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Three, Four and Five Card Blind, (3CB, 4CB and 5CB, respectively), are at their primary root, a type of forum game. What that means is that while there are some people playing 3CB at brick and mortar stores somewhere, most of the game formats, variations, and leagues form online. While the origins of the blind games are not truly known, it is safe to say that they are now a staple of any large Magic community’s forums. (Check out our Humor & Games forum for the latest rounds of 3, 4 and 5 card blind here). In each round of XCB, players construct a deck that has X amount of cards in it. These cards all start out in your hand, and you don’t lose the game if you can’t draw a card. These simple rules are the beginning of an amazing format, but wait, there’s more! In addition to those two basic rules, you may not submit a deck that can do any of the following things:
Some final notes about the rules of XCB – Random effects always go in the favor of your opponent; this means you can’t win the game with Game of Chaos, or any of the other random effects. Also, you cannot take advantage of this rule – no matter who controls the card, its owner gets the bad end of the straw for random effects. This submitted deck plays round-robin style against all the other decks that were submitted by other players. Other than the rules I’ve outlined earlier, the games play out like a regular game of Magic. If your deck wins a game, it gets three points. But if you’re still reading, my guess is you’re asking “Submit? Submit a deck? How?”, and that’s a great question. Any round of XCB will have a person running the game, called the moderator. That player is in charge of collecting all the decks, running the scores, finding out the winners, and posting the results. Normally, you have to send a PM (private message) to the moderator through the forums, and he’ll add your name to the list. The idea behind any game of blind is that, under certain circumstances, Magic: the Gathering, a game of skill and luck, can be played in a way where winning and losing games and matches is completely mathematically determined. There is no mana-screw, no amazing top-decking. Luck has been factored out of the equation, just like the Law of Averages. The ability to pick the best cards and predict the metagame is what wins matches. In short, how well you do is determined by your card choices. That’s right, card choice. Whatever number is attached to the CB in the game name is how many cards you get to choose to make a deck. This is very significant with a limited number of cards, because even the tiniest things, can change the entire outcome of the game. Let me show you a quick example: SAMPLE 3CB DECKLISTS #1
These decklists are primarily the same. They both play Lion’s Eye Diamond, and their land, and then after discarding Roar of the Wurm, they play it’s flashback to get the 6/6 Wurm token. That is all find and dandy, but, for a second, I’d like you to consider this little fact: You can get green mana from Lion’s Eye Diamond. You don’t need to play Forest to be able to play Roar of the Wurm, and therefore, if you play Forest over Strip Mine, your game is significantly worse against quite a few decks. Decks that need to use slow lands, such as storage lands or depletion lands (more on these in a minute), all lose to Strip Mine because they never even get the chance to play their spells. Their land dies, so they’re out of the game. With just a regular Forest, you run the chance that your opponent can actually do something, and therefore you can end up tying or losing games you’d otherwise win. Get what I’m saying? No? I’ll explain more as we go, but for now, it’s time jump into lands, face first, X card blind style! BASIC LANDS You can’t talk about lands in a format without talking about basic lands. Unfortunately for us, basic lands don’t do all that much in any XCB format. More likely, players will be playing non-basic lands that pack more punch. Remember, every card choice counts, so picking a basic land is most likely a bad choice. One exception to the rule is if Wasteland or Ghost Quarter is in the format. These lands destroy non-basic lands, and with basic lands in play, you don’t have anything to destroy. In most formats, however, these land destruction lands are normally banned rather quickly. MOXES What gives? Moxes aren’t land! Well my astute friend, you are correct. However, for the intents and purposes of any XCB format, a Mox is a land that breaks one of the most fundamental of all Magic: the Gathering rules – the one land per turn rule. You can, with Moxes, effectively speed your entire gameplan up by one turn. This ability to speed up the game is what makes these two decks, and decks like them viable: SAMPLE 3CB and 4CB DECKLISTS #2
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Meddling Mage and Mesmeric Fiend are both powerful cards. They’re cards that can prevent entire strategies from working right from the start by making a card unplayable or by removing a card from a players hand all together. The ability to play these creatures on turn 1 makes them especially deadly and consistently powerful. That's the reason why they've been banned in most XCB formats.
Wait a minute, cards can be banned? In most XCB formats,
there are actually quite a few cards that are banned, mostly because they are
too powerful to see normal play. It's like regular Magic in the fact that
there are some cards that they print that are just too good for the format. In
short, cards like Mesmeric Fiend and Meddling Mage change the way the game is
played, and they do it in a way that makes the game not as fun.
