Bit of a two parter here, folks~! Since I’m playing more Magic: The Gathering thanks to Arena, I have decks I play around with. I want to think about the decks I’ve been playing with later, I want to look back and see what I thought of them, and that means, yep, using the blog as a history of my life. Like some kind of web-log. Anyway, what that means is I’m going to talk about a thing that I’m thinking about in Magic: The Gathering, then I’m going to talk about a deck I’ve been playing that reminds me of it the idea! Cool? Cool. Cool!
Anyway, I don’t like black enchantment hate.
In Magic: The Gathering, to be specific.
A few years ago, now, the idea was floated to broaden the colours that could attack enchantments from two (green and white) to three (green and white and black). This is something that a number of dedicated black players and opinion havers welcomed but which more seasoned players didn’t seem to care about which I think is a good sign that it was a bad idea. The argument seemed to be that enchantments were something only two colours could deal with, while three colours could deal with artifacts.
This is some babybrain logic in my opinion because the assumption there is that enchantments and artifacts are equal, and they’re really not. Enchantments that augment your creatures are weak and non-transferable, while artifacts that augment your creatures are some of the most powerful things in the game. Artifacts are made more, give the designers more tools and can be interacted with positively by all five colours.
There are in Magic: The Gathering, a bunch of card types, and some beyond the seven or eight you’ll see in a typical Tarmogoyf-loving games: artifact, battle, conspiracy, creature, dungeon, enchantment, instant, land, phenomenon, plane, planeswalker, scheme, sorcery, tribal, and vanguard. Now of that list, it’s worth considering that the ability to interact with them is not only not equally distributed across the colours but those cards’ presence is not equally distributed either. Black and white have two of the best ways of interacting with Dungeons, for example, and white is the leader for Planeswalker support (with green and blue in second because of the Proliferate mechanic). Colours can struggle to interact with lands and battles or they can have a hard time dealing with instants and creatures.
The card types are not represented equally, their impact on the game is not equal, and therefore, the idea that their responses should be equalled out is hogwash to me.
What makes it worse is that black was already the number two for enchantment destruction because a bit under half of all enchantments are auras, and of those, half are creature auras. Black is the number one colour for killing creatures, and it will always have reasons to keep creature kill on hand – because almost every deck has some reason to care about having creatures. Black can already hit a quarter of all enchantments pretty reliably because those enchantments play inextricably into black’s existing stength. You wouldn’t bother to give black ‘destroy target aura’ because black is just going to kill the thing under the aura.
The adding of black to the enchantment removal colours bothers me philosophically, too. Enchantments are typically used to represent things like ideologies and ideas, the immaterial and the idealised. Black is a colour that doesn’t believe in things like this, concepts that transcend an idea of needs and raw power. Black is the colour that kills because that solves problems, and nobody should have the power to stop you from solving your problems. Black attacks worship not by destroying the followers’ faith in their ideal, but rather by destroying the followers. It just feels like such a flavour miss to take an important element of black’s flavour and undo it, in the name of a vague idea of balancing up removal options.
Still, the pool has been pissed in, so black is now the colour with a tiny bit of enchantment hate. Hopefully this gets treated as a foolish dead-end in the same vein as giving blue cards like Pongify and Ravenform with the new push towards transformation auras like Ichthyomorphosis. Here’s hoping.
But in the mean time, what about black enchantments?
Well, green and black enchantments?
I like Insidious Roots a lot. It’s a recent card with Murders at Karlov Manor which I probably will never get right saying it the first time. It’s an uncommon, it’s an engine card, it indicates a play pattern, and it’s not so limited in what it interacts with that you just jam them all in a deck and go ‘now what?’ You can build it super low to the ground with mostly 1 and 2 drop cards. You can play it with milling cards and a plan to get them back later. You can treat it as a reasonably sustainable engine that wants to grind out advantages long and slow or you can make it as a multi-coloured manbase deck that includes other combos.
Where I’ve been playing with it is in Standard. I used to hate the idea of it in standard – there’s Farewell and Sunfall there. Sunfall isn’t quite so bad; sure, you can lose to it, but you can also plan for it. Farewell can win, but you’ve got a lot of turns to win before they get to Farewell, and if they’re playing a ramp-heavy deck that can afford to Farewell and do other things, well, might as well just concede and move on.
I used to play it in Alchemy, but I got real sick of losing to The One Ring, which is an incredibly powerful fog effect that makes me very, very bored. It sucks to lose to Sheoldred as it is, it sucks more to lose to her while she’s also turning off the disadvantage on a super powerful card.
Anyway, the version I made is out of uncommons and commons and things I collected from playing Jump In with Karlov manor cards and a few boosters you get out of doing the mastery track. If you play Jump In, the Forensics keyword has a copy of the roots, as well as Extract a Confession, which is at the least worth trying out in the deck.
If you’d like to see the deck as I played it with minimal rares – I try to make sure I have playsets of dual lands I like – here’s a link to the deck on Archidekt! And here’s a link to a more fancy version that I spent some wildcard on for rares. Though, I gotta say, kinda thinking I want those Go For The Throats back.