As you know if you’ve been reading my articles, I’m a big fan of understanding Magic through the lens of theory. What you probably aren’t aware of is the
fact that, while my game of choice to play is definitely Magic, I’m also an avid watcher of Starcraft 2. It has its own set of theoretical approaches and
understandings attached to it. As a real time strategy game, those differ quite a lot from what we use to understand Magic naturally. However, over time
I’ve realized that some of their terminology and ways to understand strategy and tactics should hold the potential to be usefully applied to Magic to do
something we don’t actually have a developed theoretical toolkit for – at least as far as I know. That domain is the actual flow of the game.
I mean, sure, we have an understanding of what an early-, mid- and late game are, we use generalized archetypes to class similar decks together and
theories about how different decks are going to interact throughout the game, what each player’s goal needs to be and which role one should adopt to
maximize chances of winning. These all have one weakness though: they are generalizations that allow us to describe how matchups usually play out.
They aren’t particularly helpful at winning (or talking about) any specific game.
Why Borrow from a RTS Game?
As a result, one thing established Magic theory is generally hard-pressed to do is to differentiate between and account for the different gameplans any
given deck has access to and what exactly we need to do in the game at hand. In some games, a deck like Deathblade will play out like an aggro-control
deck. Thoughtseize the opponent’s answer, drop Stoneforge Mystic, and deploy Batterskull with Force of Will for back up, and before you know it your
opponent will be dead. Either that, or at least far enough behind to have no chance of coming back. At the same time though, calling Deathblade an
aggro-control-deck or playing it as one doesn’t make any sense in a majority of games.
When we look at decks in the abstract, we tend to gloss over these specific plans that deviate from what we imagine the deck to play out in a general
sense, well aware that the option exists, but also that in the majority of games we aren’t going to see it happen quite like that. Because Magic theory
tends to deal with different archetypes created because we need to decide which tools we’d like available to us before the game even starts. Our tools
aimed at understanding how each specific game unfolds remain quite limited.
In contrast, Starcraft 2 gives each player the same tools, and therefore, plans to choose from at the beginning of each and every game. As a result, the
limited amount of Starcraft theory I know is aimed significantly more at describing the different plans available to each race and which road a player has
chosen in the case at hand. Given that this type of analytical tool complements those we’re already using exceedingly well, it would be a great boon if we
could adapt those tools to be used in the context of Magic. That is what I’ll be trying to do today for the four most common strategic approaches I know
from Starcraft coverage.
Let me start with a caveat though: as mentioned, Magic is different from Starcraft in that our strategic options once the game is under way are severely
more limited than those of a Starcraft player. Instead of being able to choose from every imaginable strategy, we have already given ourselves only a
limited set of options by how we’ve constructed our deck. In addition, which strategies we can reasonably pursue is also defined by the cards we’ve drawn
in this particular game. No matter how much I want to deploy an early threat and disrupt my opponent until that threat has killed them, if I have either
not drawn a threat or any actual way to interact with my opponent, I won’t be able to implement this strategy.
That isn’t a dealbreaker though. Instead what we need to be aware of is that the choices that are purely up to the player’s discretion in Starcraft are to
a certain point forced upon us in Magic. So instead of choosing which approach we want to use this game, we need to identify which plan is best supported
by the cards we have access to this time around. By identifying what type of gameplan(s) our hand or deck supports, we can then start to work towards
reaching the correct position to implement that strategy.
Anyway, so much for where I’m coming from. Let’s go the actual analytical tools.
Cheese
Liquipedia Definition
*: “Cheese
most often refers to an unexpected strategy that relies in large parts on lack of information and/or psychological impact on the opponent. Cheese build
orders typically revolve around an early attack that, if undetected, is more difficult to defend than execute.
Players will not always cheese for an outright win. In certain scenarios, cheese can be used to either force a low-econ game or to gain an early
advantage. The unbalanced nature of cheese usually serve to make decision making on the defending side more fatal. Thus, the cheesing player is given a
chance to come back from an otherwise lost game or the possibility to outwit a stronger opponent”
*
Liquipedia is a great place to look up all kinds of interesting info about Starcraft 2 if you’re interested. I’ll be introducing all of these with their
Starcraft 2 definitions before explaining how I think they apply to Magic.