The interesting thing is, that if you couldn't play Moxes, then those cards wouldn't be nearly as powerful. You can thank the Moxes later for getting some of these amazing cards banned. Moxes do have a few drawbacks, one of which is that they’re more vulnerable to cards that would normally not be able to target Lands. For instance, Duress, a powerful discard card in the format, can make a player discard a Mox, where if that player had played a land that produced mana of a same color, Duress would not be able to affect the other player’s mana base. LOTI I know, I know, Loti aren’t land either, but hear me out on this one! Loti are such a major part of most XCB formats that you can’t mention mana, land and playing spells without mentioning them. There are three major zero cost mass-mana producers – Black Lotus, Lion’s Eye Diamond, and Lotus Bloom. Black Lotus is the most superior and most commonly used, so we’ll spend a little more time on it than the others. Black Lotus gives any XCB player a chance to do some amazing things. There are cards in the XCB formats that can do great things for 3 mana –Indentured Djinn and Megatherium come to mind rather quickly. Because Black Lotus is so good, there are even strategies based solely on beating any deck that plays it. Don’t believe me? Check out the following decklists: SAMPLE 3CB and 4CB DECKLISTS #3
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The first deck uses Treasure Hunter to get back their own Black Lotus, and then replay it to play Glowrider, who makes Black Lotus cost 1 mana instead of 0. This is huge against some decks, since most are only using Black Lotus to power their deck. The 4CB deck uses Disrupting Shoal (since normally the other free counterspells, Foil and Force of Will, are banned) and Evermind to counter an opponent’s Black Lotus. It then plays out Stormscape Apprentice, which can tap down an opposing creature If things get too rough, or just attack for 20 turns.
A few nonbasic lands stick out above the rest. A few of these actually came from the Masques block – depletion lands being one of those types. As shown with our handy Sandstone Needle example, you can see that while these lands can only be used a few times, they can make more than one mana per tap. Similarly the sacrifice lands from 5th and 6th edition can
also produce more than one mana per tap, at the cost of sacrificing the land.
While this may not sound so great, producing multiple mana from one land is a
very amazing ability if you consider some of the following decklists:
3CB and 5CB SAMPLE DECKLISTS #4
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The decks are characterized by how they use their lands. The Nezumi Shortfang deck plays out its Peat Bog turn 1, then plays Shortfang and Strip Mine the second turn. It uses the final depletion counter on Peat Bog to activate the Shortfang’s ability, hopefully making your opponent discard down to zero, and flipping the Shortfang into Stabwhisker the Odious – an amazing card in any format of blind. The Eureka deck, as played by SenorClown in the MDV forums, uses two Havenwood Battlegrounds to make a 3rd turn Eureka, which lets them play Illusions of Grandeur (gaining him 20 life), and then Sky Swallower (giving the Illusions to your opponent, who most likely will not be able to pay the cumulative upkeep). If everything works out well for the Eureka deck, it can win as early as turn 3 on their opponent’s turn. Notice that you want to sacrifice the lands, because if you used a card like Hickory Woodlot, you’d give your opponent the ability to pay the upkeep for a turn or two, which can make the difference between winning and losing the game. Remember, just a simple choice like that, between two lands that do almost the same thing, can make a huge difference in how a game gets played out. STORAGE LANDS
Where M is the mana you’d like to create, and T is the total amount of turns that it’ll take to make that mana (Not all that difficult, but important nonetheless). This means it will take four turns to make two mana of any one color (because any of the usable storage lands come into play tapped). However, 4 turns may be all you need to stall out the game long enough to win. Take a look at this next set of decklists so you can see what I mean: SAMPLE 3CB DECKLISTS #5
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Both of these decks run Saprazzan Cove, but the other storage lands are used frequently in slower formats. My favorite of the two lists, the Darksteel Reactor deck, plays out an Energy Field on turn 4, followed by a Darksteel Reactor on turn 9. This deck works especially well in formats where permanent destruction and discard spells are low in number because creatures can’t deal you damage, and Darksteel Reactor will eventually win the game on turn 29. Well, that’s it for this time, but don’t think for a second that these are the end-all be-all for lands in XCB. Tune in next time as I go over all the fun you can have with some of the best non-basics in the format. Get blind. ~Death_By_Beebles
You can discuss this article in the MDV forums
here.
Articles
Spotlights from 2007: |
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Welcome
to the first article in the Going Blind series. In this series, we’ll be looking
at some of your favorite cards in a way you’d never imagine, and we’ll be
looking at cards you’ve never heard of before, all in an attempt to take a look
at three, four and five card blind. For all those semi-concerned readers out
there, have no fear. Raiding the Dollar Bins isn’t being cancelled. With all
that being said, let’s take a look at non-bas… wait, you’re not familiar with
the card blind games? Then let me illuminate the path for you.
DEPLETION
LANDS & SACRIFICE LANDS
Although
they do remarkably the same things, there have been three sets of storage lands
– most recently, their return as dual lands in Time Spiral. Unfortunately, the
Storage lands of Time Spiral are not all that good, and so are forsaken for
much… better storage lands from Mercadian Masques and 5th Edition. Ready for a
little math? These lands make mana in the following form:
