This article is aimed at players who perhaps haven’t seen too many sets roll by down the years. It’s aimed at players who look at a dizzying array of cards and can’t instinctively understand what makes the good cards good. Its aim is to give you the analytical tools to make more sense of any spoiler, whether it’s Conflux, 11th Edition, ‘Prosper,’ or even, heaven help us, Homelands. In essence, these are all ‘angles’ from which you can approach the mass of new information. Each technique may only shed light on a handful of cards, or sometimes none, but considering each ‘world view’ should bring you closer to a better understanding of the possibilities as you start cracking open packs for real. If you’ve ever qualified for the Pro Tour, chances are that you won’t learn a lot this week by carrying on reading. But if you’ve ever wanted to qualify for the Pro Tour, chances are that you will.
Jumping Through Hoops
For now, let’s agree to accept the idea that every Magic card is designed to be good in certain situations. Ken Nagle posted an excellent defence of the ‘vanilla’ creature Cylian Elf when Shards of Alara came out, pointing out that it actually did a ton of stuff that most experienced players take for granted — attack, block, Devour fodder, in-hand bluff, and more. It’s highly likely that even if you haven’t found a use for a card, somebody somewhere has, and what’s more, it’s highly likely that people have won games with cards that you simply would not play under any circumstances. Magic is a game of near-infinite variety, and that means (when it comes to reading the spoiler) that we must assume every card will have its home. Somewhere. Once we’ve established what a card does, we need to examine what it’s going to cost us.
The first and most obvious cost is the casting cost. It’s going to cost us some mana (unless it’s Bone Saw, but we’re dealing in generalities, not exceptions). The more mana it costs, the more we’re going to want the card to do. Not only does higher converted mana cost equate with waiting longer within a game before we can physically cast a card, it also increases the likelihood that the spell will take up our entire allocation of mana for the turn. In most Limited games, it’s unlikely that we’d be able to cast an Ultimatum and then have mana left over for a spare Trained Armodon. In other words, there’s a ‘Turn’ cost associated with higher casting cost. If it’s taking up my entire Turn 6, I want it to impact the game significantly.
It doesn’t end there. Sometimes you have to give up additional resources to get a card into play. Think of the Champion ability, which forced you to have already played a certain type of card, and for that card to be rendered (at least temporarily) useless when your Champion came to play. Then there’s the kind of requirements that are to do with efficiency and synergy — if you’re going to play this Goblin King, wouldn’t it be better if you played with a load of Goblins? Mostly, and 100% of the time in Constructed, this isn’t a ‘cost’ at all, rather it’s a facet of deck design. In Limited, however, the idea of jumping through hoops in order to play a card is a powerful one. Yes, you have opened an amazing Limited bomb, which appears to force you to play it (how could you not?). But maybe in the process there are five or six other cards that you are obliged to fill your deck with because they play nice with your bomb, and as a result you weaken the overall quality of your deck. In short, one of the most common mistakes I see watching dozens of matches at Prereleases is doing something cool, when you could have just, you know, won.
Mana Issues
In a gold Format like Invasion, Ravnica, or right now, mana issues are crucial. Ravnica sealed deck play was incredibly skill-intensive when it came to building a manabase, and although Wizards will always attempt to give you the tools to play the spells you want, not all mana-fixing is created equal. Ideally, you want mana-fixing to be very cheap and efficient. Ideally, you want your mana fixers to do other things as well. Birds of Paradise is one of the greatest fixers of all time, precisely because it fills all these criteria. There’s been plenty of discussion of the value of Obelisks in Shards Limited, and the prevailing Pro view seems to be to play as few as possible. Why? Because a card is a precious resource, and a turn is a precious resource, and spending a card and a turn 3 to do something that, at the time, impacts the game in (almost) no possible way is a weighty consideration. If a card allowed you to play all of your land as any basic land type for the rest of the game (which would theoretically fix all mana problems forever, making it good) and the card cost 6 mana, chances are it would be totally unplayable. You want your mana-fixing to keep well out of the way of the business part of the game, and while you’re fixing your mana, maybe they’re making an enormous game-changing monster. That leads us neatly to our next topic…
Tempo
Consider an opening to a game like this, on the draw: Turn 1 Jungle Spire. Turn 2, Esper Panorama, end of turn sac the Panorama. Turn 3 land into Obelisk. To be kind, I’m going to assume that your killer Turn 4 play is going to be Fusion Elemental, which I think we can all get behind as being ahead of the curve at 8/8 on Turn 4. However, your opponent went like this: Turn 1 Wild Nacatl. Turn 2 second land, attack for 2, Cylian Elf. Turn 3, third land, attack for 5 (13), make Woolly Thoctar. Turn 4, attack for 10. In this scenario (and in many others replacing the utter-beating Woolly Thoctar with a more modest killing machine i.e. 3 power), your forthcoming super-powerful Fusion Elemental is utterly irrelevant. You’re dead, having curved your mana out perfectly. Even Turn 2 Elf, Turn 3 guy, Turn 4 guy is going to leave you at 10-12 life facing down three guys before you make your first impactful play of the game. If your opponent has any kind of bounce spell, or removal spell, you’re almost certainly toast. Therefore, when considering the value of cards in the spoiler, think about the speed of the format. How often do those aggressive Red-Green decks get made? Wasn’t Naya the best shard in Draft? And you should also consider very carefully whether cards like Unsummon are likely to be a crucial part of a pro-active Tempo strategy.
