you much time, there seems to be other potential buyers on the same line, and all you have is a randomly present but assuredly slow neighbor’s wifi on your phone. Then the ISP did something and left me for the week-end with their “solution”. Since that week-end happened to be immediately followed by the worker’s day, that was one additional day before I got a chance to complain about their so called solution to an actual person. And then suddenly, as I was struggling to finalize the deal, jumping through a billion hoop seemingly put in my way by a universal conspiracy from every possible service involved to mess things up and make a hell of my holidays, there it was, the white stable led, and the blazingly fast fiber connection. I’m not sure how addicted I am to the net. Last time I got disconnected for a long while, I knew I would be before hand, it was for an entire week and it was wonderful. But then again, it was in a heavenly setting : an old village perched on the top of a hill in a mountainous region, mostly doing my two favorite activities, so I’m not sure that counts.

One thing for sure, it’s becoming harder and harder to go off-grid. I’m back on, and the fact is, I’m not proud but it feels great !

On other vital news, I’ve finally reached the point where I can really enjoy writing in English, and writing here played and continues to play a major role in that. Which is not to say that I consider myself bilingual. Enjoying playing with words entails something quite different than being a grammarian or a philologist. In fact not only it isn’t exactly educated, it’s actually rather childish, really. Although I don’t remember that phase, that’s how I imagine it is for kids when they’re still shielded from the -often self-inflicted- grammar-nazism by their innocence and the levity that society grant them then, and yet can be fluent enough to have enough word-toys to play with. Here, I basically shake the words-shaker, blindingly trust the spell-checker’s check, and comfortably release the mumbo-jumbo that comes out of it with the perfect “not my native language” excuse at hand. While it’s certainly nice to feel comfy with a foreign language, it also shines a light on your relationship with your mother tongue (don’t tell me what you do with your mother tongue) : a few weeks ago if you had asked me “do you feel free to write what you want in french ?” I’d have naively answered positively -now I know better.

So excuse me if this is a bit rushed, but I’ve got an itch to scratch. I don’t understand you people. There’s something wrong with the way you choose to win. Let’s get something straight : it’s not serious to try to win by putting your opponent under one life point. That’s not how the game is supposed to be played. It just isn’t. Proof : we start with 20 life points.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way : of course Millstone is what we think about first from that perspective. The Millstone kill is quite slow mind you, but there was a time when people did play with Feldon’s Cane as their wincon. And it wasn’t a fringe deck but one of the best of its time : during Necro summer, the only serious resistance to Necro beside Sligh was Cades’s Prison, a deck after my own liking, that locks you with Winter Orb & Icy Manipulator and then win with a single Feldon’s Cane !

Which is almost 3 times slower a way to win, or more than that considering you may stick several Millstones. Sure in tournament magic it’s not without its shortcomings; basically you can’t really afford to lose a game, otherwise you’ll at best have the time to get a draw. But who cares about that, kitchen magic is where it’s at, it’s so much funnier, so let’s make those game laaaaast.. and win with :

Why the hell would you spend mana every turn without impacting the board, if you could get the same decking potential with a Moat-like effect attached ? That’s not serious, verily. Just draw your deck and then stop drawing while sitting behind your sanctuary in the kitchen (what’s more you can of course use it before that when you have a Tome or any card drawing engine out to survive in case things go wrong). So apologies to the people I’ve subjected to the Millstone win : I haven’t given you my best, I’ll try to do better next time. Maybe I’ll honor you by letting you deck yourselves thx to :

It’s tight as you don’t want to draw too much cards if you want to win like that. But the result is similar as with the Island Sanctuary, only more universal, since Fasting protects you from any source of damage, not just the non-flying ones ! In that case you probably can’t use Braingeyser much as a way to obtain card-advantage. But Braingeyser is easily the best old school wincon already -very verily. The card winconability’s no joke, and if I get the Lotus maybe I’ll get to show you how on the OldSchoolMtg’s twitch show -with a little help from my friends.

