Kibler got 30th in Jrs division of this event, my bad on that. I got 55th and my little sister got 56th, which means we both qualified for Pro Tour Los Angeles
So thanks in part to Rarran sorta you're signing Mesa Falcons at cons and Voxy is signing Gronds and Squees. He's slowly working his way through MtG content creators getting them to sign terrible cards
This video turning into Rarran slowly realizing that you were, at one point, bad at the game, is one of the greatest character arcs in history. The illusion of perfection, shattered. Beautiful.
the fact that mesa falcon was foreshadowed in the backdround art all along was just perfect, you are truly the mesa falcon guy, respect to the mad genius
Salute to CGB for the massive self-own of this video. I never knew who Mesa Falcon guy was, but it turns out it wasn't the hero we need, but the hero we deserve.
@aleksandarkovacevic7138 No, it won't. It's simply too slow for what Magic is now. The power level is absurdly high in creatures now compared to 90s Magic.
Rarran: "Did you run Mesa Falcon?" CGB: "I've never revealed my Pro Tour I deck--" Rarran: "DID YOU RUN MESA FALCON?" CGB: "YOU'RE GOD-DAMN RIGHT I DID."
I have come here to defend Serrated Arrows as it was indeed good outside of just this first Pro Tour. Besides being a card that's seen play in Pauper forever, when it was reprinted in Time Spiral, it saw competitive play throughout its time in standard and block. It was in 5 of the top 8 decks from Pro Tour Yokohama, won Worlds 2007, and top 8ed Pro Tour Hollywood. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk
In Rarran's defence, I think he missed that Necropotence is an Enchantment. The way he talked about it made me feel like he didn't realise you could use this to draw cards in exchange for life every single turn.
@@sylvainsanesti3499 There is necrologia that costs 3BB where you pay x life to draw x cards, but you can only cast it during the end step. All I know about necrologia is that back when mystical tutor was legal in legacy around 2008 some people tinkered with necrologia where the way you won would be end step cast it off a pair of dark rituals or something, draw 18-19 usually, remove 2 spirit guides, manamorphose for blue and black, cast more dark/cabal rituals off the black, mystical tutor for tendrils, then remove another spirit guide for manamorphose to add blue, quicken, then tendrils for lethal. The deck was pretty bad though particularly after ad nauseam was printed since you could just ad nauseam in the mainphase, draw a bunch, and kill the opponent without jumping through all the hoops of using instant speed cards only with an exception in there for tendrils that you used quicken to cast. All of this to say, the only versions of necro that can compete with necro are yawgmoth's bargain and griselbrand.
Rarran never competed seriously so he wouldn't be a pro. He did have a major role in keeping the game alive as one of the best content creators who brought me back into the game though
He’s a professional in that he plays hs for a living but he hasn’t played “competitively”. Rank 1 legend shows he would maybe have been capable of it, but honestly rank 1 legend is like 75% skill 25% playing more games than everyone else in high legend to keep your mmr higher. Tournament hs is also quite a different beast to ranked, with each player bringing and piloting multiple decks per match and requires another skill set to read the meta and make the correct deck and tech choices. It’s the same with any game, skill at the game is one aspect of being a pro, but arguably the more important one is skill at the metagame
@@jackweitzman6697I've been rank one legend once, just as a pleb on the internet. It's not that hard to get there for a few hours, you just need a turbo broken deck and a few days to burn. Much harder to finish out a month as r1, which I don't think Rarran's done.
Stasis is interesting because of its artwork. This is the only Magic card that Fay Jones has done artwork for. She is Richard Garfield's aunt. She already was an established artist and did it to support her nephew.
Hymn is in a third category: "Still sees play in every format where it's still legal because it's just _that_ good." Fallen Empires is hilarious because if Hymn had been printed in Arabian Nights or Legends at rare, it'd be like $100. But it was in FE at common, so original copies are still 50¢ over 25 years later lmao
@@nekrataali All true, but the Wolf one is still the highest form of Hymn. I was recently building a vintage cube and was so happy to find one wolf in the old common box.
@@nekrataali I bought a ton of Homelands and Fallen Empires since it didn't sell well and my shop sold off their stock at $1 per pack, which was great when you were the poor kid that just scraped together whatever little money you could to buy a couple packs a month. I ended up with so many copies of Hymn and most of my friends never bought any... that card was the bane of so many people in my play group, legitimately one of the best discard spells ever printed being hidden within one of the worst sets.
@@ZeroIsEvenmy quest to get 4x Wolf Hymns as a child was a *formative* moment in my life. I had *SO MANY* old man versions, but refused to play them. Had to be the wolf.
@@dialp4penguin necropotence’s potential is that you can use it in a combo deck to play it, draw like 10 cards off of it and sculpt the perfect hand to win the next turn.
@@dialp4penguin You basically pay as much life as you can to draw your whole deck. (Like 15 cards or smth) It doesn’t matter if you go to an extremely low life totall, if you’re winning instantly
I have to say, it’s really fucking cool that CGB has been there at the first pro tour competing! Who cares about the deck he brought, he’s been there since the beginning!!
mesa falcon is pretty busted. for only 2 mana a turn, it becomes a white storm crow. good to know wizards were breaking the color pie all the way back in homelands
Serrated Arrows actually still has a shell in current magic with the pauper Poison Storm deck, because it has great synergy with the proliferation mechanic !
I know some people played serrated arrows when timespiral was standard legal at my LGS since it got a timeshifted version and creatures were still reasonably small so it could give a 2 for 1 or 3 for 1 maybe.
Serrated Arrows was in the format for years because it was the only colorless removal, and some colors didn't have any removal (looking at you, green, blue)
Back when I started playing Magic (around Apocalypse), I bought a playset of Hymn to Tourach with this artwork, just because I liked it so much. To this day it's still in my binder.
8:27 Kibler used to run Mojomaster Zihi in HS a lot, and that card is basically diet Armageddon on a body, so it wouldn't have been terribly out of character for him
I mean that card saw a fair amount of play from what I remember due to rhe fact the expansion it was from was pretty weak overall so there wasn't a lot to choose from.
Yup. I started playing when ice age came out, and having fallen empires and homelands as the first two sets released in my playing days definitely caused a noticeable drop in players at least in my area. I mean, alliances seemed so powerful and was the only time i bought an box of booster packs upon release. I was in that sweet spot where i was working full time, but still living at home with my dad, by the next set release, i was on my own and disposable income was scarce again for a couple years..
