Pattern Recognition #2 - Protection

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

29 September 2016

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Hello, and welcome to Pattern Recognition, Issue 2!

My name is Jon Berry, and I am your guide through whatever subject I feel like talking about - as long as there is a pattern to my musings. Last time, I thought aloud about the Alpha Boons, and heading back to Alpha reminded me of another cycle of cards that has - for good reason - faded out of the game.

The 'Protection' mechanic, as you read through MaRo's Making Magic blog, is currently understood to be problematic, but too useful to remove. Protections allows a permanent to become utterly immune to something, be it a card type, such as Emrakul, the Promised End's Protection from Instants or from a whole colour! Now some of you may be thinking that I'm going to be talking a bit about the Wards cycle, but that's not the case. The Wards are certainly something, but I want to point out the existence of something a bit larger scale. I want to address the other protective cycle of cards, the ones that made Pillow Fort a viable design before Pillow Fort was a thing.

But before we begin, I wish to confess something. I'm very much guilty of abusing these cards, and before 2000, my mainstay deck was a 90 card mono-white deck that simply outlasted everything else with more life, more cards, more creatures... and this cycle was front and center in the deck, the arrogant me of the past took joy in locking someone out of the game.

I'm better now, thank you.

Ladies and Gentlemen of TappedOut, I present to you, the CoPs. Circle of Protection: White, Circle of Protection: Blue, Circle of Protection: Black, Circle of Protection: Red, and Circle of Protection: Green.

If you and a friend are reading this article at the same time, and they just cried out in terror, or moaned while filled with bad memories, know this; their reaction is justified. They were around when these cards proved to be the Silver Bullet, not to a deck type, but to a colour itself.

For those of you who do not have the same life experiences, look at those five cards and imagine them in a sideboard of a mono-white deck. In a format or a meta with low enchantment removal, a game two and three in a match would result in the White player dropping in the respective colors of CoP. The result of which being a card that could lock away a deck, keeping them from getting through to the squishy player hiding behind them. For the cost of (1), a Circle could prevent all damage from any single source, be it a Polar Kraken, a Channel + Fireball or any other source that had a colour

In the old days of Magic, one could make the claim that this cycle was one of the reasons why Artifact creatures existed. Not only did they work to smooth out problems in multi-coloured decks where creatures were concerned, but they also allowed the player to bypass these Circles. I personally don't, but I can see the logic in the claim.

On that point, dealing with the Circles boiled down to three primary responses. The first was to have damage sources in multiple colors, or in no colour at all, thanks to Artifacts. This would require that the White player draw and drop multiple Circles over the course of a game. But on the flip side, a Circle could slow down the game long enough for another one to show up, breaking down the opponent even further.

The second response was brute force. Every Circle has an activation cost, and if you could throw out more sources of damage than the defender had mana and defenders of their own, then you could whittle them down, bit by bit. Naturally, this was best used by Green's token generation, or in multiplayer games where multiple people would gang up on the en-Circle'd player until they stopped being a problem. And if a player spends or reserves all their mana for Protections, they're not casting other spells or being proactive - something modern Magic does not like.

The third solution was to address the Circles themselves. White and Green had enchantment removal - Disenchant and Tranquility for example, and Blue could bounce a Circle once it hit play, or simply used Counterspell to prevent it in the first place. Red and Black, however, tended to lack the means to destroy enchantments, and thus had to result to the prior methods of dealing with a Circle.

A fourth solution slowly appeared as time went on, though I suspect that, like the Eldrazi, it wasn't aimed at the Circles in particular. Yet it also hasn't seen much play as it's a direct counterpoint to any sort of 'protection' effect, no matter where it shows up. Red (with one Green option) started to get cards with the clause "damage can't be prevented", the most recent cards with that being Arrow Storm and Wild Slash. Circles are useless against sources that can't be prevented!

From a more historical standpoint, the Circles represented an extreme part of the original 'colour pie' in Magic the Gathering. Though in all fairness, I should call it a 'colour slush' for all the shared abilities they had. Anyway, in the beginning, much as it is today, one of White's strong points was its ability to protect the permanents under its control, as well as the player themselves. This manifested, not only as the "Protection from..." ability, but also in cards such as Righteousness, which could make sure that the cards you have can survive whatever the other players throw at them, and to keep doing it for as long as possible. The White Wall.

As a side note, "Protection from..." appears on 218 creatures, and while White obviously gets the largest share, it is Black of all colors that has the second most instances of it, with the majority of them being "Protection from White"! Black Knight is an example of this, and is a warning sign of the concept that I'm going to talk about in the back half of this article.

Now, because the Circles have the power to defend the player so effectively, the Circles have seen only a few variations over the years as Wizards tried to balance and tone down the power level of the cards. Some of these attempts have been more successful than others, but in the end, I think all of them can be seen as failures to stabilize the idea and make the mechanical idea viable and playable.

