#ALAS. oh well. its real in my heart. and also on discord i mentioned it uh (checks notes) 2 months ago 😭😭😭

[mamawasatesttube]

the pain of having a REALLY funny joke that you could put in an explicit fic but knowing that if you include it, literally 80% of the comments will only be about it and not about the other 10k of fic because people struggle to be genuine when commenting on explicit fic and therefore everyone will latch onto the joke and youll get frustrated that the rest of your blood sweat and tears will go seemingly unappreciated. so you can't include the joke. but god dammit its really funny

[thegeneralsnotebook]

March Feature: History of Colours Part 2 -- White

Welcome back to Part 2 of this series investigating the histories of the six main colours of the MLPCCG, from their inception and original development in Premier, all of the way forward to the present day. This month’s topic is White, a colour that seems to be in something of a rough spot right now. It’s gone quite a long while since it last had a great Mane to its name, too. The last person to enjoy major success with it was Bugle at the 2018 Continentals, with a rather unorthodox list the likes of which probably won’t be seen again. We’ll get to that. By the way, it also bears to mention that as with the last article, I owe Bugle a depth of gratitude for walking me through the early stages of the game and pointing out the notable decks that were before my time.

Going in, I was expecting a story broadly similar to Yellow, as I knew the colour had been great once upon a time in the past, then faded somewhat, and hasn’t really surfaced again yet (outside of that one exception mentioned above). It turned out though, that I was wrong. It turned out that White had never totally yielded the stage, though it did quite generously yield the spotlight. There was something going on with White in nearly every set, though it was almost never the main colour in the decks that used it, and a fair amount of the time it was doing somewhat questionable things for its decks. Things that generally involved either scoring infinite points, or pairing up with an old Friend in Purple to play many Events over and over again. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say for now that White is a colour with a lot of notoriety built up over the years, even if it’s lacked success as a primary colour. To see that, we’ll first have to step back, to a time when Rarity was indeed Truly Outrageous.

I mean, to put any other card up there would be pretty disingenuous

The Most Aptly Named Card in History

We already covered RTO just a little bit in last month’s article, during the discussion of the Yellow/White deck Ballroom Blitz. There, she was serving in the traditional role of a card capable of scoring lots of points very quickly, and thus capable of sealing games about as quickly as she could be played. And while RTO did end up seeing a lot of play in this mode, her first claim to fame actually did something a little different. Sure, the equally aptly named Taxes still let RTO do her thing of scoring points quickly, but it wasn’t going fast. It was an early form of tempo, stacking movement and play penalties on a Problem until it was virtually impossible for the opponent to confront it, and then sealing the game with RTO after the fact. It was quite the thing in the Premier era, but died out in Canterlot Nights as the meta sped up substantially.

Bugle had mentioned to me that a version of Taxes with 13 URs was floating out there somewhere, which is a pretty impressive number when you’ve only got one set to draw from. Alas, though in searching Reddit I managed to find solid evidence that it was probably out there somewhere, the list itself eluded me. I was, however, able to find a delightfully unexpected little piece of history. The Taxes list linked above actually came from none other than Grand Pause, and it was his first deck submission on the subreddit. Even a bright diamond starts from a humble beginning.

And oh, speaking of diamonds, that brings us to the third major moment for RTO in the early era of competitive play. That being Diamonds In The Sky, a deck that holds a special place in my heart as the winner of the first competitive tournament that I ever entered (not played by me, of course). Similarly to Ballroom above, the plan was simple: move fast, strike hard, and score lots of points. In this case, Blue was a perfect match for White due to its unparalleled AT efficiency, and it could get rolling real fast off the start of the game. As today, back then it was also an excellent anti-Troublemaker colour, with good options like Fears Must Be Faced for getting back the tempo against a control-oriented opponent. Being well-rounded while also being very fast and slightly more consistent than Ballroom Blitz cemented this deck’s status for a long time, at least until the meta slowed down somewhat. That was about when things started getting weird.

Oh, wait! Before we leave this era behind there is something else that bears mention. And I doubt that Bugle would let me hear the end of it if I forgot. Tiny inclusion though it may be, White played a pretty important part in good ol’ One Pace, as the provider of that primordial combo’s source of points. (No surprises there. This theme is one that will repeat a fair amount in later eras.)

Yeah, RTO gets two pictures! Listen, things were a little strange about here, okay?