The fact that Rarran is saying things like "Paying 3 life to get 3 cards at the end of your turn is a huge card advantage" really makes me proud of him. He's starting to get it. He's starting to believe.
It's contextual, that's the thing. Necro was great back then because creatures were terrible, so your life wasn't being pressured. That's how Necro becomes a centerpiece of a bunch of pretty bad combos, because if you can just draw like 14 cards, even bad combos go off. But if your opponent is doing stuff you need to answer, dropping a necro is worse than nothing.
This video was awesome! Listening to all these stories + the game show-y format is crazy fun. Plus Rarran is getting pretty good at this! Dude, I cracked hard at the turn 2 bad moon story!
The real pro move with Armageddon was to cast it even if you didnt have a board advantage or were even slightly down on the board because if you built your deck correctly, you would recover from it much faster than your opponent. You could always Swords to Plowshares their one creature on the following turn. I won several PTQs playing 4 Armageddons and it was insanely powerful.
Yeah geddon was messed up to hell, they're like let's print stone rain for everything for one mana more. Probably thought the symmetrical effect of it balanced it like the card balance, but nah as a curvetopper in aggro it's hard to get a better card even today you could play some great 4 drop creature that has some sweet abilities or just blow up all lands leaving the opponent with nothing to stop you from hitting them with your creatures. Best wrath of god protection too since no mana is pretty bad when it comes to 4 mana spells.
37:41 its not only for redudancy, its also against other hypnotic specters. If another player has hypnotic you basically got the better version for defense or attack, allowing you to sacrifice your hypnotic specter or play other cards.
these videos are insanely great, amazing even! In a way it is a shame that I do not play Magic myself (YGO player and former HS player here), so I do not necessarily crave all your videos - although I actually still watched some of the pure Magic videos. However, CGB's personality and entertainment prowess are just superb! It is a treat to watch all these "guess" videos. Thank you very much for making these.
@@theelectricant98 i love that creative twist to a pretty popular format by now in particular - the structure from the timeline really enhances this series
56:00 - Serrated Arrows were played a lot in sideboard of Pauper decks, specifically Tron and Familiars. People found a way to blink it and reset the counters, which is very good against 1/1 elves.
absolutley the heebie-jeebies, the good kind. that is how i recall magic in those days and my cards and my decks and the games with my friends. =) thanks daniel and thanks rarran ps. fun fact - working at GW at the time, MTG was banned from the company.
The whole thing with the "No sleeves during tournaments" was to prevent proxies and also so that any cameras could actually pick up and display what the cards actually were at the time, because cameras at the time notoriously could not show a good image through the sleeves. As both camera technology and sleeve technology got better, then it was allowed, I believe. I don't know the time frame though.
This is so great. The story telling, the gamesmanship, and just seeing CGB so excited to share all this magic history. And I scrolled past it for two days before I decided to check it out. I won't make that mistake again
Mill stone was a huge staple in opposition land still with emperor laquitas and howling mine it went on to win multiple tournaments during the odyssey block era. Turn one careful study or hold up force spike for their root walla or birds or nimble. Mongoose into turn 2 standstill followed by opposition once they broke standstill then millstone and laquitas to mill them out once you've tapped them down each turn and eventually play your ensnaring bridge to close things out
Jokulhaups has seen sporadic success in legacy because it does not destroy enchantments and more notably, planeswalkers. So your blood moon and kaladesh chandra stick around and you win when it resolves
Serrated Arrows is still played in pauper format in poison storm deck which uses proliferate to add arrow counters on Serrated Arrows. It is a sideboard card agains x/1s.
I don´t know about winning tournaments, but there was a millstone deck that made quite the splash as a combo/control deck. The idea is that the deck wants field of dreams in play and at least 1 millstone, ideally 2. Field of dreams says that both playxers play with the top of the library revealed, and the deck basically controlled both players draws with millstone. It also hid their own draws with sylvan library. This would havge been right up CGB´s alley
CGB actually mentioned this deck in the video where they reviewed millstone! He sounded pretty excited while he was explaining it, definitely sounded like a really cool deck!
@@zsewqaspider I would argue millstone is even better then lantern since it does not need to be sacrificed. ON the other hand lantern is both field of dreams and millstone in one card
@@garyroach4942 If you mean the antiquities video, no he does not I did in the comments lol. The millstone deck he mentioned was an actual mill deck that won by milling the opponent out. But the millstone field of dreams deck only does that if there are no other options left, but if you control both draws you usually win way before you mill them out. And the combo with sylvan library is pretty juicy too, you can keep an unimportant card on top, if you do not like 2 of the cards you saw with sylvan library you can mil that and improve your draws/filter what you need for the current game. It had recall and regrowth to get the important pieces back from the graveyard (usually you would use recall to get back the pieces and regrowth to get back recall, rinse and repeat). Variations of this deck are still played in oldschopol and win tournaments.
I remember Inquest! They had Balduvian Horde as their number one pick for the Alliance set, completely missing the mark on Force of Will. To be fair, creatures were so underpowered that something like Autumn Willow was considered to be a tier 1 power-house.
They did have Force of Will at #3, so they at least recognized that a free Counterspell was still powerful. I don’t even remember the rest of that top 10, but I still have my old Labyrinth Minotaur spin down life counter that came either in or near that issue.
I haven't played magic for years and years, I started in revised and ended around visions. These two guys have pulled me back in, I absolutely love these videos!
He didn't immediately notice the full power of brainstorm since he thought it just 'drew 1 card' but once you see fetchlands and put them together like CGB said it becomes gross and format defining to become one of the best cards ever printed in all honesty. Ponder, preordain, portent, and basically everything except ancestral pales in comparison to brainstorm in constructed. Cube draft it's a little trickier since you need to have picked up shuffle effects to take it and utilize it, but if you make it work then you'll pick brainstorm over most cards with proper shuffle support. Preordain is just more flexible since you see bad cards you bottom them no shuffle needed and shuffles are honestly bad with preordain for this reason.
I too was (and am) bad at magic. I paid money to have Polar Kraken in my deck. I was convinced for so long that if I could just get it on the board I would be unstoppable. And I never once got to play it. Hard lesson for sure.
