Pattern Recognition #129 - Black Crust

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

31 October 2019

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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.

OK, I admit it. When I saw Bake into a Pie, I knew that it was time to come back to my larger series about the nature of each of the colours, and that it was time for .

Of all the colours in Magic's history, none I find to have been changed so much over time as , and this has been done on a great variety of levels. If you compared the cards and styles of from, say, circa 2000 and today you will find that there are very few similarities between them, and what similarities there are tend to be what we would consider to be basic aspects of the cards.

But that's not the biggest change. No, for you see, has been the subject of the most changes as a result of Magic going international in scope. And the reason for that being the case of censorship.

Now, Censorship on its own is a subject I'm really not willing to touch with a barge pole any time soon. Rather, I just want to say, that of all the colours in Magic, it is that gets hit probably the most and the worst, and that has influenced the way the colour has been presented over the years.

At its core, is the colour of sacrifice. It is the colour that says to itself "In order to gain, I must first give something up". Everything that is true about builds up from this one basic premise.

In the early years of the game, this aspect of the colour was typically represented through two different costs. The first was in the Upkeep. Lord of the Pit was an excellent example. You get a rather large 7/7 creature that has both Flying and Trample, making blocking it an exercise in frustration and futility at best. Of course, you can't just have this for the low, low cost of . No, this creature requires more.

You see, with this card, you were required to sacrifice a creature during your upkeep, or else this creature would deal 7 damage to you.

Now, this was not unique to . After all, Force of Nature also existed, but this was more along the lines of being the exception and not the rule.

The other side to Back's notion of sacrifice was that of the one-time payment. This, more than the constant payments of resources, is something that has survived well into the present day, as with Murderous Rider and it's Adventure - Murderous Rider.

The idea here, the one far more palpable to Wizards and their constant search for a good equilibrium point to balance the game around, is the concept that will pay an additional cost for a spell to either reduce the mana cost of said spell from the cost that the effect would normally require - or on the other hand - will pay an extra cost to gain a bonus effect above the normal effect of a card at that mana cost.

The most direct example that I can think of off the top of my head is Spark Harvest which spells out this dichotomy directly. While you could pay a total of for the effect, you could also simply sacrifice a creature - any creature - to bring down the cost to .

Here, we see at its strongest - paying something to get a better effect for it.

But of course, that's not everything that is good for, nor does it begin to describe their massive weaknesses.

Of all the colours, is the most anti-creature. Now I can already hear you guys typing away at your responses about how is this, but I have to object. You see, deals damage as a means of removing threats on the board. They will cheerfully throw out huge and gargantuan numbers to eliminate a creature, planeswalker or a player, and that is at the core of what they do.

But on the other hand, will straight up Murder a creature. They will look at a target and simply kill it, regardless of toughness. Now, sometimes you do get a small condition, like with Fatal Push, which is ridiculously good removal, but in the end, if wants a creature dead, short of having Protection or Hexproof like White Knight or Knight of Grace, it's dead.

Yet, before I leave this connotation with behind, I do want to point out that isn't above needing to check the toughness on a creature either. But this isn't because they're doing damage to a target. No, what has is the unique capacity to create -X/-X effects for creatures, such as with Languish. This isn't damage, which is 's purview, it's power and toughness reduction to stay out of 's toes.

And this naturally ties into the previous comment about how will pay for things with alternate costs when you get the occasional card like Toxic Deluge.

Building up from these points, is the colour that benefits the most from things dying. Now, this is definitely not to say that and to a far lesser extent, get in on the act as well, it is that really drives home that they consider a creature leaving the battlefield to be just as viable a resource as entering. I mean, heck, Syr Konrad, the Grim was printed as an Uncommon just to demonstrate how effective this colour is as punishing creatures coming and going.

In addition, has one other major aspect to it that's pretty unique, though and can also do it as a side effect. is the colour of discard. No other colour in the game has cards with the text that tell a player to straight up discard cards from their hands. There's a reason why Mind Rot has been printed and reprinted 20 times over the course of the game.

Sure, will discard when you draw cards, and so will - or the latter will simply draw so many cards that they have to discard, but only looks at a hand and goes "Shrink".

I'll get into the flavour of this near the end of the second part of the article.

But for these advantages, really does have a few glaring holes in it.

