Ravitz
To begin, a quote:
"Let’s face it. I’m #1 Apprentice and always will be."
Josh Ravitz
Josh Ravitz is a curious fellow. A few months ago he declared himself retired from Magic: The Gathering. One Sunday night, I stumbled into Jonny Magic’s apartment for some late night battle (I had nothing to do the next day), and there Josh was, shuffling up for a Finkel Draft, his third of the day. It turns out that Josh had been there all weekend. It turns out he spends, well, every weekend at Jonny’s, and has risen to #1 in Finkel Draft statistics (rating, not black points)* which was updated from #2 (formerly behind Jon himself) in between my starting and submitting this article.
Side note on Jon Finkel:- Jon always drafts Blue. He says this is because Blue is fun. There can be two players to Jon’s right, both Blue; Jon will still summon third string basic Islands. He never really drafts Green. Jon is waaaaay ahead on black points, and second to only Josh in rating. End side note.
I know all this because I didn’t have a topic for this article, and Josh suggested I just write about him, and how he’s, you know, #2 #1 in Finkel Draft rating as well as the once and undying #1 Apprentice. I am opening with Josh partly for continuity with last week’s Apprentice succession conflict but mostly to point out that since his alleged retirement, he has started drafting on MTGO about twelve times a week, spends about three nights a week at the true Mecca of Magic in hopes of transcending barn (face it, you would too), and only chats with me on Magic Online, barely even on the phone any more.
None of this has anything to do with anything, so I’ll just leave it with "If I retired from something, let’s say my JOB as it were, I would spend all my free time slinging spells across the varied planes of Dominaria, too."
Feldman and Hill Again
I have been writing two or more columns essentially every week for going on four years. Sometimes it is hard to come up with interesting things to say. Therefore I have taken to just clicking the "Write a rebuttal article!" link at the bottom of Richard Feldman articles, because he comes up with interesting topics so I don’t have to think them up for myself. As such I am tithing 50% of my not inconsiderable consulting fee to Richard every week**.
This week, Richard peeled the scab off of the age-old Power versus Synergy debate… "What makes a card good?" and all that.
He begins with Opposition sore thumb Wirewood Symbiote, with a good basic outline of why it can be very exciting in a deck with Spectral Force and Coiling Oracle, and moves on through various interesting discussions to Fact or Fiction versus other card draw in context. What is “good,” indeed?
I actually think the more interesting query is "what is synergy?" People taut synergy all the time. Blah blah synergy. Synergy is basically the same as "cheesy." You know what cheesy is, right? When you play some Vietnamese kid at a fighting game in a video arcade and he bashes you with some painted whore in a real monster*** of an outfit – camo fatigues, fishnets, kohl to the eyes, and a sailor skirt (but still managing to show tops of the fishnets of course) – that’s cheesy. When someone burns you out, we call it cheesy. Some sitcoms are cheesy. We’re all expected to understand what "synergy" is. Picking on synergy is just picking on bad cards, I think. I like good cards. Good decks play good cards, and the best decks play the best cards. Lots of them.
So what about when we play all these bad cards? What about the Gnarled Masses of the world?
I always think of when Adrian Sullivan was working on his Stasis deck for Extended. Adrian could never win a match. He never lost, mind you. His Stasis deck had something good going on but he refused to play Morphling. "Morphling isn’t the right card," Adrian claimed, and adamantly. Adrian never liked Morphling as much as other players from his area. It was the best but cost so much mana. Instead, in his Stasis deck he would play weird artifact kill cards, much as he advocated Forbidden Crypt as a kill in Bloom, for perceived in-context appropriateness.
So he drew. A lot.
One day Tony Dobson needed a deck for the first Masters Series event. Tony is known for the Skull Catapult, succinctly describing why Trix was the best deck of its era (hint: it played all the most powerful and mana efficient cards in the format and was sort of also a broken combo deck that gained twenty in the middle of going off), and not knowing how his Exalted Angels worked in Rift / Slide. Tony was shipped Adrian’s Stasis deck. He threw away these terrible cards. I don’t know what they were – Library of Leng or Miser’s Cage or something – and played Morphling; he won the qualifier easily and knocked some heads around in the Masters proper. Morphling was a sore thumb, maybe, in Stasis. It didn’t feed the Stasis strategy and was obviously expensive for a deck that didn’t, you know, untap lands or whatever. Interestingly he was able to kill his opponents with the then-best control creature of all time.