To be fair, Fallen Empires had a few really strong cards, just they were all commons. Like Hymn to Tourach, Order of the Ebon Hand, Order of Leitbur, High Tide, and Goblin Grenade.
I like these Rarran videos but it's hard for me to find them in the video history. Maybe I'm missing a playlist but if there isn't one you should make one.
The Necropotence story reminds me of Dark Armed Dragon in Yu-Gi-Oh, that card became THE expensive chase card in a non-rotating game for literal years but Pojo Magazine was underwhelmed.
That's honestly pathetic, like yugioh at the time wasn't combo oriented it was more of a value type of game and dark armed dragon if unanswered could instantly blow up 3 cards and was a big beatstick. It would have been bad on release if it was released into a combo heavy meta like now. Probably thought '3 dark monsters in GY? Impossible!' even though good dark monsters existed back then.
52:23 Seeing the Homelands symbol, immediately after Mesa falcon which CGB ran because he needed Homelands cards, made me think "this was the Homelands card people used". You play this turn four to shrink your opponent's Spectre so that your Spectre could block it/it can't trade with your spectre.
That's because new players are going to be risk averse, paying life is scary, losing your natural draw is scary. And some of it is irationnal but some of it also make sense, if you are inexperienced you don't have a frame of reference for the value of cards and the value of life so not wanting to play a card that could well be detrimental while focusing on the cards that you understand make sense. I think having some experience in card games you quickly realize how valuable necropotence is though. Like, having played heartstone you see necropotence and compare it to warlock hero power and immediately you understand it's busted.
It's more that TCG's were so new people didn't know what was the best thing to be doing. If necropotence came out tomorrow for the first time everyone would be calling for the card to be banned right off the bat. Card advantage as a concept was something few people knew, but then you had people slamming craw wurm and shivan dragon thinking they're the best thing since sliced bread. Or things like tempo as a concept people didn't recognize save very few. I had a friend who played back then and opened a mox pearl who was friends with a guy who had a red/green aggro deck packing all the strip mines, stone rains, and efficient beaters like scryb sprites and kird ape at the casual tables he was basically undefeated with the deck because no one could play their cards against him and he'd just bash them to death with small creatures while they had a bunch of cards that were unplayable or by the time they played a card they were overrun.
@daftwulli6145 I played when Necro came out, I remember the instant belief the card was bad and it was not risk aversion. The card's wall of a text was not yet common. It was not instantly recognizable what the card did or how it did that. On first glance, it looks like the controller skips the draw step and then can pay 1 life to get it back. It's not immediately obvious in Ice Age, 1995 Magic you can pay 10 life to get 10 draw steps until you see someone do it--Probably in a game you then lose.
Concerning Abyssyal and Hypnotic Spectre: They come from different expansions, so contribute to the forced count. Still good enough to see play and contribute to win con.
The thing about Brainstorm is, there were no fetchlands back then. Without a way to reliably shuffle your deck after a brainstorm, you're mostly just rearranging the top cards of your deck with bad cards from your hand.
All you really ever need to say about Necropotence to explain how it bent the meta is "1996 was the year of the Black Summer." '96 in Magic was like 2011 for video games. It was the year we got gud. Card advantage was kind of a vague concept before then, and absolutely nobody would have ever thought that giving up your life for more cards was a good idea. In the meta before Necro's release it was unheard of, and Inquest was spot-on FOR THE TIME. But that time was before Necropotence was in the hands of pro-level players that saw the card for what it was. Does it really matter if you have only 2 life when you win the game? You still won the freaking game. Yeah, Necropotence was the Dark Souls of Magic cards. It forced a full reevaluation of what came before, and it completely warped everything after.
I really wish he would have talked about how popular it was to play necropotence and pay 16 immediately(to be one away from a bolt) and drawing into all your combo pieces and how that strat was actually amazing. Turn 1, swamp into dark ritual into necropotence pay 16, then you get to look at 16 more cards, make sure you have a swamp, a dark ritual or 2, and all your combo pieces and then fill up your grave with all the cards you get to discard. Was obviously risky and paying super low was even more risky later in the game where you could get double bolted or similar, but was and is one of my favorite cards and card game gambles.
There wasn't much in the way of forums, certainly, but MTG meta discussion was definitely taking place on Usenet back then. (and probably email mailing lists, but I wasn't in those)
A note on Dark Ritual being super legal. At the time, black didn't have much in the way of mana generation outside of that (and lands, obviously). While it definitely gives you the mana advantage, it's a one-shot advantage. It doesn't hang around like Llanowar Elves. While it was great for busting out that hypnotic Specter, if your opponent just Counterspelled or Fireballed the thing you were down two cards and in a really disadvantageous position. That was the tradeoff that kept it around for so long. The risk/reward pretty much evened out, oddly enough.
These are so hugely anticipated by me, on both channels, love to see these. Great team. Edit: Now that I've watched, didn't disappoint, this was such a funny banger of an episode
Hymn to Tourach is STILL banned in pauper where you only play commons because its that broken of a card. Every current decently costed "discard a card" effect allows your opponent to choose which one they want to discard and the effects that allow you to choose one from your opponent are MUCH less efficient. Discarding 2 cards from your opponents hand could probably be costed at 3 mana and be fair for standard and efficient and good for limited purposes, if they get to choose. Discarding 2 AT RANDOM, FOR 2 MANA is actually insane, it might even see play in Modern or Pioneer if it was legal there.
One thing that made Fountain of Youth playable back in the day is that you didn't have a lot of mana sinks. Creatures almost never had activated abilities, and not ones that scaled well with mana. That's why Shivan Dragon was so good in its day. So often you'd pass your turn with mana unspent and you wouldn't spend it on an opponent's turn either because you had nothing to do with it. Fountain, while not great, at least gave you something to do with that mana, and with enough time, you could gain a lot of life.
I've had my fill of X player reacts to Y cards, but I really enjoy this series because you made it a walk through Magic's history with Rarran as the audience surrogate.
Yeah, I appreciate most of the react to cards but CGB with Rarran is the best by far because of how you get an insight into the early MTG game and how it evolved.
