So Many Insane Plays Podcast Episode 77: Masters 25 Preview and Arabian Nights Review

Kevin Cron and Steve Menendian preview Masters 25 with the reprint of Doomsday, and review Arabian Nights.

0:01:00: Masters 25 Preview: Doomsday

0:42:15: Announcements: Eternal Weekend North America Date and Location

0:44:00: Team Serious Invitational Results

0:55:00: Arabian Nights

Total Runtime: 4:16:09

Show Notes

– Eternal Weekend North America 2018

– DDFT Wiki

A Short History of Doomsday

In June 1997, Weatherlight, the 11th Magic expansion, set sail. This conclusion to Mirage block was the beginning of a new storyline. Although a smaller set, it packed a punch. The most explosive card in the set was a mystifier that has intrigued Magic players for more than two decades now: Doomsday.

Some Magic cards unavoidably induce a whir of mental activity, as the discovery of their mere existence prompts the mind to search for ways to abuse it. Doomsday illustrates this principles to the extreme. At its most basic level, Doomsday is a drastic and irrevocable action that compresses all that a player has, and might ever draw, into a five card library, washing out the rest of the library and graveyard in the process. Being able to tutor for your best cards raises a natural question: how can you win the game, and quickly, by doing so?

The compression effect belies the adroit skill needed to wield such a tool. Not only must a player simultaneously select 5 cards from a graveyard and library (one more than the infamous Gifts Ungiven can tutor up), but you must then order them in an optimal constellation. The sheer quantity of possible Doomsday piles in any given 60 card deck is enormous, like calculating the odds a perfect NCAA March Madness bracket.

Casting Doomsday is a play that is as risky as it is bold. It is not simply the fact that with so many possible options in both card selection and sequencing that there is ample room for suboptimization. It’s that the cost of making a mistake is so great. A single miscue or miscalculation is prelude to defeat. At the same time, the precariousness of resolving Doomsday is belied by the number of ways an opponent might disrupt your plan. If an opponent plays a card that shuffles your library, like Extirpate, they can disrupt your sequencing and timing, perhaps fatally so. If an opponent counters a single draw spell or threat, there is rarely a viable backup plan. Doomsday is an all-or-nothing play.

The risks and inherent danger of wielding such a powerful spell are hardly enough to keep the most daring players from trying. It did not take players long to find ways to abuse this tremendous card.

The Timetwister Loop Kill

Creating Timetwister loops is one of the earliest combinations in the game of Magic. In the Wild Era of Magic, a Timetwister could recycle a played Timetwister in an endless cycle. After the institution of Banned and Restricted Lists, Regrowth and Timetwister were paired as a potential endless combo.

These strategies had various names: Recursion, Vercursion, and so on. But the heart of these decks was casting Timetwister for a burst of cards, and then Regrowth to replay Timetwister, which puts Regrowth back into your library to eventually recycle Timetwister. This simple 3 step sequence could be conducted ad infinitum. With his “looping deck,” the inaugural Magic Champion Zak Dolan was a pioneer of this strategy, and built a deck that was designed to set up this combo to gain infinite life and inflict infinite damage. But it took enormous effort to reach that point. One needed to survive long enough to develop a board, draw most of one’s library, and resolve cards like Stone Calendar. It was not until the printing of Doomsday that this combo could be set up nearly effortlessly.

A Norwegian by the name of Kristoffer played a Type 1 Doomsday deck to a Top 4 finish in a local tournament in December 1997, with an innovative concept.

Doomsday, by Kristoffer (December 1997) Business (29) 3 Doomsday 3 Arcane Denial 2 Abeyance 2 City of Solitude 2 Mystical Tutor 3