They Found It Once Again Mike Flores Unlike some other threat-based decks, such as the mana curve-conscious Sligh (which strives for smooth turn-to-turn draws) or the later Deadguy Red (which emphasizes redundant early game pressure) this one's is a style that spends a turn or two laying out early accelerators with the objective of later taking an explosive turn or succession of turns, using superior mana to power out a superior threat. In the earliest days of Magic, Llanowar Elves and Wild Growth did the job of casting an fast Craw Wurm or paying the upkeep of Force of Nature; years later, before the tuning of Wall of Roots and the printing of Priest of Titania, Wakefield used those original accelerators as the alpha compliments to Natural Order in one of this archetype's the most famous incarnations, Secret Force. For months after the release of Invasion, an updated and polychromatic look at the same philosophy gave us the interaction of Fires of Yavimaya and Nemesis fading threats, as well as Brian Kibler's Rith, the Awakener + Armadillo Cloak combination deck, The Red Zone. Irrespective of whether that specific Urza's Legacy uncommon is used in a specific design, or even legal in a Constructed format, some deck designers have taken its name as a blanket for the mana acceleration + expensive threat archetype: Tinker. For the last year, list after list, Birds of Paradise and Llanowar Elves have held eight spots in the "Tinker" decks of Standard, laying the ground primarily for Blastoderms while largely skipping over the two mana stop in the deck's curve. And while those Birds and Elves are still making deck lists, with the absence of the fading threats of Nemesis, today's g-x creature decks are less about emphasizing five mana Saproling Bursts or six mana Dragons, but instead speeding up a sleeker team with lower overall mana costs. Though threats from Beast Attack to Shivan Wurm still top the curves of modern g-r decks, the latest builds have come to reincorporate the somehow forgotten two-drop, from unkicked Titans to Wild Mongrels. Some experiments have migrated Thornscape Familiar from Invasion Block Constructed to the Birds of Paradise slot. Better late game due to its two power, and just as adequate for turn-3 Flametongue Kavu potential, Thornscape Familiar has a significant downside, lacking the ability to threaten a turn-2 Call of the Herd (itself consuming the second turn's mana); the overall lower mana costs of the g-r "Blitz" style versus the more familiar "Fires" decks nevertheless seem to justify a less specifically redundant suite of mana accelerators. Even the g-r Blitz decks that run a full compliment of Birds and Elves (such as the Deadguy g-r deck from the 2001 Invitational) can hardly be called Tinker decks. While mana acceleration is still a part of the g-r deck plan, we see a greater emphasis regarding the curve's three mana creatures, with cards like Raging Kavu and Call of the Herd taking the place of the absent suite of 4 mana 5/5 monsters. Furthermore, the raw power so often associated with the Tinker school (Armageddon was the closest thing to utility in The Red Zone) steps aside for the flexibility of Fire/Ice and the Finkel-hunting Urza's Rage. In some cases, we have green's most powerful Odyssey cards - Beast Attack and Call of the Herd - combined not just with red elimination, but blue utility and card drawing. A good example is Brian Kibler's hybridized Invitational deck; both he and Deadguy Tony Tsai used it to win their respective State Championships (their specific lists are next to each other right here). This Kibler deck is a good example of the Firestorm Principle, where Invested Opposition is buoyed by the self-contained card advantage of creatures from the aforementioned Call of the Herd and Beast Attack to Flametongue Kavu and Jungle Barrier. The synergy between all of these cards and Opposition (and between flashback and Fact or Fiction) is very powerful; I leave it to Brian to explicate more specifically. In any case, as g-r moves from the broadsword that was Fires and The Red Zone to the Swiss Army knife of the Connecticut and Georgia championship decks, from Tinker to Toolbox as it were, a position seems to have become available in the general pool of Standard decks... The archetype most likely to take up the Tinker mantle seems to be Domain. While Domain showed up at last year's Pro Tour-Tokyo, it took a back seat at that tournament to g-r beatdown and The Solution. Not until Ben Rubin's win at the Barcelona Masters was the archetype validated as a top deck: Ben Rubin Barcelona Masters Champion Main Deck Sideboard 4 Elfhame Palace 7 Forest 7 Islands 1 Mountain 2 Plains 1 Swamp 3 Questing Phelddagrif 3 Star Compass 2 Allied Strategies 4 Collective Restraint 4 Fact or Fiction 2 Absorb 3 Reviving Vapors 3 Spite/Malice 1 Elfhame Sanctuary 4 Fertile Ground 4 Harrow 1 Restock 2 Obliterate 2 Global Ruin "Draw five cards." "Armageddon... you." "Blow up all the permanents. No, you can't counter that." With four individual classes of mana acceleration powering out some ridiculous spells, Rubin's version of Domain was a good re-adaptation of Tinker theory. In a sense, Domain pushes the Tinker envelope to its logical extreme. No longer constrained even by color, Domain decks, with their access to essentially whatever mana they wish, can cast basically any available spell. It is therefore less odd than one might think that the most recent Standard descendents of IBC Domain decks seem to resemble the Rubin Masters deck only in their basic land-fetching engines. Don Lim 2001 New York State Championships, Top 4 Main Deck Sideboard 10 Forest 6 Island 1 Mountain 1 Plains 4 Swamp 4 