It seems obvious that innovation should be celebrated in Magic. Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, this isn’t always the case. In Constructed, most people do embrace it, sometimes to the detriment of their success. In Limited, many people don’t embrace it, which can hold people back from maximizing their success.

Sometimes, in Constructed, the environment becomes stale. This happened recently with the dominance of Caw-Blade. After a while, it seemed that every Standard Top 8 included at least four Caw-Blade decks, and the finals was usually a Caw-Blade mirror match. This isn’t the first time Standard has become this stagnant either: it did the same with Specter/Rack, mono-Black Necropotence, Affinity, Fires of Yavimaya, Recur/Survival, Buried Alive, Wildfire, and Bloom/Drain to name a few.

When each of these decks was first introduced, it was considered innovative, of course. Imagine being the first person to ever play against Bloom/Drain! I remember preparing for the first Pro Tour: Paris and Rob Dougherty telling me he had an incredible deck to show me that he’d come up with. It was pretty mind-blowing watching how quickly his deck “went off” and beat whatever I was testing against it.

There are two big moments for innovation in Constructed: when the environment first undergoes a big change and when it becomes stagnant. When Mirrodin came out, there was a mad scramble to innovate using cards like Frogmite, Myr Enforcer, Atog, Goblin Charbelcher, and Isochron Scepter. Once Arcbound Ravager came out in Darksteel, innovation led to stagnation as Affinity decks ended up completely dominating the format.

One of my favorite types of innovation is the kind that comes after the environment stagnates. In 1995, the newly introduced Standard format was being completely dominated by my mono-Black deck that featured Hypnotic Specter, The Rack, Hymn to Tourach, Dark Ritual, and Disrupting Scepter. Brad Mennell easily won Northeast Regionals with it, and at Nationals that year, the on-site qualifiers (meat grinders) were full of them. Despite the seemingly complete dominance of the Black discard deck, a few people successfully responded with innovative decks.

Rob Dougherty analyzed the deck and came up with a White Weenie deck that completely owned the Black deck. His deck had three key reasons for matching up well with the Black deck. First, he had lots of creatures with protection from Black: Order of Leitbur, White Knight, and Order of the White Shield. Second, he used the combination of Land Tax and Zuran Orb to keep his hand size off The Rack. This worked especially well, since his creatures all cost 1 or 2 (he had Savannah Lions, too.) Third, he used Sleight of Mind. It was the only reason he played Blue. The main reason he used it was to defeat Gloom. The Black deck’s main sideboard card against White decks was Gloom, which could be played on turn one with a Dark Ritual. A Sleight of Mind changing the word White to Black was game over in Rob’s favor. The other cool thing about Sleight of Mind was that it could change the wording on his Knights against the few non-Black decks he ran into.

While the White Weenie deck allowed Rob to cruise through a field of Black decks in the Qualifier he played in, he ran into an unexpected problem at Nationals itself. At Nationals that year, Limited was introduced and Rob found himself prevented from reaching the Top 8, despite dominating the Constructed portion. There were other innovators who did make the Top 8, however. Chief among those was eventual champion Mark Justice. He used Whirling Dervish as a pro-Black threat; he used Howling Mines to keep off The Rack and to keep his opponents on his Black Vises. He also had plenty of burn to deal with creatures like Hypnotic Specters and Knights.

Of course, innovation sometimes fails to solve the problem of a stagnant environment. Apparently Wizards of the Coast has decided this is one of those times with their recent bannings of Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic.

Innovation in Constructed isn’t always the best way to succeed. I prepared for Pro Tour: Chicago 2000 with my teammates Dave Humpherys and Rob Dougherty. We each ended up playing different decks. In our original testing, we determined that a R/G Fires of Yavimaya deck was the deck to beat. At that point, Rob left for a family vacation in Australia. While he was gone, Dave and I continued to test. Since we were certain that it was obvious that Fires was the best deck and thus would be the most played deck, we focused on trying to find ways to beat it.

Dave and I both ended up designing decks that we felt matched up well with Fires. When Rob got back from Australia, we shared our findings with him, but he felt he didn’t have enough time to do the testing required to change his deck choice. So Rob played a basic two-color version of Fires, Dave played a three-color version of Fires metagamed against other Fires decks, and I played a B/U deck designed specifically to beat Fires.

As it turns out, Rob did much better than Dave and I. Dave finished 191th, I finished 81th, and Rob finished fourth, winning $13,000. There are a couple important reasons for this. The first was that R/G Fires was probably the best deck, and Dave and I just outsmarted ourselves. The second was that Dave and I weren’t prepared enough for the other big deck, Rebels (which actually won the PT). This was especially a problem for me; I crushed the Fires decks I played against and got crushed by everything else, which were mostly Rebel decks. The problem with Dave’s deck is that ended up just being a bad version of the best deck; perhaps he had an okay matchup in the mirror, but his matchup with everything else was just worse.

