How does mogg fanatic work

Some other popular interactions came from simple cards like Unsummon or other bounce cards. There are times where I wish I could do combat tricks such as this to elicit the most effectiveness from my creatures but, alas, the Magic rules change was for the better. It also took care of mana burn , which used to be something players could use against their opponents.

I digress. Tinker Illustration by Chris Rahn. There are two changes in the history of rulings for damage on the stack: when it was introduced, and when it was removed.

The prior came about with the Sixth Edition rules change. Before this, combat was much simpler. You could only use damage prevention or regeneration spells and abilities. Combat was narrow, and creatures just smacked each other until one fell down. When the rules surrounding damage were changed to be put on the stack, things got wacky. Really wacky. Creatures that were never really meant for the battlefield suddenly carried a lot of weight, like our pal Mogg Fanatic. Cards with sacrifice effects became really popular, and there were so many new ways to keep your creatures alive in combat.

This change was implemented to open up new avenues of play and vast options. Fatal Push Illustration by Eric Deschamps. Sadly, all good things must come to an end. Even if it was interesting, the stack was and still is a difficult thing to understand at times.

It gets even more confusing with creatures disappearing after putting damage on the stack. Because of this, Wizards changed combat when they released Magic to act as we know it today, along with tons of other rules changes and overhauls. This big change made it so that damage now happens all at once unless otherwise stated, like with first strike or double strike. Most importantly, this was done to give more weight to cards that have effects like Mogg Fanatic.

Instead of getting the benefit of the sacrifice effect and blocking a creature, you now have to decide which one is the better option. A lot of good and comfortable things happened when damage rules changed to what they are now.

Greater Good Illustration by Mathias Kollros. This is what I like to think about at night. What kind of cards would be absolutely busted if they were allowed to put damage on the stack?

Off the top of my head, I imagine that already powerful cards like Greater Good or Skullclamp paired with something like Phyrexian Altar would be absolutely busted, allowing you to keep damage while drawing and playing more cards instantly.

You could also probably find some good candidates by combing through the reserved list. It may seem a little lackluster at times, but decision-making like that is what gives Wizards the design room they need to continuously pump out new and interesting cards that drive players to find wacky new interactions and achieve that kind of power in their plays.

Much later, some of my unrelated internet searches turned up information that Mark Justice used Power Surge in tournaments. But yeah, this card took a huge hit, as it was designed very specifically with mana burn in mind.

Power Surge wasn't the only card to suffer from this change Citadel of Pain and Eladamri's Vineyard spring to mind , but it does seem to have suffered the biggest blow. Burning Wish: For a time, this card was restricted in Vintage. The "Wish" cycle of cards from Judgment borrowed the concept originally used on the much clunkier Ring of Ma'Ruf, grabbing cards from outside the game.

Until the major rules overhaul in , there was no "exile zone. In tournament play, the ruling was that Ring of Ma'Ruf could get either a card that was in one's sideboard or a card that was in the player's maindeck and had been removed from the game. The original wording made this abundantly clear. Burning Wish is still a pretty good card and didn't lose that much to the rules change, but it did lose something. Out of all of the cards that became weaker due to rules changes, the one that stands out the most in my mind, the one that perhaps fell the furthest because it had been such an unmitigated success, was Mogg Fanatic.

Although it was printed under Fifth Edition rules, it wasn't long before the Sixth Edition rules changes took over, and it was then that Mogg Fanatic really began to shine. Last edited: Oct 17, For reasons I'll get into, I think it's quite possible that Mogg Fanatic gained more of a boost than any other card from the "damage on the stack" portion of the Sixth Edition rules changes and also lost more than any other card from the Magic combat rules changes.

But before getting into that, I want to look at the role of Mogg Fanatic as a goblin card and the history of Goblins as one of the oldest and most prominent creature types. In the Casual Decks forum, I've been faithfully writing reports on Tribal deckbuilding implications for every new Magic set that comes out. In my anaysis, I've got over 40 different tribes rated in the two highest tiers of competitive power. And of those and a few of the ones in the next tier down could be the theme of a powerful casual deck and most of them have cropped up in tournament settings where there was no particular incentive to build around a creature type.

