Have you ever been nostalgic for your pet deck from days gone by? You really like that old decklist you found in the archives, but you only own new cards? Want to play your deck from four years past, but your friends want to play Standard? Why not try recreating that deck in a new format! Today, we'll build an update to an historic deck, and see what kind of a mess we end up with.

Before we get too far, there are two rules I'm imposing for this article:

1. No Black. If you have been reading my articles, you know that they always somehow include Black. For this article, no Black mana can be produced and spent. Hyrbid cards that are half black can be included only if they will be paid for with non-Black mana. Lands that can produce Black mana may be included, but not with the express purpose of producing Black mana. Swamps are out, but Vivid Crags are acceptable. I'll admit that this is a bit of an arbitrary rule, but it means that you will get some fresh ideas from me, instead of the same old thing.

2. No chase rares. My last article was stuffed full of $20 silliness like Reflecting Pool and Thoughtseize. This time, I want us to be a little more frugal - not necessarily budget, just reasonable. If you see me trying to sneak in a Cryptic Command, call me out on it. Exceptions may be made for often reprinted staple cards like Wrath of God, Birds of Paradise, or Karplusan Forest, but we'll try to keep costs down a little more than usual.

What deck should we pull into Standard? Let's try going really old school, and take a look at the very first World Championship deck from 1994. Keep in mind that this was a completely different time, when Magic the Gathering was wild and free, unfettered by the modern concepts of consistency and redundancy. Hey, at least he ran 60 cards main deck:

Wow! I forgot that the first World Championships had restricted access to the free mana Moxes (Moxen?). Obviously, we won't be able to reproduce that kind of power in Standard, but remember that the deck's original opponents would also have access to these cards, making it kind of even in the end. Also, we will ignore the sideboard, since we are really interested in reviving the deck, not metagaming it for tournaments.

Instead, we'll take a look at the key cards and strategies in the deck, to see if Standard holds potential to update this deck. How do we identify the strategies involved? There are lots of ways to go about this. Obviously, playing the deck a few times would be a great way to get a feel for the deck's game plan. We can also try to look at a few key components of the deck, such as win conditions, cards that appear at higher frequencies in the deck, and any obvious synergies.

If we look at win conditions for the 1994 deck, one primary win condition jumps out at us: Serra Angel, which is a staple card in Tenth Edition. This vigilant angel is able to ignore the "can't untap" restrictions which are imposed by some of the other cards in the deck. Serra Angel's vigilance and high toughness also allow it to run double duty as attacker and defender, able to nullify many smaller would-be attackers on the opponent's side. A second set of win conditions are found in the form of Control Magic and Old Man of the Sea. These double as opposing creature removal and as threats, in the form of stolen creatures.

Since this deck runs so few full playsets of cards, it also lends itself well to identifying key cards simply by the numbers. Quickly locating the four-of-playsets, we can see that one of the key cards is again Serra Angel, confirming our assertion that it is a key win condition.

We also see that the deck runs four Swords to Plowshares, which means that updating the deck will likely include some spot removal. Fortunately, creature removal is one category that has stayed in White's jurisdiction. There are a few workable Swords to Plowshares analogs in Standard, including Condemn, Crib Swap, and Oblivion Ring. We'll keep these in mind when we go to put together some decks.

Looking at other cards that appear more than once naturally draws us to look at Stasis, which is one of the few cards that shows up twice in the decklist. In the original deck, dropping a Stasis under the right condition was very nearly game over. However, thinking ahead to our new deck, there really isn't a lot in standard that approximates this powerful and sometimes annoying card. The only cards I can think of in Standard which are even remotely Stasis-like are Mistbind Clique, which denies a turn of mana, and Wanderwine Prophets, which completely denies turns, both of which require a heavy tribal commitment. It's possible that Stasis really has no good replacement in this context.

Moving on to taking a quick look at synergies in the deck, it isn't hard to note that the vigilant win condition, Serra Angel, plays nicely with cards like Stasis and Meekstone, cards designed to keep permanents tapped. As a matter of fact, a lot of the deck seems to be designed to keep opposing creatures tapped or otherwise unavailable to fight: Time Elemental, Icy Manipulator, Kismet, Meekstone, Siren's Call, and Stasis. Some of the creature tappers run double duty as mana source tappers to impair the opponent's access to mana, along with cards like Strip Mine, Armageddon, Disenchant, Winter Orb, and Power Sink.

Summing up what we've found in our first analysis of the deck, we surmise that the deck's plan is first to impair the opponent's ability to attack and interfere with his ability to use his mana, then attack with a win condition that is immune to most of the deck's own board control cards. Can we recreate this strategy in Standard?

Sometimes, a good way to start updating a deck is to just build a deck that maps, one-to-one, old cards to new cards, to get a feel for how an updated version might look. When doing a conversion like this, you always have two conflicting criteria for what new card should replace an older card: function and cost. When it comes to function, you want to find a card that performs the same essential role as the original card, although perhaps in a different way than the original card did it. When it comes to cost, you generally want to keep the mana cost as low as possible. When choosing cards for a deck, function and cost often conflict. For example, to replace Time Walk, we have Savor the Moment, which costs only three mana, but lacks most of the function of taking an extra turn by skipping the untap step, or we could use Time Stretch, which gives us the function we desire and more, but costs a ridiculous ten mana! Looking a little further, you realize there is a third option in between these two: Time Stop costs six mana and allows you to deny the opponent the majority of his turn when played during his upkeep. Which card, if any, is best will ultimately depend on how our new deck plays out, but we need to start somewhere, right?

