A couple of years back, there was a big hullabaloo about defining card advantage, and one of the major points of contention was what to do about tokens. After all, cycling Decree of Justice for five Soldier tokens should not be considered on par with Stroke of Genius for six! However, if tokens don’t count for card advantage, does that mean Call of the Herd is somehow not a two-for-one? So went the debate.
I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Card advantage theory has always had the problem of ignoring card quality; in card advantage terms, Camel is the same thing as Spiritmonger. We excuse that by acknowledging that card advantage is only one of many ways we use to evaluate cards and plays, and point out that although both Camel and Spiritmonger are one-for-ones, Spiritmonger is clearly the more powerful card. If we’re already doing that, I see nothing wrong with saying “Decree of Justice for five Soldiers yields the same card advantage as Stroke of Genius for six, but Stroke for six is clearly the more powerful play.” (It’s almost like no one theory can be used to explain Magic by itself.)
Even Zvi Mowshowitz Grand Unified Theory does not fully encapsulate this wonderfully complex game of ours, and neither will the idea I am about to present to you. Instead, I hope to give you a new way to think about a particular facet of the game, and thereby put us one step closer to solving the puzzle.
The Concept
Imagine you are a fortress. You have four walls, one facing North, another South, another East, and another West. A neighboring fortress has just declared war on you, and is marching over an army to invade your fortress.
Trouble is, you don’t know which direction they’ll invade from.
It takes you a long time to set up your defenses, so it will be too late to move them once the enemy is in sight. If you cover the entire North wall with cannons and they come at you from the South, you’re toast. Likewise, if you take the “safe” approach and divide your cannon stock among all four walls, the enemy may be able to punch through by hitting one wall with everything he’s got.
This analogy for the metagame of tournament Magic has its roots in Sean McKeown “The Ballistics of Magic Bullets and Glass Cannons.” Sean took a very mathematical approach to the idea, but I think it’s better to conceptualize it this way.
In Magic terms, your walls are your deck’s vulnerabilities; say, for example, the North Wall is your weakness to a fast creature rush, the South Wall is your soft spot against discard, the East Wall is your vulnerability to fat creatures, and the West Wall is your inability to handle burn.
In Time Spiral Block Constructed, White Weenie attacks the North Wall (the “fast creature rush” wall). If the enemy arrives from the North, and attacks no other wall but that one, your success in defending yourself depends entirely on how many cannons you placed on the North wall. In other words, can your deck defend itself against a fast creature rush? You’d better hope so if that’s your pairing.
Naturally, if your fortress has a weak point, you can always bolster it by assigning cannons to defend that point. However, with only 60 cards (cannons) in your deck, you can’t possibly have enough resources to defend every wall completely.
Say you’re expecting a lot of White Weenie at your upcoming PTQ, so you load up on ways to stop fast creature rushes. Spike Feeder in the maindeck: cannon. Wall of Roots: cannon. Epochrasite: cannon. Citanul Woodreaders: cannon. You’re positively blistering with cannons on that North wall. The odds of your losing to a fast weenie rush are incredibly low.
Then you pair against Mono Red.
You block Sulfur Elemental with Spike Feeder. Wall of Roots halts Blood Knight. Epochrasite trades with Mogg War Marshal. That North Wall is freaking impenetrable, man! Ah, but then there’s the Gargadon. He’s not a part of the fast weenie rush; he attacks that East Wall and exploits your vulnerability to fat creatures.
Okay, no biggie. For the next tournament, you move some cannons from the North Wall to the East Wall: cut Spike Feeder and replace it with Utopia Vow. Vow is still fine against weenies, and defends you very well against Gargadon. It’s like you’ve put the cannons on the northeast corner of the fortress and are defending both walls at once! This compromise is not as good at defending the North Wall as Spike Feeder was, and it’s not as good at defending the East Wall as some of your other options are (like splashing for Slaughter Pact), but having a cannon or two on the northeast corner is preferable to having no outs to a Gargadon.
Next tournament, you pair against Mono Red again… and get burned out.
Turns out Spike Feeder was the only defense you had going for you on the West Wall (a weakness to burn). Feeder represented cannons on the northwest corner – defending you from weenies in the north and burn in the west – and by replacing him with Utopia Vow, you’d moved those cannons to the northeast – defending you from weenies in the north and fatties in the east. So you put back in the Feeder and cut Epochrasite for Utopia Vow instead.
With me so far? Good.
Now consider a twist. Let’s say that at as soon as you receive word that your neighbor has declared war on you, you pull a couple of cannons off your wall and march them over to his place!
Up to this point the model has represented a purely reactive strategy, but there is a lot more to Magic than simply dodging what your opponent throws at you. This hypothetical Green deck I’ve been referencing can “march over some cannons” by replacing Citanul Woodreaders with a big, fat, Spectral Force. (Assuming it wasn’t already, for some silly reason.)