I play EDH with people who build tribal EDH decks, seriously basing their decks around a creature type in a card singleton format and some of those decks are quite strong. But it wasn't always this way. Originally, creature types were almost entirely flavor. There were only three cards that used them mechanically in any way. At first, there wasn't enough Tribal support to make deckbuilding based on these synergies viable.

In fact, creature types were more of a liability than anything else. Casual players tried all sorts of things with creature types, but it usually wasn't worth it.

The idea of "Tribal decks" was developed, but the tools just weren't there. You'd get the occasional card like Thrull Champion or Griffin Canyon, but it wasn't enough. Not yet. When Goblin Recruiter came out in Visions , it had the issue of being an excellent goblin-finding card in an era with almost no good goblins to stack on top of one's library.

The card would eventually go on to become a tournament powerhouse albeit one with a wrongheaded ban in Legacy that continues even now. But goblins just didn't have enough good cards in The set containing Mogg Fanatic, Tempest , was a bit of an inflection point for Tribal interests.

Mogg Fanatic by itself wasn't enough to make Goblin Tribal a strong archetype, but it helped. When Mogg Fanatic was originally introduced in , the most prominent card with a Goblin Tribal synergy was probably Goblin Grenade. And for Goblin Grenade, Mogg Fanatic's ability didn't really make sense anyway. Despite this, prospective Goblin theme deckbuilders had good reason to run Mogg Fanatic. The card was flexible on its own and there just weren't that many good one-drops anyway. The closest competition in one-drop slot at the time would have been Raging Goblin, but it actually started out in Portal and was not a tournament-legal card until the Exodus reprinting.

Other excellent choices would follow over the next several years. But the options of a goblin-based deck were miserable in the 90's. Goblins, including Mogg Fanatic, did get some help with the release of Urza's Saga in This set brought in tournament-legal Goblin Matron the card had also been included in Portal Second Age.

But most importantly, this was the advent of Goblin Lackey Attentive readers might point out that this was all well before the existence of the usual Lackey synergies, such as Siege-Gang Commander. Goblin Lackey would eventually become banned in Extended for cheaply and reliably powering out a lethal goblintastic board state.

But in , Goblin Lackey wasn't the infamous aggro-combo powerhouse that it would later become. But it was a highly effective tempo engine in an era when most opponents were soft to fast aggro decks that could gain any sort of tempo advantage. Sometimes Goblin Lackey was only cheating a Goblin Patrol or Mogg Fanatic onto the board, but that still freed up mana to be use on other spells, which meant playing that much faster than the opponent.

Even in its early days, Goblin Lackey was a kind of must-block attacker, and it often teamed up with Mogg Fanatic, which was more of a don't-care-if-you-block attacker. Opponents could choose carefully, but Mogg Fanatic could always force one more damage through on any target, no matter what else happened in combat.

Even once Goblin Tribal became a proper, viable archetype, the pair were a kind of one-two punch. Combined with red burn spells that could also target either creatures to players, Mogg Fanatic made Goblin Lackey a reasonable tempo engine even before there were very many strong goblin cards to power out.

Even before Goblin Tribal was viable, Mogg Raider was a strong card in tournaments. It could sacrifice itself and other efficient goblins to boost unblocked attackers or to kill an important blocker in combat. In these decks, Mogg Fanatic was usually sacrificed to its own ability rather than Mogg Raider's ability, but it was nice to have both options. I mentioned that most tournament environments in late 90's were soft to fast aggro decks that could gain tempo advantage, which was why Goblin Lackey was a reasonably successful card despite a dearth of good goblins to cheat out.

