The Two Card Challenge
Metagaming in a Nutshell
Building a Deck with only Two Cards
Author: Nico Bohny
WIN A BLOOMBURROW COLLECTOR BOOSTER
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- Comment on our Tweet with your “best” Two-Card Deck built with the rules laid out in the article below.
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- We will pick three winners on Aug. 5, 2024 and tag them in the comments of the post.
We spent a great evening drafting last week, and since we finished early, mainly thanks to the monored and U/W tempo deck in our pod, we had some spare time as well as a spare booster in our price pool.
I came up with a simple challenge to fight for the last booster – we each got ourselves a pen and ten commons, which we used as proxies for our challenge deck.
The challenge was quite simple – build a ten card deck featuring any number of two different cards. You don’t lose to decking, if there’s a stall, the player with more life wins.
No Deckbuilding without Bannings
We timed the challenge, so everyone would get five minutes to come up with a deck, and then we started. After some seconds, a player came up with the suggestion of banning Black Lotus, so we went ahead and banned the full Power 9 (even though there was no need banning the blue ones at that point, but let’s keep things fair). We also added Thassa’s Oracle to the banned list.
Before you continue reading, you can also participate if you want. Build your deck, and then read on to see if you had beaten our decks. I’m curious to see what you came up with, so feel free to post your ideas on Twitter X.
Five-Minute-Deckbuilding
Five minutes to build a deck. Well, I glanced at my trade binder for inspiration. Would Scarab God do the job for me. Probably not in this format. Four minutes. I play a lot of Vintage lately on Magic Online, what’s good there? Wasteland and Mishra’s Factory? No, wait, I could even go for Strip Mine & Mishra’s Factory. Three minutes. Hold on, what about storm? Tendrils of Agony will not get the job done quickly, but what about Empty the Warrens? And Lotus Petal? Two more minutes. Harrrrr, the booster is mine. 8 Lotus Petals & 2 Empty the Warrens sounds perfect. Time to scribble the proxies. One more minute. Done.
Time to FIGHT
Round 1: I lost the die roll. My opponent went Mishra’s Workshop into Walking Ballista, I made sixteen Goblins. Fair enough. Easy enough.
Round 2: I won the die roll and stormed for 14 gobos. My opponent played four Mana Crypts and Platinum Emperion. And then another one, and even a third one. Wow, there went my booster.
Finals: I was thrilled to see how the finals went, and they were over as quickly as they started. While Platinum Emperion hit the battlefield again on turn one, Elspeth, Sun’s Champion came down for his opponent and finished him off pretty quickly.
What We Learned
We had a lot of fun in this experiment, and it perfectly illustrated some things we learn in recent Magic environments:
- Sometimes, you need to ban cards in order to keep a format fresh. In this case, we should have banned all the fast mana cards (Lotus Petal, Spirit Guides, Mana Crypts, Mishra’s Workshop, …) and we could do the challenge another time and have fun doing so.
- Sometimes, you need to change rules in order to have a format evolve. In our example, reactive cards were just almost unplayable, since you lacked a win option if you played them. So we would have needed the possibility to add a third card instead of only two different ones.
- There are good decks as well as there are bad decks, but there is no best deck. There’s just the best deck in the current metagame. The Elspeth player would have lost against the Walking Ballista guy or me, but he would have crushed my Strip Mine deck (which was bad to begin with, but would have been good against the Ballista deck) and so on. If I could choose a deck for the challenge again, it wouldn’t be easy at all, even though I had played it once already. Maybe Mindbreak Trap and Mishra’s Factory?
Three-Card Challenge
If you like challenges like these, I have an extra one for you:
Come up with a 15 card deck, Standard cards only, featuring any number of three different cards, as well as a sideboard featuring three copies of a fourth card. Let’s see who comes up with the best deck.
You can find me and my stuff on YouTube, Twitter and Twitch, be sure to catch up and say hi:
About the Author
Nico Bohny is a retired Pro Player from Switzerland. His impressive resume contains of two PT top 8’s, 2 Grand Prix Top 8’s and a win with the Swiss national team at Worlds 2007, where they beat Austria in the finals. He’s a Vintage aficionado and skilled Limited player.
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