The Chapin.dec

 

I have found myself watching The Reseleevables  much of late.

(https://www.youtube.com/@TheResleevables/featured)

It is really hitting exactly the right spot for my particular interests in the game right now. There are aspects of Magic in which I really was not expecting to gain further insight and yet here we find ourselves. This is a tale of one such new insight. Excluding concessions, cards that explicitly state a player wins or loses, and quirky rules for special game types like commander damage, I was firmly under the impression that there were exactly three ways to win a game. Those three ways being; decking someone, reducing their life total to zero, or giving them ten poison counters. Not so, as the master magical technician and evil warlock - Patrick Chapin, would go on to inform me. You can go one step more extreme than merely beating your opponent. You can entirely unmake their efforts. You can annul the whole concept of the game. 

So much was the gap between Chapin and his poor opponents in those primordial magical days of the early nineties that merely beating them no longer satisfied the man and new more cruel fates were devised. Chapin would build decks using cards that predominantly returned things to their owner's library and then combine that with power so as to have an ongoing mana and card advantage such that slowly he would return you to your starting situation. Count yourself lucky if that is your starting situation post having drawn your initial hand. There are the tools available such that you can be reduced to nothing but a library. A fully next level master stroke that absolutely needs recreating in cube.

Threats and outs have come a long way since Chapin was out there finding extra curricular activities to beat people with. And those people have gained a great deal of base level understanding. All this is to say that I don't think there will be many settings where you have an equal footing and any sort of reasonable chance of doing this sort of thing consistently. I think if you are wanting to pull a Chapin win on someone you are going to have to eat a lot of losers pie in the process. That at least should make any victories that much sweeter whence they finally arrive. 

Here is my best effort to make an unpowered cube iteration of a deck designed to inflict the Chapin win on someone. There seem like a couple of ways to go with this one from creatureless to Wilderness Reclamation slants however there are not loads of these "back into library" effects in the game (thankfully) and so we are mostly building upon the same core cards. Given how low to the ground things feel in my cube at present I went with this build that is as generically high powered as possible and leans a bit more on creatures to support its plan. You seem somewhat locked into Bant based on where these sorts of cards are printed. While you could drop the white you then lose the ability to handle creatures very well and wind up playing some very low rate cards and running the kinds of deck that roll over a die if you make a two power one drop. Black has some lovely tools that have good synergy like Misinformation but sadly it can't answer creatures effectively in the way the archetype wants and so it is no substitute for white. You could play it as well but at four colours we are starting to ask rather too much of the deck.

24 Spells

Oust

Noxious Revival

Birds of Paradise

Noble Hierarch

Condemn

Brainstorm

Memory Lapse

Disempower

Unexpectedly Absent

Sunscape Familiar 

Temporal Spring

Fallow Earth

Time Twister

Eternal Witness

Narset, Parter of Veils

Commit Memory

Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Cryptic Command   

Teferi, Hero of Dominaria

Stunted Resources

Plow Under

Primal Command

Vanishment

Terminus 

Nexus of Fate

16 Lands

Mystic Sanctuary

Island

Forest

Plains

Savannah

Tropical Island

Tundra

Spara's Headquarters

Breeding Pool

Hallowed Fountain

Mystic Gate

Yavimaya Coast

Windswept Heath

Misty Rainforest

Flooded Strand

Meticulous Archive

 

And of course a list of the cards I was considering;

Ephemerate

Coiling Oracle

Wall of Blossoms

Ancestral Visions

Set Adrift

Lapse of Certainty

Wilderness Reclamation

Spurnmage Advocate

Remand

Roil Spout

This is absolutely the kind of deck that will get bodied by any sort of high tempo, low cost strategy that involves turning creatures sideways. You have some god draws that can beat them but in general their stuff is so much more cost effective and powerful that they are just going to get under your disruption. This is a deck where you have to want it enough to eat a bunch of free losses. On the flip side to you being a soft target for most of the field there are decks that will have kittens facing this. Clunkier decks are so vulnerable and can have a really miserable time. And truly, if you are packing a deck like this, other peoples miserable times is a big part of why. And while your odds of winning are low against the other decks, they will also absolutely have a miserable time when you do beat them. I think the main counter to this deck is not beating it with cheap aggression, but bypassing it by concession. If you don't get fully de-permanented the deck didn't do its thing. As such I think when playing this deck you need to have some side bet on that prevents them from conceding in some way and ensures that if you win you get to do the full horror on them. That is the point of all this after all.