After a little picking and choosing, and a lot of mana calculations, here is our first stab at the updated deck. Each card lists the original card it replaced in parentheses:

This isn't really that bad of an approximation of the original deck, but it won't be winning any World Championships, either. Let's analyze a few of our decisions.

Some of the card replacement choices seem downright awful, for lack of anything better in the card pool. Stasis obviously has no good single card replacement, but, without all the free artifact acceleration, the deck was going to need more land anyway. Jace Beleren isn't even a pale imitation of Timetwister, another card with no real analog in Standard. Stoic Angel was the automatic stand in for anything that involved continuous tapping effects like Kismet and Winter Orb. Beyond those few cards, most of the cards from the 1994 deck had some sort of comparable card in 2008.

Among the more interesting card replacements, Tower Above changes the way the opponent must block, while the card it replaced, Siren's Call, altered the opponent's attack decisions. Jhessian Infiltrator replaces Black Vise as unblockable damage. Note also that, among the three options listed earlier, we went with Savor the Moment as the extra turn card. This is because we already know we are using vigilant creatures, meaning that the combat phase remains relevant in the extra turn, even without an untap.

Another interesting decision we made is not using Naturalize to replace Disenchant. Surely, Naturalize is essentially the same card as Disenchant, and it should be used here? Frequently, that would be true, but look at the context of the original deck. What would be one of the possible uses of Disenchant, given the environment? Destroying the ubiquitous Moxes! That means that Disenchant could often used as a mana denial card, as well as insurance against problem artifacts and enchantments. To keep that particular function intact in Standard, we turn to Creeping Mold. Creeping Mold retains the ability to deal with nasty enchantments and artifacts, but can also mimic the potential of Disenchant to be mana denial in the original deck.

Running this version through a few test games gives us a feel for what cards work and which ones don't. Stoic Angel is great in the deck, and it really seems to fit the strategy of the original deck. Even though it is a bit on the pricey side, we'll try to keep it in. We also learn that splashing Red for Realm Razer slows the deck down a bit - without the splash, we could use Bant Panorama instead of Terramorphic Expanse and get mana immediately, should we need it.

Now that we've built a deck where we mapped the old cards to new ones, let’s take what we've learned from it to take a stab at an updated deck, one that focuses a little more on the strategy of the World Championship 1994 deck. Let's brainstorm a bit on what directions we could take the deck.

We could return to the mana denial strategy of the original deck by moving into Red to access the Armageddon-like effects of Realm Razer and Ajani Vengeant. (Ajani might be a little over the budget rule we set. As it is, having both Stoic Angel and Sower of Temptation in this decklist is pushing our stated budget guidelines, but they're my rules, so if we break them, I only have myself to blame.) We can try either a heavier splash into Red and run four colors, or we could completely cut the Blue and replace it with Red, but cutting the Blue means losing Stoic Angel, which seems counter to the plan.

We could also try keeping Red at a minimum and instead increase the bue dependency of the deck. This would allow us to run more Surgespanners in an attempt to mimic the mana denial of the original deck. Icy Manipulator and Surgespanner have good synergy in this respect.

We could take advantage of the synergy between vigilant creatures and Savor the Moment. For three mana, you draw a card, get an extra land drop, and hopefully deal twice the damage with your vigilant fliers.

One more random idea would be to try to recreate a hint of the card drawing that was available to the original deck. While building the mapped deck, I noticed a few Clash-related cards could work in a deck like this. We could try adding Sylvan Echoes and multiple Clash-related cards, and see where that takes us.

All of these options are perfectly fine, although some of them may be more viable than others. After some deliberations, and a few test decks, I think we should try a slightly different approach to this strategy. We'll focus on the resource denial of the original deck, but we'll do it with Green land destruction spells. We'll also try to cut a few corners when it comes to monetary cost, eliminating Sower of Temptation, so that we can keep four Stoic Angels.

In this deck, we ramp up mana quickly with Birds of Paradise and Stewards of Valeron, then we either destroy lands with Creeping Mold and Drain the Well, or we tap down lands during their upkeep with Icy Manipulator and Fatestitcher. Stoic Angel keeps swarms locked down once it is in play, and Mind Spring for six or eight can mean game over. Use Broken Ambitions wisely to counter key spells - remember that our tappers and Stoic Angel can handle many of the permanents your opponents could play.

This deck has its weaknesses, just like any other. The low count of creatures, and vulnerable ones at that, mean early removal is going to hurt. Board sweepers that sneak through our defenses are going to be unpleasant for us, as well. On the other hand, tapping all your opponent's land during his upkeep means never having to worry about Wrath of God.

I hope this gives you some insight into how to update an old deck, as well as giving you a couple fun decks to play around with. Looking at the second deck we created, it's obvious that Ajani Vengeant fits into this strategy very well, but to fit Red into the deck in its current form would have meant expensive rare lands. I encourage you to try Ajani in a mana denial deck on your own, and if you come up with something good, share it in the MDV Deck sub-forum!

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Articles Spotlights from 2008:
A Fresh Perspective: Stasis - Part One.
The Apprentice Magician - Part Six.
Design on a Dime: The Lunch Meat Edition!
Fit the Flavor 2008 - FINALE!
The Games People Play - Market & EDH.
Sarpadian Empires, Vol VII: Foreword.
More Evil Than Evil.
Pauper Chronicles: Top O' the Morningtide to You!
Words from the Streetz: Uncommon and Common Magical Treasures.
The Writers Guild: The Inside Scoop.