1996 Nostaligia

 

I had not appreciated the power of nostalgia until, as with so many things in life, MtG demonstrated it to me (well before this 30th Anniversary nonsense I might add, you can keep your $250 boosters thank you very much). I recently went to an event with a bunch of old magic friends. A dozen of us rented out an old National Trust property in the country and played games, ate well, and got pissed up for a long weekend. The main gaming event was a round robin magic tournament spread over three custom formats. We had a Neon Dynasty 15 card highlander event, a commons-from-a-set sealed pool auction (in which I bid down to 5 cards and 14 life for Mirrodin so that I didn't have to try and win with nothing but Homelands commons!), and an event using the top 8 decks decks from the 1st Pro Tour as seen on the link below. 

https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Pro_Tour_Collector_Set

I started playing MtG the release week of Ice Age and I went to my first constructed tournaments not long after. These 1996 Pro Tour decks were using the same cards and formats that I cut my teeth on. I have always liked those older cards and do tend to go with original printings and art on my cube cards where possible. My favourite cards from my personal cube collection are a FBB Wrath, a FBB BoP, and a Beta Llanowar Elf. In cube however these classics are just a small fraction of the cards. In this 1996 Pro Tour event all the cards were these classic art and borders. Not only was there a different aesthetic but the game was a totally different beast. Tempo was a barely relevant concept and card advantage was basically everything. Over the years I had forgotten how much the game has changed. And yes, while it is wildly better now in most ways it certainly wasn't bad to begin with. The old magic had a real charm about it. Some epic games with wild swings. Life gain was so much more powerful because clocks were so slow and board development was so minimal (partly due to very few good threats and partly due to there being so many reset and mass removal effects). Two life might well simply mean a near Time Walk as your opponent is slowly killing you with a Mishra's Factory. Zuran Orb was able to turn all your dead late game land draws into extra time and thus extra draw steps. No wonder it was considered a bomb back then despite not really being playable these days. 

The long and short of it is that I had an absolute blast playing with these janky old pro tour decks, despite the games being much more random in outcome, and the decks being pretty poorly built, using badly designed cards, in a game where the designers were still a long way off properly understanding what they were making content for! It was simultaneously playing Magic and somehow not. It both felt like playing something fresh and new while also old, comforting, and familiar. So with all this untapped Magical fun I had found I set about finding ways I could make it more cube like. I have been doing 40 card singleton decks so long now that they are entirely my go to. It is how I wish to frame everything. And so I set about building constructed cube like decks to mimic the main archetypes in the 1996 Pro Tour top 8 decks. 

It didn't take all that long however for me to realize the issues with making a 40 card singleton deck from the 1996 era of magic. The cards mostly are unplayable and there is very little in the way of redundancy (outside of red X burn spells for some reason...). This makes replicating the decks and how they are supposed to play very tricky. My solution to this was expanding out the time frame in which I was going to source cards from. It was a fairly arbitrary exercise anyway and just so long as I remained happy with the feel and flavour of the results we were all good. To start with I went all the way back and allowed anything from Alpha to Ice Age but made sure to "ban" out the cards I still have banned in my cube today. I didn't want the thing to become some kind of vintage event. I was trying to capture the feel of that specific pro tour top eight and it was not full of Mox, it was very much a standard event. Going back in time however didn't feel like it hurt the feel at all, in part thanks to Chronicals being legal at the time and making a lot of cards from those sets standard legal again (or Type II for those that lived it!). 

There really is not much in the way of Old School, or even just the pre-Modern, card pool and so I dabbled in expanding to newer sets. I built some with everything up to Urza's Block legal and I did the same but stopping at Mirage. While this gave me scope to build a greater number and wider variety of decks they did start to move away from resembling the intended archetypes. I have since gone on to make more decks with more unusual era criteria as I loved this exercise of building old classic decks in cube form. I did end up make some lovely creations that yearn to be played but the set is not yet complete and they likely deserve their own dedicated article. 

In my quest to make good decks I even toyed with allowing multiple copies of a card provided it had different art all within the specified era but decided no-one wanted to play in a format where you could play 10% of your deck as Hymn to Tourach! Ultimately however I managed to make four distinct decks to resemble the four main (and proper, yes looking at you here Tam) archetypes represented in that top eight. They are a delight to battle with and are something I have now stashed away so as to delight other magic players whenever the time calls for something a little different, something with a bit of history behind it. I am presently in the midst of making up 8 decks in a half way house of pre-modern and old school as I enjoyed the first deck building exercise so much. By allowing sets up to Urza's block I got a whole lot more scope to build a load more cube versions of classic and progenitor decks.