My most memorable story of having all my permanents destroyed was by a Tooth and Nail player in Mirrodin block constructed tournament. They simply spent the first three turns throwing every Oxidize, Viridian Shaman and Tel-Jilad Justice at my stuff, which was primarily artifact lands. They had lands and dorks and I had literal nothing in play and yet affinity was so stupid they still lost. I found a way to eventually getting out a Somber Hoverguard and the silly green player folded to a flying threat they couldn't Shatter. This is why one for one artifact removal isn't an answer to affinity. Especially at the cost of doing your own powerful things. This deck looks exactly like the kind of deck that can go on to lose after having de-permanented an opponent.... It is absolutely a good thing that decks like this have a below 50% win rate and much as this might read like lamentations for things lost to time and power creep, they are not so. Merely my tone when plugging a deck that isn't strictly viable. 

 

Happy hunting!

White Decks Don't Jump

 

White decks do something no other colour does, or rather they don't. All the other colours relish a bit more mana, it is just fuel for the fire. White, not so much. Now I am not for one minute suggesting white don't need mana. White still absolutely wishes to curve out with a fresh juicy Plains each turn for the first portion of the game, be that just three or four lands in modern or five or six in slower formats. What I mean is that white has no interest in spending time, cards, or mana upfront, in developing their mana beyond this one land a turn. This obviously excludes Pearl Mox with it being a potential boost in mana at no real cost or risk. However, even the likes of Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond are not lock in cards for a white aggressive deck and will need concessions or otherwise appropriate lists to get the nod. This is something I find interesting and wish to probe.

Intuitively it doesn't make that much sense that a strategy that uses speed and tempo to its advantage eschews ramp and burst mana options. Generally speaking we understand more mana to be synonymous with more tempo, and if that is how you are winning then that sounds great. I always sort of assumed that it was lack of card advantage, and to some extend good mana sinks, that meant white didn't go for ramp. In my homemade cube however there is significantly greater access for all colours to high quality card advantage. Even with all the cards white could ever want, and some really quite tasty options to boost mana, the white builds still seemed to just want to pay normal prices for things and develop at the one land per turn rate. The mystery was becoming more interesting and I had more information to try and solve it with!

Black and blue simply draw cards in order to spend any extra mana they might find them selves in possession of. Both are very mana hungry colours. Red being red, and so direct, just seems to win a bit quicker, at minor consistency cost, when afforded ramp tools. Green will invest in high impact, high threat cards, so as to put extra mana to effective work. White and green are effectively opposite in this regard.

I now think whites aversion to investing in ramp comes from two factors working in tandem. The first of those is efficiency. If you can use Sword to Plowshares to kill something then you are probably pulling quite a significant mana advantage from that. To compliament whites incredibly efficient removal tools white also has some of the most effective cheap threats. Whites dorks might get rather more lacklustre as you go up the curve relative to to other colours but it is hard to compete with what they got in the low end. Why waste time and consistency on ramping when you could just be getting on with deploying your cards that are already above rate at that point in the game. Simply put, it is better casting a Savannah Lion on turn one and another two on turn two than it is to ramp on turn one and then dump out all three "Lions" on turn two. You are a card down and an attack for two damage worse off, not to mention the consistency cost if you take the ramp path.

The second factor is how white aggro decks tend to win. It isn't that explosive flurry in which a red deck ends it but much more a slowly ratcheted end, akin to how a boa constrictor defeats prey. Each little threat is part of a web of threats that lock you in place and secure the kill. It might be that Suntail Hawk equivalent that gets in the final points of damage but it was that Luminarch Aspirant that made it sufficiently threatening, and that Giver of Runes that protected both of them from spot removal, and the Selfless Spirit that protected everything from the mass removal, the Voice of Victory that allowed them to resolve etc. etc. White just has this kindof inherent self synergy where the various tools all empower each other a little towards the same end goal. If your goal is inevitable victory from a thousand small cuts then you are better off with more cuts than quicker cuts. Ramping out your threats in white simply means you will wind up with fewer or less well supported threats. Green will put their eggs in few baskets but those baskets will be huge. White likes to present every egg in a basket of its own and thus has no need of big baskets.