With most of your other cards playing defense, it’s going to be tough for one cannon to storm the opponent’s East Wall (the exposed “I’m Red and can’t kill a fatty” flank) and “capture the flag” before you succumb to the attackers. It’s a simple race: your Spectral Force against their horde of weenies. Although they’ve committed a lot more firepower to knocking your walls down than you have to knocking down theirs, you’re firing back from the North wall and laying down supporting fire the Northwest (Spike Feeder) and Northeast (Utopia Vow) corners, while your Spectral Force is pounding down their walls unopposed. The winner of this race will be determined as the game plays out.
The last piece of the metaphor is that in Magic, there are never only four walls to defend. It’s never as simple as North, South, East, and West. There are many, many different angles an opponent can use to attack you, and the only reason control strategies survive in Magic is that you can always defend multiple fronts with one card. Damnation defends against the weenie rush, evasive beaters, and fatties. Cancel stops discard spells, fatties, and burn. You get the idea.
Practical Applications
Why is this model useful? It serves as both a reminder and a way to conceptualize the critical, critical, critical give-and-take that takes happens whenever you change a card in your deck. Ever have trouble with sideboarding? Just think of it in terms of moving cannons around.
Say you have Wildfire Emissary in the board of your Mono Red deck in Time Spiral Block Constructed. Do you board him in against U/B Control?
Think about it. Half the cannons in your deck are marching on his North Wall, hoping to punch through his defenses with the weenie rush. The other half of your cannons (except Gargadon, but his role is really more to hang out and blank Tendrils of Corruption than to actually attack) are headed for the West Wall and that tender life total waiting to be burned out.
So you’re going to board in Wildfire Emissary and send him barreling into the East Wall by himself?
Tendrils of Corruption has both the North and the East walls covered just fine, so having one cannon break off from the main push to attack an equally-protected flank somewhere else will just dilute the rest of your assault. No matter what you board him in for, you’re moving cannons to a weaker position in your attack force. Don’t do it!
Now consider the opposite. Remember Pro Tour: Honolulu and the sideboarded Giant Solifuges in Osyp’s Izzetron deck?
It was classic: the opponent lined up cannons on the East Wall to stop Keiga and Meloku – Faith’s Fetters, Putrefy, Mortify, Eradicate, and so on – and Osyp attacked a different wall altogether with Giant Solifuge. (I guess you’d call his target the “northeast corner” or something – like I said, at some point you have to accept that Magic is a game of more than four walls.)
Everyone knows about the Solifuges…but not everyone knows what he boarded out for them.
Let’s say you’re Osyp, playing a Feature Match against Shu Komuro in Round 6 of Honolulu. For reference, the two decks:
Creatures (8)
Lands (23)
Spells (29)
- 2 Pyroclasm
- 1 Tidings
- 1 Blaze
- 4 Mana Leak
- 2 Confiscate
- 4 Compulsive Research
- 4 Remand
- 2 Telling Time
- 4 Electrolyze
- 1 Invoke the Firemind
- 4 Izzet Signet
Sideboard
Creatures (13)
Lands (23)
Spells (24)
First off, Remember that Osyp’s deck is more of a midrange control deck than a pure control strategy. He’s got more than a few cannons headed for Shu’s walls, and really only Remand, Mana Leak, and Confiscate defending his own.
So what are Shu’s weak points? Should Osyp bring in Solifuge and attack that one small section of wall that some players defend only with targeted removal?
Well, Shu’s only maindeck answers to Solifuge seem to be Wrath and Loxodon Hierarch. (Sakura-Tribe Elder doesn’t count because Osyp can just wait for him to turn into a land before playing the Solifuge.) Shu’s deck was pretty well-known at that tournament, and if I were in Osyp’s position I would have (correctly) expected him to board out Loxodon Hierarch – who does little against Keiga and Meloku – for more defensive cards like Cranial Extraction and Putrefy. With only Wrath and topdecked Sakura-Tribe Elder providing answers to the Solifuge, I would say it should definitely come in.
Also consider that Solifuge is a good cannon to have marching alongside Osyp’s other two offensive strategies. Every Wrath that Shu expends to remove a Solifuge is one fewer answer he has to Keiga and Meloku, and with as much mana as Osyp’s deck produces, one hit from Solifuge is realistically enough to put Shu in Blaze range.
So what cards do we take out for the Solifuges? We’re not adding or subtracting cannons here, we’re just moving them from one front to another. We’ve identified that we definitely want some cannons to move over and attack the vulnerable northeast corner, but which cannons do we move?
2 Pyroclasm and 2 Electrolyze. These are the cards in Osyp’s deck that are most blatantly defending the wrong part of the fortress. These cannons are aimed off the Beatdown Weakness Wall, and Shu has no plans to beat down. As such, these resources could be put to much better use as Giant Solifuges, knocking down Shu’s walls in the exposed part of his fortress.
