For better or worse, it’s common practice to label decks (and cards) as Good or Bad. The handy part about such simple labels is that they’re quick; if I say, “that card’s good,” you at least know that I have positive feelings toward it, and can guess that I won’t be trying to trade you a Chimney Imp or a Chicken McNugget for a playset.
In terms of cards, I’d expect the common definition of a Good Card would be “one that has a strong chance of winning you the game.” You’d say that one card is better than another if the latter gives you a higher chance of winning the game than does the former.
The problem with simple labels like Good and Bad is that they are open to a great deal of interpretation. Is Wirewood Symbiote a Good Card? Does it give you a strong chance of winning the game? “Not in a vacuum,” is the expected answer, “but in U/G Opposition, it is.”
Creatures (27)
- 4 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Wirewood Symbiote
- 4 Wood Elves
- 2 Eternal Witness
- 4 Coiling Oracle
- 2 Scryb Ranger
- 3 Spectral Force
Lands (20)
Spells (13)
Sideboard
In a straightforward mono-Green beatdown deck with no Elves to speak of, Symbiote is a vanilla 1/1. When you’re using him to bounce Coiling Oracle with combat damage stacked, on the other hand, untapping Spectral Force in the process, he’s a good deal stronger. So is he Good or not?
My beef with the label of Good is twofold:
1) It’s not specific enough. When someone asks, “Is that one good?” a simple answer of “yes” or “no” is ambiguous. If you actually want to answer the question properly, you need something more along the lines of “Yes / no in a vacuum, and / but yes / no in the context of the deck / environment / matchup we’re talking about.” That’s a mouthful – which defeats the purpose of the whole “simple label” thing – but if you fail to qualify a yes or no answer like this, you leave out critical information and risk becoming misleading. I can’t necessarily tell if you meant “good in a vacuum” or “good in the context of this deck” if you didn’t specify which you were talking about.
2) A lot of people simply don’t bother to clarify… and, as a consequence, leave out critical information and become misleading.
This is why I prefer to speak in terms of power and synergy. I’m not interested in “vacuums” – if a card is powerful, it’s powerful in the context of an environment. If it’s synergistic, it’s synergistic in the context of a deck.
Synergy is a very relative term. It’s easy to say a card is more synergistic in one deck than it is in another – Wonder is certainly more synergistic in an Ichorid deck than it is in, say, an Affinity deck – but it’s hard to look at a given card in a deck and say “yeah, it’s synergistic,” or “no, it’s not synergistic.” Take Wonder in Affinity, for example. You might think there’s no synergy because Affinity tends not to play any Islands (making Wonder a downgraded Aven Fisher) but a 2/2 flying for 3U is certainly more synergistic in a Glimmervoid deck than it is in a Boros deck that can’t even cast it. That’s silly, though, so where do you draw the line?
I’m going to define a card as synergistic in a given deck if the circumstances of the deck make it better than it would be in another deck in its environment. (I’ll qualify that by saying it has to be better than it would be in another deck that could cast it reliably enough for tournament play in order to avoid the “it’s better in this deck than it is in the Boros deck that can’t cast it!” situation.)
So Wirewood Symbiote is synergistic in U/G Opposition because it is better in that deck than it would be in, say, Zoo. Wirewood Symbiote is actively dis-synergistic in U/W Tron because it can’t be cast. Simple enough.
Next I’ll define a powerful card as one that is Good in every single deck in the environment except for those decks that actively have dis-synergy with it.
Fact or Fiction is powerful in Extended because it’s only Bad when you put it in a deck where it has dis-synergy with the rest of the list. You can safely drop it into Blue control decks of all shapes and sizes: Psychatog, Tron, and Scepter-Chant can all put the card to very good use. Ichorid, on the other hand, has very little chance of reaching the four-mana mark in time for a Fact or Fiction to be productive. Same with Affinity. Like I said, a powerful card is only ever Bad (in the environment) when you put it into a deck that actively has dis-synergy with it. Even if the deck has no synergy with the card at all, as long as there is no dis-synergy there to gum up the works, the powerful card will still be Good in that deck.
So we know Wirewood Symbiote is a synergistic card…is it also a powerful card? Is Wirewood Symbiote a card you’d say was “Good in every deck, unless that deck has dis-synergy with it?” Of course not. You can’t just drop it into any old Green creature deck and expect it to perform like Fact or Fiction. In short, it is not Good in the environment of Extended unless placed in a deck where it has synergistic interactions to power it up – such as U/G Opposition.
So the Symbiote is synergistic, but not powerful…what about the opposite? Are there cards that are powerful but not synergistic? They’re pretty hard to find, to be honest.
Let’s use Fact or Fiction again. Fact or Fiction, in a Scepter-Chant deck, is a powerful card. Its main value comes from what it does for every deck: its superb card drawing and / or card selection capabilities. However, it still has some very minor synergies, such as the Instant speed interacting well with Isochron Scepter. (You activate the Scepter on the opponent’s upkeep, leaving all your mana open to counter any attempts the opponent might make to fight it. If it resolves, you can cast Fact at Instant speed with the knowledge that they can have no response because they can’t cast spells this turn. It’s a stretch, but it’s synergy nonetheless.)