The first is that for all their focus on creatures, 's creatures really aren't that amazing. Much like how treats their creatures, looks more at the abilities than the actual creatures themselves. Look at the aforementioned Syr Konrad, the Grim, and how he has this huge text box on him that has a lot of stuff going on. The fact that he's got a 5/4 body for a cost of is almost a sideshow.

In response to this, has been getting some decent creatures lately. As anyone who has seen Knight of the Ebon Legion in action can attest to, but this is more to shore up a weakness than to give a strength to the colour.

also has a massive, colossal and frankly utterly ridiculous inability to deal with Enchantments. I mean, seriously. They can't deal with them at all. No Naturalize. No Tempest of Light. No Boomerang. No.. Ok, so shares this issue, but it's something that simply cannot address.

This weakness is shared with non-Creature Artifacts. I mean, yeah, Gate to Phyrexia exists, but it's such a hilariously bad card that even playing into the theme of sacrifice, I don't think I've ever seen it played. Ever.

EVER.

Of course, the moment an Artifact becomes a creature, then 's hate of creatures comes right to the fore, and they die just as quickly as anything else.

As for Planeswalkers, has only a few options to take care of them, usual as the result of a card that is also destroying a creature, such as Vraska's Contempt. Yes, this colour can summarily remove a 'Walker, but it's not a dedicated thing. It's simply an extension on their creature hate.

In terms of colour alliances, is best buddies with and , but for different reasons, and they bring out different aspects to that normally just don't show.

As I mentioned last time, the joining of and - or the Dimir Guild - is the loosest one as the two colours simply don't have a lot of overlap. They are all about - in their own ways - putting the "ME" first. But whereas sees this as a case of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, being able to generate more responses with effort and time. They will Dig Through Time to get an answer. But sees the same as coming at a cost. Want to draw more cards? Better pay life for them! From the classic Phyrexian Arena through to the modern day with Foreboding Fruit! Once again, pays for the advantage that others don't have to - or can't!

But this isn't where they really mesh. No, the only thing that really gets these two colours working together is in the hand. You see, is the master of putting cards into the hand, while loves to take them out. Here, we reach the concept of the Mill.

Named for the card Millstone this is a deck archetype that is - in standard at least - the domain of . But hey, has enjoyed helping things along, what with Glimpse the Unthinkable and directly attacking the hand rather than the deck in order to reduce the possibilities of a response at an inopportune time.

Other than that, there's no real overlap between the two, something Wizards has admitted. here have been some efforts to address this, but nothing has stuck, and for now, we simply have to see the Dimir color combination as something to do with the opponent's deck, and not something unique in of itself. No grand conjunction here.

On the other hand, and have a great and beautiful mechanical overlap.

They BLOW STUFF UP

And I'm not regretting that formatting choice at all.

Terminate. Twinstrike. Angrath's Rampage. Void. You want to deal out some Pain / Suffering? Look no further than these two colours. They will destroy everything in their path and still have some over for their opponent. There is nothing that they cannot remove one way or the other (except directly removing Enchantments). Not even Lands are safe!

It's this sheer purity of direction that has also hobbled this combination's development over time. has become the colour combination of total destruction while ignoring the positive outlooks of both. What am I talking about?

says, simply, "I am free. I can do what I want." There is a reason why these two colours oppose , the colour of control and order. Angrath, the Flame-Chained, during his time in-story, best exemplified this by his sentiment that he didn't care about the Immortal Sun or anything else. He wanted to go home, and would do anything in his power to do it. He wanted nothing more than to be free.

I blame the Ravnican Guild, Rakdos, for this. For three blocks, the Guild whose job description is "Work Hard, Play Hard" has been portrayed as hedonists, as chaos-spewing murderers whose lore on the Rakdos Signet shows just how mono-dimensional they portray the colour. It's all seen as a negative. Even when we get heroes in and heroes in , the moment they are put together, it's like they lose anything good or moral in them and they become mustache-twirling villains that's only short Nicol Bolas.

Angrath is a good thing, and I want to see more of him. I want to see him as a Protagonist, punching out some villain, and rooting him on the whole way. Because this colour combination needs more love.

But I think that's it for this week. Join me next time when I wrap up , and get prepped for the subjects after that. And enjoy All Hallow's Eve!

What? Didn't know that was an actual card? pft, newbies.

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!