Fun With Focal Points

For example, with a Karakas in play, I would focus on my Sneak and Show opponent’s red mana to prevent them from hitting their one reasonable win condition of Sneaking in an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn a bunch of times. Against RUG, an early fetch for a Tropical Island would imply a Tarmogoyf I wanted to slow down, resulting in aggressive mana denial.

This is the big parallel between Storm and Death and Taxes. While the cards you care about are drastically different (Force of Will versus True-Name Nemesis), the concept is the same. Use your proactive tools to catch your opponent unable to cast their relevant cards and close in for the kill.

In current Standard, I love the post-board Mono-Blue Devotion mirror. There are definitive levels of threats that come up over a game, and there are deep battles fought over each. Just two weeks ago, Anthony Lowry wrote an entire article about the intricacies of the matchup. Similarly, I loved the Esper Control mirror at Pro Tour Dragon’s Maze. The early game was about dancing around a resolved Jace, and then the midgame was about dodging Aetherling while maintaining an advantage.

I hate it when the decisions you make in these battles are fairly inconsequential, unreliable, or take an extremely long time to play out.

There are a ton of examples of the former. The classic is the Jund mirror, whether it was the pre Sarkhan the Mad Standard one where players just counted cascade spells, the early last season Standard one (before Gatecrash early) where it was Rakdos’s Return early or bust, or the Modern one where . . . well, I think round 3 of this video speaks for itself.

In Standard right now, players have a lot of these issues with the Mono-Black Devotion mirror. Don’t kill their Pack Rat on turn 2? Dead. Have the kill spell? Better hope you didn’t get Thoughtseized first. Underworld Connections and Nightveil Specter are the next step, and Connections is especially miserable to handle since there just isn’t a fight to be had. You either have the Thoughtseize or don’t.

Aside 1: Referencing my last article, this is a good example of splash-color positioning being a way to win fights. While the Thoughtseize issue still exists, Abrupt Decay is a hell of a card here. A maindeckable answer to Underworld Connections that also handles Nightveil Specter and Pack Rat? And I get to freeroll Reaper of the Wilds as another way to pull ahead in my one-for-one game? Sign me up!

Notice the common thread—powerful generic answers (aka Thoughtseize) negating interesting decisions. Things that aren’t actually answerable that end games, like drawing more cascade spells or enchantments in Mono-Black mirrors. Things that happen too early in the game for players to reliably position against them beyond mulligans, like Pack Rat or Dark Confidant.

Aside 2: Again, noticing a common thread, Stoneforge Mystic for Batterskull in Standard was one of these miserable, game-ending, hard-to-answer early threats. The answer to a temporarily interesting format was to juke to a similar but advantaged deck. Same with Lingering Souls in Jund mirrors after Pro Tour Return to Ravnica. Keep this in mind for the future.

Another Standard matchup again highlights the unreliable issue. The Red Devotion mirror is quite unfun, though that is less because the interesting interactions don’t exist and more because of how the deck is fundamentally a little shaky. It turns out one of the best things against the deck is something fast and lightly disruptive to take advantage of hands missing an aspect. In other words, the mirror is one of the best decks at dismantling the mirror, and most of the time it happens in a way that one person just doesn’t play.

The unreasonably long one is something that it appears Wizards is really trying to push away from but popped up multiple times in the past year.

The first was with Thragtusk mirrors in Standard, especially when Angel of Serenity loops got involved. Obviously there were ways to get ahead in the mirror like Selesnya Charming their Angel, but the games that came down to these repeated interactions were miserable. If both players had Angel and Tusks to loop through, it got really ugly. I heard multiple stories of "I could Craterhoof Behemoth, but it would only deal 47 and he would still be over twenty life."

Natural decking is not a fun way to end a game. All apologies to Andrew Cuneo.

Esper Control mirrors are also at a similar point, going back to Block Constructed. Part of this is a result of the legend rule change making the early fights over Jace, Architect of Thought matter much less. When they can just jam back with a Jace and keep up on cards, who cares? Going further down this line, now the only thing that matters is Aetherling. Not that Aetherling wasn’t the best thing before, but in Block the other decks were bad enough (or maybe just set up correctly) and you got to maindeck Sin Collector and more Aetherlings to juice up this fight. Now there are more answers than Aetherlings, less interaction with those answers, and just less Aetherlings. The fights over these cards are pushed out further and further, often resulting in neither player getting to resolve a win condition.

Again, Andrew Cuneo is having a party. I am not.

Aside 3: I am willing to admit some of this last one may be the Zac Hill classic of "players want formats that are just hard enough that they are better than most everyone but easy enough that people can’t be better than they are." At the same time, there’s a reason I play Magic over chess or Go that I have heard echoed by people who went far deeper into those games than I did.