In a Psychatog deck, however, Fact or Fiction is as powerful as ever – but considerably more synergistic than it is in Scepter-Chant. Not only can it feed a Psychatog no matter how the pile is split, Fact also makes Circular Logic a more reliable counter and digs the Tog player into Wonder and Deep Analysis. In a Scepter-Chant Fact or Fiction split, on the other hand, you rarely – if ever – get any value at all out of the cards in the reject pile.
To recap:
Wirewood Symbiote is not powerful in Extended, but it is synergistic in U/G Opposition.
Fact or Fiction is powerful in Extended, but it is barely synergistic at all in Scepter-Chant.
Fact or Fiction is powerful in Extended, and fairly synergistic in Psychatog.
Is Fact or Fiction a Good card? It’s hard to say “no,” but answering “yes” when you’re talking about cards that should go in your Ichorid deck is pretty misleading.
Is Fact or Fiction a powerful card in Extended? Yes, no matter what deck you’re talking about – because the definition of powerful tells you that it will only be Good in your deck if there’s no dis-synergy to prevent it from doing so. There is dis-synergy in your Ichorid deck – the four-mana mark is a completely unreasonable goal when your constant Dredging prevents you from drawing lands – and so Fact or Fiction is Bad in your deck.
So what do you do with this information?
Why, compare cards, of course.
I said earlier that a Good card is one that gives you a strong chance of winning the game. A card is better than another if the former gives you a better chance of winning the game than does the latter. In the end, all we care about is winning the game, so where do power and synergy fit in?
Speaking in terms of power and synergy lets you compare cards on a more detailed level. In last year’s Extended season, Antoine Ruel won Pro Tour: Los Angeles with the following deck.
Creatures (5)
Lands (23)
Spells (32)
One of our early updates to the deck was replacing Mental Note with Cremate. Want to know why?
“Cremate was better.” The end.
Good discussion.
Actually the reason was that Cremate was more powerful in that Extended environment, enough so that it was worth making the swap even though it was less synergistic within the Psychatog deck than Mental Note was.
Mental Note has great synergy in a Psychatog deck. It’s a one-mana cantrip, which propels you ahead on land drops (important for control decks), it digs you closer to the four-of Psychatogs that you always want to see in the midgame, it adds a card to the graveyard by “Cycling”, its ability explicitly mills another two cards into the graveyard, and it does all this without decreasing the size of your hand. Very synergistic indeed.
Cremate, on the other hand, is strictly less synergistic within a Psychatog deck. Both are one-mana cantrips, but Cremate’s ability doesn’t feed a Tog or flip Wonder / Deep Analysis like Mental Note does.
It sure is more powerful in an Extended environment that features Ichorid, CAL, and Heartbeat, though.
After breaking it down into a discussion of power and synergy, it became clear that there was a very simple trade-off on the table. Aside from the color of the casting cost (which wasn’t a big deal, as the deck consistently had access to both colors very early in the game). Mental Note was more synergistic by one line of text: “Put the top two cards of your library into your graveyard” and Cremate was more powerful by one line of text: “Remove target card in the graveyard from the game.”
We decided our Tog list had enough synergy to power up Psychatog, and made the swap.
Any time you remove a synergistic card, though, you have to take notice of how it impacts the synergies of the deck as a whole. If you play Elves in your U/G Opposition deck explicitly because they interact well with Wirewood Symbiote, for example, you must remember that they are strong because of synergy, not power. Every time you cut a Wirewood Symbiote to fit something else, all of your elves get worse. Every time you cut an Elf, all of your Wirewood Symbiotes get worse. Your Umezawa’s Jittes are still as powerful as ever (as long as your creature count stays the same), but you have to watch those Elf and Symbiote counts closely if you are relying on synergy to keep them Good.
When we took the Mental Notes out of Psychatog, we did so while noting that we had removed a synergistic card and subtly damaged the positive interactions of the deck. If we’d made ten more alterations like this – like, say, trimming other sources of extra Psychatog damage like Oboro – we might have done more harm than good, leaving our Psychatogs hungry for food and coming up short of lethal damage when we wanted them to. We would have been guilty of overvaluing power and neglecting synergy – making our deck worse (or “less Good,” if you wish) overall in the process.
In last year’s Standard season, a lot of Magnivore decks played Mana Leak instead of another Sorcery. Instants have no synergy with Magnivore, while Sorceries do…but the power of the Big Leaks in that Standard environment was such that it was worth the tradeoff. In this year’s Extended season, Psychatog players often made the opposite trade-off by running Dark Confidant, Sensei’s Divining Top, Counterbalance, and Trinket Mage over more individually powerful cards, because together they created a synergy that was stronger than the sum of the more powerful alternatives.
So why all this discussion? Why bother redefining the way we talk about Magic cards in relation to one another?
Because we’re lazy. We like to talk about Magic, but we don’t like to stop and critically analyze every last detail. We’d rather say, “dude, don’t play Trinket Mage. Trinket Mage sucks" than "don’t play Trinket Mage because you don’t have enough cards in your deck that interact positively with it. You should only play Trinket Mage if you were to instead add more cards that interact positively with it, or play a card that is individually more likely to win you the game than Trinket Mage is instead."
My aim in writing this is to give people a common halfway point – a way to discuss things in a more intelligent manner than just Good and Bad, without having to spit out a paragraph of supporting comments each time.
"Dude, don’t play Trinket Mage. It doesn’t have enough synergy with your deck."
See you next week.
Richard Feldman
Team I’m Just Making These Up Now
[email protected]