The Menace | A History of Siege Rhino

this episode is brought to you by card Kingdom go to card Kingdom comms studies to pick up seed dry nose another magic product alright let's do this you know those times in your life when you're fully on your grinds back on your [ __ ] doing your thing feeling good about it and then out of nowhere comes well come some little thorn to prick right into your side the older you get the more you understand anyway for magic players that proverbial thorn hopped right over the fence and into our yards on the sunny afternoon of September 26 2014 it was bright eyed and leather tailed and smiling ear to ear just like this little fellow we didn't know it then but for the following five hundred and sixty days it would slowly grind away at our patients and our tournament reports reappear on discussion forums and design blogs ad nauseam and push an entire standard meta game to the limits of its elasticity hang on to your seats here seed right Oh number one today I want to look back at a very pivotal time in magics competitive history to better understand how one card can define an era this is the story of siege rhino or as I've come to know it the Menace our story begins here on channel fireball calm under the banner of its most esteemed representative on September 8th 2014 lsv wrote a preview article on siege rhino just three days after debuting savage knuckle blade to the magic world we'll get to that card in a bit oftentimes when looking back at initial impressions of new cards out of context though were met with overrated takes and fantastical narratives caught up in the hype of new sets but not here lsv had it right top to bottom from the very beginning in fact this paragraph reads almost like prophecy trampled and making the opponent lose three life gives this an aggressive bent and if there's an absent beat-down deck this could be the perfect top of the curve ABS an aggro is a white black read active place quick powerful threats and looks to win the game by simply outclassing the opponent with better creatures hand disruption and versatile removal spells top end threats like siege rhino we may rock or whisper wood can simply be better than anything your opponent can muster gaining three life also makes this a very plausible anti agro card which points towards both mid-range and control seed Rhino has really become the mascot of the deck I mean siege rhino is just the reason to play the deck I mean the life swing the trample the 4/5 it doesn't even matter even in an aggressive deck having cards that are good against other aggressive decks is very valuable and this looks like it's versatile enough to check a lot of different boxes I mean just look at Sperling here stabilized at one life against mana red in the face of all most lethal learned and now Sperling gets to play a siege rhino going back up to for its furling just hanging on here so how can one card be so versatile that it shows up in three very different archetypes well let's start with stats first and foremost siege rhino is a gold card that requires three colors to cast it this is the kind of design that mark rosewater the head designer from magic has turned cut and paste design it's where you have a gold card and you take an ability that each individual color can do and you copy and paste it onto one card so for seed rhino it's the green body the white gained life and a black lose life ability in theory this strict mana cost should have been prohibitive to keep players in a very specific Lane but seed rhino was printed alongside a light-colored fetchlands as well as an uncommon cycle of trial ends that tapped for all three of its colors so then Caryatid was also a fundamental piece to the mana puzzle which allowed for turn 3 rhinos in the mid range iterations of the absent decks these three colors also thematically matched up with the khans of tarkir clans with each of the wedges receiving their own cut-and-paste creatures I mentioned the savage knuckle blade earlier this card received a bunch of attention very early on because of its apparent flexibility between the early and late game Ellis bees preview article predicted it would become a staple in the format as it played out though seed Rhino ended up outclassing this guy for the entirety of its life in standard due in large part to that pointin toughness that five toughness all cements that abs and mirrors got very crowded on the ground there on both sides this slow the game down just one side they tend to speed it up pretty quick do that again the difficult to attack rhino to other rhinos means that this is the semi-final match of pro tour Khan's of tarkir or seed rhino debuted at the highest level of competitive play I like this bird's-eye view of the battlefield because it really encapsulates the sort of mess that ended up defining this era of magic mid-range mirrors with a million permanence in play tons of ways to gain life and destroy creatures and no obvious path to crash through the line it was also the origin of this meme the first of many Rhino related images that emerged following its printing so we may ask to what do we owe seed rhinos extremely push stats how did a four or