The first of the four gameplans that commonly appear in Starcraft 2 is the so-called ‘cheese.’ It revolves around going all in on an early hopefully
game-deciding attack aimed at hitting before the opponent’s defenses can be up or at exploiting a particular weakness in the opponent’s build by producing
a threat they can’t actually interact with. We’re already familiar with this approach to the game as there are complete decks dedicated to doing just this
and nothing else, such as Belcher and Oops, All Spells!, but this often also applies to all-out aggressive decks such as Rabble Red in the last Standard
season and Dredge as the ultimate “you can’t even meaningfully interact with me” deck. However, the strategy has applications far outside of decks
dedicated to implementing it.
Combo decks in general are most adept at cheesing the opponent. Turn 1 City of Traitors, Lotus Petal, Show and Tell, plop down Griselbrand is as cheesy a
move as they come – in spite of the deck being capable of playing a longer game – and the different Storm archetypes will also rely on going all in on turn
1 or 2 some of the time if that’s how their hand shapes up.
Even far less extreme decks employ this from time to time. One classic example is the “three Wasteland” hand (three Wastelands with not much else to do).
When you keep that hand, you bet that your opponent won’t be able to actually start to function on one mana while you destroy their first three lands,
hoping they won’t draw more lands so that you’ve steered the game into an irrecoverable position.
In general, whenever you say to yourself “Alright, I’m going to do this really powerful thing on turn 1 or 2 and hope that’s good enough,
” that’s a pretty good sign you’re trying to cheese your opponent out. One thing to note is that the ability to employ the cheese strategy is strongly tied
to that elusive ability of decks we usually call “getting free wins.”
Made possible by:
set ups that allow early combo attempts (Show and Tell, Storm) and cheap, highly powerful threats (Delver of Secrets, Goblin Guide, Goblin Lackey, Geist of
Saint Traft, Stoneforge Mystic, but also something like Chalice of the Void under correct conditions) as well as cards that can suddenly become
overwhelming if used in multiples (Wasteland, multiple Spheres in Vintage Workshop decks).
Hands/matchups/situations we want to employ this in:
cheese is most effective either when we start behind (bad matchups, heavy mulligans) or when the cheese is powerful enough to be positive expected value in
almost any situation (turn 1 kills or Blood Moon-style effects in particular).
What to work towards:
Implement your plan ASAP. If you have some way to disrupt your opponent, obviously try to stop their early interaction from working instead of dealing with
cards that help them to play their own game.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
The biggest weakness of this line of play is obviously that it demands a rather heavy commitment of resources, meaning if the attack fails, you’re usually
either significantly behind or even completely out of the game. Its main strength is that it wins the game when they don’t have it, thereby essentially
invalidating a large number of cards in the opponent’s deck (anything that doesn’t stop the attack). Because of this it’s one of the best ways to try to
recover when you’re in a bad spot and also one of the better ways for a lesser skilled player to defeat a stronger opponent.
How to fight it:
Focus every resource and thought on stopping the attack, sacrificing whatever lategame potential you need to. After all, if you stop the cheese, they’ll be
severely crippled so you win mostly by default if you have anything left over.
Timing Attacks
Liquipedia
: “A timing attack, or timing push
, is an attack that is done during a certain period or moment in time that results in an increased advantage compared to attacking outside that window.
The time period in which an attack is stronger than outside the time period is commonly referred to as a
timing window
.
“
What that means is that when you’re going for a timing attack, you commit most or all of your resources on preceding turns preparing for one powerful
attack, timed in such a way that it beats what the opponent has right then but that could be stopped easily even slightly later. ANT operates under this
premise in what I’d estimate to be 70+% of its games (create a position from which they can’t interact with you for a turn, then kill them on the spot),
but blue control mirrors regularly function in this way too, because players try to find a spot to resolve one of their strong advantage plays (such as
Jace, the Mind Sculptor or the Counterbalance lock) while the opponent is unable to stop it. Because of a control deck’s defensive focus, a lot of games
against blue control decks in general come down to this actually.
