It’s been a while since I’ve written about Magic.  I’ve mainly been writing for Oh Em Gee Dot Com (http://www.ohemgee.com), doing anime reviews.  Well, Ska asked for submissions, and I decided to go back to what brought me to this little dance.

 In this article, I decided to turn my attention to Apocalypse.  The new set has shaken Magic right down to it’s foundations, with enemy colored pain lands, and enemy colored spells.

 Every color got some great power.  The Volvers are creatures with kicker costs that are the enemy colors, but the kickers give them huge benefits.  There are now enemy colored split cards.  Cats and dogs are living together in harmony.

 But possibly the best card in the set isn’t a multi-colored card.  Black’s new type of spell is a creature that makes you draw a card and lose one life (or draw two and lose two life) when it comes into play.  The rare version of that card isn’t a creature.

 Phyrexian Arena is an enchantment that costs two black mana and one colorless to cast.  During your upkeep, draw a card and lose one life.

 Let’s look at this in the simplest terms possible.

 Phyrexian Arena does put you in a little bit of danger with the life loss, but you draw two cards a turn to your opponent’s one.  CARD ADVANTAGE.  I’ll gladly pay one life every turn to draw more threats and solutions than my opponent will.

 Not to mention the fact that the card effect is cumulative.  Three cards a turn for two life with two Phyrexian Arenas in play?  Unless you draw nothing but land, your opponent will be scooping his cards up and reshuffling his deck soon enough.

 The life loss is a major problem, but with the new Death Grasp spell, you can kill an opponent’s creature, and gain extra life in the process, not to mention the new discard spell, Gerrard’s Verdict.  A couple of extra life is a couple of extra cards.

 So, why did Wizards of the Coast print this card?  Most of the people who read this might be about to learn something.  The events take place in 1996.

 In the Ice Age set, Wizards of the Coast printed a card called Necropotence.  The majority of the players took one look at this enchantment and tossed it aside.  Junk rare is a phrase that gets tossed around quite a bit… this is the original junk rare right here.

 Necropotence is a black enchantment that costs three black mana.  It causes you to skip your draw phase.  You activate Necropotence by paying one life, and you set a card aside.  At the beginning of your discard phase, you add any cards set aside with Necropotence to your hand.  Any cards discarded with Necropotence in play are removed from the game.

 Everybody took a look at this card and put it into their binders.  Not only do you NOT get your mandatory card per turn, you have to pay life to get any cards AT ALL.  Why would I want to do that?

 Until people realized that you could activate Necropotence several times in the same turn.  Simply stated, Necropotence is the best form of card advantage in Magic’s history.  One card can net you 19 or more cards with one use.  Black beatdown decks could empty their hands, and not worry about stalling out, because Necropotence was right there to fill their hands back up again.

 The summer of 1996 was when everybody caught on.  It was dubbed “The Black Summer” because over half the people playing in a tournament would be playing a mono-black deck with Necropotence in it, and about a quarter of the rest would be playing a deck specifically designed to beat a deck with Necropotence in it.  Simply put, it dominated the game.

 Which meant that the reprint of Necropotence in 5th Edition was even more confusing.  Nobody played mono-black Necro decks (the Magic metagame is sort of like the tides… ebb and flow), so they removed it when they printed 6th Edition.  Even after Necropotence was removed from the basic set, and thus removed from use in Standard tournaments, it was still used in suicide black decks and several combo decks in the Extended environment.

 The most recent was Michelle Bush’s Trix deck.  It won with counterspells, a weird-ass combination of cards that won the game, Demonic Consultation
(Necropotence’s partner in crime) or Vampiric Tutor to get the Necropotence out of the deck, Necropotence to get the combination set up.

 The kill engine in Trix was another pair of junk rares, Illusions of Grandeur (Cumulative Upkeep: 2, when Illusions comes into play gain 20 life, when Illusions leaves play lose 20 life) and Donate (Target opponent gains control of a permanent you control).  Play Illusions, gain 20 life, use Necropotence to draw a shitload of cards, use Donate to give your opponent the Illusions, they die when they lose 20 life when it leaves play.  Ingenious idea.

 Wizards of the Coast tried valiantly to save their beloved card, going so far as to ban cards from Extended that produced mana quickly, including the venerable Dark Ritual.  They banned a ton of  cards except Necropotence in an attempt to bring the power of the card down, but in the end they had to ban Necropotence in Extended format tournaments anyways.

 This would be a great place to end this story… except that Wizards of the Coast printed a DIFFERENT version of Necropotence in the Urza’s block.  The R&D department at WotC doesn’t catch on quickly, and in the ultimate power gamer block, they reprinted a fixed version of Necropotence.

 Or so they thought.  Yawgmoth’s Bargain is a black enchantment that was released in Urza’s Destiny, and it costs two black mana and four colorless mana.  Bargain doesn’t have the jumble of text that Necropotence does.  Bargain says, “Skip your draw phase.  Pay 1 life: draw a card.”  No worrying about putting the cards into your hand in your discard phase… they just go right up into your hand.

 There’s a saying, that if a card has the word Yawgmoth in the title (Yawgmoth’s Bargain, Yawgmoth’s Will, Yawgmoth’s Agenda), it’s very good, and the Bargain is certainly part of that.  The DCI realized how broken the Bargain can be, despite costing six mana (since Urza’s block was FILLED with fast artifact mana), and promptly banned it in Extended and restricted it in Classic (Type 1) tournaments.

 Wizards of the Coast R&D makes TONS of mistakes (and I’ll have to spend an article in the future talking about these horribly broken cards), and thinking that taking away one of the problems with Necropotence and adding three measly mana to the cost was going to change anything is one of the most ridiculous ideas I have ever heard.

 So, you may be asking, where does Phyrexian Arena fit in all this?

 The Arena is the bastard child of Necropotence and Yawgmoth’s Bargain.  You can see the resemblance in the eyes.  Arena gives it’s controller a card for one life point.  Very powerful.  But since you can only draw one extra card per turn per Arena in play, it’s not HIDEOUSLY BROKEN like it’s predecessors.  It’s still a card that will power mono-black and black/white decks for a few years.

 Arena is very good.  A few years ago, it was much better.

The article about Necropotence being restricted in Type 1 can be found here

The article about Necropotence being banned in Extended is right here

(ed. note -- yes, I KNOW you're not supposed to use the word "here" as a link, but I thought I'd save everyone the cut-and-past of the URLs.  Anyone who's really bothered by it can lodge a complaint to the webmaster here)

Nathan Loney
http://www.ohemgee.com