Magic and the Internet
The last time I assisted a Standard tournament some weeks ago, I was amazed of what I saw. Every
person in the room except me and my play group were playing the same 4 decks. Vampires, some
beatdown, white something and another thing with artifacts I don’t quite understand yet. We were
playing A weird Land Control (me), a weird haste slight, and a weird elf ally. But all of them were
basically playing the same deck copied times over. To make things worse, even the sideboard was the
same and to just add salt to insult to injury, some said “Are those Alex’s blahs? I could only trade 2. You
got the other 3 you lucky shrimp!”
I suddenly realized that most of the people playing there in that particular tournament were playing
internet decks. Decks anyone in the internet perfected in a Pro Tour, then proceeded to post it on the
internet and was copied forever after to infinity ad nauseam.
I faced two vampire decks (That were identical, but one was missing a copy of vampire nocturnus the
other had in excess) and two white blue artifact decks that I still don’t know what they do (no lands, no
actions). The last deck I played against was the slight haste from one of my mates.
Why people has the need to go look for decks on the internet, make a carbon copy of it (some a very
expensive foil carbon copy of it) and play it just changing a land or two and claiming the discovery of
warm water? Are they lobotomized and can’t think for themselves and build anything?
When I played during Mercadian, Invasion, Oddyseey, and I think even Onslaught, people would just
build their decks with their brains. They would look in magazines what cards were being broken beyond
recognition and went on their merry way to break them in a different manner with different kinds. Or
just look what could be broken.
Some made what we call a ranch (A deck that relied on a combo with so many cards, that if one was
missing it was impossible to win, or at least it needed much more time), some made crazy win
conditions, some very strange combos that couldn’t work with logic but only with rules and most
important of all, it was fun!
But today, people only like to go to tournaments and play decks that are on the internet tested, or the
counter measure of the same deck (that of course, comes from the internet). What happened to build
your own deck? Why this horrible search of the holy grail on the internet? Just to win?
Worse is, that when confronted with a deck that has no previous record on the internet (like my weird
land control with only 8 land breakers) it is totally misleading and basically, the frustration in their faces
not being able to sideboard and answer is just sad. And people would get mad at me because “where
did you get that deck? It is amazing! It is so well balanced and it killed this meta-game-10-times-pro-tour-champio-tried-and-true KILLER deck” and of course my answer, for them is more puzzling and some
people don’t like to accept it. My answer?
“I built it.”
