One of my favorite decks I’ve ever played comes from Worlds 2007, a Legacy creation that looked like:
4 Brainstorm
3 Ponder
2 Peek
4 Nimble Mongoose
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Dark Confidant
4 Stifle
1 Spell Snare
1 Repeal
3 Survival of the Fittest
1 Wonder
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
3 Ghastly Demise
1 Darkblast
4 Daze
4 Force of Will
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
1 Wooded Foothills
4 Tropical Island
4 Underground Sea
1 Island
Sideboard
1 Thoughtseize
1 Spell Snare
1 Dark Confidant
1 Threads of Disloyalty
4 Engineered Plague
2 Krosan Grip
1 Extirpate
1 Coffin Purge
2 Pithing Needle
1 Genesis
An oft-misunderstood attribute of this deck, and lists like it, are the untutorable one-ofs that pepper the main and especially the board. People understand the Wonder, the Squee – but Repeal, Spell Snare, and especially the one-of Thoughtseize absolutely drive people crazy. Surely, they think, you could have done something better?
Lists like these often appear to the outsider to be cobbled together at the last minute, haphazard scraps of “good-enough” that contain enough tools to get the job done, but are rarely optimized. Yet increasingly we’re seeing more and more lists from very good deck designers – Nassif’s Five-Color Control from Kyoto comes to mind – that feature numbers like “1 Terror, 1 Celestial Purge, 1 Pithing Needle,” stone absent any tutors whatsoever. Even the notoriously-quirky-in-regard-to-numbers* Adrian Sullivan remarked to me over GChat after Nassif’s win that the numbers in that deck “seemed very Chapin” – that they couldn’t decide upon what was correct, so they just went up to 61 and gave themselves access to more tools.
I wasn’t on Nassif’s team, so I can’t say anything about the thought process that went into the numbers in that list. But over the last couple of years I’ve built a startlingly large amount of decks that feature singletons of cards like Tarfire, Terror, and Remove Soul. We’ve seen things like Levy’s back-to-back GP wins with one Firebolt, one Armadillo Cloak, one Jitte. And I’m never going to forget Sam Black singleton Bird of Paradise. What’s changing is that I’m beginning to understand why, a lot of the time, these seemingly-counterintuitive numbers are not some kind of compromise between available time and the need to have certain tools available. That frequently, they are just correct.
The reason this is important is that so often you’ll show someone a deck like my current Mono-U Wizards list, inspired by Brian Kowal:
4 Spell Snare
4 Spellstutter
4 Mana Leak
2 Trinket Mage
3 Engineered Explosives
1 Relic of Progenitus
2 Cryptic Command
1 Glen Elendra Archmage
1 Threads of Disloyalty
2 Venser, Shaper Savant
4 Thirst for Knowledge
3 Vendilion Clique
3 Umezawa’s Jitte
2 Chrome Mox
2 Seat of the Synod
4 Mutavault
3 Riptide Lab
1 Academy Ruins
4 Island
1 Steam Vents
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Breeding Pool
4 River of Tears
1 Secluded Glen
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
Sideboard:
1 Trinket Mage
3 Sower of Temptation
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Tormod’s Crypt
2 Threads of Disloyalty
1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
2 Glen Elendra Archmage
3 Trickbind
1 Pithing Needle
… and they will start changing cards all haphazardly before even playing a game. “One Glen Elendra? That doesn’t make any sense!” “One Hurkyl’s Recall? Isn’t the Affinity matchup terrible for you?” And they will start to lose games because they fail to have access to the critical mass of tools necessary to win matchups against a diverse field.
I shed some light on this issue a little bit last week when I talked about some of the strains that the Standard format at present puts upon the Tezzeret deck. You have to have at least four, preferably more, answers to the cards Tidehollow Sculler, Mistbind Clique, Spectral Procession, Figure of Destiny, and Gaddock Teeg – but there are a limited number of slots to go around. Therefore you must carefully apportion the potential to interact with cards that prove problematic to you if they’re left unmolested.
This is not to say that one-ofs either are or aren’t correct. If what you need to do is make people discard potentially-problematic spells on the first turn, certainly playing one single copy of Thoughtseize is very, very wrong. But frequently people fail to take into consideration what their ideal sixty-card configurations are against the entire field. They feel great when they’re loaded up with 4 Explosives, 2 Night of Souls’ Betrayal, 2 Damnation against Elves, but suddenly the Mono-U Wizards matchup rears its ugly head and they realize there isn’t any sideboard space.
There’s a reason people have such a guttural dislike for numbers like one Damnation in the sideboard with zero Wrath effects in the maindeck. We have to give the collective instinct some credit. If you can only beat aggro by wiping their board with a sweeper, then it’s pointless for your plan to revolve around a singleton. And, ideally, every single card in your deck should be contributing to some kind of plan. There are times, though, where your deck’s strategy is perfectly capable of handling your average weenie swarm most of the time – but sometimes they break through and there’s nothing you can do about it. In cases like this, you may find yourself with an extra sideboard slot once you’ve devised ways of handling the field’s other matchups. You determine that what would be the greatest ever is for you to be able, sometimes, to wipe all their animals off the face of the earth and laugh maniacally at the sad, lonely state of their empty board.