This, I think, was a notion of compromise and a glimmer of future tuning in control decks. It’s not so different from Walamies playing Morphling instead of just the super synergistic Call of the Herd in his deck, or the whole school of "tap out" Blue control decks that we’ve seen over the past couple of years. I initially thought Whispers of the Muse would Time Spiral us back to the glory days of Mike Donais and Brian Schneider polychromatic control decks, but that card, so much more synergistic with counters, is barely played.
I would not go so far as to say that bad cards make for bad decks all the time, but I think they make for poor choices most of the time, if forcing out "good cards" due to opportunity cost. For instance in Standard, one of the reasons that Careful Consideration and especially Compulsive Research, and to a lesser extent Court Hussar, were better than Whispers of the Muse is that the function of card draw was to find Wrath of God under pressure, and Whispers of the Muse does not shine when compared to the deep diggers, even if it is a superior long game attrition tool. That said, you can win with basically any pile at the Pro Tour or the first week of the following PTQ season, but in the Internet age, lists tighten up pretty quickly, limiting what you can get away with playing in the middle of a PTQ season. "Synergistic" decks become obsoleted by similar decks with more horsepower in PTQ seasons, even when you can’t convince all of their adherents.
I do think that Richard has a point, but I would have gone about the discussion in a very different way. Generally I think that you want to err on the side of power over synergy. Power is power. Power – at least when not heavily limited by speed – ensures value. Personally I like to play cards that are really good when they are on the top of my deck, so that I can pick them up and put them into play. Though I am known for long term strategies and not tight tactics or operations, my absolute favorite thing is to build using cards that quickly and directly affect the game state at their curve points (specifically board, then life totals) rather than those that require a methodical setup in and of themselves.
Short answer: Play with power.
There are times when it is acceptable or even preferable to err on this "synergy," but in my experience the opportunities are specific. I think that Richard dances around the truth in his article. Basically he is talking about – or at least I would have characterized the successful process as – linears. Linear cards are the ones that encourage you to play many or all cards of a certain type, sub-type, or theme. Often the cards in a heavily linear deck will be weak individually, but will be very strong as part of a whole. Mechancis-driven decks like Rift / Slide (lots of cycling), Ravager Affinity (lots of artifacts), and Deep Dog (fair to heavy amount of Madness) are all examples of linear strategies. Astral Slide is a very special card, one-of-a-kind in this game, but utterly useless when cycling cards are not at arm’s reach. Numerous cards in the archetype Ravager deck have been banned in various formats, despite the fact that they are unplayable outside the lone archetype. Deep Dog is glacial without one of its trademark two-drops, and in fact, killing all the Aquamoebas was a strategy for reducing the opponent’s efficiency to Durkwood Boar levels.
Wirewood Symbiote is good in Opposition because there are double digits of Elves in the deck. There is a point in even a U/G Opposition deck with Spectral Force where Wirewood Symbiote ceases to be good (supposing the Opposition player wants to explore Sosuke’s Summons and a Snake engine in the alternative). I think that for Wirewood Symbiote to be playable, it is not a matter of synergy but reaching a critical mass of Elves appropriate to the linear. Wild Mongrel is considered to be one of the two best two-drops in a game defined by powerful two-drops; he is probably the overall best. However, Wild Mongrel was not played in the original Bests; Jon Becker called him "Mild" Mongrel. The poor guy didn’t do anything. Phantom Centaur was the better off-linear Green creature.
There is a famous urban legend of Magic development where Pat Chapin objected to a certain two-mana Artifact Creature. "I really think you should have to pay one mana to sacrifice an artifact," Pat suggested. No! This card will only be played in "modular" theme decks (and we want to encourage the play of these modular cards). I guess both of them were right.
In all seriousness, Arcbound Ravager is not what it usually is unless accompanied by twenty artifact lands and a fine support staff. Certainly the fairy godmother’s wings are born of the Red Bull that is Great Furnace. Imagine her in Deep Dog. There was a time when Disciple of the Vault was strictly Nate Heiss sideboard option against Akroma’s Vengeance. Today? Banned.
In the case of Disciple of the Vault (only slightly more impressive than Arcbound Ravager out of immediate linear context) and Arcbound Ravager… They played / play for the most powerful offensive deck the game has ever seen. Deep Dog is no longer Tier 1 in Extended, but in original Odyssey Block and Standard contexts, it was always a contender on power and speed. In these cases the total strength of these decks outweighs the sum of the parts.