Made possible by:
Strong threats that, once resolved, will heavily impact the game while being hard to answer retroactively (possibly because the game is just over) as well
as interactive tools that enable you to either force the opponent to take their shields down or in of themselves remove their ability to stop the threat
you’re looking to deploy. Knowing your opponent has defensive options such as Daze that lose their effectiveness rapidly is also an excellent position to
start preparing a timing attack from.
Hands/matchups/situations we want to employ this in:
I mentioned already that this is often the correct strategy against decks with a large number of reactive pieces that are timing sensitive. You’ll want to
go for a timing attack with hands that have one strong threat and either a wide variety of disruptive pieces or cards that require the same form of
response as your timing threat to create the window you need.
An example: one of the sweeter hands to open in the Miracles mirror on the play is three lands, Sensei’s Divining Top, Counterbalance, Vendilion Clique,
and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. This allows you to cast Top on turn 1, Counterbalance on turn 2 – at least one of which will need to be countered – Clique on
turn 3 to get rid of any remaining way to stop a planeswalker, followed by your actual relevant threat, the Jace on turn 4.
Matchup-wise, timing attacks are the most effective way to play games in which your opponent has inevitability (as that means you need to find a spot to
end the game at some point because you’ll lose if the game continues for long enough). One typical example is Miracles turning into an Entreat the Angels
deck against midrange strategies that can deal with their Counterbalance lock (usually due to Abrupt Decay) but which can also overpower them with card
advantage if given enough time (Shardless Sultai with its Ancestral Visions, Punishing Fire from Jund).
A timing attack is significantly easier to implement in games that are either equal or in which the player going for it already has an advantage as that
usually makes creating the necessary timing window significantly easier. Depending on the power level of the timing attack, it might also be a useful tool
to recover from a bad position by going all-in (the classic “Entreat for five Angels after your Liliana of the Veil ultimate resolves”).
Situations to work towards:
Inherently, you want to create a spot in which you can present a powerful threat while the opponent is temporarily unable to deal with it. It is worthy of
note that sometimes the opponent creates the opening themselves, leaving you the opportunity for a timing attack essentially for free (say, casting Ad
Nauseum in response to your opponent tapping their last mana source during your end step to cast a Brainstorm).
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Because you shape the game in such a way as to resolve one particular threat, if that threat is easily dealt with, you can end up putting yourself in a
position that is significantly worse than if you had just tried to further your long game. In the Top-Counterbalance-Clique-Jace timing attack I described
above, for example, you might use the Vendilion Clique to push away a Spell Pierce you could have just tried to blank in the long game instead of the Jace
in your opponent’s hand. If they draw a replacement counter off of the Clique and stop your Jace, you’ve just allowed them to resolve their own unhindered.
How to fight it:
Delay the window for as long as possible (say by slow-rolling sorcery speed spells until you can play them while keeping countermagic up) or deny your
opponent information about the actual state of your defensive capabilities. (This is the very reason you should counter Duress with a hand of Counterspell,
Tarmogoyf and two lands – at least they don’t know the shields are down so they might hold off on going for the attack assuming you have another
way to defend yourself.)
Harassment
Liquipedia
: “Harass or Harassment
is the act of using a small number of units, usually with superior mobility, to cause damage to the enemy without a large engagement. Harassment is
usually targeted at damaging or disrupting the enemy’s economy, sometimes even his or her production, all-in order to throw the opponent off.”
Applied to Magic, this essentially equates to a strategy of disrupting the opponent’s gameplan until either a superior lategame play becomes available or
an already existent pressure/an early advantage can carry the game home. Temur Delver is a very evident example of a deck built around implementing this
kind of gameplan – play a cheap threat then make sure their mana is in a shambles and all their spells eat Dazes and Spell Pierces until they die. Other
decks can situationally do the same by using countermagic, discard, or Wastelands to protect a Dark Confidant or stall until they can resolve their Liliana
of the Veil or Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Against permanent-based decks, removal can fill a similar function, killing whatever they play while riding
something that provides a continuous advantage or building towards some ridiculous endgame threat (think Sphinx’s Revelation). To cut a long story short,
with a harassment strategy we try to buy time by attacking vital resources necessary to implement the opponent’s gameplan until we can either achieve a
superior position or end the game outright.