Agreed. I mostly skip over them at this point, but I really like the way these two have innovated on the concept. The CGB showing Rarran Magic are definitely my favorite, but Rarran's A or B was an interesting take on it too. The issue we run into a lot of the time is that it's just "person with no concept of what these things means gets things wrong ha ha" and like... duh? Those get old fast. A or B mitigates that a lot and these history-based CGB videos even more so, especially as we keep going.
Thinking back, Dark Ritual was a part of every large expansion and core set after until 1999 (removed from Sixth Edition, but still in Mercadian Masques). It was finally realized to be too much after combo winter but how it took that long to figure out, I don't know.
OUCH on the "how do you choose a card at random" story. Holly hell I felt that. D: Poor [Mesa Falcon] & [Bad Moon] combo guy suffered emotional damage that lasts to this very day.
TBF on brainstorm, SOOO much of it's power is tied to fetchlands or other easy ways to shuffle your library. I don't think there was any way to easily shuffle in that tourney. Plus with how powerful black was and things needing multiple black pips per spell it's harder for them to splash blue.
Serrated Arrows was definitely a product of the time. Yeah you needed a homelands card but it also doubled as removal against all the pro black and pro white knights when most removal at the time was white and black. Having colorless removal was good.
CGB, please don't feel ashamed of the cards you played. We have all been there and honestly have become better players because of it. Just some, like you, become more and better :D Thank you an awesome video mate, this was great
Worth noting that the trick of hiding your good cards on top of your deck with brainstorm in response to hymn didn’t work back then, because instants resolved FIFO prior to the 6th edition rules update rather than LIFO like now.
37:50 rarran acting as if novice engineer and gnomish inventor were not both in the classic heartstone set at the same time, both doing functionally the same thing, drawing you a card
The difference in cost and stats is significant enough that they fill different purposes though. The novice engineer is for combo players that just want to draw through their deck while people who play gnomish inventor actually want to trade with it and get value out of it. The two cards in this video I forget the names are pretty much the same card except one is worse and costs 1 more mana
Kibler got 30th in Jrs division of this event, my bad on that. I got 55th and my little sister got 56th, which means we both qualified for Pro Tour Los Angeles
I guess those birds wasnt as bad if you got higher than your sis 😂
Never heard "butt pumping" before, well not in this context anyway
You qualifed? Hell yeah, Mesa Falcon **got there**!!
@@js2188 I once heard "butt breathing" (as opposed to fire breathing) and almost fell on the floor laughing
So thanks in part to Rarran sorta you're signing Mesa Falcons at cons and Voxy is signing Gronds and Squees. He's slowly working his way through MtG content creators getting them to sign terrible cards
This video turning into Rarran slowly realizing that you were, at one point, bad at the game, is one of the greatest character arcs in history. The illusion of perfection, shattered. Beautiful.
Look... Who among us has never overvalued a life gain card?
Never meet your heroes.
@@mahtimonni97omg. The first deck I ever played was mono white life gain and I so badly did this
Going to your first tournament is when litl boy becomes a man
the fact that mesa falcon was foreshadowed in the backdround art all along was just perfect, you are truly the mesa falcon guy, respect to the mad genius
I didn't even notice that at first!
@@Dj87887 me neither, until i did!
Salute to CGB for the massive self-own of this video. I never knew who Mesa Falcon guy was, but it turns out it wasn't the hero we need, but the hero we deserve.
will Mesa Falcon be good if you can switch attack and health. In Hearstone it would be
@aleksandarkovacevic7138 No, it won't. It's simply too slow for what Magic is now. The power level is absurdly high in creatures now compared to 90s Magic.
MFG*
This crossover with Rarran has got to be my favorite ongoing series on TH-cam right now.
I'm a life long magic player and this series is the only reason i've heard of either of these people
Rarran: "Did you run Mesa Falcon?"
CGB: "I've never revealed my Pro Tour I deck--"
Rarran: "DID YOU RUN MESA FALCON?"
CGB: "YOU'RE GOD-DAMN RIGHT I DID."
What do you wanna discuss now?! His favorite color?
Rarran: "No one's going to think less of you."
Me: ...
Son, we live in a world that has Hypnotic Specters, and those spectes have to be blocked by creatures with Flying. Who's gonna do it? Ernham Djinn!?
46:26
Petition to change CGB's Screen name to Mesa Falcon Guy
Got to change the acronym to MFG; luckily, I think he could slip it into the intro and outro without upsetting the rhythm!
CovertGoMesa
MFG MTG
Subtitle: Me's a falcon guy (in Jar-Jar voice)
CovertGoMesaFalcon
I'm loving all of Rarran's MTG crossovers
Same, they have good chemistry
Love is a strong word.. and I agree with you
Same!
absolutely
I don't even know of Rarran outside of these crossovers. And they're some of my favorite MTG content.
I have come here to defend Serrated Arrows as it was indeed good outside of just this first Pro Tour. Besides being a card that's seen play in Pauper forever, when it was reprinted in Time Spiral, it saw competitive play throughout its time in standard and block. It was in 5 of the top 8 decks from Pro Tour Yokohama, won Worlds 2007, and top 8ed Pro Tour Hollywood. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk
Oh dang, Brian "Don't call me Brian 'Brian Kibler' Kibler" Kibler gets his own category
He isnt called Brian Brian "Don't call me Brian ´Dragonlord´ 'Brian Kibler' Kibler" Kibler for nothing
BK is an artist of bad picks
I love BDCMBBKKK
I like how this video was basically an excuse for CGB to come out of the closet as Mesa Falcon Guy after all this time
I kind of wish I was there in 96 to watch CGB get pwned. However I was attending preschool back then.
This has to be one of the coolest concepts for a MTG video! I love how it's both a gameshow and a history lesson. You crushed it man
I always love that CGB is willing to admit that he wasn’t always the expert he is today.
CGB? Who's that?
Ohhh, you mean the Mesa Falcon Guy. Or MFG if you will.
CMFGB thankyou
He still isn't really an expert tho
You can SEE cgb dying as rarran evaluates falcon
In Rarran's defence, I think he missed that Necropotence is an Enchantment. The way he talked about it made me feel like he didn't realise you could use this to draw cards in exchange for life every single turn.
He’s actually seen it before, it was one of the first magic cards he evaluated and was told it was amazing
i mean, pretty sure it would still be broken if it was for 1 turn only
@@sylvainsanesti3499 You're probably right, but a one turn version is obviously less good and also less obviously good.