Allied Strategies 3 Collective Restraint 4 Evasive Action 4 Worldly Counsel 1 Death Grasp 4 Pernicious Deed 4 Early Harvest 4 Harrow 2 Holistic Wisdom 4 Rampant Growth 3 Restock 1 Ghitu Fire Aaron Breider 2001 Michigan State Champion Main Deck Sideboard 11 Forest 6 Island 2 Mountain 1 Plains 2 Swamp 4 Flametongue Kavu 2 Spiritmonger 4 Allied Strategies 4 Collective Restraint 4 Evasive Action 4 Fact or Fiction 4 Repulse 4 Call of the Herd 4 Harrow 4 Rampant Growth Lim (a co-designer of Spring 2000's dominant Parallax Replenish archetype) modified the Tsuyoshi Fujita "Rice Snack" deck from the 2001 Magic Invitational; Breider, noted primarily for his r-w "Peace of Crap" deck, took a totally different look at the Domain engine. While both players ran Harrow and Rampant Growth to accelerate their mana bases and get the Domain in play, and took advantage of the Domain with exactly the same cards (Allied Strategies, Collective Restraint, and Evasive Action), their long term game plans could not be more different from one another, or from the Rubin deck. Lim's is a combination deck: its plan is to cast Early Harvest repeatedly and then send a 20 point Death Grasp or Ghitu Fire at the opponent; Breider's deck is a more straightforward look: he uses his mana accelerants to play out powerful individual threats. That being said, all these Domain decks have a couple of things in common. For one thing, they play out the early game exactly the same as one another... While Rubin's original has the more fragile Fertile Ground (his deck didn't have access to Seventh Edition'sRampant Growth), all of them have heavy green components to cast accelerators on the second and third turns. Because - powerful as they are - the Domain cards are more expensive than most decks' threats, all three run the exceptionally powerful Collective Restraint to deter early beatdown. In addition, all three have the same base philosophy: every spell drawn is either mana acceleration or it is a bomb. In Rubin's deck, a bomb literally blows up the world. Global Ruin and Obliterate are surprisingly easy casts despite their high mana costs. Due to the nature of the Domain, and the presence of Elfhame Sanctuary in his specific version, these supposedly symmetrical spells will generally leave Rubin's deck in better position than his opponent's. He ends the game with the incomparable Questing Phelddagrif. The Lim deck is heavier on the mana acceleration aspect, including Early Harvest in addition to the standard suite. As a trade off to having a lower threat-to-mana ratio, if one of his threat spells does resolve, his opponent will generally lose to that single card. Unlike the original version of Rice Snack, Lim's runs Pernicious Deed as well as Collective Restraint to diversify his board control and remove the otherwise game-winning Meddling Mage. The Breider deck shares the incredible card drawing ability of the other Domain decks, but takes a more direct path to victory. With access to each of the best creatures in Standard, almost every card in this Wakefield-friendly take on Domain is an opportunity to card advantage, or can be ridden to the end of the game. "Whatever you did with that huge amount of mana had to have an impact right away that stopped you from dying." -Zvi Mowshowitz With "draw five cards" being on the relatively innocuous end of what some of these decks are capable of doing, the resolution of a non-mana spell will often put the opponent in a terrible position. The biggest potential problem of these decks, therefore, tends to be a loss of tempo rather than card advantage or quality. While Collective Restraint, Pernicious Deed, or simply laying a quality blocker can potentially generate card advantage, the "stop sign" effect these cards have against aggressive decks will often help to nullify lost tempo or simply help to buy the Domain player the necessary turns to set up his own more powerful spells. Beating blue is often another story. Allied Strategies does not draw many cards at all if it fails to resolve, and Questing Phelddagrif and Spiritmonger may seem to do everything by themselves, but they actually "do everything but live through Wrath of God", "if they actually resolve", that is. It was the addition of Mana Leak in Suicide Brown that lifted that deck against permission, and similarly, the Evasive Actions of the Domain decks (especially Don's) help them immensely against control decks. That being said, we have at this point discussed main decks only. Unlike most Tinker decks of the last several years, Domain has access not only to a large volume of mana, but every color as well. As such, tuning Domain for post-sideboard matchups will generally be favorable, especially if cards like Mask of Intolerance and Planar Overlay are not common. Zvi Mowshowitz once suggested that if Meddling Mage or another specialized small creature was a problem, Domain could simply sideboard Urza's Rage for it (and Aaron Breider did); Andrew Cuneo at one point advocated an Ordered Migration/Rith's Charm Domain deck that won by controlling the board with 1/1 token creatures. As Pernicious Deed was ironically a problem for his deck with few other non-land permanents, Cuneo could sideboard Draco against the Deed. "Nope," he'd say against a Deed player tapping only five activation mana. "It only costs five for me." If straightforward green creature decks continue in their popularity in Standard, with Static Orb or blue aggro-control decks taking a back seat to their efficiency and low draw deviations, Domain Tinker decks of various styles, complete with their excellent anti-beatdown measures and overpowered threat spells, should prove an attractive alternative.