Collected Company (CoCo) has been a decisive MTG card for over eight and a half years now. Some players extol the value of two bodies with selection at instant speed for only four mana, while others lament the value of two bodies with selection at instant speed for only four mana. The difference seems to be which side of the table you are sitting on.
I was in the camp NOT casting CoCo, so I was inspired to create this little app/game riffing on the value of the standard standard:
This was also a time period when Doge, Kanye upstaging Taylor Swift, and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy were all hott topics in pop culture.
Technically this Meta was all before my time, but just barely. DTK was released in March 2015, and it wasn’t August 1st of that year when Dean Dean came to my house with packs of dragons.
Here he his holding my face to the quick start pamphlet until I could grasp the magnificence.
I had no concept of Formats or Meta at that point, so I only learned about the scourge later.
But with the Arena expansion of Explorer to include the DTK exclusive, even in 2023 people are still talking about it:
“I have been experiencing extreme frustration every time I play against someone in explorer running collected company. 4/5 times it swings the game in their favor so much that you’ll lose in the next 2 turns. With the insane power of low-cost cards in explorer, what have y’all’s experiences been playing with this card/against it? It seems like 4 mana is a bargain for the power offered by this card.”
reddit
That’s not exactly my experience with it in Explorer recently. Even without playing the recommended ETB from library or graveyard hate; the format has so much else going on. Sure, I raise my eyebrows when I see CoCo go on the stack, but honestly it’s usually in desperation looking for blockers not Spell Quelling or Tireless Tracking.
There are so many more dangerous and infuriating combos in Explorer that on the occasion when I see one in the wild I just smile a little to myself about the good times we had giving a hard time to an honest card.
Remember, nothing in life is certain except Death, Taxes, and Power Creep.