Jamie Was Right About Everything: Part 1 Mike Flores You will periodically hear the lamentations of players who miss a mythical character called Jamie Wakefield. They miss a man who most of them have never met, but whose internet articles about enormous monsters, the Lovely Mare, and the once-and-again long road to the Pro Tour gave them both inspiration and pleasure. These players miss a writer whose spelling and grammar were so bad that he could neither spell nor punctuate the name of his favorite creature properly; though given dozens of opportunities to appear correctly, "Verdant Force" over and over appeared in Jamie's deck lists and in the bodies of his articles as "THE BEST FATTY EVER PRINTED". Those close to Jamie, though, who worked and fought with this now legendary absentee, lament something else: Jamie the theorist. Given the recent successes of Secret Force at Worlds 2001, the inclusion of more and more lands in almost all decks, and the recurring complaints of mana problems across formats, it is only now, years after his retirement, that we realize: Jamie Was Right About Everything. As this subject "everything" is a bit broad (and is probably more accurately "most stuff"), I have chosen to break down and reexamine a Wakefield tenet or so from the past in hopes of learning something for formats present and to come. Part I: The Secrets of No-Mar Unlikely as it may seem, Secret Force, Jamie's most famous creation, was neither his first love nor the first Extended deck he used to qualify for the Pro Tour. In 1998, Jamie (and later the future English National Champion, Mark Wraith) used this odd deck to pick up a ticket to "the Boat," that floating fortress of Deadguy glory, the Queen Mary. The Brothers Very Grimm* 4 Steel Golem 4 Carrionette 2 Necrosavant 4 Nekrataal 4 Sengir Vampire 2 Contagion 4 Dark Ritual 2 Diabolic Edict 3 Drain Life 4 Hymn to Tourach 3 Nevinyrral's Disk 4 Mishra's Factory 18 Swamp 4 Wasteland This deck is eccentric for what it includes, but more eccentric for what it lacks. If you don't remember, in the Extended of 1998, there was another black card that was legal, but has been recently banned by the DCI. The absence of Necropotence in Jamie's deck is neither an oversight nor an error... it is an example of personal preference. (Jamie long maintained that he hated Necropotence because it "clogged his hand".) Players such as Eric Taylor will instruct you that properly built Necropotence decks minimize mana costs so as to cast as many threats per turn as possible, then reload the hand with the power of Necropotence. It is for that reason that he constructed Patrick Chapin's 1999 Pro Tour-Chicago "free spell" Necrodeck with so many near-zero mana costs, and also why that most unfair of enchantments never found a home in the Wakefield School. You see, Jamie insisted on winning with the fattest creatures possible. While his threat cards were almost uniformly bigger than those of his average opponent, Jamie's monsters were also on average more expensive. Because of that, he would not generally have been able to make great use of Necropotence card advantage. At the same time, Jamie would not generally have approved of Necropotence. Across every deck he ever played or designed, Jamie voiced a stern disapproval for drawing extra cards (he didn't even run Impulse in his monoblue decks). Should Jamie have some sort of card advantage mechanism, it tended to be based on potentially being ahead after destroying something that didn't belong to him... his opponent's hand or creatures, for instance. You can see from the above list that the main potentialities for card advantage in The Brothers Very Grimm are all proactive... Nevinyrral's Disk, Carrionette, Hymn to Tourach, Nekrataal. If you were wondering about the small size of the Carrionettes or Nekrataals in Jamie's qualifying deck, they were present not primarily as threats but as elimination spells that were flexible enough to be sometimes threatening. Besides a single-minded "fatties are the only true road to victory" attitude and a disdain for non-interactive card advantage, Jamie tended to play lots and lots of dedicated removal. In The Brothers Very Grimm, you can readily see Contagion, Diabolic Edict, and Drain Life piled on top of the Nevinyrral's Disks, Carrionettes, and Nekrataals we've already discussed. Jamie was a big believer in powerful threats and flexible elimination spells... even when he was caught playing monogreen (the game's most notoriously removal-light color), Jamie would run multiple Elvish Lyrists and a full boat of four Creeping Molds. Finally, even when the rest of the Magic world went cantrip-happy, and cut lands in favor of every cheap play from Lodestone Bauble to Impulse, Jamie was a staunch believer in 26 lands. Often