In the beginning of MtG history there were just decks. People put spells and land together, usually with too little of the latter, and they tried to make sure those spells were the best mix of spells on offer. Then decks started to specialize a bit, they went about doing things. Usually this was preventing the opponent from playing the game by messing with all their mana sources. This 1996 Pro Tour is that era of magic. There is/was no tempo decks, no combo decks, no aggro decks. Just decks doing things. There is a control archetype and it is defined mostly by it's lack of a thing. It is the deck that doesn't mess with your mana, instead it messes with everything else you do. It is just a deck like all the others but it has more answers and less threats and as such lines up with what we think of as control today. In just a few short years from this time of magical innocence we had found most of the core forms a deck can take. Aggro decks in Sligh, then in Stompy and White Weenie. (To be fair White Weenie did sort of already exist but it was just a bad Erny Geddon build, a kind of accident arisen just as a housing to ram full of pump knights, also, only total masochists play mono white in a world where Dark Ritual and Gloom co-exist...). We also then had tempo decks using cheap threats backed up by cheap disruption arise. We had full on combo decks with Tolarian Academy Stroking people out, and some more reasonable Reanimator strategies. The game was starting to be properly understood and mapped out. That arc from the simple high power in beta down through some of the lowest power sets in magic history and then back up to Urza's block is where the real wild west of magic was. It is where all the most broken cards are to be found while the designers were finding their feet. An era of discovery and rapid change. 

So, at the very start of this arc where decks were just piles of cards doing things we find ourselves. It is time to take a look at some of these cube-ified classic decks in all their splendour. The first deck I made trying to replicate the 1996 PT lists is the classic Erny-Geddon, which was represented twice in the event by Poulter and Lestree and it might well be my favourite of the lookers. I have always like green and white lands the most and this list contains some glorious and classic art beyond that. A chance to use Serra Angel couldn't really be passed up even if it is one of the weakest cards in the list. This deck also had the greatest degree of scope of the four decks to build. I had a build that used Meekstone and cut out the bigger dorks. It was probably better overall but you can't go round cutting not only the namesake card of the deck but the most powerful creature of the era! Ultimately with just the single Armageddon copy this deck is more of beatdown deck than a prison deck, especially as I had the temerity to put a decent land count in all of the decks it would be facing. Something most of the actual PT top 8 were kind enough to not bother with! I particularly enjoyed the way the Fallen Empires lands play in this list, to a new player they mostly look dodgy and bad but they add a lot of option density to a typically drier format and interact nicely with several other cards. 

The second deck is the infamous necro deck, piloted in the event by Leon Lindback. I took Necro to my first couple of sanctioned events and I got thoroughly pounded as you might expect for a 13 year old kid with under a year of playing experience. This deck is naughty as I snuck in a Lake of the Dead which is outside of the format I set. I don't even think it improves the deck I just didn't have another suitably old unique swamp! I also do not have an old Sinkhole and so I had to ruin the look anyway. Nice to have things to work towards! This deck is a little bit more of a black weenie deck than a classic necro deck due to lack of redundancy (the same issue I ran into with the Geddon list) and as such should probably be playing a bad moon. Ideally though taking out the bad creatures and replacing them with second copies of the key cards would make this play a lot better and more representatively. Being the only mono colour deck of the four this one certainly struggled most with making up numbers. At least it didn't have to face Circle of Protection: Black and Karma on top of all those protection from black dorks....) That being said, I seem to have not put Aeliophile in this list which is a big oversight in a format chock full of protection from black dorks! Some very easy to cut Bats in this list! It isn't even the best 0/1 flyer for one black mana in the format which is pretty damning. Demonic Tutor does help this deck play somewhat closely to the original and it is a real classic. The first deck to really use life as a resource and really push the envelope on just winning via card advantage. 

Deck three is this most classic of control decks. It aims to outlast and deny everything. All counters and removal and no real threats. Both Loconto and Regnier played versions of a blue white control deck in the top eight they were fairly different. Despite the better finish of Loconto this is much closer to the better built Regnier version which in honor of Rob Salmon we shall call Hamster Control. Good card advantage was so hard to come by in early magic. Your best means to get it was with mass removal effects like Wrath of God. By running no creatures you blank a lot of the opponents cards and thus gain pseudo card advantage. In a format where tempo is of low import and card advantage is almost everything that is a pretty good plan! This to my mind really was the archetypal and original control deck. It predates Randy Beulers mono blue Draw Go list as well as the Counter Post decks that were only possible once Strip Mine had rotated out (and indeed in the case of the meta we are specifically talking about here - Outpost actually being printed!). This list is a joy to play with it all being about timing and lining up your answers sensibly. Threats were not diverse or popping out too fast back in 1996 and so this deck could really take its time and make a long term plan to safely secure the game. Playing this as an experienced player does make one appreciate why a lot of good older players really love their control decks. 

Lastly we have one of the most innovative decks of the format. This one suffers a little from lack of redundancy as well and could really do with another Howling Mine and Winter Orb or two. This too was a creatureless deck but I couldn't make that work for these colours. The prison element also suffered rather and so this ended up looking more like a burn deck than an odd control/prison deck. So, while I love how this looks and plays I do not think I have done justice to the list. Yes, Mark Justice's list. I have sat here for too long now trying to work out how to word that better so it doesn't look like a pun or just read badly, But I can't so moving on. As you can see, all of these lists except the one with countermagic elect to attack mana bases. This was effective due to how little lands people played as well as the high power in mana denial cards. We see almost none of that these days as people do not enjoy having nothing that they can do. 