Hosers
I’m not entirely sure where the term hoser originates. I guess that it stems from the idea of ‘putting out the fire,’ literally dousing the flames. In Magic terms, this refers to cards that are extremely effective at negating a particular strategy. Think of a card like Night of Souls’ Betrayal. As soon as a creature comes into play, it instantly gets -1/-1. If a Woolly Thoctar comes down, it’s a slightly-downsized 4/3. But Heritage Druid? Dead. Wirewood Symbiote? Dead. Llanowar Elves? Dead. Mogg Fanatic? I won’t go on. Any strategy, like Elves in Extended, is going to have fits dealing with this card. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Elves in Extended will have killed you before it becomes a problem, so you should consider whether your hoser cards will arrive in time to be relevant. Sometimes cards become hosers because of inherent weaknesses in the color pie. Take Circle of Protection: Green, for example. Green decks have traditionally had any number of ways to get rid of pesky enchantments. Circle of Protection: Red, on the other hand, was a real handful for mono-Red decks to cope with, since Red doesn’t get enchantment removal. A key to understanding potential hosers in a set is to know the Format you’re considering, something we’ll discuss later on. At the heart of it though is simply this question: What are people playing right now in this Format, and what does this card from the spoiler do to give them problems?
Card Advantage
Every time I write those two words I get nervous, because the definition of Card Advantage has exercised the minds of the finest theorists in the game, and I’m not one of them. That said, options are good, and more options than the other guy are very good, and lots more options than the other guy is really really good. For options, read ‘cards.’ That’s why Mulligans are bad news, because you voluntarily put yourself a card behind before the game begins. In simple terms, the easiest way to gain Card Advantage is to draw extra cards from your library, making ‘Draw A Card’ arguably the three best words in the game. Often, cards with apparently minimal effects at cheap cost will be ‘sweetened’ by R&D by adding ‘draw a card’ to them. These cards are known as Cantrips, and are something you should look at carefully. A card like Kaleidostone has a significant upgrade simply because it replaces itself in your hand when it comes into play. Looking at decks that make a splash in Constructed, you will frequently find cards that generate Card Advantage. At its purest, a card like Tidings demonstrates this perfectly. There are of course decks that eschew this strategy. All-In Red in Extended is the poster boy for this strategy, where Card Advantage is ignored and resources are splurged willy-nilly into an Eggs-Basket-One approach, whether it be Deus of Calamity, Demigod of Revenge, or Magus of the Moon. Look for the cards that help you to get ahead in the game by giving you more cards, more options.
Investment
Since I’m dealing with awkward topics, let’s do Investment. Again, hundreds of thousands of words have been written about what this is and isn’t, but the simple version goes like this. A card like Jayemdae Tome is a prime example. You draw the Tome. You spend four mana (and likely your whole turn) casting it. The following turn you spend four mana to activate it. You’ve now drawn one card, ‘getting back’ the card you ‘lost’ when you Invested in the Tome in the first place. The following turn, you spend another four mana, and draw a card from the Tome. You’re now ‘up’ a card. In other words, your Investment for one card was 12 mana over three turns, plus the draw step and the slot in your deck for actually playing with the Tome. It’s not necessarily wrong to make this kind of Investment — in a long game with plenty of mana in a control deck, the Tome could easily spell You Lose to an opponent — it’s important to consider what it is that you’re committing to when you Invest in a card.
