M11 Makes Things Awkward

Hello and welcome to my first MTG article, and my first real writing experience. Let’s start off with a bit of background about myself. I’m just a lonely 16 year old to-be junior in high school who spends a bunch of time on MTG. I’m not going to be blowing away any Pro Tours anytime soon, and seeing as this is my first article I’m going to keep it kinda simple. I’m a limited addict and a desperate rouge deck builder. Between way too sparse monthly visits to my store to gobble down limited, I work hard on new cool rouge deck ideas. I pretty much always end up failing and resorting to a budget established archetype filled in with some unexpected pet cards, but I feel this has helped me understand the game pretty well. Enough to write about it? We’ll see.

So, let us begin. After hearing about M11′s reprinting of Mana Leak, people we’re getting more hyped up than when a kitchen table player opens Akroma (Well, maybe not that much). But mana leak is not a stand alone card, we’ve also got Jace’s Ingenuity and Mystifying Maze on our hands in this set. What’s so special about these cards other than quality? They show us something, a shift Wizards is trying to make.

For a while now we’ve had tap out control where U/W does such shenanigans as tapping 9 mana for martial coup, among things. It’s a much less traditional control and more of a stall-until-you-lock-them out-with-card-advantage type thing. What Mana Leak et al. does is shift away from this kind of control, most likely a shift that will carry through to Scars of skullclamp Mirrodin. They seem to be turning blue into the type of draw-go countering a-hole that he was back in the days of counterspell and Force of Will.

Let me start by saying this is utterly surprising to me. Draw go is the exact type of thing wizards considers “un-fun” and is a main reason faeries was such a hated deck. The tap-out style of control is much more “fun”to wizards, and I would have thought they would have stayed in that vein. When I say “fun” I don’t mean I think of it that way; though draw-go may be more frustrating to play against, I think they all have around the same levels of fun attributable to them. I tend to stray away from wizards judgment for such reasons as they also think overpriced mythics are fun, but that’s another story for another day. My point here is that I don’t think anyone expected this move.

So, what does this mean for when M11 rolls onto shelves? Well, nothing. In my opinion, having just a few support types for this archetype will be as effective at making a T2 draw-go deck as the support cards for devour made that a deck. Tap-out will still be dominant up until when Scars rotates in, then we have quite the interesting situation. The cards revealed are very good, but they won’t make there way from M11 packs onto a tier 1 draw-go just yet. This doesn’t mean people won’t try, oh they’ll try. They’ll try in droves, by the millions they will count. They march toward our lines and threaten our homes, their footsteps will shake the ground, THEIR ARROWS WILL BLOT OUT THE SUN!!!

…

And we will fight in the shade.

THIS IS SPARTA!

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