Legacy format
Ah, there’s always a happy medium, isn’t there? Three months after my post complaining about Wizards of the Coast’s promotion of Type 2 over Type 1 (I’m talking about Magic: The Gathering again, folks) I’ve converted most of my decks to “Type 1.5″. This is Type 1, with the cards on the Type 1 “Restricted List”, a collection of severely broken and under-costed cards, banned. This has mostly involved removing Sol Rings and Demonic Tutors, and voila, Type 1.5-legal. I also have one “Extended” deck (which they could call Type 1.75, because it’s between Types 1.5 and 2, or Type 1.596 if you perform a proper linear interpolation between the two counting the number of sets allowed [oh, never mind]), and one Onslaught-block deck (which qualifies as Type 2 until late 2004.) A couple of decks I kept at some even finer-grained hybrid that needs a better name than “Type 1.5 plus one restricted but non-Power card“. My squirrels, for instance, kept their one Earthcraft. My elephants are in this category for now, but as soon as I replace the Fastbond with an Exploration they’ll be Type 1.5-legal as well. A couple of decks I’ve kept as juicily Type 1 as I can afford (my lone Mox Pearl along with a Sol Ring, a Mox Diamond, a Demonic Tutor, and so on.) One is my fun five color deck that has morphed gradually from the deck I was playing during Mirage block, the other is a white and black deck of the sort that they’re now calling MaskNought but that I designed myself before it became the rage thankyouverymuch, except that mine is a lot more fun.
It seems that Type 1.5 is my natural settling place (or casual unpowered Type 1.) I hate the degeneracy of competitive Type 1, which features turn-one kills, leaving the games decidable by a coin flip and forcing you to play Force of Wills (Forces of Will?) but I love its card pool. So there.

















