Unrestrict Balance.

Hey, hi. No, I’m not joking. Are you ?

Why the hell should Balance be restricted ? Do you have a proper, solid reason for its restriction ?

Ok, that’s a bit aggressive. Truth be told, not that long ago, reading that I’d have automatically assumed the writer to be insane. So I’ll just tell it as the story of how I got insane, I guess.

Warning : some pics might be softly NSFW

So as I said, I came to old school formats through nostalgia, which pushed me into the Original Type II. After my first lesson, which was that my old control-millstone strategy wasn’t at all the boogeyman of the format, I realized Balance wasn’t restricted in that format and I thought “What fool we were not to play 4 of those in our decks !” And so I tried to abuse the card, and tried and tried and mostly failed. Then I played some old school 93/94, a format where finally I could play ctrl-UW and win ! Ok, more like 5c-control, bust still a mostly blue-white control deck. After a while, I started noticing something. That card Balance -the supposed Armageddon+Wrath of god+Mind Twist– I almost never wanted to cast it. The card was just sitting in my hand doing nothing and was telling me : “Play me and Mind Twist yourself. Oh, and how much would you give to have a Moat or a simple, good ol’ Wrath of God in my stead ?” Of course from time to time it would save my ass, often at the cost of a significant part of my hand, but still, it happens. And when it does it feels quite spectacular. You were strapped for mana, attacked by a swarm, a turn away from death and suddenly your savior arrives : Balance. Those cases are a bit like the Channel/Fireball effect that I discussed in that former report, by their sensationalism, they twist your impression of the card, whereas cold numbers would tell a very different story. And in this specific case, I just had too many of “Do you want to Mind Twist yourself” and too little of “I gave you a new lease on life, and for two mana what’s more !” So I started playing without it in my Book deck, and felt mostly the better for it. You have to take in those times where you have 4 mana, a Demonic Tutor, but no Balance to search for, it hurts in the beginning, but it hurts rarely, so it stayed like this, like Martin Berlin and more and more other The Book players, Stephen Menendian starting 60 “The Tinker The Deck” and I expect things to normalize to zero balance played in control decks.

Such is the background that one day prompted me to have a little bit of fun and indulge my curiosity : daring to test Adam Maysonet’s Rack-Balance (MRB) deck. That step only made sense in part. I’ve got to tell you, that was the day. No, not the day I played it, the day I found the decklist, probably in The Duelist. The day the world informed me that despite my local, isolated if not inbred success, I was not the shit. No way in hell I’d have come up with something that ingenious. Not in a million years. The discovery of MRB was the day I knew I was at best a second-grade deckbuilder.

I tested the original list, and did a bit of updating ultimately settling on that.

Long story short : MRB is a mediocre deck in terms of power-level. It broke my mind, and you could even say a little piece of my heart, but that deck that holds such a crucial place in my appreciation of deckbuilding doesn’t hold up to modern standard. It just doesn’t.

First off, it gets owned in a disgusting fashion by any control deck, and it’s not even close. Do you play 4 counterspells and 4 Disenchants ? Well, the rest of your deck better be pathetic if you want MRB to stand a chance against yours. That is, you still need to know how play against it. Just out of principle I’ll let you discover it for yourself if your interested and haven’t already. Things went downhill from there, as I assumed that it would at least destroy weeny/aggro decks, but realized that it was very hard to find a good matchup for it. Oh and I forgot to say, it needs Strip Mine to be restricted, period. If that’s the case, it needs the opponent not to have access to much artifact removal. That is, it would need them to be mono-black. Except black has access to two hilariously good enchantments against the MRB. Which one is the funniest against a deck whose engine is based on Bazaar of Baghdad and Sylvan Library : Underworld Dreams or Chains of Mestiphopheles ? (The second one, obviously, but still; you can have a jolly good time with the much more affordable Underworld Dreams against MRB.)

But well, we’ll just have to admit that Maysonet’s Rack-Balance isn’t the be-all end-all, and move on. The Balance case doesn’t rest entirely on the shoulders of Adam Maysonet I guess, even though it came down in history as the most dangerous one.