So, if you get the horn for old magic cards and want a big old nostalgia hit build up some decks like these and do some battles. Or play the actual decks and just look at these like the beautiful works of art they are! But we are not done yet for sexy pictures and nostalgia injections. I have a few more decks from extended time periods. There are some pet cards I just love and wanted to squeeze in but didn't feel I could reasonably do within the parameters of my first objective! Obviously one doesn't just stop when a task like this is completed, we look for the next task to work towards and it transpired that was the same but sliding the timer along and repeating. So these are three of the decks from my part complete project to do eight distinct tribute builds to various World Championship decks up to and including Urza's block. 

I also got sufficiently carried away to start designing and old school cube. Just to see what it would look like and to see how sexy it would be. It transpires that it is pretty much like my very first cube just with the Mirrodin cards removed. A cube where threats are sufficiently low powered that you mostly play combo and control decks. A format arguably low enough in power that the actual power cards are not all that egregious! Certainly it is a project I will not abandon however it turns out that I am less into the art styles progressively less as the pre-modern era goes along. There is a sort of cartoon look that seems to take over from the darker older styles from Urza's block onwards  and I start to lose that magical nostalgia vibe. It is also not that new or exciting as I have done so much cubing with that style of cube when I first got into the format. I could try and do a cube with cards just up to Urza's block but I imagine it would be pretty terrible to play even if it was delightful to look at. 

Here is a link to what I have put together so far for the pre-modern cube. It lacks the sexyness as Cube Cobra doesn't automatically chose the version of the card I want it to and I am certainly not about making it look all nice before I finish it off and test it! 

https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/49ju6?view=spoiler

I am sure I will find more new and fun ways to make and build these magic period pieces in some sort of cube based way. And I am sure if they are sexy enough I will be getting out my camera and making posts about them! For now however here is the first three of the up-to-Urza-era tribute decks. 

This first deck is Sligh or RDW or even Ponza if you really want to stretch the imagination. If we are calling this RDW it conceptually has not changed much since. This deck is broadly trying to do what a RDW list is trying to do now. Burn was pretty strong back in the day which helps make up for dorks generally being pretty weak. This was the first pre-modern cube style deck I built which looks like a current era deck in that it has a plan, a curve appropriate to that, redundancy, and that can be easily defined as an aggressive deck. It mostly tried to be wrapping things up while the opponent was still floundering around doing not much in the way of relevant stuff and fighting on such a direct axis so as to make irrelevant a lot of the cards in the opponents deck. 

Next we have the dreaded beast of the Academy deck. Commonly agreed upon as the most broken and oppressive deck ever to exist in standard. Capable of turn one wins and just doing absurd things with cards and mana. This deck looks good even when utterly stripped of redundancy. It was one of the few builds where I had plenty of options for things I could happily put in (High Tide and Turn About anyone!?) Indeed I could well have made this list more powerful or more interactive and able to get out of sticky situations. In practice it probably needs no help and should be curtailed a little if possible in order to promote better and fairer games. The power of this deck is also somewhat telling in that I already had every single card I considered for the build which is entirely not the case for any of the other 11 decks I have done/am doing so far like this. I should put in a Meditate but it is one that I didn't have  and so I just threw in a cantrip. It should probably be a Whispers of the Muse rather than Brainstorm so as to align it better with the time period! By the time I come to play this set of 8 I am sure I will have tweaked these three pictured here somewhat! I did at least let it have Memory Jar which it never got to enjoy in real life as the card was emergency banned before it was tournament legal due to how egregious it would have been in this shell. 

And lastly for now we have this elegant little stompy deck landing somewhere between Svend Geertsen's 1997 deck and Matt Linde's 1999 list. Just lots of stats on the cheap. Even purer and more linear than the mono red aggro deck! Stompy has not held up so well against the test of time as the red deck has and we have not seen mono green decks of this style since. Mono green decks that have had success since stompy have all gone a bit bigger or longer with much more mana or more more value. 

The final five decks completing this series will be a BG Survival Recurring Nightmare list, a big artifact red deck, a white weenie deck, an UR tempo deck, and another UW control deck and who knows when my whims will take me to completing it or where they will go there after! With all this silly current power creep, over printing of cards, hard to take seriously crossovers, and cash grabbing releases of late it would not be of much surprise to me if I were to end up spending more time focused on the earlier periods of magic rather more! I hope you enjoyed this little nostalgia trip and found the old cards to be a delight to behold. Playing with exclusively old magic cards is a thing I would encourage all keen players to have a go with at some point, either for the first time or as a revisiting. I was surprised at the contrast in both aesthetic and play style and I was around at the time! These spells and cards are starting to look and feel like the ancient tome bound secrets a wizard might treasure.