But the card that really shows the contrast between then and now would have to be this little guy Not only was this flea-infested rascal a functional card, efficient for its mana cost at the time. It was an all-out multi-format superstar. Jackal Pup saw success every constructed tournament format and bolstered the "Sligh" archetype. So despite how tame it might seem by the standards of today, Jackal Pup gave Sligh decks an appreciable speed boost.

Some of the biggest early successes for Mogg Fanatic were decks in which it was practically a support card for Jackal Pup. Both one-drop creatures would attack early on while opponents were trying to build a board state. Opponents were incentivized to block Jackal Pup because at 2 power, it would dangerously lower the defending player's life total if allowed to swing unblocked too many times.

As the game progressed, more blockers would emerge, but Mogg Fanatic would always either get through unblocked or get sacrificed, doing damage anyway. Opponents were left with no good options to keep their life totals high, and Sligh decks could finish them off with Fireblast, Fireball, Cursed Scroll, etc.

Playing Sligh is all about being faster and more efficient than your opponent. Cards in these decks tend to be efficient attackers, reusable damage-dealers, sources of targeted direct damage, or cards to put opponents at a tempo disadvantage.

Mogg Fanatic is a cheap creature that doubles as a cheap burn spell. So it became one of the most popular creatures to use in this kind of red aggro deck. It would serve in that role for many years, but was pretty strong right away. Mogg Fanatic was a Sligh staple in Type 1, Type 1.

X Extended. It also seemed, from what I saw, to make it into most casual red-based decks at the time. After all, it was a common so it was available even to us scrubs and its ability made it just about the most efficient one-drop available to most players. Decks roughly classed as "Sligh" were the primary tournament niche for Mogg Fanatic.

And after all, that's a pretty broad category. Any deck that was "red aggressive creatures with burn spells for support and a low mana curve" fell into that category. Not all of them in the late 's used Mogg Fanatic, but it was popular in most formats and my superficial research on the subject seems to indicate that the card generally gained traction in the early years following its initial release.

Aside from Sligh and primitive early versions of Goblin-themed decks, Mogg Fanatic also fit nicely into a third red archetype: Burn. I had my first casual Burn deck running sometime in , I think. And I can't quite remember if Mogg Fanatic was in there from the beginning. It probably was, but it also wouldn't have mattered much anyway, as my card pool and knowledge were both deficient, so I was relying on crap like Meteor Shower because it was what I had to work with at the time.

Anyway, Mogg Fanatic was a Burn staple for me, and stuck around in my Burn deck for over a decade. On a whim, I just dug up a waybackmachine archive of my first CPA front page article, which was about Burn decks. The article was bad. All of my early articles for this site were bad, although I maintain that they did eventually get better and I'm actually still kind of proud of the Rabid Wombat article as well as some of the ones that followed.

Sure enough, I mentioned Mogg Fanatic in that article. I had this to say One of the few creatures that fits well in burn decks, and most of the others are goblins as well. This one is the best though. It gets a creature on the board to attack, which can be useful in drawn-out games against creatureless decks or block which can save some you some damage.

Under Fifth Edition rules, Mogg Fanatic was already one of the best red one-drop creatures. And then the Sixth Edition rules changes introduced the stack and the infamous "combat damage on the stack. Under the new rules, Mogg Fanatic could It's tough to properly emphasize just how strong of a card Mogg Fanatic became with these changes.

The most obvious superstar to gain a boost from combat damage on the stack was probably Morphling, a creature that had only existed for about six months before the rules changed. I used Morphling a lot myself and will almost certainly start a Memories thread for the card at some point. Sixth Edition catapulted Morphling to success. It became known as the best card in a set full of excellent cards.

It was nicknamed "Superman. But I can't really say that Morphling was the biggest loser of the Magic rules changes. By the mid's, Morphling had already lost a lot of traction. The thing about "Superman" was that the card was flexible enough to be the best option to reign on the battlefield in an otherwise creature-light or creature-free control deck. Morphling dethroned Serra Angel as the favored threat in popular hard control strategies.

