In the first part, we looked into the injustice toward Zoo decks that City in a Bottle represents. But that’s not enough, what if Zoo were so overpowered that it required such a broken safeguard ? Notice that while The Abyss and Moat are great, they give the fast aggro decks some time to do some damage with their creatures, a “comfort” that CiB doesn’t grant. But we still should evaluate things in terms of their context, that is, the metagame.

Since the swedish-based metagame in its present form is not made to be balanced , we’ll consider only the EC format.

Blackened Is The End

One metagame element that we did go over is the one of the WW-based decks vs RUG

Zoo decks. As we’ve seen it’s very easy for those white-based decks to insert CiBs in their sideboard and get a big advantage in the fight, while the RUG Zoo deck cannot respond in kind. But there’s a way for Zoo to retaliate. For there are other terrible sideboard cards, and as it happen there’s one that hurts WW a lot. Gloom is a black card, so you’d need to play “Dark Zoo” to equalize the chances.

The reason why you can’t really abandon any of the base RUG colors is almost axiomatic. Firstly you need good “range” (direct damage) to beat The Deck in this format, that’s generally the case in that kind of matchup, even more so in a format where control is so strong, so red is mandatory. Secondly, to stand a chance at attacking fast enough in a format with a good control deck, you need at least a good one drop. So at least Savannah Lions or Kird Ape (Ghazbán Ogre is a funny bet, but you won’t risk losing it to a Lightning of either the Chain or Bolt kind). If it’s only the cat, you’re steered into WWrx since we’ve determined that you play red, and if you were playing green you’d play both the cat and the ape, which we don’t, but you won’t find decent enough two drops outside of green that aren’t color intensive so WW it is. If it’s both then you already play RG for the ape, and white for the lion, that doesn’t leave much room for a good three drop unfortunately or early bigger creatures in general, since crusade doesn’t do the trick there and you can’t fill the three mana slot with a good threat, since Serendib Efreet

isn’t available. You’re less impacted by CiB and Gloom which is great, but you lose the blue spoilers, the very important possibility to place Energy Fluxes in your sideboard (and it’s not like you have the mana for Dust to Dust or Shatterstorm to try to compensate), have a hole in your curve at the three mana spot, a hard time to compete with the other aggro decks and their bigger critters, and good reasons to be terrified of both Fireball and Earthquake : not worth it (disappointing, including vs The Deck). If it’s the Ape, red and green are locked in. You can build a good curve, but to do that you need to add blue. So how do you slot black in ? The way to do it, I think, is to play Birds of Paradise instead of moxes. With 4 BoP and 4 City of Brass you can consider that you have 6 black sources, if you follow Frank Karsten’s suggestion to consider each bird as half a source of each color of mana (making the quartet quite excellent overall in a multi coloured-deck). That’s not an awful lot, and White Weenie decks tend to play Icatian Javelineers, so I wouldn’t count on the Birds living for long. But when on the play the Javelineer can’t get your turn 1 BoP, which opens to a potential turn 2 Gloom blow-out. I think if you try to build a Dark Zoo eschewing this BoP plan you’ll find you’ll either have an unreliable manabase, or one that’s just too large. Many people forget that moxes are mono-colored sources of mana, which some decks can’t really afford to play. Moxes aren’t actually auto-includes, see some examples here and there in the Old School 95 format. Anyways, here’s how I would build such a 94 EC Dark Zoo deck :

Note the other advantages of the BoPs : they combine better than the Moxes with Energy Flux, another broken sideboard card, and a quite important one to fight The Deck and Workshop decks -among others. What’s more they’re great to sacrifice when facing an Abyss and it seems people don’t play Wrath of God anymore. I don’t find that pure White Weenie doesn’t offer enough resistance to The Deck, as we’ve seen you need direct damage to beat control. So, currently we see a lot of “Pink weenie” decks in the EC metagame. That’s good, but I tend to favor adding blue to that (in a manner which seems to have been premiered by Erik “Sehl” Larsson in Sweden quite some time ago), because I find the combination of Sleight of Mind (need to fight those Glooms), blue power cards and Energy Fluxes is just too good not to change 4 plains for 4 Tundras (although as far as “unpowered” decks go, Pink Weenie is among the top choices for sure). Here’s the Next Level WW I’ve tested the above Dark Zoo deck against :

I find that matchup to be fair. So the balance between the two main style of aggro decks may not be a problem after all (we’d want to have two competitive aggro deck rather than one, but assuming they both play their role in keeping control in check if one trounces the other then only one is actually competitive).