That’s a pretty obvious cut, though. A trickier question is whether or not to bring in Annex – and if so, for what?
Boarding in only one land destruction spell is always a strategic gambit. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to “go all the way” by attacking from that angle, as most decks in Magic have a natural defense to land destruction known as “just draw some more lands.” If you want to win off just land destruction, you need the opponent to have an abnormally high weakness to it; either he has a land-light draw or is highly disrupted by the loss of a land (such as a Tron piece or Urborg).
Fortunately, Annex not only puts the opponent a turn further away from casting a Dragon, it also puts you ahead. Turn 3 Annex begets turn 4 Keiga, turn 4 Confiscate, or a sequence of plays like Signet-Compulsive Research–Remand. In any event, the main reason you would want to leave it in the board would be if you were playing against a beatdown player; they’re going to kill you before you’ll ever realize the advantages gained by the two-for-one resource advantage. Since Shu has no beatdown going for him, we want the Annexes.
So what do we cut?
Those last two Electrolyzes are no better than the first two we boarded out; they’re still defending the wrong wall, and we’d rather attack in this matchup. We’ll take them out for 2 Annex. At this point we’ve taken out 4 Electrolyze and 2 Pyroclasm for 4 Giant Solifuge and 2 Annex. How do we fit the last two Annexes in?
We don’t.
Remember, you’re not just “adding” the Annexes to your deck – you are moving cannons around. When you put in Annex, you have to cut something else – and everything else in the deck is doing the job we want it to. As nice as Annex is, it’s not going to actually beat down any of Shu’s walls like a threat will, so we don’t want to cut Keiga, Meloku, Confiscate, the “X” burn spells, or Solifuge for it. We’ve also already boarded out four cantrips in Electrolyze, which is like taking out two lands, so taking out any more early card draw spells (or mana sources) could lead us to land-light draws. Land screwing ourselves is a weakness Shu won’t even have to dedicate cannons to exploit – we’ll just cut out the middleman and shoot ourselves in the foot for him.
That leaves Mana Leak, and Tidings. These are both powerful cards against Shu; will Annex actually be better? Mana Leak actually negates one of Shu’s expensive threats rather than delaying it for a turn, and Tidings is important for finding the Tron and refueling in the late game. Both of these are better than Annex, so it’s more productive to leave those cannons where they are than to move them somewhere where they’ll be less useful.
Now our cannon placement is more or less optimized. We took six cannons off the north wall where they were doing close to nothing (-4 Electrolyze, -2 Pyroclasm), moved four of them to attack Shu’s exposed northeast corner (+4 Giant Solifuge), and moved another two to offensive positions (+2 Annex) in a supporting role. Any further cuts would either land screw us, make our offense less focused, or take cannons off the southeast corner (fatty defense and resistance to discard, i.e. Cranial Extraction) in exchange for marginally effective offensive cannons in the form of Annex.
It made sense to cut the North Wall cannons of Electrolyze for Annex, because although Annex is not the most focused card in the world, the North Wall is not being attacked at all! At least the cannons are not twiddling their thumbs when we move them to the front line. Bringing in more Annexes, however, means taking cannons off the South Wall and East Wall. Shu has both Cranial Extraction and several Dragons, so keeping defensive cannons on those walls is a lot more important than moving them to a marginally effective position in the front lines.
So don’t “make room” for the last two copies of Annex! You’ll actually be making your deck worse if you do.
The Grain of Salt
As I said earlier, no theory in Magic has ever approached the monumental task of explaining the whole game in simple terms. As such, I think it’s important to mention the aspects of the game my Fortress Theory (and Sean’s Ballistics Theory) doesn’t cover.
Fortress Theory applies mainly to the give-and-take of threats and answers, and doesn’t have much to do with lands or card draw spells. When I mentioned that we shouldn’t board out more early card draw spells against Shu Komuro because it would lower our land counts too much, that had nothing to do with moving cannons and everything to do with Magic. Not everything is strategic positioning; some of it is just basic stuff, like taking care of your mana so that you can cast your spells.
I think a lot of theories overstep their bounds in situations like this, and I’ll be the first to admit that my reflex was to start explaining how mana screw is just one different wall in your fortress that gets naturally attacked by every cannon the opponent sends at you. If I’d done that, I would have been stretching the theory so far it would have stopped being simple – and therefore useful. The whole point of theory is to simplify the game, not to warp it into a different game altogether.
So use this theory as a way to conceptualize give-and-take, but don’t forget that the other aspects of the game haven’t gone anywhere. There’s still a mana curve. There’s still tempo. There’s still card advantage. You still need enough lands to cast your spells, and you can still bluff your way around all the mathematics in the world.
Now you can sideboard a little better, too (I hope) and may have learned something about deck design along the way.
Until next time!
Richard Feldman
Team :S
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