Made possible by:
Cheap interactive cards that allow you to attack the opponent’s specific gameplan, backed by either similarly cheap threats or access to a decisive
lategame threat. Wasteland, Stifle, Thoughtseize, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, and Hymn to Tourach are all cards that favor a harassment-based playstyle.
Hands/matchups/situations we want to employ this in:
Hands that want to play this way should be reasonably obvious due to the large number of interactive pieces necessary. A good question to ask yourself is
what you’d do if you had a Hymn to Tourach in hand. If “cast Hymn” would be the thing you’d want to do most, you likely want to be harassing your opponent
this game.
Harassment is particularly effective against opponents that have stumbled already (mulligans, landlight draws, mana flood) as it is significantly easier to
reach a point at which they are effectively incapacitated if you’re already ahead on resources.
In addition, a harassment-based gameplan is generally your best option if your opponent’s deck is trying to do something objectively more powerful than
yours (matchups against combo in which you need to disrupt them are a prime example of this).
Harassment is also a powerful tool to help compensate for lackluster draws. If your hand is bad, stopping the opponent from doing something meaningful is
an excellent way to buy time to draw out of the trouble you’re in (think Duressing a Brainstorm instead of a Force of Will when playing Storm).
Situations to work towards:
Getting ahead early or deploying an early threat is the most powerful way of making sure that your harassment has the impact you want it to have.
Harassment efforts also tend to be cumulative – at least if they attack a similar set of resources – so you really want to avoid this kind of gameplan if
you only have a limited amount of disruptive options while going for it when you have a lot of them. One example: if your hand is full of Dazes and Spell
Pierces, it’s often a good idea to counter ANT’s cantrips. However if you only have one or two pieces of countermagic, you’re probably better of trying to
keep them back to stop any actual combo attempts or to preserve an information-advantage as described under how to fight timing attacks.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
The strength of a harassment strategy is that it tries to keep the opponent from furthering their own gameplan, making it unlikely for the game to be lost
anytime soon. It’s defining weakness is that you really need some way to actually profit from the effort you’re putting into disrupting them as otherwise
they’ll draw out of it, making all your earlier efforts moot.
How to fight it:
As a result of needing to capitalize in a timely manner, the best way to fight a harassment strategy is to concentrate on weathering the storm by fighting
whatever their profit mechanism is. Play around as many disruptive tools as possible (the whole “play around Daze and fetch basics” thing against Delver
decks), and make killing their early threat/answering their expected follow up the priority in how you play the game.
The Macro Game
Liquipedia doesn’t actually have an entry for Macro games as such because “Macro” is used as a general term in a multitude of contexts.It’s defined as: “Macro (short for macromanagement) is everything dealing with your economy.”
A macro game is essentially a game that is focused on who can use their resources more efficiently in the long term. As a result, macro games are
usually long, drawn out grindfests that are decided by which player can get in more and more relevant X-for-ones or produce straight up card advantage or
who has a better understanding of what it is that really matters when both players get to do whatever they want.
Whenever you’re making a play with the idea that it will get you ahead a number of turns down the line, you’re basing your decision on the idea that you’re
going to win the macro game. This can reach from card-advantage plays like boarding out Force of Will against blue midrange decks, putting back your
Umezawa’s Jitte with Brainstorm to ensure your third Stoneforge Mystic still has something to fetch, or suspending Ancestral Vision on turn 1 instead of
playing Thoughtseize to such innocuous lines as making sure to keep a Lightning Bolt with Ponder against your opponent’s control deck because you expect
Moat to come down before your (non-flying) creatures can do their job. Essentially, the macro-game is what unfolds if neither player decides, or at least
successfully manages, to end the game with a concerted attack.
Made possible by:
Both players staying alive for extended periods of time. In this type of game, a deck usually becomes better the more opportunities it provides to create
card advantage.
