Good or Bad: Conditional Spells In Type One

Casting costs are relatively important in Type One, for more purposes than just evaluating how much mana you need to put in your deck (especially since cheating on casting costs is the primary goal of many if not most Type One strategies). Its actual import reveals itself through the usefulness of other cards: Powder Keg, Smother, Engineered Explosives, Pernicious Deed, as well as the classically sidelined counterspells, Prohibit and Spell Blast. Other cards ranging from Overload and Plaguebearer to Gorilla Shaman and Chalice of the Void also care very much about this aspect of a card.

Most of these cards are removal, and Disrupting Shoal adds itself to the group of counterspells that would be so delicious if only cards had a consistent enough cost spread. Those players familiar with Workshop prison decks will also know how much difference one mana makes to a player’s ability to escape a lock in a sticky moment.

In the middle of my draft* for this article, I realized that arraying cards by mana cost and then type also made it convenient to consider color, so I reached for other types of conditional spells. The Elemental Blast spells especially came to mind, so I used those as the main lens, but, well, you’ll see in a moment.

* : No booster packs involved; if you try really hard you might remember some other definitions of “draft”, one of which should fit here.

Chalice of the Void

2005 February Casting Costs

(Out of 4827, X-spells excluded)

0: 604 – 12.5%

1: 1297 – 26.9%

2: 987 – 20.5%

3: 992 – 20.6%

4: 282 – 5.9%

5: 384 – 7.9%

6: 175 – 3.6%

7: 42 – 0.9%

8: 48 – 1.0%

11: 16 – 0.3%

X

113 Chalice of the Void

38 Engineered Explosives

25 Skeletal Scrying

18 Decree of Justice

11 Mind Twist

2 Stroke of Genius

The average non-X-spell casting cost is 2.32 mana. The single most nuclear option is X=1, and that gets even better when you notice how few artifacts it blocks. In the shadow of Trinisphere and Crucible of Worlds, Chalice was noticed less and less over 2004, but it quietly held its most-used artifact spot and now that Trinisphere has fallen, I expect it will ascend to staple status in Prison decks. (Rudy van Soest of Dutchieland has already said of a suggested Stax list, “You need to run Chalice maindeck. Until you do, I cannot comment on anything else.”) This gets even better if you go the bold, Kevin Cron-approved path of excluding Goblin Welder from your build. (Noting that Cron has called his build “highly metagamed”.)

Since Chalice doesn’t usually matter above X=2, you’re playing a spell that doesn’t affect essentially 40% of all spells. Fortunately, a large percentage of the spells above that range are (a) Force of Will, (b) cards that are only rarely hardcast anyway (e.g., Akroma), or (c) cards that are difficult or useless to cast without spells in the range that you do have control over (e.g., Tendrils of Agony).

Disrupting Shoal

Blue Cards Only

(Out of 1750, 34.8% of total)

1: 494 – 28.2%

2: 454 – 25.9%

3: 400 – 22.9%

4: 74 – 4.2%

5: 306 – 17.5%

6: 20 – 1.1%

X+3: 2 – 0.1%

Considering Disrupting Shoal, the most useful evaluation is to see how it would perform with the set of Blue cards that everyone was playing anyway. If it forces you to play worse Blue cards so that you can assure the casting costs are right, then there’s probably a bigger problem with the format (i.e., over-focus on turn one). Side-by-side, Blue has a superabundance of five-mana cards, and is fairly even with the most important one-to-three range. (Note that every color will have a slightly higher percent pattern than the overall because no color has zero-mana except artifacts.)

Given that, it’s a matter of how likely it is that you’ll have the right casting cost at the right time, that time clearly being any opposing main phase during which you lack double-Blue mana. It’s also important that you consider it easier to expend those two cards immediately rather than deal with what’s played in some other way (in other words, it’s a rare day when anyone will pitch Ancestral Recall to Force of Will).

Disrupting Shoal’s big drawback is that as the game goes on, it continues to be generally worse than Force of Will, because FoW has a solid cost of 3UU, while with Shoal you have to guess how much mana to leave open, and if you guess wrong, you might open a key window for the opponent. This may also be skill-testing, but since the opponent could have anything in hand, it’s hard to feel like you’re in control. Continuing to hold back the cards to pitch for it becomes worse as well. To me, this means that playing Shoal is a big effort for a diminishing payoff, and you should only do it if you need to shore up the first turn radically.

Engineered Explosives, Annul

2005 February Card Type Breakdown

(Out of 5035)

38.5% Instant: 1936

28.8% Artifact: 1450

9.8% Creature: 495

9.7% Sorcery: 486

7.8% Enchantment: 392

5.5% Art. Creature: 276

The Explosives are able to affect about 51.9% of the nonland cards. The mana curve on those cards is a little different than the whole card pool, though.

