Yesterday’s DCI announcement restricting Fact or Fiction in Type 1 caught few people by surprise. The card had defined the environment since it was printed, and has been consistently called “the best card-drawer since Ancestral Recall.” The ensuing dominance of control decks virtually shut out aggressive strategies from any sort of tournament success. Suicide Black, with its host of discard spells and Phyrexian Negator, was the only aggro deck able to stand up to the juggernaut that control had become, and Suicide decks fared poorly against the other aggressive decks that would put in a hopeless appearance each time, rolling over the black deck only to be crushed later by control decks time after time.

The restriction of Fact or Fiction is supposed to re-balance the environment and allow aggro decks to compete. Unfortunately I think this solution was the wrong one. Rather than adding one more card to the restricted list the return of some old favorites could do more to address the uneven playing field that currently exists.

I don’t agree that Fact or Fiction was the card that shut down aggro decks. At four mana, the card is too slow to help against the sheer speed that red, green and black weenie decks bring to the table. Rather, Fact primarily defined control mirror matches. An instant-speed card-drawer for a reasonable amount of mana is the last thing a permission player wants to see during his end step. The strength of this card became so important to games between two control decks that more and more cards became devoted to dealing with this threat. Five-color control began experimenting with Duress, and a mono-blue deck arose with mana acceleration and only Powder Kegs for creature control.

For reference, this is the deck that got Fact or Fiction restricted:

Necro Blue, by Acolytec (posted on Beyond Dominia)

4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
4 Mana Leak (played over Counterspell to take advantage of colorless mana from Moxes)
2 Counterspell
3 Misdirection

4 Fact or Fiction
1 Timewalk
1 Ancestral Recall

4 Morphling
2 Masticore
3 Powder Keg

1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
5 Moxes
15 Islands
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Wasteland
1 Strip Mine
2 Back to Basics

That hardly looks like a deck designed to hose an aggressive creature rush. The reason that it does is two-fold. First, aggro decks at this time are extremely weak. Coinciding with the printing of Fact or Fiction was the restriction of Necropotence, which allowed control decks to compete with mono-black. Red decks no longer had anyone they could beat if they couldn’t expect a decent amount of black in the field, and a green deck that’s fast enough to deal with The Abyss from a multi-color control deck looks much like the 9-land green that was popular in Extended last season – far too vulnerable to Powder Keg.

The potent threat of Back to Basics forced the multicolor decks to rethink their approach as well, devoting more mana and sideboard space to supporting Red Elemental Blast and Gorilla Shaman, and even dropping the traditional Swords to Plowshares in favor of the rather embarrassing Diabolic Edict which, while it kills Morphling, leaves something to be desired against Sligh. The field for aggro decks was never more open.

In my view, the card that has shut down aggro is Mana Drain. When a creature-based deck has some amount of board pressure but sees two blue mana untapped, the proper play in Type 1 is to see how far the existing threat will go. In any other format you want to play out more creatures to increase the pressure unless you expect a Wrath of God, but here, for just two mana, the threat of Mana Drain means that you should hold back for fear that the extra mana boost will allow the control deck to play The Abyss or worse, Morphling. As long as this card is in the environment, aggressive decks can’t play aggressively without potentially giving the opponent a 3 turn jump in mana development.

However, Mana Drain can’t be restricted, in part for sentimental reasons and in part because it’s necessary to stabilize the format. There are a number of viable, even strong, combo decks waiting to be unleashed. Despite having nearly all of their components restricted, decks based on Tolarian Academy, Yawgmoth’s Bargain or Replenish remain capable of winning in three or fewer turns on a regular basis. Only a strong control deck with Force of Will backed up by additional counters can keep them in check. If control becomes unplayable, which the restriction of Mana Drain would probably accomplish, then combo would return with a vengeance, and nobody wants a format where games can’t last past turn 4. Lesser combos based on Doomsday, Reap or Fastbond might even become tier-1 material.

The restriction of Fact or Fiction may actually hurt aggro decks more than it helps. The reason is linked to the observation above that Fact defined control mirrors far more than it defined control vs aggro games. Its absence will make mono-blue control substantially weaker and return five-color control, the descendant of Weissman’s “The Deck,” to their dominant position. So long as mono-blue was the top deck, black could compete at least in theory (it could beat the top decks, but often loses randomly to little kiddie red decks that show up at the bottom tables). Blue’s best weapon was Misdirection, which fails to answer either Duress or Negator. Multicolored control strategies have all the tools they need to handle creature decks though. Compost and Spiritual Focus shut down discard effects, Pyroclasm ruins the creature base, and they still have access to Misdirection. If they’re really scared, there’s even COP: Black and Light of Day. Black can’t compete with that, nor can red compete with Zuran Orb, the Circle of Protection and the Mind Twist that will put an end to its sideboarding attempts.