Another EC Deck The Deck

Here to justify the problematic nature of the card in the metagame I have to do something that would probably justify an article in itself. But I need it now, so here goes : my current The Deck list in the EC format. Note that I have several ways to build a The Deck deck (damn if there ever was a name for a deck that would make you spell some absurd sentences!), that I’ve tested them, including the traditional ones of course and that I wouldn’t say that their strength vary by an awful lot, but I think there’s still some work to do in EC control. Too often I see control decklists from EC tourney reports that look like Swedish lists. I think having Strip Mines unrestricted changes a lot, and not just because the game is less often decided by a turn 1 Library of Alexandria, or because that makes Mishra’s Workshop’s unrestriction look safer. But also, because one of the most oppressive card for aggro is an untapped Mishra’s Factory backed with counterspell mana. That doesn’t mean that you should necessarily abandon the factories altogether. If they’re overpowered, just because there’s a proportionate solution to the card doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your chances at having a mini-moat on your side. It’s not particularly clear to me, contrary to what Brian Weissman advise, that replacing them for a Strip Mine plan is better. Sometimes it is, but many times you just draw a dead Strip Mine when a live Mishra’s Factory (powered by the modern rules) would end up being the Mini-Moat that would save your life. But since as a control deck you have to prioritize your chances against aggro that last possibility is probably to be favored. I did wander along the Strip Mine route, considering that the pump knights also make the factories even less relevant, and that aggro decks tend to be lighter in mana, but after many tests and consideration I’ve reverted to try and abuse the little land that could too much. Another important reason : the Strip Mine way is way too slow. While less durable than in Swedish 94, the MF will still get some points in now and then. Hence the power to hold back some of the opponent army is to be used. It’s a bit of a bet to use Moat to try to block pink weenies decks, they typically play 3+ disenchant maindeck, plus a Chaos Orb. What’s more they don’t combine well with the MFs. The Abyss suffers from being an enchantment too and Workshops decks are a thing, but more importantly the white pump knight create situations where, along with White Knights and MF of their own, the enchant world from hell doesn’t nearly do enough to WW (also, as seen in the Zoo list above, BoP and armada of efficient Zoo beater regularly means that The Abyss is too little, too late there too). So here comes the shocker : I’ve reverted back to good old Wrath of God.

Of course it’s tough to assemble two white mana in the Deck, especially in this format, but if they want to block that with Strip Mines, it means they won’t attack your Mini-Moats. They can’t do it all, and whatever plan they chose you’re still very well equipped. Also, while we’re at it, let’s screw burn altogether by relying on an Ivory Tower/WoG combo. Life gain is a necessary element of classical control decks anyways. Without it, control just find themselves losing to burn, even when it looks like they’ve stabilized. The reason being : with Mana Drain restricted, you won’t be playing much counterspells, so most burn will go through anyways. I think in the EC format you can’t just copy the Swedish control program : aggro just improves too much with the unrestricted Strip Mines. Playing a swedish list in such a format, it won’t take you too long to notice what makes you lose : the only weak card in the deck (that’s Jayemdae Tome for you, buddy !).

When such an important slot is used to play something that not only won’t affect the board, but also can only hope to try to replace itself a turn later, you’ll lose to appropriately build aggro lists. Also, the card is almost sure to fail at replacing itself, cause what are the chances that you get a 4 drop on its first activation, after you’ve wasted it anyway by trying to make a cantrip out of your card drawing engine ? Oh and a four drop that wouldn’t be called J.Tome is what you could call replacing itself. Of course you’re really hoping to get a StP or something cheap and life-saving so as to keep the dream of surviving while toming, but really you need an unbalanced format for that to be possible (like, as Weissman pointed out, back in the day multiple Mana Drain legal, or as in the Swedish format, factories making small creatures recoil to the point of giving you plenty of time to survived despite the high cost of JT’s activation). Basically Jayemdae Tome is a win-more card that happens to be one of the only self-sufficient card drawing engine in the format. That’s the card that make you lose, since you only can lose to aggro (in principle), and that’s how you lose to it. The answer of course is that you need proper board-breaking cards in the 4 mana slot. You can’t bank everything on the mirror like they do in Sweden, you need to adapt and use more anti-creature measures. Now while life gain is an essential component of control, card drawing also is, so I’m not convinced we should abandon completely the tomes. It’s most likely a necessary weakling, but three definitely aren’t adapted to such an environment. Transmute artifact helps, and also one might want to consider Sylvan Library, since that works well with both the transmute and life gain anyways. 94 EC The Deck Tower :

