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Magic the Gathering - What Wizards Won't Tell You - Deck #1 Creature Feature
I bought a book at a used book store today called "What the Wizards Won't Tell You" (An experts guide to the card game Magic, the Gathering) by Gregg Stanley. I was surprised that this book exists. There is no date or publisher info and the ISBN looks sketchy, like this was only sold at cons and card shops by a fan. It's professionally made, but poorly written. I'm convinced that the author is neither an "expert" or able to give you a good "guide" with this book.
After some research this book was published by Stanley Designs in 1997. So, yes it was self-published. It's a lot more money than I paid for it online... I only spent $1. So I guess I won that, but I have no idea why anyone would want this book besides humor and an archaeological investigation of the early years of Magic the Gathering. The most interesting part of the book to me was the deck lists at the end of the book that are hilariously bad. Here is the first one. I uploaded the info to the Tappedout Deck Builder website to see (Click the SOURCE link under the picture).
"Very heavy in large and uncommon cards. Has pyro power. The large number of uncommon cards exposes you to less risk than a deck of common and rare cards. The large creatures make the deck a little slow, but in a Wheel game your attacker may have to hold creatures back early on. Use the Control Magics on your predator. Best used in wheel games where your creatures are running into opponents who sacrifice their creatures to hold yours off a turn.
— Gregg StanleyIf they also have many large creatures then move up to a higher number deck. Vulnerable to enchantments, but SOMEBODY will play a Tranquility.
— Gregg StanleyThe worst advice here is to go above 60 cards... This deck is 63. You want to always have the lowest card count deck, so you statistically draw your winning cards faster. Making a huge deck waters down your chances to draw the right cards.
As you can see this is an incredibly casual deck. Most competitive MTG decks have the most powerful cards in the meta, with a few synergistic commons and uncommons. These weaker cards are only included if they progress the game to the powerful cards or work really well with the powerful cards that win you the game. You want the max of 4 of every powerful card in your deck, to increase the chance of drawing the cards. This deck has a bunch of horrible cards with single copies of the card... There are two walls in here. Walls are historically bad and only drag the game down unless they have a specific purpose. These are "vanilla" walls, meaning they have no abilities.
Throughout this book this guy hates the card Tranquility... he probably thought it was the bane of his existence in 1997. You could always Counterspell bro. Or build a deck that wasn't so dependent on artifacts and enchantments.
Best of all, this deck is based of of a defunct (or even outright made up by the author) format of Magic the Gathering called "Wheel Game"... I haven't seen any reference elsewhere about this format anywhere. I'm guessing it is a multiplayer format. Let me know if you have any clue what this is.
I fixed this deck in about 1 minute, with minimal effort. The original cards seem to be exclusively from fourth edition. So, I only added cards from that set. I removed all the walls and random cards that don't win the game or work together. I put 4 of all the best cards. This deck is based in control and fat fliers. I tried to add as little new cards to the deck. There are many I would rather have, but to keep on theme I tried to keep as many of the originals. I only added Giant Strength, Zephyr Falcon and Counterspell. The curve is now better with a bunch of two drops. What do you think would have done to fix this deck? I'm going to post more of these decks soon.
Is there ever a reason to have a wall in a deck with no combo?
© 2019 Ian McGonigal