five trampled with a six point life swing end up at four mana well would you believe me if I told you that this is the card to blame I doubt you even remember it magic is such an elegant game because all of its tiny pieces interlace with one another sort of like a rhizome that old adage about butterflies and hurricanes applies to the game's development tinker with one piece over here and suddenly you've got a huge problem over there that's where first response comes in and the article titled it's the pillar that never was senior game designer Sam Stoddard traces the gentle push and pull between the original iteration of first-response and the birth of siege rhino here's what happened first response started at two mana but the m15 pain lands allowed players in the future future league to produce two tokens a turn starting on turn three this clogged up the ground which as a result is why seed Rhino picked up trample at that point in testing though seed Rhino looked very different it was three mana it had a drain ability for two was only a three-four and had the lock sat on spider rules text so then development pushed seed Rhino up to four mana and had it trampled to combat the tokens which in turn brought some wacky version of NFL down to three mana to keep the clans curve balanced wait but what about that anti discard text why was that there well let's add another branch to this rhizome Liliana of the Vale was supposed to be an M 15 as well and Rhino would have been her foil when Liliana was removed so was the need for that rules text and to keep the card competitive the other stats were bolstered even further what's most fascinating about seeing the development files of this card is the constant reiteration of its power and toughness siege rhino was at some point a 3 3 a 3 4 a 4 3 3 5 and 2 4 for this line here though gained a toughness brings us back to the semi-finals of ProTour Khan's of tarkir to the crowded frontlines and the first glimmer of its tournament dominance I love the interaction of Artie's deck though the Soron solid visitor with with C Brenner just seems like I really just great route to take for this deck where especially if you feel like you're gonna be in a world of C try not sure the next year in standard re 1 this match and in game 4 of the finals he drew the perfect out to Shaun MacLaren's Byrne has 11 points burning him we know how this sentence all relaxed shake an hour relaxes the champion of proto concept hockey in 2014 but that was just the beginning performance later in the finals for the world magic cup 2014 siege rhino was at the core of Denmark's abzan whip deck and team unified standard a siege rhino now for simon Hilson the danes won that tournament meanwhile Pro Tour hall-of-famer Patrick Chapin was battling in the finals against the returning World Championship our shen har with a deck full of siege rhinos himself Patrick goes right to see Joey turn 3 why not just three weeks prior to registering for the World Championship tape and commented on the strength of the card in his podcast thanks to use rhino is kind of an absurd magic card and keep mine this is kind of a comical magic card for anybody who's ever played with earnings in that tournament setting and be happy about it ghin was a 4/5 for 4 with a drawback this guy said he's got trampled which is already better it should make up for the fact that he has trample you have to agree to drain your opponent for 3 life which I think a lot of people might not fully appreciate just how strong draining your opponent 4/3 is you might be saying Oh healing salves not that good I wouldn't play with it yeah but I mean you're literally getting it for zero mana and without having to pay a card two days later writer Mark and ste Co published an article titled so you hate seeds RINO on Star City games it lamented the creatures push stats and ubiquity across the Medicaid certainly would not be the last word on the matter fast forward two Pro Tour fate reforged in February of 2015 in the semifinals Jesse Hampton brought abs and mid-range to the tournaments and top baited with seed rhinos in the main deck we see seed Rhino come into play here again that shifts the life total and presents more of a threat if you're paying attention this was a modern tournament a few bannings ago when birthing pod was still legal siege rhino was one of the stronger targets to exchange for a kitchen Fink's lsv called attention to this deck a couple of months prior stating then in the top eight of grand prix madrid there were more seed rhinos than treasure cruises for drop it seems like with the help of kitchen things scrub some options here this meant that in four consecutive major tournaments seed Rhino showed up in the top eight of each one as a result of course the rumblings were growing louder Alex the great 38 put it elegantly here untapped out that same month saying simply screw seed rhino but the Menace would not let up [Music] in April 2015 siege rhino found itself in another table 8 piloted by Italian pro Marco can elute see if not for a very bad matchup to the eventual winner in Martin dings red aggro deck abzan control could have very well won impro toward dragons Tarkio 