The counter example in terms of two-drops is obviously Tallowisp. The Tallowisp decks prove that you can play unexpected linears at a Pro Tour and make Day 2 but can’t get away with the same palette and win at the more defined PTQ level. The difference between the ‘Wisp decks and Affinity or Deep Dog exist on two levels. The first and more obvious one is about strength and power. Affinity was the strongest. Deep Dog was one of the strongest. Ghost Dad was not strong in the abstract, probably sub-25th percentile on power during its Standard. Secondly, it was obsoleted by a competing "same" deck (Ghost Husk). Husk played the same powerful cards (Shining Shoal, Ghost Council of Orzhova, some would say Dark Confidant) but replaced the weaker linear of Tallowisp and specifically chosen Auras with a combination of individually powerful cards like Orzhov Pontiff and the two-card kill combo of Nantuko Husk and Promise of Bunrei. The result was a faster deck that was in the 90th percentile of offensive and defensive speed versus power.
Ultimately, if it’s my opinion (and Fridays it’s my opinion) you choose "synergy" on strong linears. The goal of choosing power over synergy is that power is meant to ensure value; as we’ve discussed before, linears come pre-packaged with super normal value. Tallowisp is a linear but was weaker than other available options in the format at the time. Morphling might have been less "synergistic" with the Stasis strategy on mana, but it was powerful. You could play it without Stasis in play and it would beat up the opponent. You could rip it off the top of your deck and race. Moreover it defensibly had some nice synergies with being able to untap under Stasis, plus allowed Dobson to win games he "should" have won where Adrian had difficulty closing.
Note that Fact or Fiction has always been the stones, and hasn’t ceased to be the stones. When a card like Gifts Ungiven is chosen over it correctly it is usually part of a strong liner. Compare two Psychatog decks, Ruel versus Kenji. Kenji’s deck played Gifts Ungiven as a two-for-one (in some ways comparable to Fact or Fiction), but also as a card that fed Life from the Loam; in a sense, it replaced and improved on having three more copies of Life from the Loam in-deck. Where there are no strong linears competing for space, Fact or Fiction remains the sensible choice, generally only mitigated by curve (say, by Thirst for Knowledge).
Curve is obviously the most important element pulling down the card power of decks (that’s why we don’t play decks of all four mana spells). This is where Gnarled Mass comes into play. The U/G Legends strategy was one of the best ones in Kamigawa Block, and would consistently win a long game versus every strategy; the problem was getting blown out by White Weenie if U/G tapped at the wrong time (Dust Drinker) or being swarmed early by Black Hand. Gnarled Mass’s core function was simply to steal tempo, preventing early swarm kills and making Hokori unprofitable (though you can also make the argument that it was on par or superior to Kitsune Blademaster, Raving Oni-Slave, and Takenuma Bleeder, all tournament role players or staples in-Block). I generally try to pick the most "appropriate" card for the job (sorry if that is as imprecise as cheesy or synergy). Here are some elements that I like to use, besides curve:
Respect for Role Players
I love a Role Player. I play all manner of cards that have no point but to win one matchup. I break obvious "synergy" and play under-powered cards all the time if they attack from an odd angle without disrupting my core strategy too much. I started playing weenie decks with Wrath of God more than ten years ago; I don’t mind blowing my own guys up if I can finish even a little bit ahead. Maindeck Scrabbling Claws in Bests? I guess I just hate the old TOGIT guys.
Differentiation within Archetype
Obviously the notion of "Net Decking" is worthless if you want to win at tournaments. Sometimes you have to play decks that are based on or even carbon copied from the Internet because they are better than whatever you made. However best positioning yourself to actually win the tournament tends to require some amount of innovation because, when "Net Decking" you have no real presumption of information advantage unless you are very quick. There are two very different processes by which to accomplish similar goals.
Focus or specialization – Templating the "Net Deck" to somehow enrich or increase the effectiveness of the deck at its core values. I see this process as the streamlining of mana costs of Hattori-Hazo to the URzaTron that Osyp and the ex-TOGIT guys played at Pro Tour: Honolulu last year. The bets were that 1) if the deck established ‘Tron that it would be favored to win and 2) there was little the opponent could do that was better than tapping out for one of the Blue Kamigawa Legends. Therefore we played every Electrolyze we could to draw into ‘Tron while controlling the board. This was also the awareness that 12 of our 23 lands produced colorless mana… We pulled away from the UU of Hinder, certainly the Black splash, and found more single-color friendly options, including using Keiga and Meloku as board control. The marriage of these two big ideas was what initially brought two, then four Remands to our version. I see the California incorporation of Ghost Quarter in Loam as the same idea from the other side of the floor. Loam was already concerned at some degree with mana control, and Ghost Quarter had already been played in concert with Life from the Loam in previous formats (plus, it was Strip Mine in many Extended matchups). On one side cards are selected narrowly so as to best survive or dig to the point where it is assumed to win, on the other, synergy is built into the deck such that its ability to win is broadened without changing how that is; in neither case is the core competency of the deck compromised.