Let's start with the two missing CoPs. Yes, this cycle actually got bigger before it got smaller. First is Circle of Protection: Artifacts, a Circle that costs (2) to activate, but plugged up a hole in the defences that White's other Circles had. With this, now the only way to get around an en-Circle'd defence was to use animated lands!

The last one is Circle of Protection: Shadow. This Tempest block card was less part of the pattern, and more an in-block response to the temporary proliferation of Shadow as a mechanic. For those who don't want to go digging through the comprehensive rules, creatures with the Shadow keyword can only block or be blocked by other creatures with Shadow. For those of you who remember Portal, it was called Horsemanship.

Greater Realm of Preservation was an attempt to bring balance to the idea by limiting it to Red and Black on a single card, and requiring a larger activation cost. Prismatic Circle sought to put the defensive card on a timer through the use of the Cumulative upkeep, and the Sphere cycle (such as Sphere of Truth) went for simple damage reduction rather than prevention. Well, still technically damage prevention, but it would not prevent all of the damage.

And yet the Circles - as much as I like them and want to troll some Modern Meta with them - represent a larger concept that I mentioned I would be coming back to, and this has been an underlying assumption about the way Magic works that has been in the game since the beginning. And most people don't think about it, they just accept it and move on.

What am I talking about?

Color Hate.

Go grab one of your cards. It doesn't matter as long as it has the proper back on it. Flip it over and look at those five colored dots. From the top and clockwise, we have White, Blue, Black, Red and Green. Pick any one of those, and the two colors adjacent to it were designed considered to be 'friend' or 'ally' colors.

Even before multi-colored cards, decks that contained two allied colors tended to work well together White/Green, and their focus on creatures or Red/Black and their love of making everything die....

But the two colors across from your chosen colour? Those were the enemy colors. They were the ones you had little to no synergy with, and you had special counters for the, cards that were specifically designed to make a mess of any opponent who fielded those colors.

Yet White broke that concept on a basic level because they could deliver Color Hate to all the colors - including itself! - while maintaining a purely defensive posture. No matter what you did, White could go "No", and mean it. This was a state of affairs that lasted clear through to Eighth Edition! Nine tried to keep the concept while throttling it back to the class opponents, but that obviously in retrospect didn't turn out well as we don't see many such hard counters in more contemporary sets. Ninth had only CoP: Black and CoP: Red, and none of them survived past that point.

Color Hate is another subject that used to be addressed in MaRo's making magic, though those particular articles are years old by this point. The idea that on a meta level, colors were counters to other colors became another layer of the Rock-Paper-Scissors effect of deck archetypes. If you know the meta is focusing on Blue, do you run Red/Green and hope the counterpoints fall in your favour, or do you go with the flow, and stick with the safer Black/White? Yet even that runs afoul of the fact that for every colour's allies hate each other in turn! Look at the Black Knight I pointed out earlier.

And the Circles transcended that. They hated /everyone/. I may seem like I'm harping on the subject here, but in the end, with all the years of experience and thousands of cards since then the resolution to the idea is clear. While the colour pie has codified and been re-tuned over the years, the idea that on a basic level, colours hated colours was wrong.

If I had to place a guess as to when this started to happen, I would have to say around the time of the Invasion Block. It was the first aggressively multicolored block in the game, years before Ravnica put the final nails in the coffin. Coming between 7th and 8th Editions, Invasion, Planeshift and Apocalypse showed that, even for just one set, everyone could put aside their differences and find just enough common ground to make a stand.

And that was the end of it. 8th Edition came after, and that was the last printing of the Circles as a whole cycle. The lessons were learned, and being able to stand alone, telling everyone else that they can't interact with you ever was here to stay.

One last thing before I go, something that I have to place here because I really couldn't find a decent spot in the main body of my little tirade. Magic may no longer support it as a baseline mechanic, but it's not above returning to the idea that sometimes, you just have to bring the hate. Iona, Shield of Emeria may only target a single color, and can see play as that last bit of lockout before the player moves in for the win.

To end, I wanted to show you a Modern Deck that I quickly whipped up as an example of White's Color Hate. I present to you, Cheese it! It's the CoPs!:

Cheese it, It's the CoPs!

Modern berryjon

SCORE: 34 | 24 COMMENTS | 3032 VIEWS | IN 19 FOLDERS

Play with it is easy. Find out which color(s) your opponent is playing, sideboard out creatures that don't match, and inboard the relevant Circles. Watch them hate you. Flavour to taste.

Thank you. Next time, I think I'll move past looking at card cycles, and examine a pattern in mechanics - namely, combat tricks. See you then.