Magic Memories: Squandered Resources

[Oversoul]

I believe that the very first time I saw a Magic card, it was Teremko Griffin from Mirage, at some point in early 1997. I was visiting a small game store a mile and a half from my house, looking for figures for Warhammer Quest. Martin McKenna's art drew me in, but it was the layout of the cards themselves and their sheer variety that intrigued me. I didn't learn much about the game in that visit, and I didn't buy any cards, but it served as a kind of entry point. Later that year, my mother, seeing my interest, my mother learned that a set meant for beginners, Portal, was scheduled to release soon. She asked if I'd be interested and got me a starter set. Unbeknownst to me, just as I was getting my first taste of the game, professional players were discovering the broken potential of a card from the most recent mainline Magic expansion: Squandered Resources.

Mark Rosewater has noted that some professional players at the time insisted that R&D must have deliberately inserted cards into Visions in order to make the Prosperous Bloom deck possible. They felt that it seemed engineered, a claim that WotC themselves have always denied. For my part, I never doubted that the confluence of card designs were organic and that WotC were being forthright about this. But I can kind of see why a player at the time might have thought the interactions seemed deliberately tailored to enable the Prosperous Bloom deck.

A lot of information has come out about behind-the-scenes set design surrounding the story of how WotC had a planned expansion called "Menagerie." Although they never completed this set, it was used to create Mirage and Visions. This was a kind of precursor to the block system, so there wasn't very much thought put into which cards would go into the large set and which ones would go into the small set. It mostly feels like Mirage/Visions is just one super-expansion. But to savvy players at the time, it must have seemed like Visions conveniently provided all of the tools to unlock the potential of combo gameplay in Type 2. And while several cards came together to make this engine work, the card that started it all was Squandered Resources.

Combo decks had been done in the past, but they were generally fueled by broken cards from the original core set like the Power 9. Also, DCI card bans made some of these decks short-lived. Most such decks were what I called "Pattern A" in the Comboist Manifesto. "A" is for "aggregate." These decks relied on assembling certain, highly specific card interactions with low functionality taken separately. The most iconic was Channel + Fireball, which got Channel restricted in Type 1 in 1994 and banned in Type 2 in 1995. Other examples include Time Vault + Animate Artifact + Instill Energy and Lich + Mirror Universe. But Type 2 was policed so effectively that no combo decks really emerged. The Standard format had no Black Lotus, no Wheel of Fortune, no Regrowth, no Power Artifact, etc.

Squandered Resources allows players to sacrifice lands for a burst of mana. By itself, this is potentially powerful, but somewhat limited in terms of scope, given the other tools available in Standard. The presence of Natural Balance in Mirage amplified this into a rapid mana production engine and enabled easy access to mana of any color. This burst of mana could allow a deck to get ahead of the aggro decks available at the time. Squandered Resources on turn 2 could, with no missed land drops, lead to six mana on turn 3, which Natural Balance could then turn into up to 12 mana. With Infernal Contract from Mirage and both Vampiric Tutor and Impulse from Visions, the deck could then resolve Cadaverous Bloom from Mirage and use it with the blue mana provided by Squandered Resources to fuel increasing X-values of Prosperity from Visions, which could generate copious mana for Drain Life, reprinted in Mirage. Under the rules at the time, this enabled players to go all the way to 0 life with Infernal Contract, but go back to a positive life total with Drain Life for the win. This whole thing is more like what I have called "Pattern C" in the Comboist Manifesto. "C" is for "chains." Spells and abilities from different cards interact for powerful synergies. The aggregate of Cadaverous Bloom + Prosperity is what draws so many cards and makes so much mana, but it only gets there because it was supported along the way by things like Infernal Contract, Three Wishes, Vampiric Tutor, Impulse, and Elven Cache. But it's Squandered Resources that enables all of this to move quickly enough to outrace beatdown. When WotC created the Block Constructed format, Squandered Resources was banned in order to stop the ProsBloom deck from dominating the format.