Hybridization – The nature of this templating comes with the reverse in mind. There are a couple of ways that you can look at a deck. If you are in a Rock / Paper / Scissors metagame, how will you succeed? Making a choice like ‘Tron or Loam is a conscious adoption of Rock, choosing the de facto strongest strategy. The Focus or Specialization plan is about making the best Rock one can, beating other Rocks on speed and efficiency (or sheer size, towering over competing Rocks), being such a big Rock that Paper will have difficulty covering; being such a fast Rock that it can power through flimsy Paper. The Japanese method is to be both Rock and Paper, even sideboard into Scissors. Rarely do the Japanese have the best Rock deck; it seems only their version of the Resident Genius builds in this way (among high Q-rated players), and even he builds for flexible sub-themes viz. LD sub-themes in beatdown or burn. However they can sometimes beat Paper on account of being a bad Paper deck, too; they can beat other Rocks with their any kind of Paper side; of course Scissors is still smashed by even a less efficient Rock; that’s their bet. Decks like Solar Flare – board control, minor disruption, major card draw, minor Japanimator, all short-term metagame definition – are typical of "typically" Japanese design, down to the variations of Solar Flares… this one playing two Persecutes and this one three… this one adding a Signet and removing a land… this one playing only Wrath of God as dedicated creature elimination main versus this one with two or three or more Mortifies… this one with Dread Return versus this one with Body Double versus this one with Adarkar Valkyrie… varied redundant draw suites (Court Hussar which is anti-beatdown versus Careful Consideration which is top-down Japanimator) further define the very characteristic design style.
Note that this attitude yields Brain Freeze (strange card) in Ryuchi Arita’s NO Stick and positioning Sulfur Elemental (really puzzling, at first blush mislaid card) main in the U/R ‘Tron. Conversely the err of perceived synergy over power can be perhaps best illustrated in the move from Hinder in Hattori-Hanzo to two and then four Remands. At the time Remand was not Tier 1 in Standard (even if it may have been predicted to be potentially Staple). Yaso did not play it in his Champs-era or even Worlds-style Jushi, and even we saw this card as a compromise on our colored mana that would incidentally help draw into particular non-Blue producing lands. I guess the joke was on us – everyone, maybe – because a year later, Remand is considered by many to be #1 in Standard overall. At the same time this shows how a yield or compromise to synergy leading to a great deck is actually indicative of playing the best / most powerful available card(s). Remand is, today, a Staple four-of in most Blue decks.
As for Zac, last week he wrote:
"It occurred to me that most players are awful at what Mike calls ‘top down deck design’ – that is, building a deck to solve a problem rather than just building a deck for the hell of it."
This is wrong, at least from my perspective, which I guess is the right perspective given that Zac was writing about me. Ironically I don’t consider myself very good at top-down. By the way, I use this language borrowed from BDM, who uses it borrowed from somebody else in case I am offending anyone.
Top-down: I have an idea and I build to the idea. Often the result is a deck that does not fit into the metagame, bypasses the metagame, or ultimately defines the metagame. Okay, I guess I designed Napster. The best of the top-down designers is Zvi Mowshowitz with Seth Burn and Scott Johns. The quintessential top-down is ID19, where Zvi sees a broken card in a new set, declares one month in advance that he will break that card, and proceeds to make the U.S. National team when given the first opportunity to play that card; meanwhile his rivals are summoning Infantry Veteran.
Bottom-up: I perceive a problem and build to specifically interact with that problem in-context, meaning the solution, if successful, to ultimately multiple problems. This is not just deck design but a complicated math problem; I consider myself to excel at this style of design rather than top-down. The best of the bottom-up deck designers is clearly Brian Schneider, though because he spent so many years breaking cards in-house rather than for-tournaments, he has acquired a half dozen rivals over the years.
Okay, I have to pull BDM off of Yokahama testing now. Rob Dougherty just called. Actually I have to pee, and then we are casting. For once, Craig is getting my column two hours early.
LOVE
MIKE
* For those keeping score at home, I am in last place in ratings in ranking, though not in red points.
** This is a lie.
*** Look it up.