Faeries 2008

An email I wrote recently about the 2008 Faeries spectre:

I think you give Faeries a little too much credit in your review of 2008. It has certainly been a strong deck over the last year but it was only a dominant deck for a couple brief points in time. The tendency with linear mechanics like tribal is for the decks to tend to build themselves -- each card is good only when played with certain other cards. Because Lorwyn was the first set of the new rotation and the block was two sets large, almost all of the faeries deck appeared in one quick chunk and remained largely in tact from Standard, to Block Constructed, and back to Standard (and to a lesser extent to Extended). This concentration of cards into two adjacent sets at the beginning of a block is what has led to Faeries notoriety. While the rest of the metagame has changed over the year, Faeries has always been there. On top of that, it is a control deck, which means that it is popular with pro players (who have a good chance to win no matter what they play) and that it is often not fun to lose to.

However, if you look at the numbers, Faeries was only really scary at one point in time. The first time I remember people worrying about Faeries was Pro Tour Hollywood. However, the fear then proved to be unjustified as Faeries ended up with only one deck in the top eight (played by one of the best players in the world) despite being the most played deck in the tournament and posted a 47% win percentage overall (see http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/460). Next, people worried that the deck was too good in Block Constructed. I agree that it was too good in the early part of the Block season before Eventide was legal. At the end of the Block season, I went through all the North American PTQ top eight results posted on Wizards' site and looked at just the decks that won the tournaments. Before Eventide, Faeries won 66% of the PTQs, which is scary. After Eventide, Faeries won 27%, Kithkin won 24%, and Five Color Control (which I defined as decks with Reflecting Pool and Cryptic Command) won 36% so the field was fairly even (though Cryptic Command was played in both Faeries and Five Color Control -- 63% of the winning decks). Over the summer, Nationals was filled Tokens decks, Mono-Red Aggro, Swans combo, Red Storm, Reveillark, and only a few Faeries decks. With the Shards of Alara rotation, most decks in Standard (and a lot of Extended) lost a lot of cards but Faeries only had to change two cards so it began the new Standard format as one of the decks to beat. However, if you look at the results from Worlds, Faeries posted only a 52% win percentage overall in Standard (see http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/17d) and had essentially even match-ups against popular decks like Kithkin, Tokens, and Red/Black aggro. It did end up with five decks in the top eight but that just shows that the best players are attracted to Faeries since the Standard portion only makes up one third of the process for determining the Worlds top eight. In the Worlds top eight, all the Faeries decks combined went 2-3 (not counting the mirror match).

I won't comment on Faeries in Extended because I've written too much already and that format seems to be unstable any way, but hopefully this gives some justification for why Bitterblossom has remained legal in Standard and Block Constructed since it was printed.