Before I begin this week's column, I just want to take a moment to thank everyone who has written in over the past few weeks with support, questions, and suggestions. I was especially gratified to hear from a great many of you who, after reading my "Prerelease Primer", decided to go to your first Magic tournament during the Prerelease weekend. I received one letter from a player who not only did well, but who defeated the number one ranked player in the world. Way to go!
If it seems like I'm stalling before diving into White Week, it's probably because I am. I decided that I would write about "White Weenie" decks and—as a nod to my previous column—attempt to build a modern version using only Onslaught and Legions cards. The problem? I've never played with a White Weenie deck in my life, and I don't know that I have ever even built one before.
White Weenie decks have perhaps the oldest pedigree in the Magic game, and they have won more than their fair share of "best in show"—from the smallest playgroups all the way to World Championships. I thought we could take a look at some of the more successful White Weenie decks in Magic history and attempt to borrow elements from them and build a new deck or two.
Today's lesson:
What the heck is a White Weenie and what do successful versions look like?
The name of the deck pretty much sums it up. White weenies are cheap, efficient creatures that overrun slower opponents before they get a chance to set up. Once your cheap creatures are on the board, you can get rid of your opponents' creatures with removal, their resources with global effects like Armageddon, or their powerful artifacts and enchantments with disenchant effects.
How do you decide whether a creature is efficient? A measure of a creature's efficiency is the ratio between its power and its casting cost. Tom Chanpheng featured what is undoubtedly the most efficient creature ever to show up in a White Weenie deck when he won the 1996 Magic World Championship with the following deck.
Tom Chanpheng's White Weenie
1996 World Championships
The efficient card I am referring to is Savannah Lions. For a single white mana, Tom was able to play a 2/1 creature on the first turn of the game with twelve creatures to back it up on the following turn (fifteen if you count the other three Lions). Two points of power for one mana is virtually unheard of in newer Magic expansions and there is a good reason for that. Quite simply, it creates decks that are too fast for slower decks to be viable. Today, the best you are going to do is a 2/1 or a 2/2 for two mana.
Tom's deck played more mana than you would normally expect to find in a White Weenie deck. That is due to the presence of some more expensive spells like Serra Angel and the plains-eating Kjeldoran Outpost. It's hard to imagine building a deck like this in today's environment because the deck uses absolutely broken cards, like Zuran Orb, Land Tax, and Balance, that were restricted to a single copy per deck. What we can take from it is its reliance on inexpensive creatures with a good power-to-casting-cost ratio and a few late-game, back-breaking creatures.
The next time a White Weenie deck made its presence known on the tournament scene was a couple of years later when Matt Linde won the 1998 U.S. Nationals and Brian Hacker made Top 8 at the World Championships with the following deck designed by Kyle Rose (it seems a shame not to give him credit considering that he also created the deck after this).
Matt Linde's White Weenie
1998 U.S. Nationals and World Championships
At the time this deck was played, the most popular decks were aggressive red decks that relied on efficient creatures and burn spells to kill their opponents quickly. This deck was able to gain life with Soul Warden to give the red player an uphill climb. To make matters worse, the deck had seven creatures with protection from red and eleven with protection from black. The en-Kor creatures allowed you to redirect damage done to them to another creature—effectively giving the en-Kors protection from red and black as well. (The damage prevention rules were different back in 1998, but this trick still works.)
This deck had creatures to spare and seven fewer lands than the previous deck. While it did not have any large creatures, such as the Serra Angel, it could make a huge creature with the curiously spelled Empyrial Armor. Cataclysm was this deck's closer, leaving each player with only one of each type of permanent after it resolved. An Armored shadow creature was often too much for a player to race after the Cataclysm.
Interestingly, both decks made use of the recently reprinted White Knight. Will White Knight make it into our version? When Kyle Rose built the following 1999 U.S. Nationals - winning deck he did not have White Knight to play with and instead used the Longbow Archers that replaced it in the base set.
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It seems that the White Weenie had seen several championships already.
