Pattern Recognition #165 - UB Fae

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

27 August 2020

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition! This is TappedOut.net's longest running article series. In it, I aim to bring to you each week a new article about some piece of Magic, be it a card, a mechanic, a deck, or something more fundamental or abstract. I am something of an Old Fogey and part-time Smart Ass, so I sometimes talk out my ass. Feel free to dissent or just plain old correct me! I also have a Patreon if you feel like helping out.

Let's talk a bit about how the "Metgame" works in Magic. To whit, it is the state of balance in the game between decks and the Aggro-Combo-Control archetypes. When the Metagame is in a good place, decks may have an advantage over some other decks, but in turn, other decks will hod an advantage over them.

When the metagame is in a bad place, one deck will have such a huge advantage their either you're playing that deck, or you're playing the deck designed to beat that deck, and hoping you can actually win.

And for the vast majority of the game's history - Combo Summer, Necro Winter and Okotober - being exceptions, this was not the case. Sure, there were bad decks out there taking up a huge segment of gameplay, but in the end, I think that of all the decks that have crossed my path, one that really stands out, even years later as being metagame warping was Faeries from Shadowmoor and Lorwyn, and their domination of the Standard metagame that has since become slightly memetic in of itself.

To begin with, Faeries were one of the Tribes in the Tribal heavy Lorwyn/Shadowmoor blocks, and looking over those tribes was what started me on this article. Because of all of them, while I love the Kithkin, and still scream in terror over what this set did for Elves, it was the Faeries who came out the massive winners from these four sets.

At its core, the deck is designed around a large number of creatures with Flash and interesting enters-the-battlefield abilities in order to gain a decisive advantage over the opponent. Supporting this were cards like Bitterblossom and Cryptic Command, both powerful cards in their own right who could help maintain and control the tempo of the deck.

Here, allow me to show you an example deck from the time:

UB Pattern Faeries

Casual* berryjon

SCORE: 1 | 91 VIEWS | IN 1 FOLDER

Now, again because people keep thinking my decks are somehow tuned and ready to rumble when they are not, this is just a proof of concept for the deck.

Now, as you can see, the majority of this deck is , which is true of Faeries in general. They are a tribe, and the addition of is a variable to incorporate some of the Faeries as well as support cards like Bitterblossom or certain removal cards that were in Standard at the time that I chose not to put into the deck.

The deck works through a combination of basic control - if you ever want to call Cryptic Command basic - and Flash Faeries such as Mistbind Clique to lock down your opponents resources, preventing them from doing things. What things? Well, pretty much anything? Lands? Tapped. Creatures? Unsummoned. Spells? Countered. This reactive control style of play that had the added benefit of putting creatures into play allowed for this deck to act as an Aggro deck on its turn, then switch gears to a control deck on the opponents turn without ever losing traction.

In more modern terms, have you seen those Flash decks in Standard Meta this past year? Yeah, that, but with slightly less big creatures and more creature death and card discarding. And Milling. Can't forget that now that it's a proper ability keyword type thing.

But what made Faerie decks so devastating to the meta at the time wasn't just the existence of Thoughtseize (though that certainly helped), but rather because of the lack of a good response that wasn't another Faerie deck. had all the reactive counterspells going on, and when you have Spellstuttter Sprite as your primary means of coutnering spells, then Guttural Response - the intended counterpoint to 's control style - just falls flat on its face.

The traditional aggro decks of the time tended to not be fast enough. Ravnica block rotated out of standard to make room for these two blocks, and while there were definitely aggro cards in the block, they tended towards the Goblins in and , while didn't help out as much as they traditionally did.

What we got in this year or so, was a metaphorical cooldown after just how amazing Ravnica was as part of the cyclical structure of the set design process. In addition the introduction of the Planeswalker card type as well as the Tribal experiment, Lorwyn and Shadowmoor (and yes, their back end sets as well) downplayed a lot of responses that would have been in place to deal with this sort of tempo-control deck.

This was all in 2008 and 2009, and the New World Order was still in the process of being worked out and worked on. (Wow, I wrote that three years ago?) And again, Lorwyn and Shadowmoor were the start of this. The game was being simplified, and despite this effort, something slipped through the cracks. And the idea that Faeries could appear out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly was something that was seen as acceptable.

So you have a deck that hold down two of the major deck styles and does both well, without any serious counter-play available at the time. I know my words aren't doing this justice because for most of you, you've never seen anything this prevalent before. Not even Oko the Broko got this bad, seeing so much play. Smuggler's Copter reached that level of 'every deck'-ness.

But one bad deck archetype does not a memetic problem make, and it was only when Extended got rolled into Modern that this deck really started to be more than a flash in the pan. Oh, it was still good in Extended, but remember, Modern was supposed to 'fix' Extended amongst other claims, and as part of that, Bitterblossom, that source of free creatures, had its ban in Extended carried over into Modern when the format was born.

Actually, when I mentioned I was talking about this subject at my FLGS, the first words out of the Magic Judge there was "Oh, Bitterblossom!"

So yeah, even now, certain cards are indelibly known as part of this deck.

Regardless, Faeries are a consistent thing across Modern, though not a big thing either. They are a subset of the generic control decks that exist, doing much the same thing as they did in Standard, but with a larger card base to draw on. You get Faerie Seer to help smooth out their card draws, Inquisition of Kozilek as a second version of Thoughtseize, Brazen Borrower for the Adventure attached to him and not a lot else.

It's that most of the powerful cards in this deck came from a single block. That these cards all hit within a year, and they all synergized well. This wasn't a deck that grew up on piece at a time over years. It's a deck that appeared pretty much as a whole concept and stabilized right then and there.

But the thing is, it wasn't [i]Faeries[/i] that are the problem. It was just a creature type that happened to be associated with a series of very synergistic abilities. This wasn't the intent, but it is something that has been run with in the sets and years since. Faeries have since become synonymous with the conjunction of 's control and low level aggressive decks, full of cheap and evasive creatures that you can't really swat down without running into the control aspect of the deck, a never ending cycle of give and take.

Faeries had their day in the sun, and they have since entered into the collective memory of the game as an example of Tribal synergies gone overboard and too far. A lesson learned and almost never forgotten. coughEldrazicough

Sorry for the short article, it's been a low energy week for me for the most part. Join me next week when I talk about something else. What, I don't know yet. I think I might look at the other Lorwyn tribes.

So, while I work on that, tell me about the deck types that you think warped Standard, and what you did for or against them. Write your comments below!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!