Goldfishing
This is the idea that your opponent will do precisely nothing against you. They won’t lay lands, counter your spells, make creatures, nothing. This allows your cards to perform in a perfect vacuum. A 1/1 monster will take 20 turns to win, a 2/2 will take 10 turns, and so on. One stage further down the line is imagining what a spell might do, and how often it might do it. Cryptic Command has a ton of applications (see Versatility, below). How often will tapping creatures be useful? How often can I expect to draw a card? What spells will I want to counter? This sort of consideration becomes more important with cards that can be expected to trade at better than 1 for 1. If you cast Pyroclasm and kill the one monster of your opponent, is that ‘fair’ value for the card? Can you expect to generate 2 for 1, or 3 for 1, on a regular basis? Inevitably, these considerations are conditional on the game state. At 2 life, staring down a Mogg Fanatic, ripping Pyroclasm represents a great draw. Whenever the spoiler throws up a card like this with the obvious potential for mass or at least double removal, go through some scenarios in your head, and come up with Disappointing, Expected and Bonus outcomes. Of these, the Expected is the most important, yet it’s in our nature to remember the extremes, not least because these are the basis of the stories we hear in between rounds at tournaments. ‘I killed seven monsters,’ ‘I can’t believe I spent 6 mana just to kill a Dragon Fodder token’ etc.
Breaking the Symmetry
If we continue with the theme of mass removal, how can we ensure that a card like Wrath of God works to our advantage? The card is symmetrical — that is to say it makes no distinction between the two players — so if we want it to be good for us, we need to break the symmetry. Clearly, a situation where our opponent has monsters and we do not is ideal. It follows on from this that in Constructed we might want to build this asymmetry into our decks, by running Wrath of God in a deck with relatively few creatures. This is a simple example, while a card like Howling Mine provides a sterner challenge. In that example, not only do both players apparently benefit from drawing extra cards, there are two built-in disadvantages to the player casting the card. First, he’s made the Investment. He drew the card, made a slot in his deck for it, and spent mana casting it. His opponent has Invested nothing in the card. Second, it’s his opponent who gets first use out of the benefit. The caster has to wait until his next upkeep to even catch up to his opponent, and many’s the Howling Mine player who curses as their opponent draws an extra card and then Disenchants the artifact. Pro Tour: Honolulu was a great example of how to Break The Symmetry of Howling Mine, with both Tiago Chan and Antoine Ruel making the Top 8. If there’s a card in the spoiler that looks like it benefits both players, ask yourself how it can be made to just benefit you.
When A Drawback Isn’t
Every card in Magic has many, many drawbacks, simply because there hasn’t (yet) been a card printed that can replicate any card in the game at exactly the time you need it. What’s the drawback of a creature? It isn’t a counterspell. What’s the drawback of Incinerate? It doesn’t draw you cards. What’s the drawback of Terror? It doesn’t give your guy +3/+3. Every card is designed and developed to function in a certain way, and as deckbuilders we look for ways to maximise the utility and minimise the drawback. This much is straightforward. However, this idea can be seen at a much lower level, within the text of a particular card. Typically, a card will be given aggresively-costed stats for the casting cost in exchange for some kind of drawback. The awesomely-designed Serra Avenger is a brilliant example. There’s no way in the world you should get a 3/3 Vigilant Flyer for 2 measly mana. Ah, but there’s a drawback. No playing on Turns 1, 2, or 3. Sure, it still costs very little, meaning you might be able to do something with the other two mana on Turn 4, but your opponent also has four mana available, perhaps for Rewind, or Wrath of God. With this kind of drawback, there’s no way around it, since Turn 4 will roll around right after Turn 3, every single time. Your call then is to decide whether the drawback is sufficient to disqualify the card from playing the role you want it to, in this case smashing face. Like always, the answer depends on what Format you’re playing, and what you’re trying to accomplish within your deck as a whole. In Time Spiral Block Constructed, the ‘wait around a bit’ part of Serra Avenger didn’t for the most part put people off, since it turned out that four White mana parlaying into two 3/3 Vigilant Flyers on Turn 4 was pretty decent.
There’s another type of drawback, and this is where serious deck designers start sitting up straight and sensing blood in the water. These are the Drawbacks That Aren’t. In other words, a restricting or apparently negative clause in the contract between you and the card – ‘I will give you these services for the payment of X, but regretfully I have to inform you that Y…’ – can be turned into ‘I will give you these services for the payment of X, and as a special bonus offer to players of deck Q, I am happy to inform you that Y…’. This is a tremendously exciting time for a deck designer. A fine example from Conflux is Esperzoa. 4/3 Flyers are good cards. 4/3 Flyers for three mana are crazy good cards (for Limited at least). So, Esperzoa has a drawback that forces you to return an artifact you control to your hand every turn. That’s bad (theoretically) because you have to already have another artifact in play, otherwise the Esperzoa will just permanently be bouncing back to your hand. However, what if the artifact we were bouncing every turn was something that liked being played from hand, because it had a comes-into-play ability? Suppose that comes-into-play ability said Draw A Card. Wouldn’t that make Kaleidostone and Esperzoa an absolutely foolish Limited combination? Yes Sir, it would. Any time you can find a Drawback That Isn’t, you’re in business.
