Channel Fireball vs. Doran: A Clash of Iconic Standard Decks

Hello everyone, and welcome to the next match in the Best Standard Deck Ever Tournament! This week, we have one of the oldest decks in the field, a deck built around one of Magic's most iconic combos in card-ref:Channel Fireball from Worlds 1995 taking on Doran, the Siege Tower, Abzan Midrange from Lorwyn Standard in 2007! Which deck is moving on, and which is going home? Let's get to the video and find out!

Built around the most iconic combo in Magic's history—card-ref:Channel to make a ton of mana and card-ref:Fireball to burn your opponent out of the game—Channel Fireball made the Top 8 of Worlds 1995 in the hands of Derek Rank, although oddly, the deck's sideboard seems to have been lost to time, which is one of the perils of decklists from the pre-internet age.

At a glance, the deck looks pretty janky—its main non-combo finisher is card-ref:Orgg, after all. But the combo of card-ref:Channel and card-ref:Fireball, backed by some fast mana and Demonic Consultation to tutor up whatever combo piece is missing, Commander-style, means that with a good draw, the deck can win the game by Turn 2.

The deck also takes advantage of the rules of its time. Before the Sixth Edition rule changes in 1999, the rules of Magic were that you could only die at the end of a phase or the end of combat. Even if your life total hit zero, the game wouldn't "check" to see if you were dead until the phase ended, which is especially powerful with card-ref:Channel since it means you can pay all the way down to zero life to make mana and still cast a lethal card-ref:Fireball at your opponent's face. To make the deck work the way it used to back in 1995, we'll be playing with that rule today.

As the premiere midrange deck of original Lorwyn Standard, Doran, the Siege Tower is built around itself, although the deck is only lightly focused on its "toughness matters" ability. While cards like Birds of Paradise, card-ref:Tarmogoyf, and Ohran Viper do get slightly bigger with a Doran, the Siege Tower on the battlefield, for the most part, Doran is just an overstatted beater in a removal-heavy midrange deck.

The deck also takes advantage of what, at the time, was a brand-new card type in planeswalkers, which were first released in Lorwyn with the "Lorwyn Five" of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Chandra Nalaar, Garruk Wildspeaker, Liliana Vess, and Ajani Goldmane. Doran plays both Garruk Wildspeaker and Liliana Vess. This would foreshadow the planeswalker-heavy next decade of Magic.

If you know anything about Worlds 2007, it is likely the iconic semi-finals match where Gabriel Nassif and Patrick Chapin battled through an epic Dragonstorm mirror, which came down to some absurd Ignite Memories luck. But what you probably don't know about Worlds 2007 is that it was actually Doran that managed to defeat Dragonstorm and bring Uri Peleg the World Championship!