2 in August 2015 Matt Sperling made it to the semifinals of Pro Tour magic origins on the weathered back of CC dry note at this point the menace had been legal in standard for about a year and we had learned a couple of Maxim's along the way the first and any time your opponent just doing multiple seeds Rhinos you just can't win Seth Manfield proved Paul correct at the World Championships 2015 at the end of that month pocket aces man and he didn't even have to cast him it was in October of this year that saffron olive decided to take siege rhino to the extreme putting is against the odds series in the spotlight and solidifying himself as the community's wackiest deck builder two rhinos could do the trick but Seth wanted 34 for a while now everyone has known that seat rhino is really powerful for seized rhinos can dominate a game of magic and then last week people started playing bring delights to play eight sees rhinos since bring delight almost always searches for a siege rhino so a siege rhinos was even better so I thought well what if we take this to the extreme and just play thirty four seat rhinos like every card in the deck is the siege rhino how would a deck like that work out and true against the odds fashion it kind of did work out kinda past the turn and hope we can just RINO RINO RINO RINO RINO and that will get the job done two months later after the release of battle for zendikar which brought with it a slew of new overpowered cards and ambitious mana bases siege rhino came through yet again and took the whole damn tournament down seed rhino now what Takamura keeps looking up that's it cazilou kita kumara of japan is your proto battle for Zendikar champion Wow see Drano don't care see Grendel don't give a [ __ ] it just takes what it wants like for example another trip to the semifinals of the world magic Cup 2015 and bang remember this guy oh yeah and then again a year later to the world magic Cup 2016 but possibly my favourite seeds Rhino moment to date when it successfully crude a Smuggler's copter in modern look at this siege rhino for martin i'd like to assume that those are flashes of lightning accompanying the incoming storm rather than our photographer and so throughout the course of its legality and standard siege rhino top aidid every single major tournament except for the very last one pro tour oath of the gatewatch was another modern tournament but had its own snowstorm to weather and medium I'm just gonna go one word Eldrazi this was no environment for a pachyderm this could be it and that's it JC tau is our champion by March 2016 the majority of the magic community was ready for siege rhino s departure a countdown was set up through reddit for April 8th henceforth known as siege rhino rotation day channel fireball published a video that month of the top eight cons and fate cards they wouldn't miss seed rhino appeared at number 3 and the number 1 spot was held for none other than the second seed right up this is the card that were really the happiest they travel in packs the siege rhino subreddit would disagree though while the community cried out against the beast for nearly two years they were celebrating its dominance with silly means when the fateful day finally came game stores across the country were sending off siege rhino in the form of farewell cakes and Viking funerals Sarah McLachlan's angel tended to accompany the rituals loading ready runs solidified its departure with crap shot 332 titled simply the Rhino the question at the heart of this video was posed to mark rosewater on his blog was printing seeds Rhino a mistake mark thought so but lsv responded time travel and take backup you know two or three standard cards or even five I seizure and just would be able ago what the Menace taught us ultimately is that the standard format is an inherently flawed and closed ecosystem that will always revolve around a very few number of select powerful cards even the most pushed cards in a vacuum like savage knuckle blade may never get their chance to shine because of one extra point of toughness on the floor mats most dominant creature this era also marks the slow transition from spells to creatures siege rhino is one of those hybrid cards that incorporates a sorcery effect on an already gigantic body since 2014 we've seen a number of cards that take this idea to even further limits eventually though after five hundred and sixty long days seed Rhino rotated out of standard and since then in a weird way I've kind of grown an affection for the old four five maybe a minute sometimes but I wouldn't trade him for any of the kid Noah [Music] but much like that old 50's sitcom the Menace has been remade again and again [Music] [Applause] and again [Music] and again and again and with every new iteration on a format warping and groan inducing new design a familiar voice that goes through the neighborhood [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Rhystic Studies

Views: 641,529

Keywords: magic the gathering, mtg, trading card game, themagicmansam, siege rhino, dennis the menace, khans of tarkir, history, standard, lsv

Id: keXoU1p54tA

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 21 2019