@@Belgarion9989 Hahaha, fair enough. My memory is so bad I can't hold others accountable for that kinda thing 😂
@@sylvainsanesti3499 There is necrologia that costs 3BB where you pay x life to draw x cards, but you can only cast it during the end step. All I know about necrologia is that back when mystical tutor was legal in legacy around 2008 some people tinkered with necrologia where the way you won would be end step cast it off a pair of dark rituals or something, draw 18-19 usually, remove 2 spirit guides, manamorphose for blue and black, cast more dark/cabal rituals off the black, mystical tutor for tendrils, then remove another spirit guide for manamorphose to add blue, quicken, then tendrils for lethal. The deck was pretty bad though particularly after ad nauseam was printed since you could just ad nauseam in the mainphase, draw a bunch, and kill the opponent without jumping through all the hoops of using instant speed cards only with an exception in there for tendrils that you used quicken to cast. All of this to say, the only versions of necro that can compete with necro are yawgmoth's bargain and griselbrand.
I love how when CGB shows up on Rarran’s channel he’s defined as a magic pro and when Rarran shows up here he’s just a hearthstone player
Rarran never competed seriously so he wouldn't be a pro. He did have a major role in keeping the game alive as one of the best content creators who brought me back into the game though
@@Coded_THwasn’t he rank 1 at one point?
He’s a professional in that he plays hs for a living but he hasn’t played “competitively”. Rank 1 legend shows he would maybe have been capable of it, but honestly rank 1 legend is like 75% skill 25% playing more games than everyone else in high legend to keep your mmr higher. Tournament hs is also quite a different beast to ranked, with each player bringing and piloting multiple decks per match and requires another skill set to read the meta and make the correct deck and tech choices. It’s the same with any game, skill at the game is one aspect of being a pro, but arguably the more important one is skill at the metagame
@@jackweitzman6697I've been rank one legend once, just as a pleb on the internet. It's not that hard to get there for a few hours, you just need a turbo broken deck and a few days to burn. Much harder to finish out a month as r1, which I don't think Rarran's done.
I mean rarran is not good. Hes above average probably since he reaches legend but hes not a good player
Stasis is interesting because of its artwork. This is the only Magic card that Fay Jones has done artwork for. She is Richard Garfield's aunt. She already was an established artist and did it to support her nephew.
Nice!! I memorized the cards name 'stasis' only because I wanted to be able to look the beautiful artwork up anytime
When rarran started contemplating how good discarding your own cards was with hymn i nearly lost it. Thank god cgb told him it hits opponents.😂
He’s not even entirely wrong though
@@markuskoivisto i think the situation has to be reallly specific to cast hymn on oneself. Thoughtseize sure but hymn is hard😅
He needs to evaluate One with Nothing.
@@FrozenLavaDragonProd He did, he thought that card was good too.
Hymn to Tourach: “I was too busy looking at the wolf”
Rarran just absolutely in the tank trying to figure out why a card that let you discard two others at random might be good
Hymn is in a third category: "Still sees play in every format where it's still legal because it's just _that_ good." Fallen Empires is hilarious because if Hymn had been printed in Arabian Nights or Legends at rare, it'd be like $100. But it was in FE at common, so original copies are still 50¢ over 25 years later lmao
@@nekrataali All true, but the Wolf one is still the highest form of Hymn. I was recently building a vintage cube and was so happy to find one wolf in the old common box.
@@nekrataali I bought a ton of Homelands and Fallen Empires since it didn't sell well and my shop sold off their stock at $1 per pack, which was great when you were the poor kid that just scraped together whatever little money you could to buy a couple packs a month. I ended up with so many copies of Hymn and most of my friends never bought any... that card was the bane of so many people in my play group, legitimately one of the best discard spells ever printed being hidden within one of the worst sets.
@@ZeroIsEvenmy quest to get 4x Wolf Hymns as a child was a *formative* moment in my life.
I had *SO MANY* old man versions, but refused to play them. Had to be the wolf.
“Three cards for three life”
Oh, you sweet summer child.
I'm not really a magic player, how was he wrong there? Is that not what it does?
Most people drew way more than 3 cards
@@dialp4penguin necropotence’s potential is that you can use it in a combo deck to play it, draw like 10 cards off of it and sculpt the perfect hand to win the next turn.
@@dialp4penguinRemember: the only life point that matters is the last one.
@@dialp4penguin
You basically pay as much life as you can to draw your whole deck. (Like 15 cards or smth)
It doesn’t matter if you go to an extremely low life totall, if you’re winning instantly
CGB, I don't think we will meet in this life. But if, contrary to expectations, we do meet, I'll have my Mesa Falcon ready for you to sign.
I was gonna bring my Shark Typhoon, but this video has changed me
I checked and one can get an original Mesa Falcon for 20 cents. Maybe it will double in price if it's signed!
"A 1h20 video between cgb and rarran? I'll check it out but definitely not finishing it."
Got sad when cgb said "last one." Love you two.
I have to say, it’s really fucking cool that CGB has been there at the first pro tour competing! Who cares about the deck he brought, he’s been there since the beginning!!
if "the beginning" happened about 4 years into the game
@@moralnexus yeah thats still the beginning
It's wild to me cause that was the year I played my first game of magic with my friend and his dad.
mesa falcon is pretty busted. for only 2 mana a turn, it becomes a white storm crow. good to know wizards were breaking the color pie all the way back in homelands
Serrated Arrows actually still has a shell in current magic with the pauper Poison Storm deck, because it has great synergy with the proliferation mechanic !
It also saw play in old versions of boros kuldotha because the format was still reasonably slow, so picking it up to reset it was totally viable!
I know some people played serrated arrows when timespiral was standard legal at my LGS since it got a timeshifted version and creatures were still reasonably small so it could give a 2 for 1 or 3 for 1 maybe.
Serrated Arrows was basically Umezawa's Jitte before Jitte.
Serrated Arrows was in the format for years because it was the only colorless removal, and some colors didn't have any removal (looking at you, green, blue)
It was or is still a staple in pauper cube or pauper sideboards so its not a bad per se.
Another thing about Serrated Arrows: as a colorless artifact, it could fit into literally any deck, hence why so many turned to it
Necro, Hyppie, Hymn, Ritual - all of the main ingredience of what became known as the "Black Summer" of Magic.