There has to be a way to abuse it. We don’t have Zuran Orb in the format, and Dark Heart of the Woods isn’t white, so you can say goodbye to the Armageddon part : it’s a relic of post Ice-Age times, when Balance+Zuran Orb was the biggest play you could do in type II. So let’s aim for a 2 mana Wrath of God+ Mind Twist combo. That means no proper creatures (Mishra’s Factory and Jade Statue can and will be considered of course), or in very limited numbers (some MRB lists features two Atogs). You probably want to empty your hand relatively fast, or find a way to prevent your opponent from doing so, lest the Mind Twist part wouldn’t do much. Since lands are equalized too, that leaves you with artifacts, enchantments instants and sorceries as the bulk of your deck. But as we’ve seen there are awesome anti-artifact measure, including massive ones, in almost every color. I’m not, or at least wasn’t that insane. This article is months in the making. If it’s hard for you to believe that Balance may be balanced in some formats, don’t assume it came easy to me. I had to regularly come back to the testing phase, wondering if this hadn’t been all just an accident of variance, like a charade that fate would have played on me. It never changed, any strongly artifact-based deck just had that inherent weakness in it, that couldn’t be totally negated by the hand-emptying ability of Balance. Still, here’s one of the most decent list I could come up with. I know it doesn’t look like much, and if you’re so inclined you can certainly ignore it on the basis that sure, I’m no Zwi, Pat Chapin or Mike Flores. But I’ll insist, even after months of trying and while I don’t consider it as the most powerful 4-Balances list I could come up with, of all those this is the most powerful one that actually is centered around the sorcery :

That list performed more solidly than the MRB, which was too easy to disrupt. Jade Burn doesn’t upset control decks, but has a more robust matchup against Electric Eel Aggro and other UR Burn strategies than MRB. It seems to beat Deadguy Ale, though decklists can vary a lot, and ErhnamGeddon is a bad matchup; against WW decks it does about as well as MRB, that is, the matchup is fair, depending on the amount of artifact hate in the weenie deck. Of course one could try to improve a bit by adding a bit of black and green for Regrowth and Demonic Tutor, it’s a choice to open yourself to Blood Moon oppression or not, and since blue wasn’t in the mix, I chose to be Blood Moon-proof in this case, but I doubt ignoring it for the few out of colors spoilers you can get would transform this modest deck into a powerhouse.

The problem is almost intrinsic : you want to abuse the card, so you want to empty their hand, so you want to play the Rack, and you need to play the moxes, the Library of Leng gambit relies on playing another artifact, and so does the Disrupting Scepter/Jade Statue one. Once you go the Rack route it seems you’re doomed to make your deck fair by way of playing a lot of artifacts.

Ok, so as for me and after months of trying, there’s no killer list centered around Balance. Still, it might be a killer adjunct in some decks, we have to explore that path. To recap; here are the limitations that Balance put on your deckbuilding if you want it to be awesome : almost no creature spell, almost no card advantage other than the hand-emptying effect of Balance and not too much lands (and certainly no Fastbond game). I see two type of decks that fit the description : prison and combo, and by that I certainly don’t mean that all of those fit that description, let alone in this old-school, where Parfait plays more Howling Mine than Winter Orbs (and with good reasons!), Mirrorball has a quite conniving way to generate card-advantage in addition to playing Fastbond like Fork Recursion do, and Power Monolith decks, by way of needing UU to play their key spell are almost pushed towards traditional blue CA. By the way, one of the interesting thing with Balance is that blue generally doesn’t fit in well with the card[^1]. Ancestral Recall is at risk of being undone by Balance and counterspells can sit stupidly in the hand impairing your ability to Mind Twist the adversary. Yet, that’s too bad but Blood Moon with white doesn’t make much sense : your mana will give them white through their Fellwar Stones, which means they won’t have much problem disenchanting it. Still, it’s quite likely that the path -if any- is through (some) enchantments, since there’s only so much you can do with non-permanents, and too much artifacts without counterspells to protect them is an impediment. Field of Dreams/Millstone combo is too slow, too control-ish of a deck to fit in with the card adequately. Flood could help making your opponent overextend, but the biggest decks in the game don’t play non-flyers (UR often doesn’t) or don’t care much since they’ll drown you in card advantage and take control of the game (The Book) before taking care of the card if they feel like it. Land Tax seems risky, but I still tried it in TaxEdge and got a train-wreck of a deck. Sylvan Library is already tested in the MRB, but can be used elsewhere. A card that has been surprisingly good with Balance is Evil Presence, it’s no Spreading Seas for sure, but it costs less and drawing a card is not what you’re aiming for in a Balance Deck, also in a format where Strip Mines are restricted, Library of Alexandria and Mishra’s Factories so crucial, it played out well on the curve and with the program. Chains of Mephistopheles is a fascinating card that I will expand on with tech I don’t remember seeing elsewhere in the next blog entry, so I won’t develop too much here, but I don’t think both cards play particularly well together, as Balance doesn’t really care that your opponent draws many cards, as it will equalize cards in hand. Anyways, I tried to include balances into Power Monolith and it didn’t pan out. Roaming the old newsgroups I heard about other Balance decks, some didn’t make much sense (like big creatures plus Balances), but I felt obliged to try the Prison/Titania/Balance tech : no dice. The most effective deck I’ve found that plays 4 Balance almost plays it as an afterthought, it’s not subtle, you might as well call it The Brute, it mostly plays gigantic Forked Fireballs, after having set-up as much Mana Flares and Mana Vault as it can (keeping one or two vaults in hand to play for the big final fireball when you fear mass artifact removal, hence being somewhat less affected by it). White gives it a nice way to get rid of circle of protections and since the deck doesn’t try to get card advantage per se (it might still do by way of Forking an Ancestral Recall) or to have a creature plan, Balance just fits in fine. Honestly I feel too ashamed to publish such a list, it’s just not my style, and was developed just as an attempt to break Balance. While the decks does surprisingly well maindeck, it’s no metagame breaker. And if you stay in white/red, you can probably build a sort of affordable powerful deck by using Fellwar Stones instead of Moxes. Which leads me to one of Balance advantage : an unlimited version is quite cheap and that’s if you’re playing in a strict old school version (a revised one is worth 2 bucks, top). It also feels fair to give white a good 2 mana spell that has a chance to fight Ancestral Recall and other broken cards, with blue having Counterspell, red Fork, black Hymn to Tourach if you play with Fallen Empires and green.. well I guess Sylvan Library will take the spot.