So what’s the deal ? The deal is I find the matchup versus those aggro decks too close to call.. given infinite time. There will still be many matches that control won’t have the time to win, despite the help of the factories. Which is great, since, as you probably know : the normal order of things is that aggro will lose to midrange, which will lose to control which loses to aggro (that’s just an overview, combo, aggro-control, burn and other oddities aren’t factored in there, we’re just painting with broad strokes here). Hence the EC format healthiness, aggro does keep control in check, though by the skin of its clock-aware teeth.

Two City in a Bottle plus one Transmute Artifact. Sure I play a deck that wants a lot of

mana and plays 3+ City of Brass +1 LoA. But the Zoo decks play the same amount of Arabian Nights lands, so that’s not much of a factor, the most important factor is that I have a two mana hoser. And it changes things, and in the wrong way, that is, the aggro deck now loses to the control deck. Compounded to the fact that I’m not feeling WW variants doing all that well (lone Crusade feel sad, real sad) I see that as a real problem : the truth of the matter is I think the Eternal Central metagame hasn’t matured yet. It’s not terrible, and we see less and less Zoo lists (CiBs obliging), more and more pink weenie ones, which absolutely makes sense, but the well built and fast piloted control list can overcome both of those decks, as is, and that’s a problem since it’s the best equipped to deal with everything else in general. You want aggro to put enough pressure on control so that they have to allocate so much slots to defending themselves against aggro that it limits its ability in other kind of matchups (typically midrange, sometimes combo or other archetypes). I think the obvious way to give aggression a chance is to ban City in a Bottle. Restricting it would help, but as said in the first part, Transmute Artifact exist, and make such a restriction a bit tame.

The Midrange Non-Case

But what of midrange you might ask ?

Well here’s the thing : as much I like a challenge, and believe me I tried, I don’t see myself or anybody coming anywhere to a midrange decklist in 93/94 that could be a player on the competitive level. To be a contender such a list should have decent winrates (or rather losing rates) vs The Deck, and the reverse towards aggro. Now in a CiB world it might not seem too hard to build, say, a Grixis-based list that would combine the benefits of crazy sideboard cards like CiB and Gloom to contain aggro decks (a bit as I did in the EC event in Genoa), I’m not even that sure on that one, but with regard to balancing the format, I don’t need to, because I don’t see midrange coming anywhere close to acceptable loserates vs The Deck. So that’s it for the 93/94 format, no midrange to play a role at the top level. If you want a more balanced format go to Old School 95 (as it happens I hold regular tournaments in this format, serendipity !). The situation for Power Monolith combo ain’t that much better : don’t need to see how it fares vs aggro, since it mostly folds to control.

Now What ?

But now, let’s imagine the bottles banned. We’d have to devolve to canned beer and ethanol injections. Also, wouldn’t we have an imbalance between Gloom-boosted Dark Zoo and CiB-orphaned WWrx decks ? Not really, as some of you have noticed, there’s a very nice card, and I would add, much more interesting strategically than the barbaric CiB, that sees almost no play but would cripple the Zoo armada in a much more reasonable measure : Meekstone. Now that would require siding the Crusade out for WW, which is sort of a cost, or another strategical angle to the card. WW-based decks are made of small creature, which will either pump themselves (Order of Leitbur), have power inferior to three, or won’t tap (Serra Angel). It’s the ideal terrain for a Meekstone sideboard plan : your creatures aren’t affected, some of theirs if tapped will stay so, and if they want to play some to keep untapped, well those aren’t such great walls when they make you lose one life per turn (Serendibs) or give forestwalk to one of the opposing critter (Erhnies). Also, and again, it’s not that easy for a Dark Zoo deck to bet on Gloom since the mana isn’t there for a reliable black mana in the early game. I think that matchup is promising, and looking to be not only balanced, but interesting -absent multiple City in the Bottle.