40:33 ''What if my specter was just bigger?''
Covert 2024
Back when I started playing Magic (around Apocalypse), I bought a playset of Hymn to Tourach with this artwork, just because I liked it so much. To this day it's still in my binder.
8:27 Kibler used to run Mojomaster Zihi in HS a lot, and that card is basically diet Armageddon on a body, so it wouldn't have been terribly out of character for him
I mean that card saw a fair amount of play from what I remember due to rhe fact the expansion it was from was pretty weak overall so there wasn't a lot to choose from.
Yup. I started playing when ice age came out, and having fallen empires and homelands as the first two sets released in my playing days definitely caused a noticeable drop in players at least in my area. I mean, alliances seemed so powerful and was the only time i bought an box of booster packs upon release. I was in that sweet spot where i was working full time, but still living at home with my dad, by the next set release, i was on my own and disposable income was scarce again for a couple years..
The fact that Rarran is saying things like "Paying 3 life to get 3 cards at the end of your turn is a huge card advantage" really makes me proud of him.
He's starting to get it. He's starting to believe.
It's contextual, that's the thing. Necro was great back then because creatures were terrible, so your life wasn't being pressured. That's how Necro becomes a centerpiece of a bunch of pretty bad combos, because if you can just draw like 14 cards, even bad combos go off.
But if your opponent is doing stuff you need to answer, dropping a necro is worse than nothing.
@@lostalone9320 it's still great now. Lol
@@lostalone9320answer your opponent by winning the game cuz you drew a whole hand of cards lol
This video was awesome! Listening to all these stories + the game show-y format is crazy fun. Plus Rarran is getting pretty good at this!
Dude, I cracked hard at the turn 2 bad moon story!
Rarran should drag you into the madness of a Noah game show
Seconded!
Has he not been on there?
Love these colab videos with Rarran. I enjoy hearing random facts about magic cards being slept on and the ante mechanic
1:03:52 Oh, that's funny. It's a Klein Bottle in the art :D The 4-dimensional version of the Möbius Strip :D
The real pro move with Armageddon was to cast it even if you didnt have a board advantage or were even slightly down on the board because if you built your deck correctly, you would recover from it much faster than your opponent. You could always Swords to Plowshares their one creature on the following turn. I won several PTQs playing 4 Armageddons and it was insanely powerful.
Yeah geddon was messed up to hell, they're like let's print stone rain for everything for one mana more. Probably thought the symmetrical effect of it balanced it like the card balance, but nah as a curvetopper in aggro it's hard to get a better card even today you could play some great 4 drop creature that has some sweet abilities or just blow up all lands leaving the opponent with nothing to stop you from hitting them with your creatures. Best wrath of god protection too since no mana is pretty bad when it comes to 4 mana spells.
I LOVE how you formatted this with the different categories, made it fun to play along at home
37:41 its not only for redudancy, its also against other hypnotic specters. If another player has hypnotic you basically got the better version for defense or attack, allowing you to sacrifice your hypnotic specter or play other cards.
Not that I'll do this, but the first thing when I saw Mesa Falcon was that "It can be thick enough to block a spectre" 🙃
If a specter eats 4 mana every turn it's done its job.
these videos are insanely great, amazing even!
In a way it is a shame that I do not play Magic myself (YGO player and former HS player here), so I do not necessarily crave all your videos - although I actually still watched some of the pure Magic videos. However, CGB's personality and entertainment prowess are just superb! It is a treat to watch all these "guess" videos. Thank you very much for making these.
Its a fun way to get a taste of early card game history for anyone really
@@theelectricant98 i love that creative twist to a pretty popular format by now in particular - the structure from the timeline really enhances this series
56:00 - Serrated Arrows were played a lot in sideboard of Pauper decks, specifically Tron and Familiars. People found a way to blink it and reset the counters, which is very good against 1/1 elves.
Love the mix of "other players react to Magic" and the historical facts about the first pro tour
lol Rarran forgetting that he saw Necropotence before.
And brainstorm
absolutley the heebie-jeebies, the good kind. that is how i recall magic in those days and my cards and my decks and the games with my friends. =)
thanks daniel and thanks rarran
ps. fun fact - working at GW at the time, MTG was banned from the company.
So on brand for GW knowing they had the worse game, though arguably better hobby, even in the light of magic's early blunder years.
The whole thing with the "No sleeves during tournaments" was to prevent proxies and also so that any cameras could actually pick up and display what the cards actually were at the time, because cameras at the time notoriously could not show a good image through the sleeves. As both camera technology and sleeve technology got better, then it was allowed, I believe. I don't know the time frame though.
This is so great. The story telling, the gamesmanship, and just seeing CGB so excited to share all this magic history. And I scrolled past it for two days before I decided to check it out. I won't make that mistake again
Mill stone was a huge staple in opposition land still with emperor laquitas and howling mine it went on to win multiple tournaments during the odyssey block era. Turn one careful study or hold up force spike for their root walla or birds or nimble. Mongoose into turn 2 standstill followed by opposition once they broke standstill then millstone and laquitas to mill them out once you've tapped them down each turn and eventually play your ensnaring bridge to close things out
Jokulhaups has seen sporadic success in legacy because it does not destroy enchantments and more notably, planeswalkers. So your blood moon and kaladesh chandra stick around and you win when it resolves
Man, the nostalgia. I remember those Big Red decks with Rukh Eggs, Jokulhaups and Nev’s Disk.
Serrated Arrows is still played in pauper format in poison storm deck which uses proliferate to add arrow counters on Serrated Arrows. It is a sideboard card agains x/1s.
The background being Mesa Falcon this WHOLE time BLEW. MY. MIND.
OMG
I don´t know about winning tournaments, but there was a millstone deck that made quite the splash as a combo/control deck. The idea is that the deck wants field of dreams in play and at least 1 millstone, ideally 2. Field of dreams says that both playxers play with the top of the library revealed, and the deck basically controlled both players draws with millstone. It also hid their own draws with sylvan library. This would havge been right up CGB´s alley
CGB actually mentioned this deck in the video where they reviewed millstone! He sounded pretty excited while he was explaining it, definitely sounded like a really cool deck!
