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« on: July 19, 2010, 11:03:34 pm »
Bear with me for a moment, a small anecdote makes things much clearer in the end.
Early in the life of the game of Magic: The Gathering, a player named Brain Wiessman created "The Deck." If you are unfamiliar with his creation, the strategy was this: He used removal, such as swords to plowshares, to destroy early threats, stabilizing. He then used cards such as ancestral recall to gain card advantage. This allowed him to finish his opponent with a serra angel or fireball. While this may not seem complicated, it was a revolutionary concept. Brain had successfully created a control build, one that would change Magic forever. The deck had such a strong impact because of one simple insight: noncreature spells were better than creatures.
Now, years later, Magic has changed greatly. The current metagame is dominated by midrange decks such as Jund, Naya, and others. This change has occurred for one reason. Creatures are getting stronger. The power creep seen in Shards of Alara, for example, has allowed for creature based decks, going against the great theory of The Deck. The entire metagame has shifted.
Now you are probably wondering what this has to do with Elements. Elements is a budding card game, with very few cards. However, the metagame is the opposite of Magic's beginnings. The creatures of Elements dominate the game. Removal is absolutely pitiful, only able to 1-for-1 with creatures that are hardly threats. Gravity pull is only plausible in creature based decks, and simple removal such as Lightning is far too inefficient to deal with the sheer number of creatures that a simple deck can produce. Cards such as fractal give creatures even more card advantage than non-creature spells. Others, like firefly queen can produce creatures far faster than any control deck can handle them. Traditional control builds are just not viable.
My ultimate question is this: when does the metagame of Elements shift, just as Magic did? When do we see “Destroy all creatures”, or even “Destroy target creature”? When do we see “Draw two cards”? Will control ever be viable, or will creatures dominate forever?
P.S. I understand that Elements is not Magic, and does not intend to copy Magic, I simply used it as an example because of familiarity. What I have described is a transformation that not only Magic has gone through.
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