Versatility
Frank Karsten has told me on several occasions that the Pro Tour as a whole is fundamentally Control orientated, because it allows the best players the most room and the longest time to outmaneuver and outskill opponents. Versatility gives you more options, which is why cards like the Charm cycle from Shards are so handy. Sure, most of the time you might be casting Pyroclasm for your BRG, but when your opponent is on 4 life and you have 2 damage onboard, those two +1/+1 counters sound like the ballgame right there. (And by the way boys and girls, if you weren’t watching the Superbowl you missed a staggering sporting spectacle.) By all means, look for cards that give you options, that don’t dictate to you how they’re played. While doing this, you should remember that Versatility isn’t everything. If your three options are Weak Thing A, Poor Thing B, or You Lose The Game C, being able to choose between these three still doesn’t feel like the value. I’ve been looking for the opportunity to write this phrase for nearly two years, and now’s the time. Remember, you can’t polish a turd.
Narrowness
There’s no doubt that most Hosers are Narrow. They don’t often have many applications. Instead, they are laser-focused to do one small thing very, very well. That’s what Narrow is, a trade-off between Versatility and Reliability. Incinerate can kill many, many creatures, and under certain circumstances can kill a Tarmogoyf. Whereas it will most always kill a Birds Of Paradise, most of the time my money would be on the Tarmogoyf. What about a card that said ‘Destroy target Tarmogoyf’…? I think we can see that such a card would be a big favorite over Incinerate if what we wanted — all we wanted — was to put 0/1s-8/9s in the bin. Any time you find a card that unambiguously does a very specific thing, you need to ask yourself how often that effect is likely to be relevant. Take Corrupted Roots, for example. It’s as cheap as things generally get, and it’s possible that in the course of a game the enchanted land might tap two or three times, generating 6 points of life loss. Sounds good value for just one mana, but the circumstances for playing this card and getting good value from it are extraordinary. First, there has to be a Plains or Forest for you to enchant, and since only the most convoluted thinker could imagine putting it on your own Plains or Forest, your opponent must be playing them. Not only must he be playing them, in a Limited format chock full of alternative mana sources to basic lands, and where five-color decks frequently run just one basic of two if not three of the colors, the land must be in play. Okay, so we attach it, and watch the lifeloss get rolling, right? Wrong, unless we manage to draw Corrupted Roots really early in the game, when our opponent will likely be forced into tapping the land for fear of tempo loss. Once we’re passed maybe Turn 5 or 6, chances are that they’ll never have to tap it again. You will draw Corrupted Roots in your first three Turns roughly 1 time in 4. You’ll be able to cast it maybe half the time, and on half of those occasions will it be impactful on the game i.e. 4-6 lifeloss. At a rough guess, Corrupted Roots will be a Good Card 1 game in every 16. Maybe. It is, in short, far too Narrow for the benefit that comes with it.
Believing the Hype
Don’t.
Know the Format
Do.
Not for You
Sometimes we look at a card and simply cannot imagine what possessed R&D to let it see the light of day. Thing is, Magic is a lot of different games wrapped up in one shiny packet. As StarCityGames.com readers, many of you will be tournament players, looking for the next big thing to take over Standard. Or Extended, Legacy, Vintage, Block Constructed. Or Sealed, or Draft. Of course, you may be a Judge and Elder Dragon Highlander could be your thing. I’ve even heard that there are some people who play the game casually, and play in some other forms of, I hope I’ve got this right, Multiplayer Magic. If memory serves, there is even a distinguished writer on this very site who spends much of his time designing entirely new ways to play the game. Abe someone? I think you get my point. Magic cards cater to a massive variety of tastes, and a lot of the time those tastes won’t be yours. That’s especially true if you’re interested in the Best Cards, because that automatically leaves you willing to consider 80% of all the Magic cards ever printed as essentially chaff. Therefore, if you’re beating your head against a brick wall trying to work out what special use a card of a comparable power level to Bog Hoodlums has that will enable you to win Pro Tour: Kyoto later this month, don’t. Chances are the card is Not For You.
As always, there’s a ton more to say, and any one of these topics could (and maybe one day will) be an article all to itself. Having played exhaustively at The Games Club Prerelease where I was gunslinging, and then a more sedate bunch of Swiss Rounds on Sunday at the awesome Nick & Fizz farewell party (only spoiled by a last-round loss to the Editor), it’s clear to me that the most pressing matter to come out of the weekend, at least from a Limited perspective, is mana issues, so that’s what we’ll delve more deeply into next week.
Until then, as ever, thanks for reading.
R.