DVD Extras for “The Three-Deuce”

Most of you have probably read my most recent column on the mother ship, The Three-Deuce. If you haven’t yet… Well… The link was right there in that previous sentence!

The Three-Deuce was originally a Grand Prix winning deck popularized by Trey Van Cleave. I picked the name’s pocket to use on this article, which was a split between a pair of topics, three and two.

The execution on Top Decks is changing slightly. Instead of focusing on the blue and gray boxes and Top 8 trending every week during a PTQ season we are doing more strategy and in-depth explorations of decks and strategies that I find to be interesting.

This week the strategic theme was about how some successful decks of the past were able to incorporate new cards from a set appearing in the middle of a Constructed format (you know, like how Conflux is complicating the middle of our present PTQ season).

It was difficult to write the “three” section on approaching a format as a new set is injected in the middle of things without applying Stage theory, but I couldn’t assume that my mother ship readers are familiar with that set of angles… But you guys have all read The Breakdown of Theory and Breakdown in Phase III, right? Right!

So here come the DVD Extras…

1. The Macey Deck
   The inclusion of the Macey deck in White Weenie is a classic Stage Three. Remember the rules of Stage Three are that one deck is actively dictating the field of battle and that the other deck only has a couple of cards that matter. Kjeldoran Outpost in White Weenie prevents the control deck from being able to win with pure creature elimination redundancy, and in fact puts the onus on the control to draw one of its limited number of Strip Mines in order to deal with the threat. One thing that I didn’t mention but probably never came up is that the control can also race.
2. Tempest in Sligh
   Stage theory again… Pre-Tempest Magic put most decks on having to get to about four mana in order to do anything interesting. Wrath of God is the obvious four mana card, but there were many Icy Manipulators, and even the “beatdown” decks were Erhnam Djinn attackers. Tempest in Sligh changed the fortunes of the beatdown by pulling the mana threshold back — way back — to like one mana for Jackal Pup and Mogg Fanatic… So these decks were almost never in the “basically manascrewed” ghetto of Stage One; moreover, the easy mana control of Wasteland would bomb slower decks back to the stone age of “basically manascrewed” even if they should have been in Stage Two, non-interactively for the most part.
3. Jar
   I have always maintained that people hate combo decks — whether they use these terms or not — because most of the “skill” in Magic occurs during Stage Two (where most of the interaction occurs); Jar exemplifies the combo deck with no Stage Two. Stage One is so short because of the mana acceleration and searching and then as soon as the first Tinker pops you are in a situation where basically everything you are playing, tutoring up, et cetera ad infinitum is better than whatever the other guy is gunning and relatively few of his cards matter (especially if you have Defense Grids on board)… textbook Stage Three… on turn one or whatever.

This is not to say that there is no skill in playing combo decks… There is certainly a lot of probability and picking the right tools, but the lack of interaction is what turns a lot of players off, especially the less spike-competitive ones.

Onto the Deuce!

SWOT Storm! was a late addition to this article. Originally my intrepid editor Kelly Digges was afeared that I used copyrighted music in the video (a no-no… Can’t run that stuff on the mother ship!). However I contacted him that I used some canned beats that came on my MacBook Pro and Kelly gave the SWOT Storm! ye olde green light on the second printing as it were.

Which was cool.

LOVE
MIKE