One big thing to note is that a lot of these issues occur in mirror matches, but that makes a lot of sense.

First of all, it’s easier for cards to interact on different levels if the cards you are playing are different. When identical sequences occur, there is usually a straight tradeoff or some huge advantage based on order of play. Modularity of spells and reactive options in general spice things up, but on the flip side, you have things like the Valakut mirror where both players throw their cards at each other. At least in the sequencing case, things end fast.

Second, if a matchup is miserable between different decks, it usually means one of the two decks loses so badly it isn’t a matchup. If that matchup is that bad and matters, the deck that loses it often quickly becomes a poor option to play because of this fact. Think of every terrible deck you have ever tested and how quickly you are disgusted with playing it against anything. If the matchup is a mirror, the win percentage for either side is the same regardless of how the matchup plays out. The issue is not naturally self-correcting. To an extent people stop playing decks because of a bad mirror match, but sometimes the deck with a terrible mirror just beats everything else. I kept counting cascade spells in 40% of my matches because it meant I was way ahead in the other 60% of them, and people who didn’t were typically making bad decisions.

A lot of the same things apply to Limited. While the color system tends to make Limited self-correcting, having the ability to work on format issues on a deeper level is what keeps me interested in a format.

A prime example of self-correcting but not interesting is Avacyn Restored. Given even distribution of the cards (aka the first drafts of the format), black was by far the worst color. Come the Pro Tour, it was the most likely to 3-0 because no one wanted it. Until you had the extra density of picks that came from drafting a "worse" color, you couldn’t assemble a cohesive deck.

Despite this being a thing that happened, it didn’t mean that the format actually self-corrected to be fun. Good luck beating a Druid’s Familiar with anything. The cards that you had to choose from didn’t actually give you ways to interact with the many game breakers of the format.

Theros, on the other hand, executed a lot of similar concepts in the right way. While Wingsteed Rider has a similar play pattern to the cards in Avacyn Restored that were problematic and resulted in runaway game states, it can be planned for. The build-your-own Exalted Angel draw with Hopeful Eidolon does win a lot of games, but even green has reasonable answers to it.

This also applies to Cubes and more specifically why I greatly prefer unpowered Cubes to powered ones like the current Magic Online Holiday Cube. Introducing free mana in such a low concentration creates a lot of variance in how games are played. Sometimes your opponent is casting Wrath of God on turn 4; sometimes you are facing down Jace, the Mind Sculptor on turn 1.

I have a blast playing Vintage, where the same issues with power-level variance are true. The issue is that the way Vintage decks are constructed doesn’t line up with how most powered Cube decks look. In Vintage decks, there is a large number of ways to interact on the same axis as the broken spells, like free counters (Force of Will, Mental Misstep), cheap discard (Thoughtseize), or just having your own similarly powerful cards. If your turn 1 play in Vintage is land, go, you kept that hand for a reason. Cube doesn’t work that way.

Powered Cube more closely resembles drafting old Magic sets, only instead of Spy Network and Chaoslace showing up you have cards that have historic precedent of being good. For the same reason you don’t see people playing Nearheath Pilgrim in Vintage, the card probably shouldn’t be a part of a Cube with Mind Twist and Ancestral Recall.

Ideally, there would be more bleed between combo Cubes and powered Cubes. Admittedly combo Cubes have their own issues (see below), but in general all the archetypes are playing the same game. If you build a White Weenie deck into your powered Cube, it should be closer to Death and Taxes or Paul Rietzl’s Amsterdam deck than Kithkin. The red deck should be disruptive like the ones that survived in the same Extended formats where Tinker was legal. You should not be asking people if they want to play Bonfire of the Damned.

Aside 4: The big issues with combo Cube are the inconsistency of finding a two-part combo in any given draft, generic hate tends to be better than generic combo when the tutors are spread out, and people tend to balance their combos poorly and include Time Vault and Life from the Loam with the expectation people will play both.

So obviously it has been interesting on a personal level for me to ramble about this, but what are the real takeaways from this?

1. A broad spectrum of similar power-level cards creates the most interesting Magic. See also the original Ravnica Standard.

2. If a deck beats everything else, avoiding a rancid mirror match is not a reason to choose something else.

3. When looking at a mirror match that seems unsolvable, try to juke to a different color for a new set of threats and answers. The loss of reliability might not be worth it, but trying is better than nothing.

4. Cube is not a showcase of what cards were good. It is a unique format that needs tuning and tweaking to be balanced. You can balance to your own theme or nostalgia points, but some things should not be mixed and matched.

As always, I hope there is something useful to scrape from this.