Control, Errata, and Thawing Glaciers

[morgan_coke]

Saw the new art Thawing Glaciers wizards put out the other day, with the new/errata'd wording on it and it got me thinking.

Thawing Glaciers was the bomb-diggity back in the day. It was card draw and mana acceleration and endless land drops, all in one card. Probably the best land wizards had printed to that point since Library and Strip Mine. Then the card got errata'd and the game sped up, and eventually fetchlands got printed and so did Crucible of Worlds and Wasteland and Thawing Glaciers fell by the wayside.

It's still a cool card, and a lot of players like me have nostalgic feelings towards it, but even in a controllish/landstill shell its just not a good card. Control decks in Eternal formats have also been hurting for a long time now, as the aggro decks are so fast and the number of threats control decks face is so varied that it becomes extremely difficult to anticipate/deal with all of them effectively.

Assuming we (and Wizards) want the format to include actual control decks along with the wide variety of aggro-control decks present, then control decks need a power boost. To an extent, with cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor, this is already happening. Another way this could be facilitated is to look at existing cards that can be given a boost.

Thawing Glaciers seems like just such a card. If restored to its original wording, it would have a chance to see play in Legacy control decks. It wouldn't be anywhere near dominating, given the overall speed of the format, the slowness of the card, and the prevalence of things like Wasteland, but it could give a very specific type of deck that is currently pretty much absent from the metagame a boost, as well as tingling a lot of players' nostalgia/happy bones, which seems like something wizards likes to do every so often.

I'm guessing there are probably other cards that Wizards could operate on like this, where removing some errata or another that was initially instituted for power level reasons might give a little boost to a specific deck type that is currently weak. Waylay might be another such option to "fix" with a power level boost un-errataing that would give white-weenie and boros style decks a moderate boost in power, though, like a powered up thawing glaciers, I'm not actually sure that it would even see play today.

These are cards that are unplayable in Vintage and illegal in every other format but Legacy. I think this is a really unexplored area of Eternal maintenance that deserves a look. If nothing else, its another tool for Wizards to use in addition to the Banned and Restricted Lists.

*for those who don't know, the old Thawing Glaciers wording let you use it on during your opponents' end step, then again during your turn before it bounced to your hand at the end of your turn, thus one Glaciers would put two lands into play. Waylay was similar in trickery, you cast it during your opponents' end step, then attacked with the Knights during your turn before saccing them in your own end step.

[Aggro_zombies]

Having control decks be available in the format would be nice, but there are a couple of issues here:

1) You get the most value out of Thawing Glaciers in a mono-colored deck, because then it's active for the longest period of time. However, in such a deck, you'd have to come up with a reason why it would necessarily be better than Scrying Sheets and Divining Top - you'd want to be running Top anyway, and while Sheets doesn't accelerate you per se, it's also not completely kold to tempo strategies and can tap for mana itself.

2) If you play Thawing Glaciers in a multicolor deck, you have to come up with a reason why you'd want it over fetches, which are vastly superior at fixing your mana. Yes, an un-errata'd Glaciers would allow you to "accelerate" yourself in the sense that you get two lands over roughly a turn, and then have a blank land drop the turn afterward (Turn 1, Glaciers. Turn 2, untap, play land, find land. Turn 3, play land, find land, bounce Glaciers. If you re-drop Glaciers on the fourth turn, you're not really netting mana because you have two dead land drops (CiPT) and two turns where you're eating mana to find lands that also CiPT). This is not tremendously exciting when you could be using cards that find duals with very little downside.

3) If you play Thawing Glaciers in a deck that includes green and any number of other colors, you have to come up with a reason why you'd want it over Exploration. Yes, Thawing Glaciers searches for lands and therefore works all the time. Yes, Glaciers is quite awesome with Exploration. However, Exploration will actually boost your land count, without eating mana and without being taken out by Wasteland. Also, it allows you to Waste someone twice in a turn, which is pretty sweet.