Hands/matchups/situations we want to employ this in:
You want to be trying to play a macro-game whenever you feel that you’re favored in a long game and aren’t presented with any extremely low-risk ways to
realize a timing attack. Reasons to feel favored in the long game are access to superior card advantage (you suspend Ancestral Visions on turn 1) or
quality (turn 1 Sensei’s Divining Top), having inevitability in the matchup (for example due to Counterbalance + Sensei’s Divining Top, Punishing Fire +
Grove of the Burnwillows, or Life from the Loam) or your opponent’s deck being terrible in a macro-game (Belcher).
Situationally, it generally makes sense to play for the macro-game when you’re already significantly ahead on resources or when the current situation
leaves you essentially untouchable as long as you don’t mess up or get extremely unlucky (you have an un-answered Jace, the Mind Sculptor on the board).
Finally, one reason to go for the macro-game can often be that you feel you are a better player than your opponent, in particular when you feel your
opponent is just spewing value left and right. The reason for this is simply the length of the macro game. The longer the game goes, the more decisions
each of you should usually have to make and each time you make the right play or your opponent makes the wrong one, you will get further ahead. At some
point they might even give you a surprising opening to make a lethal timing attack work.
Situations to work towards:
The prime directive is to make the play that won’t lose you the game. Cast your removal on your turn against Infect to make sure you don’t get blown out by
Vines of Vastwood and keep counterspell mana open instead of actually doing anything. Once that is taken care of, you then want to extract as much value as
possible from each of your cards. The typical Legacy example is to slow-roll Brainstorm until you have two completely useless cards in hand and a shuffle
effect ready.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
The biggest strength of playing a macro-game is that as long as your assumption that you will win the long game is correct and you aren’t misjudging your opponent’s threat potential, you should only very rarely be at risk. The burden of investing in an aggressive play
is on the opponent, and because of the cost associated with aggressive plays, it means that you get a lot of easy opportunities to pull ahead.
The biggest weakness of playing for the macro game is actually that it allows the game to continue. You actually increase variance in a certain sense – you might draw fifteen lands in a row and allow them to come back, after all, which wouldn’t have been an issue if you had just killed them – thereby
forgoing “free” wins because your focus on maximizing your lategame potential leads to a missed timing attack that would have been sure to work.
In addition, trying to extract as much value as possible can be dangerous on its own when it suddenly turns out that your opponent actually had an
efficiently set up attack waiting and you now struggle to turn those cards you’ve accumulated into relevant defensive moves due to mana constraints.
There’s also the risk that you misjudged your opponent’s skill-level (higher than yours) or lategame potential and figured out much too late that they
actually have inevitability (say it turns out your opponent has Academy Ruins and Engineered Explosives in their deck and can just kill every threat you
present if they get to enough mana).
How to fight it:
Especially with decks with a similar late gamepotential, there’s always the option to go into macro-mode yourself, making your plays in such a way as to
maximize your own potential.
If that isn’t an option, one of the best ways to counteract your opponent’s macro-plans is to put pressure on them. In doing so, you want to give them as
few opportunities to actually trade advantageously (e.g. don’t Invigorate your Blighted Agent while they have mana open). They’ll be forced to react
without actually getting ahead in the process but also possibly leaving them unable to defend momentarily. That allows you to capitalize on the effort made
to set things up with a well-executed timing attack or draw that allows you to cheese them out (transformational sideboards can be quite excellent at
enabling the latter, say three Geist of Saint Traft in a Miracles sideboard to just jam on turn 3 when they’ve removed all their copies of Terminus).
Back From The Future
There is a lot to be learned from looking to theory from beyond the realm of dedicated Magic writing. Other games such as Go, Chess, or Poker have been
played for literally centuries. Other newer games often still have a well-developed body of knowledge we can learn from. It definitely pays to look beyond
our own nose if we’re trying to better our understanding of this wonderful game we’re all involved with, and I hope what I cribbed today was useful to all
of you.
Feel free to share ideas from other games that might bear examination, your own opinions on what I had to say today, and how useful this exploration was to
you. I’m looking forward to reading what you have to say!