Howling Mine I’ve already talked about. It’s a pseudo milling card since it makes your opponent draw his additional cards before you do, and yes it works, and has been done many times. The Mine isn’t as pure a wincon as the other wincons here but it sure is quite the con, with the innocent player thinking that it’s such a cool card letting him drawing cards too. Additionally, if your decks needs combos or synergies, furthermore if your deck is good at preventing your opponent from playing their spells like say, Marc Hernandez’s prison deck from the world ’95 championship final, which by the way also uses the Island Sanctuary wincon since they also combine well with Howling Mine -and which, just in passing, shows that attributing that brand of prison deck to Cade is a dubious move- then the card is unparalleled to set that up for you.

But then, as always comes the dreaded time : it’s LoL time. Library of Leng must, apparently absolutely have to rear its objectively ugly head whenever I think of zany magic tech.. Arf. So here goes : LoL + Disrupting Scepter. Once I’ve drawn the last (useful) card in my library, I activate my Disrupting Scepter, targeting me (for some reason WotC changed its initial “opponent discards a card” functionality), so I discard a card, the card I just drew if that’s all I have, and discard it to the top of my library. Rinse, repeat, recur, deck your opponent, win. So basically I can enjoy an unlimited hand size (and sit on the very high top of my Ivory Tower on the kitchen table), some form of protection from all that discard going around, AND get a wincon if combined with a card-advantage engine ? Sign me in ! That’s not fair, but it works.

To be exhaustive, if you really need to play a filthy creature, Dwarven Armorer can fill that role. Just make sure you don’t attack with it to retain the purity of the game-plan.

Which means -leaving ogt2-legal serious wincons- that Gwendlyn Di Corci, one of the very few old school creatures that can claim to play a decent midrange role (in case you had a craving for some old school midrange action, who knows?) -as in : it’s quite excellent at stopping aggro creatures from attacking, but also has the power to limit the control’s opposition card advantage, and to put them under pressure when need be!- well, Gwendlyn offers a verily serious way to win, provided you also play the LoL game.

And if you “up your game”, you can play a similar game with Mishra’s War Machine, but that doesn’t get a pass from me, everyone’s got their limit and I’ve firmly set this article into seriousness territory. Fuckin’ LoL ! It’s a like a poisonous meme, a mental invasion. After discussing the combo with Bazaar and then Chains of Mephistopheles+Howling Mine it had to impose itself onto me once again.. Wait. Bazaar of Baghdad + Library of Leng ? No I’m not talking about the great filtering ability or the opportunity to discard whatever you feel like discarding. I mean, let’s see : I have three cards left in my library, LoL, Bazaar, and I draw my card for the turn. So I have two cards left in my library, and if I activate my Bazaar, I’ll draw them and I’ll have for sure three cards to discard back to the top of my library, so the next turn I have three cards in my library, draw one and can repeat ad nauseam. Oh Jerry.. I think we just broke Library of Leng !

Ok, time to get even seriouser. Let’s look at the best cards of all time. Black Lotus ? Ancestral Recall ? No : Contract from Below. And it’s not even close. But it’s not a wincon. So let’s just limit ourselves to tournament playable wincons. So Ancestral Recall, right ? Sure, it is a wincon, though an unreliable one as players have taken the habit of not casting it on their opponents, effectively putting themselves in a losing position but well.. as Brian Weissman said, verily the real game changers in the deck and the format are Mind Twist and Library of Alexandria anyways. But that was back then, cause there was much “worse” to be printed :

Here’s another anecdote about Weissman : despite his talent, when Patrick Chapin told him about the superiority of Necropotence, at first he didn’t want to admit it. So they played it out. It went to game 3, and Chapin was in a great position. Weissman would deck himself as he had no wincon left. But Weissman drew a disenchant and destroyed Chapin’s Necropotence. Chapin, having drawn his entire library got decked. So Weissman was right, right ? Of course not, a match proving nothing but, more importantly, Chapin had made a huge mistake. See, Chapin was very right to play Necro, overrate it he did not, indeed he underrated it. He had another Necro in hand, had he played it, he would have been the one letting his opponent deck himself. So that’s the lay of the verily serious land people. You can let people deck themselves with a moat effect, with a life gaining effect, or you can deck them with one of the absolute best card drawing engine ever printed. While it’s not in the realm of impossibility that I might have overstated a thing or two here and there, there’s still an undeniable fact : the Skull IS a wincon.

Period.