For pretty much the entirety of the 90's, truly massive creatures came with untenable drawbacks, such that Morphling was a popular payload for Oath of Druids. That kind of dearth of high-end payloads for combat is long-gone. It would be unthinkable now to anyone who doesn't either remember early 00's Magic well or happen to relive it in some kind of Old School format.

This being the CPA, most who read this will fall into the former category anyway. But do note that the vast majority of current Magic players do not. Like Morphling, the other beefy creatures that were strong in the early 00's generally fell to power creep. It's not that none of them were ever good anymore, but they were increasingly relegated to niche roles if not supplanted entirely by new stuff.

In contrast, while that was going on, Mogg Fanatic actually became even stronger! With the arrival of Onslaught Block in , decks based around creature types not yet popularly known as "tribes" got substantial boosts. Mogg Fanatic seems to have been a consistent and immediate 4-of for most goblin-based decks.

Although mostly employed for its overall value as a one-drop that happened to fit into the tribe, there were some notable synergies Some of these decks used Goblin Pyromancer for attempted finishing blows, boosting a team of goblins and hoping that after combat, the opponent would be in range of lethal damage from spells and abilities. Mogg Fanatic could help make sure Goblin Pyromancer got there.

Goblin Sharpshooter was an excellent damage-dealing utility creature and Mogg Fanatic could team up with it to get extra damage in on either a creature or a player.

Sparksmith, Gempalm Incinerator, and Goblin Piledriver count the number of goblins you have on the battlefield before doing damage. Mogg Fanatic could contribute to the effects of those cards, then be activated to throw another damage onto the creature or player being hit. By , this was much more potent than it had been in Siege-Gange Commander was the preferred payload for Mogg Fanatic.

With Patriarch's Bidding on the stack, Mogg Fanatic could be sacrificed to ping the opponent for 1 and then come back anyway once the spell resolved. Mogg Fanatic also received the incidental benefits of other goblin-based cards like Goblin Warchief, Goblin Ringleader, and Goblin King.

In some ways, as far as the goblin-fueled mechanics of these decks were concerned, Mogg Fanatic was the least relevant goblin they were using. But its on-demand damage, available on such a cheap creature that was, after all, a goblin made Mogg Fanatic so useful that it was a core aspect of Goblin Tribal decks.

I won't attempt to quantify how strong Goblins decks were in tournament formats. I was focused on casual play at the time and goblins were everywhere anyway, especially once Siege-Gang Commander came out. I do remember that Goblins decks made appearances in Type 1 and Type 1. The "Food Chain Goblins" deck was fascinating and short-lived. It could operate as an aggro deck, attacking the opponent with goblins. But if it could get both Food Chain and Goblin Recruiter, the player could combo off, stacking the top of the library so that each Goblin Ringleader would grab the next Goblin Ringleader and three other goblins.

Mogg Fanatic had no particular role in the combo, but was a cheap, efficient goblin to help out, and saw play in this deck as well. Food Chain Goblins continued to exist as a fringe Type 1 deck. A few months later, Aether Vial came out in Darksteel. While not exclusive to Goblins decks, the card was another excellent way for goblins to get an overwhelming early tempo advantage. With Mogg Fanatic as a continuing staple, the archetype remained in Extended as a force to be reckoned with.

In September of , Aether Vial was banned in Extended. I'm not sure of Mogg Fanatic would have continued to serve a valuable role in Extended Goblins decks after that point, but Tempest rotated out of Extended the next month. And so ended the story of Mogg Fanatic in Extended. Of course, by that point, the Legacy format had been established, and Mogg Fanatic had found multiple niches in its new home.

For the latter half of the 00's, Mogg Fanatic would probably be associated in the minds of most players with the Legacy Goblins archetype. And the Goblins deck was, in its heyday, the top deck in the format. Mogg Fanatic was a staple for the deck at that time. And this history alone would make for an interesting story, more of one than most cards ever get. But it's not the whole picture.