 

[Oversoul]

After initially getting into the Pokemon TCG, my friend Nick saw me playing Magic in junior high and started playing the game in 1999, around the release of Mercadian Masques. Nick used variations on "Aloysius the Hun" as callsigns online, and was once a member here at the CPA under the name "Al0ysiusHWWW", which I think stood for "Aloysius the Hun from Walla Walla, Washington." Nick no longer goes by any of those names (including "Nick") anymore, so I'll use "Al0ysius" for clarity and simplicity here.

Something that seems uncanny all these years later is that Aloysius had arguably learned and mastered more concepts in the gameplay and deck construction of Magic: the Gathering between starting out and the release of Nemesis than I had since 1997. It probably shouldn't be that surprising. I was learning by playing test games against myself and by conscripting my young siblings to play with me. Al0ysius learned by playing in an after-school game club against other teenagers. Within a few months, my friend had surpassed me on some of this stuff.

Before Aloysius had even gotten into Magic, I was already gleefully employing the Sliver Queen + Heartstone + Ashnod's Altar combo. And it was around this time that I also started using Necropotence + Zur's Weirding + Ivory Tower. These were not optimized, potent combo decks. But they were combo decks of a sort, and by the time Aloysius was into the game, I was trying to built a Tolarian Academy combo deck, with further designs on a High Tide combo deck, a Dream Halls combo deck, a Fruity Pebbles deck, Channel/Fireball, and Donate + Illusionso of Grandeur. Al0ysius mentioned that I was effectively claiming every combo deck, and so began searching for ones I hadn't. In actuality, this was some time after Aloysius had built a Yawgmoth's Bargain deck based around putting Spirit Link on Serra Avatar, but this was deemed (by Al0ysius) not to count. After some research, Al0ysius settled on ProsBloom. I built a weak version of the deck based on what I could find online for ProsBloom at the time (this was probably 2001). But Al0ysius studied how the deck worked more than I had, and made thoughtful changes.

The version of ProsBloom that Al0ysius ran with for a few years was ultimately stronger than the classic tournament-winning archetype had actually been. This wasn't because Al0ysius was a superior player, but because of our card pool. I talked about this in the Magic Memories thread for Storm Seeker...

When I initially built a ProsBloom deck for Nick, I was a bit constrained, not owning full playsets of some of the key cards. I was trying to copy as closely as possible the successful Standard decklists, although I did substitute a few of the missing cards with cards that weren't in Standard when ProsBloom was played in tournaments. I forget what my list looked like, but I'm almost certain that it was considerably worse than the iconic Standard tournament ProsBloom lists. But when Nick got his hands on the deck, everything changed.

Nick saw that with access to the larger cardpool of anything in casual Magic we could acquire, there were some much better choices for a ProsBloom list. He kept the core of Squandered Resources, Cadaverous Bloom, Natural Balance, and Prosperity. He even left Infernal Contract in the deck. Other than those cards and maybe Vampiric Tutor, he changed everything else. Meditate was just as good as Infernal Contract for acceleration on the combo turn, so that went in. For additional mana acceleration he used Lotus Petal and Lion's Eye Diamond (a card that was still largely obscure, unrealized potential at the time). While I can't recall every detail, I think he moved City of Solitude to the main deck, because it made going off unimpeded much easier. Some of this was stuff that we'd already talked about, so I didn't find it surprising. Drawing from a bigger card pool for better choices just made sense. But I assumed that the kill card would always be Drain Life. Nick demonstrated that Storm Seeker was much, much better for that purpose.

I can't find a decklist right now, although I know we had a few variations on it over the years. Something I didn't mention there, but which I see from an old post that Al0ysius did touch on, is that we added Dark Ritual almost right away and never regretted it. Why didn't the pro players run Dark Ritual? I don't know. They may have been so reliant on Squandered Resources + Natural Balance for mana production that Dark Ritual seemed superfluous. Seems sketchy to me, though.