It's like a primodial form of lantern control
@@zsewqaspider I would argue millstone is even better then lantern since it does not need to be sacrificed. ON the other hand lantern is both field of dreams and millstone in one card
@@garyroach4942 If you mean the antiquities video, no he does not I did in the comments lol. The millstone deck he mentioned was an actual mill deck that won by milling the opponent out. But the millstone field of dreams deck only does that if there are no other options left, but if you control both draws you usually win way before you mill them out. And the combo with sylvan library is pretty juicy too, you can keep an unimportant card on top, if you do not like 2 of the cards you saw with sylvan library you can mil that and improve your draws/filter what you need for the current game. It had recall and regrowth to get the important pieces back from the graveyard (usually you would use recall to get back the pieces and regrowth to get back recall, rinse and repeat). Variations of this deck are still played in oldschopol and win tournaments.
I remember Inquest! They had Balduvian Horde as their number one pick for the Alliance set, completely missing the mark on Force of Will. To be fair, creatures were so underpowered that something like Autumn Willow was considered to be a tier 1 power-house.
They did have Force of Will at #3, so they at least recognized that a free Counterspell was still powerful. I don’t even remember the rest of that top 10, but I still have my old Labyrinth Minotaur spin down life counter that came either in or near that issue.
I haven't played magic for years and years, I started in revised and ended around visions. These two guys have pulled me back in, I absolutely love these videos!
That "pick the most worn-out card" line is immensely big brain.
It’s funny because of what I have heard and seen from early Magic my thought was oh the opponent did something to cheat and that’s how they knew.
CGB trying to hold it together during the *Mesa Falcon* part was everything
Rarran spotted Necro, Brainstorm, and Chime right off the bat. That’s insane
He already saw necro and brainstorm from his collab from PVDDR
He didn't immediately notice the full power of brainstorm since he thought it just 'drew 1 card' but once you see fetchlands and put them together like CGB said it becomes gross and format defining to become one of the best cards ever printed in all honesty. Ponder, preordain, portent, and basically everything except ancestral pales in comparison to brainstorm in constructed. Cube draft it's a little trickier since you need to have picked up shuffle effects to take it and utilize it, but if you make it work then you'll pick brainstorm over most cards with proper shuffle support. Preordain is just more flexible since you see bad cards you bottom them no shuffle needed and shuffles are honestly bad with preordain for this reason.
50:30 "No one's gonna think less of you"
Sir have you MET Magic players? Yes, we will. 🤣
I too was (and am) bad at magic. I paid money to have Polar Kraken in my deck. I was convinced for so long that if I could just get it on the board I would be unstoppable. And I never once got to play it. Hard lesson for sure.
I love this window you give us into the competitive days of Magic in ages long past.
To be fair, Fallen Empires had a few really strong cards, just they were all commons. Like Hymn to Tourach, Order of the Ebon Hand, Order of Leitbur, High Tide, and Goblin Grenade.
I like these Rarran videos but it's hard for me to find them in the video history. Maybe I'm missing a playlist but if there isn't one you should make one.
The origin story of the Mesa Falcon bit 😂
The Necropotence story reminds me of Dark Armed Dragon in Yu-Gi-Oh, that card became THE expensive chase card in a non-rotating game for literal years but Pojo Magazine was underwhelmed.
That's honestly pathetic, like yugioh at the time wasn't combo oriented it was more of a value type of game and dark armed dragon if unanswered could instantly blow up 3 cards and was a big beatstick. It would have been bad on release if it was released into a combo heavy meta like now. Probably thought '3 dark monsters in GY? Impossible!' even though good dark monsters existed back then.
@@dark_rit Yeah, it was a really bad read.
Feels like thousands of times:
Turn 1 Swamp, dark ritual, hyppi.
Turn 2 swamp, hymn, attack.
52:23 Seeing the Homelands symbol, immediately after Mesa falcon which CGB ran because he needed Homelands cards, made me think "this was the Homelands card people used". You play this turn four to shrink your opponent's Spectre so that your Spectre could block it/it can't trade with your spectre.
It's amazing that necropotence is still the card displayed to fool players that may think it's bad.
dude when it came out it had one of the lowest ratings in the set and it took a while for people to realize how good it was.
It's such an obvious card today. Draw your deck for 3 mana and some life.
That's because new players are going to be risk averse, paying life is scary, losing your natural draw is scary. And some of it is irationnal but some of it also make sense, if you are inexperienced you don't have a frame of reference for the value of cards and the value of life so not wanting to play a card that could well be detrimental while focusing on the cards that you understand make sense.
I think having some experience in card games you quickly realize how valuable necropotence is though. Like, having played heartstone you see necropotence and compare it to warlock hero power and immediately you understand it's busted.
It's more that TCG's were so new people didn't know what was the best thing to be doing. If necropotence came out tomorrow for the first time everyone would be calling for the card to be banned right off the bat. Card advantage as a concept was something few people knew, but then you had people slamming craw wurm and shivan dragon thinking they're the best thing since sliced bread. Or things like tempo as a concept people didn't recognize save very few. I had a friend who played back then and opened a mox pearl who was friends with a guy who had a red/green aggro deck packing all the strip mines, stone rains, and efficient beaters like scryb sprites and kird ape at the casual tables he was basically undefeated with the deck because no one could play their cards against him and he'd just bash them to death with small creatures while they had a bunch of cards that were unplayable or by the time they played a card they were overrun.
@daftwulli6145 I played when Necro came out, I remember the instant belief the card was bad and it was not risk aversion. The card's wall of a text was not yet common. It was not instantly recognizable what the card did or how it did that. On first glance, it looks like the controller skips the draw step and then can pay 1 life to get it back. It's not immediately obvious in Ice Age, 1995 Magic you can pay 10 life to get 10 draw steps until you see someone do it--Probably in a game you then lose.
Concerning Abyssyal and Hypnotic Spectre:
They come from different expansions, so contribute to the forced count. Still good enough to see play and contribute to win con.
The thing about Brainstorm is, there were no fetchlands back then. Without a way to reliably shuffle your deck after a brainstorm, you're mostly just rearranging the top cards of your deck with bad cards from your hand.
All you really ever need to say about Necropotence to explain how it bent the meta is "1996 was the year of the Black Summer."