Both in Legacy tournament play and in other places, I'd describe Mogg Fanatic as fitting into four primary niches in the 00's. Goblins While almost all other staple creatures in Goblins decks had some sort of tribal some kind of tribal synergy, Mogg Fanatic was almost universal and generally used in full playsets, for all of the reasons I've already gone over.

Sligh Personally, I started to see less and less of the traditional "Sligh" red aggro as time went on, but Mogg Fanatic remained a staple in the archetype for longer than any other creature. Burn New printings in the 00's enabled Burn decks to drop almost all creatures, but I still found it necessary to run a few. Mogg Fanatic had been something of a staple for its guaranteed single point of damage and its potential to offer more. It continued in this role for most of the decade. But Mogg Fanatic popped up in other combos to create infinite damage loops.

I won't try to list every possibility. Some of these were one-off Legacy tournament successes, experimental Legacy decks, or strictly casual decks. They're also pretty similar to each other in the end. Mogg Fanatic wasn't the only possible kill condition for such a deck, but it tended to be the one with the best utility outside of the combo setup.

That's four pretty distinct applications. In none of these decks was Mogg Fanatic a centerpiece. But it was useful enough to keep running anyway. Mogg Fanatic had its departures from competitive formats due to set rotations. Some of the archetypes that hosted it were diminished with time. But overall, it performed well for itself and was among the most prolific of one-drop creatures in Magic for over a decade.

At any point in the 00's, I'd have cited it as the most important one-drop red creature in history. Other creatures were more prominent as heavy-hitters, but they came and went. Almost a decade after its first appearance in Tempest , Mogg Fanatic returned to Standard with the release of Tenth Edition.

I was essentially ignoring Standard at the time and could tell you little from my own recollection, but my retrospective inquiries have led me to believe that red was generally underwhelming back in I could tell you that it was great in Legacy, but for Standard, I've got to depend on other people's memories. However, Mogg Fanatic was an instant staple in any red-heavy deck in the environment. Ravnica Block was still in Standard, so this mostly meant "Rakdos" and "Gruul" beatdown decks, although other archetypes showed up as well Mogg Fanatic was fine in a Boros Weenie deck.

Later, other archetypes took over, but wherever red was prominent, Mogg Fanatic was likely to make appearances. Mogg Fanatic did damage. That was its thing. And red specializes in damage. Other creatures could deal more damage, but Mogg Fanatic could deal damage early and reliably. It was efficient and efficiency won out over other factors. It had been one of the most prolific red cards across multiple formats. It had been reprinted in a core set and had carved out niches for itself yet again.

In and early , I'd probably have placed the card in contention even against older staple creatures like Birds of Paradise. Mogg Fanatic kept going and it seemed that it would never stop. Of course, in , it hit a brick wall. July The inaptly named "Magic Rules Changes" go into effect. Combat damage assignment is completely reworked. Most importantly, combat damage no longer uses the stack. This is a huge blow to a lot of creatures, but Mogg Fanatic is perhaps the most prominent among them.

Its potential to deal 2 damage to creatures in the same combat phase, 1 while attacking or blocking and another 1 from its ability, is revoked. In tournament play, the effect appears to have been immediate and profound. Not only does the new core set replace the old one, rotating Mogg Fanatic out of Standard, but the Legacy decks using Mogg Fanatic seem to diminish in response to this change although other factors were also at work.

This single development was bound to lower the overall stock of Mogg Fanatic among Magic players in general.

A brick wall for the trajectory of one of the greatest stars. But there'd be more October The new large expansion set, Zendikar , hits the shelves. This is a power-packed set. In particular, it seems to be a kind of inflection point for the power creep of creatures. Players get more bang for their buck when summoning, a deliberate design decision by WotC to even playing field of creatures relative to non-creature spells.

This new set comes with a new red one-drop for aggressive decks that outclasses the old choices: Goblin Guide. The weakened Mogg Fanatic pales in comparison to this new card.