Three little words
December 8th 2008 03:49
It wasn’t one of the ten most powerful cards in the Limited Edition.
It hasn’t been the best at what it does since 1994.
It's barely played in competitive decks any more (and in spite of the huge number of variants and similar cards, it hasn't been possible to counter every spell your opponent plays for a while now).
Yet Counterspell remains one of the most notorious cards in Magic, and the three little words in its text box are the most feared in the entire game. Why?
Think of spells that counter other spells as anti-missile missiles. They take down a threat in mid-flight, and when they are set up correctly they protect you from any kind of harm; but they have to be deployed in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, because if anything gets through it can lose you the game.
Creatures like this are the reason there are very few blue control decks any more that don’t use at least one other color (usually white or black).
The sheer power of a well-placed counterspell is the most-cited reason for their revilement. There is nothing more frustrating than thinking you were about to do something (get a neat creature, play a big spell) only to be stopped in your tracks because the other guy had two islands available. Adrenaline levels are very high just before, during, and after any kind of action, even ones as simple as taking a card from your hand and putting it on the table, and to have it denied has both a physiological and psychological effect on players.
But other strategies which attack other players’ ability to take action are usually considered merely annoying, even when they are more proactive than countermagic and thus more generally effective. Why should Counterspell be hated so much more than cards which force the opponent to discard cards before he can play them? Why is countering a spell so much worse than destroying the land that would have allowed it to be played?
Some players hate this card nearly as much as blue control cards. Personally, I love it, but then again, I often play red decks and use a lot of basic lands.
An attempt to answer those questions could read: anything which prevents the opponent from playing his deck is unfair and unfun. But this is a very slippery slope to start on. For example, the existence of creatures like Kird Ape puts a “clock” on any environment they exist in; if you know you could be attacked by those kinds of creatures in the early turns, your deck must be able to set up whatever it does within about four turns, and if it can’t, it must either change or disappear. From this fact, you could argue that inexpensive creatures prevent people from playing certain kinds of decks, and so should not be part of the Magic environment. Yet it has always a cornerstone of Magic that some decks are slow and some are fast; and if you make one of those speeds unavailable, it becomes a different game – one with significantly less depth and entertainment value. Every card interacts with another type of card in some way, and every card puts some kind of restriction on what can and cannot be played around it. If you start restricting existing or new cards on that basis, how many are going to be left when you’re finished?
I actually think the real problem with countermagic is not what it does but how it does it – specifically, what sort of art, name, and flavor text the cards are given. If every Counterspell variant depicts blue- and lawful-aligned characters turning up their noses, imposing arbitrary restrictions on other people, and generally acting like the parents in Footloose, of course they (and the people who play them) are going to get a bad reputation. But if you depict those same characters channelling the strength of the winds, manipulating the stuff of magic itself, and wearing stylish clothes, maybe people will stop looking at them and the associated strategies as a multiverse-scale buzzkill.
When Jace was first printed, he was called the worst planeswalker in Lorwyn. A new publicist and hairstylist later, Standard loves him.
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