4) Accelerating control's mana doesn't make it any less crappy, especially when the accelerator itself comes into play tapped and requires mana to make more tapped lands. Like, spending your first four turns getting to four mana and a Glaciers is basically exactly what Zoo wants you to do, because all you're doing is finding lands instead of, like, killing the Zoo player's guys to stay out of burn range.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, I'm pretty sure the errata on Waylay and Glaciers is now justified as being "getting the cards to work the way they were intended to work," and not power-level errata, which has since been removed from basically all cards as per Wizards policy. In that sense, it probably won't be removed - and if it is, I really hope they do it to all the cards like that and make Mox Diamond into a better Lotus Petal again.

[SpikeyMikey]

Mox Diamond wouldn't be nearly as much fun as Lotus Vale and Scorched Ruins, but I'd be terrified of what those would do to the format. Especially Vale in Tendrils.

[grahf]

Can someone explain the power level errata on Thawing Glaciers? Does it have to do with the "at end of turn" -> "cleanup step" wording change? I feel like I'm missing something there.

[Nessaja]

Without the errata you could use it in the end of turn step without having to bounce it to search for 2 lands. With the errata you always return it because it now has an "until end of turn" clause built in.

[Meekrab]

Without the errata you could use it in the end of turn step without having to bounce it to search for 2 lands. With the errata you always return it because it now has an "until end of turn" clause built in.
No, it doesn't.


Thawing Glaciers (0)
Land
Thawing Glaciers enters the battlefield tapped.
1, T: Search your library for a basic land card, put that card onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle your library. Return Thawing Glaciers to its owner's hand at the beginning of the next cleanup step.

The difference is the new rules, specifically 314.3:


314.3. If the conditions for any state-based effects exist or if any triggered abilities are waiting to be put onto the stack, the active player gets priority and players may play spells and abilities. Once the stack is empty and all players pass, another cleanup step begins. Otherwise, no player receives priority and the step ends.
So Thawing Glaciers will always get returned to your hand on the turn you use the ability.

[Ecoris]

The difference is the new rules, specifically 314.3:

So Thawing Glaciers will always get returned to your hand on the turn you use the ability.

I don't see what you are referring to. That rule has existed for more that a decade.

Prior to the M10 rules update Thawing Glaciers used the "substance"-trick to make it work as intended. The "at the beginning of the cleanup step" wording achieves the same and is cleaner. (The only functional difference is that you could Stifle the return-ability and use it once more on your own turn. You can't do that anymore because it would just re-trigger in the second cleanup step).

[Rico Suave]

Control is dead because it can't actually control the format.

How do you build a control deck that beats aggro like Zoo, Goblins, and Merfolk? By the time you get a reasonable shot against the aggro decks you have already sacrificed the Lands, ANT, and Reanimator match-ups.

The problem is control does not have all purpose cards that are effective. You can't run Wrath of God and shore up your match against Zoo and Reanimator - in fact Wrath isn't good against either one. You need to run pinpoint cards like Firespout and Relic of Progenitus which are the only cards that cut it but are terrible in every match you don't need them.

And we all know Johnny home-brewer likes nothing better than a Legacy tournament, where he can show up with his terrible deck that has no chance of winning the tournament but boy does it ruin your control deck simply because you can't realistically devote space to beating that particular strategy. The last time I played Landstill, I got paired against Turbo-Haups in round 1 and wanted to die.

The only way for a control deck to thrive in such an environment is to not be control anymore. It has two main options:
1) Adopt an aggro component, and become a bastardized aggro-control deck
2) Adopt a combo component, which is evidenced by the success of Dreadstill, Natural Order, and in Extended you can see Dark Depths Control decks

A natural control deck just struggles too hard. Aggro is pretty good in this format.

"Fixing" Thawing Glaciers isn't going to do anything.

[DrJones]

Control doesn't work anymore because people got tired of Stasis vs Stasis in 1998. There's currently not enough time on the clock to play 3 rounds in pure control matchups. In fact, when a control deck finds a way to abuse the time rule or the draw rule, R&D changes the floor rules and ban cards to keep it in check, as Sharazad proves.

Currently, control decks are FORCED by the floor rules to add a combo finish if they want to remain competitive. And I think it's for the better, because I played back then when people built decks with graveyard-shuffling effects as their kill condition.