'96 in Magic was like 2011 for video games. It was the year we got gud. Card advantage was kind of a vague concept before then, and absolutely nobody would have ever thought that giving up your life for more cards was a good idea. In the meta before Necro's release it was unheard of, and Inquest was spot-on FOR THE TIME.
But that time was before Necropotence was in the hands of pro-level players that saw the card for what it was. Does it really matter if you have only 2 life when you win the game? You still won the freaking game.
Yeah, Necropotence was the Dark Souls of Magic cards. It forced a full reevaluation of what came before, and it completely warped everything after.
Elkin Bottle: Elkin is an anagram of Klein, and there is a Klein Bottle in the picture. I've seen the card before and not even realized that. lol
also CGB’s covert codename should just be Mesa Falcon at this point :p
I really wish he would have talked about how popular it was to play necropotence and pay 16 immediately(to be one away from a bolt) and drawing into all your combo pieces and how that strat was actually amazing. Turn 1, swamp into dark ritual into necropotence pay 16, then you get to look at 16 more cards, make sure you have a swamp, a dark ritual or 2, and all your combo pieces and then fill up your grave with all the cards you get to discard. Was obviously risky and paying super low was even more risky later in the game where you could get double bolted or similar, but was and is one of my favorite cards and card game gambles.
There wasn't much in the way of forums, certainly, but MTG meta discussion was definitely taking place on Usenet back then. (and probably email mailing lists, but I wasn't in those)
A note on Dark Ritual being super legal. At the time, black didn't have much in the way of mana generation outside of that (and lands, obviously). While it definitely gives you the mana advantage, it's a one-shot advantage. It doesn't hang around like Llanowar Elves. While it was great for busting out that hypnotic Specter, if your opponent just Counterspelled or Fireballed the thing you were down two cards and in a really disadvantageous position. That was the tradeoff that kept it around for so long. The risk/reward pretty much evened out, oddly enough.
The secret of his name comes to light, CBG was converting from being a Mesa Falcon guy to blue all along
These are so hugely anticipated by me, on both channels, love to see these. Great team.
Edit: Now that I've watched, didn't disappoint, this was such a funny banger of an episode
The fact the Rarran said "Meesa Falcon" with a straight face 😂😂
Goofy aah
the mesa birdie makes sense, you were a kid with tunnel vision on a flying only strat
its so good to know that CGB came from humble deckbuilding beginnings! Thank you for sharing I respect you so much more now!
Love these videos! I got into magic during midnight hunt so its cool to hear about all the stuff i missed.
My favourite Hymn to Tourach art is the one where they're clearly playing Magic.
there are 2 wolves in you, and they're both kissing
These are the 2 wolves
As a hearthstone player just getting into magic this was one of the coolist ways to look at a past tournament.
All I got out of this was magic pro tour happened, then magically rarran was born. His dad tapped some "mana" and summon him from the womb
So you're saying CGB is Rarrans dad
Hymn to Tourach is STILL banned in pauper where you only play commons because its that broken of a card. Every current decently costed "discard a card" effect allows your opponent to choose which one they want to discard and the effects that allow you to choose one from your opponent are MUCH less efficient.
Discarding 2 cards from your opponents hand could probably be costed at 3 mana and be fair for standard and efficient and good for limited purposes, if they get to choose. Discarding 2 AT RANDOM, FOR 2 MANA is actually insane, it might even see play in Modern or Pioneer if it was legal there.
Watched a few of these, whatever card is shown first: “Unfair to show that card first” 😂
One thing that made Fountain of Youth playable back in the day is that you didn't have a lot of mana sinks. Creatures almost never had activated abilities, and not ones that scaled well with mana. That's why Shivan Dragon was so good in its day. So often you'd pass your turn with mana unspent and you wouldn't spend it on an opponent's turn either because you had nothing to do with it. Fountain, while not great, at least gave you something to do with that mana, and with enough time, you could gain a lot of life.
These videos got me hooked on mtg arena after only playing hs. Love it, keep it up :)
I've had my fill of X player reacts to Y cards, but I really enjoy this series because you made it a walk through Magic's history with Rarran as the audience surrogate.
Yeah, I appreciate most of the react to cards but CGB with Rarran is the best by far because of how you get an insight into the early MTG game and how it evolved.
Agreed. I mostly skip over them at this point, but I really like the way these two have innovated on the concept. The CGB showing Rarran Magic are definitely my favorite, but Rarran's A or B was an interesting take on it too. The issue we run into a lot of the time is that it's just "person with no concept of what these things means gets things wrong ha ha" and like... duh? Those get old fast. A or B mitigates that a lot and these history-based CGB videos even more so, especially as we keep going.
I like that CGB was once a bad player who has now become a pro player. It's the secret character arc
Thinking back, Dark Ritual was a part of every large expansion and core set after until 1999 (removed from Sixth Edition, but still in Mercadian Masques). It was finally realized to be too much after combo winter but how it took that long to figure out, I don't know.
OUCH on the "how do you choose a card at random" story. Holly hell I felt that. D:
Poor [Mesa Falcon] & [Bad Moon] combo guy suffered emotional damage that lasts to this very day.
33:08 For those that know, you just pray they never got windfury.
TBF on brainstorm, SOOO much of it's power is tied to fetchlands or other easy ways to shuffle your library. I don't think there was any way to easily shuffle in that tourney. Plus with how powerful black was and things needing multiple black pips per spell it's harder for them to splash blue.
Serrated Arrows was definitely a product of the time. Yeah you needed a homelands card but it also doubled as removal against all the pro black and pro white knights when most removal at the time was white and black. Having colorless removal was good.
CGB, please don't feel ashamed of the cards you played. We have all been there and honestly have become better players because of it. Just some, like you, become more and better :D Thank you an awesome video mate, this was great
Worth noting that the trick of hiding your good cards on top of your deck with brainstorm in response to hymn didn’t work back then, because instants resolved FIFO prior to the 6th edition rules update rather than LIFO like now.
37:50 rarran acting as if novice engineer and gnomish inventor were not both in the classic heartstone set at the same time, both doing functionally the same thing, drawing you a card
The difference in cost and stats is significant enough that they fill different purposes though. The novice engineer is for combo players that just want to draw through their deck while people who play gnomish inventor actually want to trade with it and get value out of it. The two cards in this video I forget the names are pretty much the same card except one is worse and costs 1 more mana