A Very Messy Time

As we transition into the later era of Premier Block, things get somewhat confused with respect to what White was up to. From a macro perspective, sure, we all know where this story goes. DJ and Maud end up on top, waging an endless war while everyone else could only lurk in their shadows. Yes, we’re not going to see another White Mane in this history for a long time. But that doesn’t mean that the colour was done for good. It still saw play, albeit for mostly just the one reason.

The slate of decks from this era is about as varied as they come. Most notable of them all I think would be Cosmic Bowling, the first deck to abuse the Pinny Lane/Dr. Hooves combo for massive bursts of AT generation. The game plan was pretty simple, as with the ability to suddenly generate large amounts of AT, the deck could rapidly and unexpectedly confront Problems, raking in the first-confront bonuses and sometimes dropping RTOs for even more. The deck could generate lots of Power thanks to Action Shot and Savoir Faire, plus had the usual AT-savings from Cloudchaser, point-scoring cards in White, and a nice new Mane in DJ to make everything that much more consistent. This wasn’t the deck that got Pinny banned, but it absolutely was the first step down that road.

Of less significant notoriety we had a couple of decks that I hadn’t even heard of until Bugle brought them to my attention. Maud Games was a deck with brief notability, coming and going in the early phase of RR as things were slowing down and the meta was largely grappling with One Pace. It used White (who’d guess?) for the points from RTO and for some of its still good control tools like Stand Still! Likewise, from a much later point in this era, Outrageous Theft got more mileage out of RTO by copying her with Queen Chrysalis, Identity Theft, and thus allowed itself to do even more of the normal White things.

See, what did I say? Things were weird. The colour was used quite extensively, but you see the same three or four cards popping up pretty much everywhere. The only places where the other White cards saw play was, well…

I told you that things were going to get weird

Let’s Just Get This Out Of The Way

Of all the archetypes, the one where White has seen the most consistent usage basically since the start of the game has been combo. There were a few reasons for this, but largely over history it’s been due to the fact that White was the colour for scoring points in weird ways. Historically, whether it was Fashion Week, or RTO, or as we travel into modern times, even Mistmane, White was the go-to colour for decks that wanted to score their points in unconventional ways. And again, as above, White was usually not the primary colour in any of these decks. Usually, it was just the win condition. But well, the win condition is a pretty important part so I can hardly get away without mentioning it. Thus, in this section, I’m going to be lumping the combos together, and boy there were a lot of them.

I already mentioned One Pace up above, but here we find its later evolution, One Shot, which at least was nice enough to include a little more White, even if it was still just performing the role of a win con. I would heartily recommend the linked article for reading, though, as it is one of the more complex combos out there.

And they keep on coming! One of, if not the most infamous combo deck ever was of course Dragon Express, and in the pattern established herein, there wasn’t a whole lot of White, but Breezy Rarity was the reason that the deck was able to win games.

Adding on to the tradition of fiendishly complicated combos, from the time of Absolute Discord there was Screw Shot, which… honestly I’m not even going to get into that one. I’m linking to the primers on these for a reason, here. Suffice it to say that once again White is here purely to score some points, though admittedly here there are at least multiple winning cycles through a White endpoint.

And no, we’re not stopping there! I’m going to get through all of the silly combos in this section, even though the next one on the list, Pie-Eating Contest, actually breaks the above pattern by not using White just to score points. For once, it’s a crucial part of the combo, abusing Teamwork Trenderhoof as part of a loop to destroy everything on the opponent’s side of the board in a single faceoff. Before the flips, even.

Finally, to bring the train home, let’s wrap it up with 104.3 FM, The Cheese, fittingly ending off this section by combining some of White’s point-scoring with some of White’s playing fast-and-loose with the rules. This one took advantage of UR Trenderhoof and Uniqueness to repeatedly play cards from the discard pile, though a later rules change invalidated the concept.

Whew, that was a lot of nonsense. Yet you know what I find to be the craziest thing? We’re more than 1700 words in and I still haven’t mentioned Eff Stop yet.