bragging that he was "never manascrewed," Jamie would advocate 26 land and ONE color (he'd be sure to capitalize "one") in the hopes that he could minimize bad luck draws. So after discussing an ancient deck by a long-retired player, your question is obvious... what does all of this teach us today? To answer, why not look at a version of the best archetype of Invasion Block Constructed? Jacob "Danger" Janoska scored a Top 8 finish in that format's final premiere event with the following version of No-Mar: 2 Desolation Angel 4 Ravenous Rats 4 Spectral Lynx 4 Dromar's Charm 4 Fact or Fiction 4 Gerrard's Verdict 4 Recoil 2 Rout 1 Spite/Malice 4 Vindicate 1 Yawgmoth's Agenda 1 Ancient Spring 4 Caves of Koilos 4 Coastal Tower 2 Dromar's Cavern 2 Island 3 Plains 4 Salt Marsh 6 Swamp While Janoska's Grand Prix-Minneapolis deck is by no means a direct translation of our old Wakefield design, most of the deck's modifications have been dictated by format and legal cards, not general philosophy. The Invasion Block was defined by polychromatic cards; it was nearly impossible to play a one-color deck, and not one version had enough tournament success to prove viability, which is one reason why the 2001 No-Mar build is three times as many colors as Jamie's 1998 fatty deck. On the other hand, for a deck that does not seem to be a direct descendent of The Brothers Very Grimm, the No-Mar archetype shows remarkable similarities. It has 26 lands. Its primary route to victory is an enormous black creature. Its smaller creatures echo Carrionette and Nekrataal with the card advantage they generate (Ravenous Rats) or their ability to help hold the ground (Spectral Lynx). It even plays a Hymn to Tourach reprint in Gerrard's Verdict! While No-Mar deviates from Wakefield philosophy via the presence of Fact or Fiction (a non-interactive, card-drawing, get-ahead engine), the presence of a lone construction slot seems minimal when you consider that the balance of the deck's spells are all flexible removal. Once he got over the particular colored symbols in their mana costs, I'm sure Jamie would have loved cards like Recoil and Vindicate... the "never dead" Creeping Mold, which is both more expensive and less powerful than either, was one of his favorite spells. Even No-Mar's permission, Dromar's Charm and Spite/Malice, serve double-duty as point removal; Rout fills the Nevinyrral's Disk "reset" spot nicely. Finally, the matriarch of No-Mar, Desolation Angel herself, is nearly the quintessential Wakefield threat. While the double white kicker cost complicates her title somewhat, this card nonetheless represents exactly what Jamie loved about fatties. He believed that spending a lot of mana for a worthwhile creature card was an investment in quality; at 3 ManaBlack ManaBlack ManaWhite ManaWhite Mana, Desolation Angel with kicker certainly is expensive, but as a 5/4 flyer with a remarkable special ability, her quality, should she hit the table, should be obvious. Because fatties were fairly difficult to remove, Jamie considered them reliable victory conditions once in play**. "It's the last fatty that kills you," Jamie would say, time and again; in most games, Desolation Angel's kicker ability makes sure she is the last enormous monster to hit the board. Jamie Wakefield dreamed of a world where blue's bounce and controller exchange spells were still good, but disempowered, where combo decks were both slower than creature decks and less reliable than control decks. He wanted green creatures to be the best creatures; he wanted them to be huge. Jamie wanted flexible board control cards to show up in winning decks. He wanted players to run a lot of land in their decks, and to have mana problems if they chose not to. Jamie Wakefield wanted Creeping Mold in the basic set. My dear readers, we now live in almost precisely Jamie Wakefield's dream world for Magic. When Secret Force - complete with maindeck Creeping Mold - puts the mighty Potato in the Top 8 of the World Championships, and a worried Mowshowitz rails against the universal power of a 3/3 for 2 ManaGreen Mana and a 4/4 for 2 ManaGreen ManaGreen ManaGreen Mana, you know that we are in a new world indeed. Dust off those old "King of the Fatties" articles, fellow magicians. It appears that for the time being, the school to attend is The Wakefield School. * This deck takes its name from imagined brothers from the Weatherlight expansion, Gallowbraid and Morinfen. Ironically, Jamie replaced these "Brothers Very Grimm" with Necrosavant, but did not change the deck's name. ** Jamie always hated blue mages' Tradewind Riders and Treacheries because they didn't actually have to remove his creatures to deal with them. I think he would have appreciated how Persuasion is inferior to both Control Magic and Treachery.