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GOAT Magic - Breakfast Cereal (Trix vs. Fruity Pebbles)


Magic has a long, confusing, and mostly unexplained history of naming combo decks as breakfast cereals: Fruity Pebbles, Trix, Coco Pebbles, Full English Breakfast, Eggs, Wheaties, Cheerios—the list goes on and on. However, when it comes to breakfast cereal decks, two stick out among the rest as being the most powerful: Trix and Fruity Pebbles. Fruity Pebbles is of note because it apparently started the breakfast cereal–naming craze, although no one seems to know the origin of the name. Meanwhile, Trix is considered by some Hall of Famers to be the single greatest deck they've ever played.

Maybe the most interesting part of today's GOAT matchup is that both decks are from a similar time in the late 1990s, so both have access to a lot of the same cards, which means the matchup is much more fair than if we played Fruity Pebbles (with Force of Will and Mana Vault) against a more modern breakfast deck like Eggs. Plus, these two decks are widely considered not just to be among the greatest cereal decks of all time but also among the most important and groundbreaking early combo decks!

So, for today's GOAT Magic, it's a breakfast battle—Trix against Fruity Pebbles—to figure out which cereal decks is truly the greatest of all time. Richard will be playing Fruity Pebbles, using the list that Kai Budde took to Pro Tour Chicago back in 1999, while I'll be battling for Trix with the deck Tsuyoshi Ikeda used to win GP Kuala Lumpur in 2000. Which cereal deck is the greatest of all time? Let's get to the videos and find out!

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Note: We couldn't find a sideboard for the Fruity Pebbles deck, so we decided that the Trix deck wouldn't sideboard to make things as fair as possible. 

Discussion

So, there you have it. It seems that Trix is indeed the greatest breakfast cereal deck of all time. We ended up taking the match 3-1 over Richard, and in all honesty, we probably should have won the first game as well but brutally punted with Illusions of Grandeur. While it felt like Fruity Pebbles could win some games in the matchup, even though we had a lot of the same cards, the Fruity Pebbles deck was much less consistent for two big reasons. First, it needs three cards to combo off instead of two like Trix, which means even though both decks have a ton of tutors, it's harder to set up Shield Sphere, Enduring Renewal, and Goblin Bombardment than it is to set up Illusions of Grandeur and Donate. The second and perhaps even bigger issue is one of the cards Fruity Pebbles didn't have:

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Necropotence was actually the best card in the Trix deck by a significant margin. Sure, we won by Donating an Illusions of Grandeur, but it was the ability to slam a Necropotence (as early as Turn 1 with Dark Ritual) that really put the game out of reach. Not only does the enchantment generate a ton of card advantage, but it also helps us set up our combo and stop our opponent's combo by finding our Force of Wills. This was the biggest different in the match: while both decks have an easy-to-set-up, game-winning combo, our deck also has a random three-mana enchantment that wins the game as soon as it resolves, while Richard's did not.

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Apart from the games, maybe the most enlightening aspect of this GOAT Magic was realizing just how much Magic in general—but more specifically, Standard—has changed over the past 20 years. Look over the deck lists for Trix and Fruity Pebbles. How many of the cards in these decks do you think Wizards would reprint today in Standard? Out of the non-land main-deck cards, I think it's just Duress and maybe the zero-mana artifacts. While I'm a fan of powerful Standard formats, I couldn't imagine a new player walking into an FNM and running into either of the decks we played today. So, while midrange slog-fests aren't always fun, degenerate Turn 2 combo decks probably aren't where we want Standard to be either. But mostly, it's just amazing to think that this match—Trix versus Fruity Pebbles—is in the same format of the same game as a matchup like Ramunap Red versus GB Energy. And I guess this is part of the magic of Magic—even though the rules are (mostly) the same, the game is always changing, evolving, and growing, to the point where playing the GOAT cereal decks of Standard's past feels like a completely different game than playing Standard today. 

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today! We'll be back in a few weeks with another edition of GOAT Magic. In the meantime, if  you have any sweet ideas for GOAT matchups, make sure to let us know in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive (and Richard @MTGGoldfish) or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.



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