2005 Feb. Engineered Explosives Targets By Casting Cost

(Out of 2465)

0: 604 – 24.5%

1: 377 – 15.3%

2: 427 – 17.3%

3: 513 – 20.8%

4: 184 – 7.5%

5: 84 – 3.4%

6: 170 – 6.9%

7: 42 – 1.7%

8: 48 – 2.0%

11: 16 – 0.7%

For most decks, you don’t want to rely on Explosives above X=3, and even three can be hard in the early game. That puts 77.9% of permanents within reach, but if you exclude the zero-cost group as largely irrelevant, it’s more like two-thirds. This is enough to be convincingly better than Powder Keg, but the activation cost does make it less likely to be effective against prison decks. In fact, any artifact-based deck is likely to make Explosives ineffective or, more often, act as spot removal.

Annul is much more limited. The reason is that half of the artifacts are mana sources, rarely something you’d want to counter, and as you get higher, other counterspells are better – a single additional mana nets you the power of Mana Leak or even Mana Drain itself. This is less ambiguous than even Prohibit to my mind, because even in the best interpretation, Annul fights against 36.6% of spells, while un-Kickered Prohibit is almost twice that broad, and has at least arguable advantage over Mana Leak if the opponent has abundant mana later in the game. Heck, Flash Counter is more broadly effective than Annul. I suggest skipping it.

Gorilla Shaman

2005 Feb. Non-Creature Artifacts By Casting Cost

(Out of 1450, 28.8% of total)

0: 600 – 41.4%

1: 147 – 10.1%

2: 114 – 7.9%

3: 265 – 18.3%

4: 105 – 7.2%

5: 45 – 3.1%

6: 22 – 1.5%

8: 1 – 0.0%

X: 151 – 10.4%

I just wanted to briefly highlight this classic card’s actual ability to turn things around. Since Xs are as good as zeroes, half of all noncreature artifacts can be wiped with ease. Since these are almost completely mana artifacts, there’s not much new to say about the monkey; any veteran knows it’s a mana denial card.

Blue Elemental Blast / Red Elemental Blast

Does Artifact Count as a Color?
2005 February Color Breakdown

(Out of 5035)

34.8% Blue: 1750

34.3% Artifact: 1726

12.0% Red: 605

9.1% Black: 460

5.2% White: 264

2.6% Green: 131

2.0% Gold: 99

BEB is well-recognized for its anti-Welder role, and considering that Welder is a sixth of all Red cards (combined with Rack and Ruin it makes up over a third of that entire color), it is near-exclusively good for Welders. Since colors have much better solutions to the Welder (Icatian Javelineers!), BEB is most useful for a Mono-Blue deck that doesn’t have many other good options. Since the opportunity cost of playing another color is so low, though, this is rarely a good overall plan.

REB is much better. You’ll remember I said to skip Annul when it fought against a similar portion of spells. The question with REB is twofold:

(1) Is the Blue subset a lot better to counter than most artifacts?

(2) How much benefit is derived from the ability to destroy permanents with REB?

The first question gets a definite yes – resolving a Smokestack versus resolving a Gifts Ungiven is worlds apart in terms of decisive game effect. With Trinisphere gone, this will only become more clear; old-school artifact prison components are often much more efficiently answered by mass removal like Rack and Ruin and Nevinyrral’s Disk than by a narrowly tailored counterspell. Blue spells are very often the ones you use general counterspells on anyway, so a narrowly tailored solution is just fine.

The second point, about the added benefit of permanent removal, asks how many Blue cards are permanents. 20.8% of nonartifact creatures (103/495) are Blue as well as 40.8% of enchantments (160/392), but obviously no artifacts or artifact creatures. This is just 15% of all Blue spells, and a good chunk of that is cards like Standstill and Morphling which it makes no sense to consider as targetable. This part of REB is rarely important; it is usually a counterspell, and that function is usually enough to justify it.

The last time that I analyzed casting costs, some interesting questions arose on TheManaDrain concerning the usefulness of general data without context. In the intervening year, I’ve thought of two reasons why you should care about generalized information. First, while all of this information about any given deck can be ascertained by thorough playtesting, the reason you’re reading articles instead of playing right this moment is that seeing generalized information and synopses of what is typical in recent events provides you with intellectual shortcuts – heuristics – when you see something in a real game.

Far more potentially important though, is that the proven best way to win Type One tournaments is to surprise everyone with a new deck. Given the size of the cardpool, it’s even harder for teams and especially individuals to discover every idea and test it. Even a deck that everyone knows might exist, like the recent Doomsday and Oath of Druids decks, is far from a sure thing, and if you see it in the last round of the Swiss, it probably isn’t the same as the build your team dismissed as crap. It’s much easier to make mistakes against these unanticipated decks for the same reason it’s easier to make mistakes against decks that you haven’t playtested against even when you know the complete decklist. The good news, though, is that the Vintage playables pool is so much better than almost all the rest of the cards that any new deck will be 80-90% familiar.

And that means it will follow a very similar setup to what you see here.

Philip Stanton

prstanto at gmail.com

Appendix: Casting Cost Sort

0: 604

93 Tormod’s Crypt

73 Black Lotus

71 Mox Sapphire

69 Mox Ruby

68 Mox Jet

66 Mox Pearl

64 Mox Emerald

56 Mana Crypt

26 Lotus Petal

6 Chrome Mox

4 Ornithopter

3 Mox Diamond

2 Lion’s Eye Diamond

2 Welding Jar

1 Zuran Orb