It’s no coincidence that you see more ‘weird numbers’ in control decks. The conventional wisdom is that a greater density of card-drawing spells allows you to look at more cards and turn several of those ones into virtual twos-and-threes. This is true in a sense, but I believe it misses out on a more vital point. Frequently, a control deck can get away with a singleton Celestial Purge because most of the time a control deck’s plan is just to stay alive for awhile. It’s a much more general plan that doesn’t require as many specific tools to engineer a relatively intricate favorable board state. Something like B/W tokens is not going to run one Terror, for example, because it needs every card in its deck to make an army that triggers Heights, make that army bigger, or ensure that that army gets through to deal damage. If the plan of the deck needs a Terror, it probably needs a full set of them (or something close).
By contrast, control decks frequently employ a diversity of means to ‘stay alive,’ and they have to: they’re being attacked from a lot of different angles. Most of the time the difference between the control deck that 0-2 drops and the one that wins the tournament is that the successful deck manages to predict how other strategies will attempt to interact with it, and then trumps those attempted interactions. The rise of Wall of Reverence is a perfect example of this. Simultaneously recognizing the need to dodge Banefire, the inability of most of the format’s aggressive decks to combat a creature with six points of toughness, and the comparative inelegance of Wrath of God in a format defined by one-man armies and the Persist ability, Nassif & co. managed to neutralize a huge number of interaction-axes while using up a small number of slots.
This opens up space for some fine-tuning.
On the surface, taking the Nassif list as an example, a single Celestial Purge seems even more nonsensical given the three copies of Wall of Reverence. Wall is at its best against Red and/or Black permanents, right? Purge is certainly superior versus Bitterblossom, but if the whole point of Wall is to get out of burn range while blocking moderately-sized creatures, and if it’s insane enough to include three copies in the maindeck, wouldn’t we want the fourth before something else so narrow?
In short, no.
Part of it has to do with mana curve, and basically everyone understands that. Four mana spells in particular have notoriously diminishing returns. Part of it is the added value against Bitterblossom that I just mentioned. But the main reason, in my opinion, that you want to diversify is that people are eventually going to be able to defend against your primary means of interaction.
I was never a fan of the Jim Roy notion of ‘threat diversity’ as it was articulated, because it seemed to imply that the very value of shall we say ‘creative numbers’ rested in literal diversity. The problem is that while 2 Wild Nacatl, 1 Akrasan Squire, 2 Isamaru, 2 Savannah Lions, 1 Wild Dogs is certainly a diverse base of one-drops for a green-white aggro deck, it doesn’t really interact diversely. But the reality of a constructed metagame, particularly in a large format where pretty much any tool is available to accomplish any task if you look hard enough for it, is that people are going to adapt. I don’t just mean with regards to deck construction, either. If you don’t know that the opponent has Plumeveil, you’re going to attack very differently than if you do. Adding a couple of general-use singleton answers, especially those that are largely interchangeable, counteracts the opponent’s ability to trump your plan through a different style of play.
In the Legacy decklist above, the choice to play one Extirpate and one Coffin Purge against Cephalid Breakfast was deliberate. Both cards served the purpose of stopping a reanimation spell, but Coffin Purge worked through a Duress or Thoughtseize and could be used twice, while Extirpate dodged countermagic and had more proactive utility. Ninety percent of the time, when used in the intended context, there was virtually no difference between the two spells. But preventing the opponent from employing a singular plan – hit him with Cabal Therapy as quickly as possible, hold vital spells in my hand so as not to get Forced and Extirpated, provided added value at very little cost.
A much better way of looking at seemingly-peculiar one-ofs, then, is to cease thinking about them as individual cards. This is, incidentally, one of the many benefits to the theory of Interaction Advantage: shifts in framework like this become much easier. But Terror and Broken Ambitions both become, for example, “2: Counter target fourth-turn Mistbind Clique.” And your deck will need X amount of that card to function. Meanwhile, those three Broken Ambitions and that one Negate will become four copies of the card “2: Counter target second-turn Bitterblossom if you are on the play,” which the deck will again require a certain threshold of in order to succeed.
Shifting your thinking from ‘cards’ to ‘interactions’ enables a better, more effective, less prejudiced deckbuilding process while simultaneously allowing you to understand more easily the choices of the world’s top deck designers. Some of their numbers may be ‘unsexy.’ They may be jarring, and they may be counterintuitive. But it’s vital to suppress your initial negative reaction to something just because it doesn’t look nice and clean on paper. If you do that, the real reasons behind that ‘awful’ ‘random’ ‘pointless’ singleton Pithing Needle will, in all likelihood, become far more obvious.
Zac
* Adrian will say he has no particular affinity for weird numbers, that he just likes to win.