|
|
| |
|
| ||
|
|
by Erin Feeney
You're playing That!?! Recently my mother (not a Magic player) was listening to me talk to a friend about Magic. The subject of cheapness was brought up, and we talked about that for awhile. Later that day, my mom asked me what cheapness was. I found it was one of those words that's really hard to define on the spot, like "irony". So what is cheap? It depends a lot on whom you ask. I've gone through about 3 different phases of what I believed was cheap:
I interviewed some players that I know, and talked with them at length on the subject of cheap. After many exhausting minutes of research, I found that there are two separate categories of what is cheap: when you are in tournaments, and when you are playing casually. In a tournament, a lot of cards are fair game. You'll see a CoP hit the table, as well as anarchies and karmas. In Type 1 tournaments, black vises, control magics, and cheap bolt decks are also more popular. If half the cards that are consistently played in tournaments were played in friendly play, you'd hear more groans than if someone was playing a stasis deck. Meanwhile, in casual play, people rarely sideboard against each other. In any case, the person who puts down a Circle of Protection in a 5-way game is sure to suck up at least a couple of bolts. And I won't even start with the complaints that I get about black vises. Of course, there really is no such thing as cheap. People just use that word to insult cards that they don't like. But realistically, if everyone decided to play cheap cards, everyone would respond with cheap cards, and so on. Eventually we would all play stasis or counter decks. By the way, I smack anyone who casts a blood moon when I'm playing my five color deck. Then I put in conversion. Lately, I have decided to put in whatever I wanted. This seems to be a good policy in my opinion, because wasn't Magic made to have a free environment where people express their creativity however they want, and thus put anything in their deck? (Wait a sec, doesn't that go against everything DCI stands for? Oh well.)
Erin Feeney
|
|