No history of White could possibly be complete without this guy

The Shutter-Click Heard ‘Round The World

Now, Eff Stop had been doing his thing pretty much since the start of the game. He is, after all, a Premier card. Through most of the early sets, he was a reasonably well-recognized tool, but enjoyed nowhere near the success of the other ones mentioned above. Yet, as time went on, the card infamous for “always getting better with every new set” kept getting better. The story of Eff Stop’s journey to getting banned starts in Absolute Discord, with another little piece of history. A Control Deck With Bad Draws was the first claim to fame for a now well-known tinkerer with the Seattle group named Skitter. This was the first notable deck that did the things Eff Stop would later be most famous for: enabling control decks to replay their important Events again, and again, and again. A later deck named Stopping Corn from around the same era did something largely similar, getting its namesake from replaying Popping Corn every turn to devastating effect.

By the time of the modern era, Eff Stop had settled down into what by now is by far his most recognizable role: partnering up with Gyro to deliver unmatched efficiency for control decks that could now minimize the deck space allotted to Events, while still getting maximum value out of them. Especially once Photo Finish showed up in High Magic, Purple/White control decks were everywhere, and the standard toolbox formulation showed up again and again. I’m going to select one representative example in the form of Cruel Mistress, a toolbox of 27 distinct cards that got particular value from wiping the opponent’s board with the combo of Spoiled Rich and Cruel Taskmistress.

But we shouldn’t forget that Eff Stop wasn’t just doing the usual toolbox thing around now. He was also playing what was admittedly a tangential role in another infamous deck: Tantabuse, where he and Interdimensional Portal served as a measure of backup when the usual tool of Minuette wasn’t available.

Finally, no discussion of Eff Stop and toolboxes could be complete without Vinyl’s Bag of Tricks, what many may consider the ultimate incarnation of the concept. With 11 distinct Events spread out over only 16 card slots, this deck captured the versatility of being able to answer almost anything the opponent could do, with the inevitability of being able to provide that same answer every turn for the rest of the game. After Bugle’s success with this deck, it was no surprise that Eff Stop ultimately got banned, bringing the era of toolbox control to an end with it.

Notably, this era wasn’t one of total control darkness. A consistent bright spot for aggro in the colour was of course the Octavia Mane from EO. Even though she hasn’t yet quite cracked the big time, there was and indeed continues to be experimentation with her. And, before Bluna fell in with the Pink crowd and Hot Wings became the only deck for miles around, she was often paired up with White, and did reasonably well too. Here’s a list that T8’d at 2016 BABSCon, something of a comforting refresher of the glory days of RTO that got this article started.

White’s still playing second fiddle, but it’s a pretty darn good orchestra

A Modern Era Just As Messy

The modern era, which I take to start at the introduction of the Core format, has been in all its complexity a continuation on the various themes that held sway over the course of this colour’s existence. Even without Eff Stop, Photo Finish still saw play as a backstop of control, especially as the new Chaos variant rose to prominence. In more recent times, naturally Mistmane has been added in as well. New potent tools like Bodyguard gave it a new lease on life heading into SB, though once again not taking too much of the spotlight for itself. And there were even new combos, of a sort, if you think of banking up AT until Mistmane wins the game on her own to be much of a combo. Still, it was potent for a time.

Indeed, White has spent nearly all of its history playing the secondary role, when it even got that. As Bugle pointed out to me, only 2 White Manes have ever made T16 at NA Continentals. Once for Octavia, and once for the deck that will be ending off the article this time. Because while the colour has so generously yielded the spotlight in almost of all of the lists above, there is one glaring exception of such unparalleled primacy that it simply must stand on its own. Naturally, I’m referring to Meanie Belle’s Big Sister, the 2018 NA Continental Champion.

Perhaps most fittingly for a colour that expressed itself in the past by providing useful tools to other colours, this deck is nothing but tools. It’s all useful Events, Troublemakers and Resources, put together to facilitate something that Rarity and her colour had been seemingly unable to do over the whole course of the meta’s history: hog the spotlight. While it was a bright flash, Friends Forever came next, Yellow sprang back to prominence (as we covered in January), and Meadowbrook served as the ultimate answer to this smorgasboard of Resources.

Conclusion

That was a wild ride of an article. I can safely say that before I started out on this I had no idea of the breadth of different archetypes and eras that I was going to be covering as I went through the history on this one. Indeed, even though White took a long time to find itself a starring role, it was a force behind many of the major movements in the game’s history. From the combo decks that each had their moment in the Sun, to the dynasty of control that held sway in the early pre-modern era, White was always there, always helping. It’s got a little something for everyone.

Part 1 of A History of Colour covered Yellow. Next up will be Purple.