Since the very beginning, Magic has used mana
costs—color requirements in particular—as part of a way to balance cards. Look at these two cards, from the original
Magic set. They’re the same color, the same rarity,
and the same converted mana cost, but one’s a 2/2 and the other’s a 2/3, meaning one
straight up beats the other in combat. Even though their converted mana costs are
the same, their mana costs are different. Now, if you’re playing only red, then there’s
basically no difference between these two cards. You can cast them both on turn three no problem. Now let’s say you’re playing red and black. You can’t cast Hurloon Minotaur without
two red sources, and thanks to the random nature of Magic, sometimes you’ll draw only
one red source and the Minotaur’ll be stranded in your hand. The idea is that restrictive mana costs give
card designers license to jack up the power level of cards. Magic’s been around for a quarter of a century,
but Magic designers still use mana restrictions as a way to push the power level of individual
cards. Goblin Chainwhirler is a good example of what
happens when R&D leans a little too hard on the premise that mana restrictions are prohibitive
when, in reality, they aren’t. In case you’ve been living under a rock
for the past six months or so, the best deck in Standard has been a black-red aggressive
deck that’s mostly red but has a small black splash that facilitates Scrapheap Scrounger,
Unlicensed Disintegration, and the Ribbons half of Cut // Ribbons. Goblin Chainwhirler was never supposed to
work in a two-color deck; its whole design is contingent on the hope that playing it
forces the deckbuilder to go one color and lose out on the options an additional color
brings to the table. R&D messes this up a lot, particularly with
sets that have a multicolor theme. Here’s a really extreme example. This deck’s almost ten years old at this
point, so most of you watching probably don’t know what any of the cards do. That’s okay, because we’re gonna take
a deeper look at the spells here real quick. Look at the mana costs here. This is… god, this is so bonkers. I can’t believe Magic used to be like this. We took out all the colored mana symbols from
the maindeck of that Cruel Control deck and uh yeah this is absurd. A straight up five-color deck that’s base-grixis
but can support a card that has four green mana symbols in its casting cost. This isn’t hyperbole: that shouldn’t be
possible. The problem with Lorwyn and Alara Standard
is that the cards were clearly designed with the assumption that colored mana symbols were
a real restriction. This premise falls apart thanks to two things:
Reflecting Pool and a cycle of uncommon lands from Lowyn. One of the tenants Magic was built on is that
the colors of the cards matter—you shouldn’t be able to just put all the best cards in
a pile and call it a day. Admittedly, the Vivid cycle’s pretty slow—they
all enter the battlefield tapped, after all—but between Plumeveil and Volcanic Fallout, the
five-color control deck had plenty of ways to stave off aggressive strategies wait wait
wait… Plumeveil and Volcanic Fallout. Both intended to be cast on turn three…
in the same deck. Mana that good probably wasn’t intentional. I’m pretty sure the Vivid land/Reflecting
Pool combo was intentional, but slow combos like that are usually preyed on by aggressive
decks. However, stuff like Plumeveil, Volcanic Fallout,
Wall of Reverence, Terror, Remove Soul, et cetera—all ensure that aggro couldn’t
really do anything. The roadblocks were good by themselves, and
the fact that the deck got to cast the best six and seven-mana cards in the format to
close out games, unencumbered by something as trivial as mana costs, meant that nothing
else really had a chance. The idea here is that mana’s usually better
than people think. Yeah, a mono-color deck is always an option,
but empirical evidence suggests that you should be willing to take on some risk. Not only are the risks rarely as steep as
they seem, but the payoffs are usually worth it. Here’s an example from Return to Ravnica
Standard: good ol’ Bant Control. White-blue-green. Like Plumeveil before it, this deck had its
own annoying roadblock to aggro decks: Thragtusk, which comboed with Restoration Angel to nauseating
effect. Playing against those two cards was not fun. To add to the unfun, the deck also played
the full four Sphinx’s Revelation, because the thing Stroke of Genius needed was lifegain. For a control deck, Reid’s Bant Control
list had a lot of win conditions, thanks to the ever-present Slaughter Games, but the
most unintuitive win condition was Nephalia Drownyard, which falls outside of the Bant
colors. So why would Reid give up consistency for
a Millstone? As Riley Knight noted the other week, the
manabase in Return to Ravnica Standard is going to be very similar to the manabase we’re
about to see in Guilds of Ravnica Standard, but there’s one big difference: RTR Standard
had Farseek, meaning any shockland Return to Ravnica had to offer was just two mana
away. This resulted in some messed up stuff, ie.,
the deck had enough room in the manabase to support a copy of Nephalia Drownyard, which…
is a colorless land. With an activated ability. That requires black mana. This deck isn’t black! It didn’t matter. The splash wasn’t free—no splash really
is—but the risk was worth the payoff. Reid Duke top 8’d two Standard GPs in a
row with Bant Control—if the deck actually gave up consistency to accommodate Nephalia
Drownyard, Reid probably wouldn’t have done so well at both tournaments. He probably wouldn’t have even played the
deck. This is going waaaaaay back, but the 61-card
monstrosity that won Worlds in 1997 was a five-color deck that had ten Swamps in it. It’s… mostly black, but it’s got some
other stuff. Like Man-o’-War. And Uktabi Orangutan. I don’t know. This deck’s a little dubious, I’m not
gonna lie. Like, everything in here is a 2/2 and it has
Earthquake, so… yeah. But it won Worlds, so who am I to judge? I’m just an idiot in your computer or phone
or tablet. The reason the deck worked at all is because
of City of Brass, Gemstone Mine, and Undiscovered Paradise. The deck plays three of each instead of four-four-one,
ostensibly because he couldn’t figure out which lands were the optimal choice. Whatever. The point is that the mana back then allowed
for some wild stuff. Thawing Glaciers was a fixture in this Standard
format as well, but this deck plays five colors without giving up any speed. Man, this deck is baffling. It just looks like he mashed two draft decks
together. Magic was wild. The point here is that fortune favors the
bold. If you think you can cast Niv-Mizzet, Parun,
well then guess what? You probably can. Screw the math. If you can dream it, you can do it. But hey, maybe you feel differently about
this. That’s what the comments are for. After you like and subscribe, be sure to lay
out, in painstaking detail, your manabase philosophy. And keep in mind that, as always, sound logic
is forbidden in comment sections. Thanks so much for watching, and I will see
you next time.