A thousand time or more I came back to it, thinking there had to be a way, to no avail. While I’m not the best deckbuilder alive, people in general back then where even worse, not by inferior wits of course.

Two decades of progress frantically sped-up by online sharing will do that, to most decks at least, which is a common thread I’ve found when timewalking old historical formats : what ruled often didn’t really deserve to. And as for WotC, it took them some time to find their pace and some rhyme and reason, hell, it took them almost half a decade to give Necropotence the axe !

As for Balance, I have little doubt it would be broken in many formats, and considering Ice Age and unretricted Zuran Orb were about to be released, its restriction was probably for the best. But in the context of 93/94, we know that some restrictions were unfounded and were removed without damage (like Copy Artifact and Fork), and I won’t be talking about the earlier ridiculous WotC restrictions or lack thereof, as that wouldn’t be fair : that restriction happened in ’95, April 19th to be accurate, concurrently as the Fork’s one, and I consider that like Fork, that decision was unfounded and hasty (Tom Wylie actually took quite some time to consider those cases, but things were moving real slow back then).

So, while I don’t like to assume what the reader is thinking or putting words into their mouths, realize that the Balance case is a special case, not only is it fair to assume that most of the readership would find the proposition preposterous, I myself would have automatically assumed the card an unshakable member of the restricted list, and only came to that notion through a series of almost accidental discoveries. It’s not that everything has been tried and that I could know for sure that it wouldn’t be broken eventually. It wouldn’t surprise me all that much if it could be, it’s merely that unless people break it fast, they deserve the time to try. That considered here’s my message to you : the onus is on the accusation to prove the accused card of any brokenness. I consider proven that the historical Balance strategies are not format warping in any ways. I’m just me and did all I could, so if you still want to maintain that Balance is to be restricted, it’s your job to provide a decklist that “breaks it”. Good luck.

[^1]: This is not always true. Florida Orb and Finkel-Blance for instance rely on blue for some counterspells and tutors, but those decks weren’t aiming all that much for the Mind Twist effect, but rather for Wrath+Armageddon by way of Zuran Orb; and those counterspells were mostly Force of Wills, which work as a premium when there’s no land in play. Also, not the topic of the day, but if you think those decks were the most powerful of their times, I have again to refute that argument : I have done some extensive timewalking in old school type II, including this specific one that ultimately saw those strategies emerge and can’t say that they’re my top picks, but that would be a topic for much much later, if we were ever to timewalk to fall ’96.