Or they could play a combination of cards which locks you into an infinite draw and discard cycle, decking you in a single turn.
Not that it particularly affects the message of the article, but I was under the impression that Magic has evolved away from decks that focus on using lots of creatures to deplete all the other player’s life points being viable, unless you have some mechanism for playing them very early into the game when they have hardly any mana.
Modern-day Magic sets are actually very creature focussed. The Vintage format (which lets you play cards from any set) is something of another matter, but it’s also not very popular (mainly due to cost).
ShardPhoenix is correct: The R&D team for Magic has explicitly upheld a design philosophy that favors using lots of creatures to win, in contrast to the older style of winning with few to no creatures.
It’s been a few years since I followed the game, but it seemed to me like it was gradually moving further and further away from creature focus since I was first introduced to it in elementary school.
tl;dr: The game was dominated by spells from 1995-2003, so the philosophical change began ~8 years ago in 2004.
I believe Ice Age [1995] marks the beginning of the “spells win” era—but I’m not familiar with what sort of tournament scene existed before that point. This peaked with the Urza’s Saga block in 1998, largely considered the single most unbalanced set ever printed. Mirrodin [2003] was meant to be a return to creatures, and almost succeeded. Unfortunately, a small number of severely broken cards warped the format in to something that was still focused almost entirely around combo decks.
I believe Kamigawa [2004] marks the first block that wasn’t dominated by combo/spell strategies, and actually valued creatures, although “Magic 2010” [2009] was probably the first block that truly captured the new “creatures win” focus of the game—from then on, it’s pretty much indisputable that the focus of the game had changed.
Or they could play a combination of cards which locks you into an infinite draw and discard cycle, decking you in a single turn.
Not that it particularly affects the message of the article, but I was under the impression that Magic has evolved away from decks that focus on using lots of creatures to deplete all the other player’s life points being viable, unless you have some mechanism for playing them very early into the game when they have hardly any mana.
Modern-day Magic sets are actually very creature focussed. The Vintage format (which lets you play cards from any set) is something of another matter, but it’s also not very popular (mainly due to cost).
ShardPhoenix is correct: The R&D team for Magic has explicitly upheld a design philosophy that favors using lots of creatures to win, in contrast to the older style of winning with few to no creatures.
How old is this older style?
It’s been a few years since I followed the game, but it seemed to me like it was gradually moving further and further away from creature focus since I was first introduced to it in elementary school.
tl;dr: The game was dominated by spells from 1995-2003, so the philosophical change began ~8 years ago in 2004.
I believe Ice Age [1995] marks the beginning of the “spells win” era—but I’m not familiar with what sort of tournament scene existed before that point. This peaked with the Urza’s Saga block in 1998, largely considered the single most unbalanced set ever printed. Mirrodin [2003] was meant to be a return to creatures, and almost succeeded. Unfortunately, a small number of severely broken cards warped the format in to something that was still focused almost entirely around combo decks.
I believe Kamigawa [2004] marks the first block that wasn’t dominated by combo/spell strategies, and actually valued creatures, although “Magic 2010” [2009] was probably the first block that truly captured the new “creatures win” focus of the game—from then on, it’s pretty much indisputable that the focus of the game had changed.