So obviously this was a situation where innovation backfired. I learned from this. Now if I’m convinced that a deck is the best deck, I play it. If for some reason I can find a deck that’s better than the “best” deck, that’s fine, but I don’t want a deck that only beats one deck. My deck choice in Chicago was probably a little influenced by my successful innovation for the first Pro Tour: Paris.

Rob had been dominating our play-testing with Bloom/Drain. As a result, Dave and I decided on decks that were great against it. This had a very different result than Chicago: Rob finished 190th, Dave finished ninth, and I finished third. There are two big reasons for this. First, Rob changed decks at the last minute and played Black Weenie instead of Bloom/Drain, which he sorely regrets. Second, while Dave and I played different decks than each other, we were both prepared for other decks besides just Bloom/Drain.

Dave played a U/W control deck, and I played a U/R aggro deck. However, we both played Memory Lapse (an amazing card against Bloom/Drain), and we both played Man-o'-War. Man-o'-War was great against the aggro decks in the field, especially the many Black decks running Skulking Ghosts and Tar Pit Warriors. My success at Paris with an innovative deck unlike what everyone else was playing made me more inclined to try to do that at future tournaments, like Chicago in 2000.

While I receive friendly teasing from my friends and teammates about the deck I played in Chicago in 2000, innovation in Constructed is generally well-regarded, even celebrated. This isn’t always the case in Limited. There only seems to be one way to go in Limited that most people are open to. When a set comes out, there will be three to five relatively obvious archetypes, and people will draft the best cards they open/are passed and see which of those three to five archetypes they can slot those cards into. You just look for which one of them is “coming to you.”

While this is a fine strategy, there is still room for innovation. In Constructed, people become bored with the exact same deck winning all the time, so innovation is celebrated. In addition, it’s easier to test out how good a new Constructed design is for yourself than it is to test someone else’s draft strategy. While it might take some time to figure out how to play a Constructed deck optimally, at least the exact contents are available to you most of the time. I can articulate a draft strategy and even win a tournament using it, but there seem to multiple problems with getting people excited about a new draft strategy.

• There are forty-two choices to make during a draft and usually more than thirty of them are important.
• Those choices are different every draft.
• After those choices, you still have to build a deck, never having the exact pool you had before.
• Now you have to play it correctly. If I make an innovative new Constructed deck and encourage you to try it, this is your starting point. I can even give you play tips keeping in mind the exact contents of the deck. I can tell you how to play a draft archetype, but I don’t know what the exact contents of your deck will be, or those of your opponent’s deck. In Constructed, I can say, “When playing against Valakut Ramp, do this; when playing against RDW, do this . . .”
• Limited games are often decided by bombs. You may draft a couple bombs and win an eight-man draft. Then you might be inclined to think that the draft strategy you used was a good one, but you might in fact have won in spite of your strategy, because you drew some bombs at the right time. The key to a really good draft strategy is making the sum of a deck’s parts so strong that you don’t need bombs to win a draft, and/or you make cards that aren’t normally considered bombs into bombs in the context of your deck.
• People tend to ascribe Constructed losses to matchups and Limited losses to luck. If you lose to RDW with Valakut Ramp, most people will understand that it’s a bad matchup. If I beat an Infect draft deck with my Metalcraft draft deck, people are often likely to write it off to the vagaries of luck in Limited.

It’s important to realize that innovation is just as important (if not more important) in Limited as it is in Constructed. One of the most powerful things you can do in Draft is to identify a card that you can get late in drafts on a regular basis and draft a powerful deck that makes powerful use of it. My favorite example of this was at Pro Tour: Chicago in 1998. That was where I accessed the power of Endangered Armodon. It was a 4/5 for 4 mana that I could often get twelfth to fourteenth pick. Even other pros seemed to think it was unplayable. Not only was I able to draft entire decks out of creatures that were compatible with it (toughness 3 or greater), but it made it great for me to draft creature-sweepers like Evincar's Justice and Nausea, which would crush the many Shadow decks people were drafting buy wouldn’t hurt me at all.

Some people might have been worried that I wouldn’t have early plays, but commons like Spike Drone, and Canopy Spider were available late and there were tons of 3-drops in Green and Black with a toughness of 3. I could also often get big uncommon walls at 2 mana. I cruised through that field, narrowly missing the Top 8.

A more recent example would be Scars of Mirrodin draft. I found that colored creatures with Metalcraft were available extremely late: Vedalken Certarch, Auriok Sunchaser, Ghalma's Warden, Lumengrid Drake, and Bleak Coven Vampires especially. As a result, I drafted R/W, U/W, or B/R Metalcraft every time. Given that I could reliably get commons that were powerful in my deck late and often make them seem like bombs in the context of my deck, I didn’t need to draft around bombs, and I could avoid the risks involved with drafting Infect.

When thinking about innovation in Magic, remember two things. First, it’s not always a good thing. I think it’s important to explore innovative decks, but don’t play something innovative just for the sake of being innovative. Second, don’t dismiss innovation in Limited. Just because it’s widely believed that there are only a few legitimate ways to draft a format doesn’t mean you should accept that without first attempting to find some other successful strategy.