In short, there is no aggro deck that should consistently beat five-color control.

Instead of attempting to weaken control, the DCI ought to look for a way to strengthen aggro. There are two strong, but not broken, aggro cards on the restricted list that would accomplish this goal: Necropotence and Berserk. In my opinion, it was the loss of Necro (conveniently at the same time Fact or Fiction was printed) that actually resulted in the ascendance of control.

Bring back Necro and mono-black suddenly has the tools it needs to compete with the big guns of control. It’s tough to match that kind of card-drawing power. Anyone who remembers its presence in Type 1, or the Black Summer of Type 2, shouldn’t need much to convince them that Necro black beats anything with a blue base. And what beats Necro? Two underplayed, and at present downright bad, aggro decks: Sligh and White Weenie. Burn and protection from black creatures destroy the Necro deck, and hence would become competitive again. With proper sideboarding, these decks might even have a chance against a control field that can no longer sideboard hate for them at the expense of the Necro matchup.

One might object that Necropotence is restricted for a reason. That’s true, sort of. However, it’s not the classic black aggro deck with a card-drawing engine that got it restricted. It was a combo deck.

Trix 2000 by Michael Bower aka mikephoen (posted on Beyond Dominia)

The Combo (8)
4 Illusions of Grandeur
4 Donate

Search/ Set-Up (13)
4 Necropotence
4 Demonic Consultation
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Yawgmoth's Will
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk

Disruption/ Protection (11)
4 Force of Will
4 Duress
2 Red Elemental Blast
1 Boomerang

Mana Sources (28)
4 Dark Ritual
1 Black Lotus
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Jet
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Sol Ring
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Gemstone Mine
4 Underground Sea
4 Underground River
4 Badlands

This deck is strong. Far too strong, and it needed to be dealt with. Restricting Necropotence did that, but at terrible cost to the classic aggro decks. There are two possible solutions: errata could be issued on Illusions of Grandeur so that it read, in part, “When you lose control of Illusions of Grandeur, lose 20 life.” This solution is likely to be undesirable because of the impact it would have on the Extended environment. Therefore, the card could be restricted rather than reworded.

Some people object that there are other combo decks that Necro could fuel. That’s only partly true. Only the Trix combo provided the unique synergy that allowed the Trix player to draw 20 extra cards in the middle of going off, and as a result allowed the deck to start the combo without having all the pieces in hand. Casting Illusions was virtually guaranteed to find Donate. No other card (for example, Forbidden Crypt has been suggested) does that. Without those 20 extra cards, or that extra life, the combo engine is relatively easy to disrupt or to race against.

It has also been suggested that Donate was the problem card and should be the target of any restriction. That solution would be inadequate because of the problem noted above – playing Illusions practically guarantees you find either Donate or a search card. The presence of cheap recursion effects like Regrowth and Reclaim allows the combo player to use the Donate more than once if necessary. If a Tolarian Academy combo deck is still possible, there must be enough search in the environment to make up for the restriction of a weak and silly card like Donate which is really incidental to the function of the rest of the deck.

Finally, I think Berserk should be unrestricted. Four copies of Necro make white and red competitive again, and blue-based control would remain competitive because it can crush red and white, but poor green gets nothing out of all that. In Type 1 it can’t deal with Lightning Bolts, and white’s first striking creatures are too much. Berserk increases a Stompy deck’s speed by a good turn or so, potentially allowing it to compete with slower control decks and also with the suicidal Necro decks. Admittedly, this is a very strong card. However, it’s been restricted for seven years, and hasn’t seen play for 5 of those. Nobody really knows what it’s capable of. However I can say that each color has a commonly played answer to it that would prevent it from becoming dominant:

red: Lightning Bolt
white: Swords to Plowshares
blue: Misdirection (or any other counterspell)
black: wait, which removal spell doesn’t work?
green: okay they don’t have anything but Fog, but green players aren’t going to complain about this, right?

One complaint with Berserk has been that it allowed a “combo-feeling” deck with Ball Lightning and Blood Lust to be too fast. In fact that’s the reason it was restricted. Does that sound scary any more? Remember this card:

Hatred 3BB
Instant
As an additional cost to play Hatred,
pay any amount of life.
Target creature gets +X/+0 until end
of turn, where X is the amount of life
paid in this way.

As long as four copies of that are legal (and not played) in the environment, it seems hard to suggest that Berserk would be a problem. Hatred costs one less mana than the Ball-Lust-Berserk “combo,” and three less colored mana. Moreover, it’s black and gets Dark Ritual and Yawgmoth’s Will to accelerate it.

So that’s the end of my rant. It took me a long time to be convinced of this view, and I’ve argued against the return of Necro for many months, but now it seems like the right thing to do.