On Rock Paper Scissors and the Magic Environment A tournament report

In our live time we are all afflicted at one time or another with other peoples opinion. They usually spout off on a subject that they have only cursory knowledge and we are forced to nod approvingly and look for a distraction. Far too often recently I have been forced to hear that some unknown moron does not play Type 2 magic because it is like Rock Paper Scissors. Now RPS is a fine game with lots of bluffing and second guessing. Unfortunately magic seems to be fairly straight forward and Type 2 is presently full of different decks and ideas.

Christmas in July there was a Type 2 tournament at Boldo’s Armory and I was going to play my old and stale early harvest stroke deck. In this tournament there were 9 players who represented a fair portion of magic decks. More specifically there was a Bargain deck, a blue control, a coastal piracy sprite, a pattern-geddon, Black control, a black white sengir autocrat trick control deck, rebels, a contamination deck, and stompy. Now some of these were similar to the standard net decks but most were unique in an interesting way except the bargain deck. Now with the simple RPS analogy it should be simple to see who wins or so they argue. Unfortunately the real world is seldom simple. Conventional wisdom says black beats green, Rebels beat other creatures, and blue control is the only one worth while. So of course with a few play mistakes we get a finals of pattern-geddon and early harvest stroke. Green was the dominate color in the tournament with 4 out of 9 decks black.

What when wrong with the type 2 RPS? People made up different decks. The two green decks in the finals were both multi-color affairs with lots of control. The rest of the field was build to destroy the major deck types out there with an emphasis on control. When the finals finished my deck was victorious in a hard fought armageddon filled affair which would have given any deck type trouble. As for the skeptics they are probably still at the Rock Paper Scissors championship.