The Usual Suspects

There are many mechanics that players will say are “broken.”  Affinity gets a lot of hate and it is an undeserved hate.  I can feel many of you reaching for the “back” button on your screen right now, but hear me out on this.  I will admit that during the days of “affinities” reign of terror in standard, I, too, gave it much hate.  I use the word “affinity” in quotes because let’s really look at the mechanic and the deck that spawned the hate.  Here’s Gabriel Nassif's “affinity” deck that made top 8 at worlds in 2004.

Notice anything odd about it?  The cards that bring all the power to the deck (Disciple of the Vault, Arcbound Ravager, Skullclamp, Seat of the Synod, Valut of Whispers) don’t have affinity.  It only plays three spells with the word “affinity” on them:  Frogmite, Somber Hovergaurd, and Thoughtcast.  (Yes, it also has Furnace Dragon in the side, I'm looking at the mainboard)  That’s it?  These four cards are what made the affinity mechanic broken?  Most decks didn't even run Somber Hoverguard, so we're really talking about just three cards.  The deck actually has a misleading name.  During the days of this deck, I still played paper magic.  For some reason the name “affinity” for this deck never caught on in my region.  We called it “Ravager.”  The reason for this was because there were rogue players, like me, who actually ran dedicated affinity decks.  This is a more current version I use in the casual room of my affinity deck:

A brief look at this deck will show that is primarily creature based, which was the goal.  I wanted to showcase the fun creatures of Affinity, namely Qumulox.  I have mad love for this guy.  5/4 flier on turn three or four is always a beautiful thing.  It's not easy to pull off, but I still like him more than Broodstar.  The other noticeable thing is that the real power in this deck is from Cranial Plating and Shrapnel Blast.  Neither of these cards has Affinity either, but benefit from cheap artifacts.

The Heart of the Issue

I was playing a game, wasn’t paying attention, and I kept a hand I shouldn’t have.  By Turn 3 I had this in play.  Great Furnace, Vault of Whispers, Ornithopter, and Cranial Plating.   I played the second Great Furnace in my hand leaving the rest of my hand useless because it contained all blue cards.  I had drawn a Myr Enforcer for the turn.  I used 2 mana to equip the Ornithopter and then paid 1 to play the Enforcer.  This prompted my opponent to say, “You’re lame for playing affinity.  You should play cards that aren’t banned.”  He then conceded.

Despite his comments making little sense, I pondered why he conceded.  Was the Enforcer the real problem?  He said “affinity” and that was the only card with affinity.  A 4/4 on Turn 3 was the problem?  Woolly Thoctar is a 5/4 and lands on Turn 2 (most of the time) and attacks on Turn 3 for 5 damage.  My guess is that he was angry at the 6/2 Ornithopter.  If I hadn’t played the Enforcer it would have been 5/2.  Is a flying 5/2 somehow less offensive?  Its 6/2 status was due to cheap artifacts, not affinity.  The saddest part of this whole thing was that this guy was playing blue/black and had all his lands untapped, but for some reason, apparently, had no answers to creatures in his deck.

Here is a list of the 20 cards with the word “affinity” on them.  A majority of them are simply unplayable (I’m looking at you Blinkmoth Infusion).  It’s hard to look at cards like Chromescale Drake and Into Thin Air and say, “It has affinity!  It’s so broken!”  If anything, the affinity cards are extremely well balanced.  Most of them even require colored mana to use them.  The last five don’t even have affinity for artifacts.  They have affinity for basic lands, which makes them much better than the others, in my opinion, since you don’t need anything extra in play to cast them.

Frogmite and Enforcer are pretty much the only creatures to see play, and I already talked about my thoughts on Myr Enforcer, so let’s look at Frogmite.  By themselves these cards are inconsequential.  They only cause problems when a player has multiple copies in hand.  Most of the time, though, it goes like this:
      Turn 1: Artifact land
      Turn 2: Artifact land, pay 2 -> play Frogmite.
A 2/2 for 2 mana on Turn 2 with no abilities is better known as a Grizzly Bear.  Not much of a threat to any deck.  In fact, I have never had anyone concede after I played a Turn 2 Grizzly Bear, but tapping out for a Frogmite gets most people to concede.  Even if you can get Frogmite out on Turn 1, the process to do so would leave your hand mostly empty and set you up to be devastated if your opponent has any removal.  Also a 2/2 on Turn 1 that can attack on Turn 2 is not exactly rare these days.  The list of creatures that can deal 2 damage on Turn 2 is pretty big.  The only other reason to play a Frogmite on Turn 1 would be to facilitate a storm combo.  Since I’m talking about extended, and the storm cards in extended are not that great, it is pretty clear that storm is not the way to go on this.  If I am playing Classic and I’m playing storm, I’m going to be doing a lot more than just playing a Frogmite on Turn 2.  My opponent should be dead by Turn 2.

That brings us to Thoughtcast.  It has a base mana cost of 4U.  To get it to its cheapest value, you need four artifacts in play AND blue mana.  That's fairly conditional.  On top of that, with the cost reduction it basically reads, “U: draw two cards at sorcery speed.”  It doesn’t even have the common courtesy to be an instant.  Yes, it can be played on Turn 1, assuming you have some Moxes and mana accel in hand.  However, that goes back to my earlier statement, the spell is not good because of affinity, it’s good because of cheap artifacts.  If you were playing more expensive artifacts, this card would be terrible.  Case in point, I run it in my Tribal Golems deck and frequently find it clogging my hand because I can't cast it.  I either don't have enough artifacts in play to reduce the cost (seriously who would pay 5 mana to draw 2 cards) or I am missing the blue mana.

Obviously the biggest fuel behind affinity’s power are the artifact lands.  Without the artifact lands this mechanic would fall on its face and die.  Ever tried making an affinity deck without artifact lands?  Just the deck construction alone will make you instantly reconsider that idea.  I’m not going to go into great detail on the “messed up” quality of artifact land because Aaron Foreythe, the current head of WOTC R&D, already wrote a great article about it.  In it he mentions the exact same cards I mention hear, but without the detailed explanation of why none of them are actually broken.  You can read that article for yourself HERE.  I highly recommend it.  It gets to the heart of the artifact land problem and really helps explain the beating the affinity mechanic has taken.

My point to all of this is that the affinity mechanic and the name affinity have taken a lot of bad press, and it’s bad press it doesn’t deserve.  I think we should all just ease off affinity a bit and learn to appreciate a really cool mechanic.  I also advise all of you to give it a try.  Build an “affinity” deck that doesn’t have Ravager in it and see just how much fun the deck can be.