As you might imagine from the title, this article was inspired by something Zvi Mowshowitz said the other day…
[Actually, I should take a break here and comment that Zvi and I met once through Mike Flores, and that I was part of a Katz’s Deli excursion with those two gentlemen and half a dozen others. However, I got the distinct impression that after I departed that day, Zvi probably turned to Flores and asked, “now who was that guy again?” So this article should not be interpreted as a statement that Mark Young has the Zvi Seal of Approval. Zvi’s comments appear here only because they are in the public domain at his LiveJournal. The rest of this column is my opinion and mine alone. That is all.]
Ahem. As I was saying, Zvi had something interesting to say about the card Damnation, which you have all probably seen already and had fits over. Mark Rosewater says in this column that Zvi did not want the card to see print. As it turns out, Zvi’s opinion is quite a bit stronger than that:
Damnation is a mistake. It is a mistake that Standard will have to live with for two years. It is a mistake that Extended will have to live with for seven. It is one Legacy will have to live with forever. That was my opinion at the time. That is what I told everyone who would listen, and everyone who wouldn’t listen. And that is my opinion now. Printing this card severely damages the position of creatures in all of these formats, it makes Blue/Black a monster, and it cripples White as anything but a beatdown or minor utility splash color. It is very bad for the game. That does not mean that it will "break" any format, which it won’t. I don’t have a deck from my time at Wizards that can prove any of this. This is all theory. And of course, the people will adapt. Life will go on. But it will be less interesting; it will be less colorful and less dynamic than it would otherwise have been.
If you like Magic, then you should click the link and read the whole thing, but that is enough of an excerpt for the purposes of this article.
Now, I should say right now that I have no beef with StarCityGames.com own misterorange, Evan Erwin. I love his “Magic Show” series of video articles. Obviously, I am saying this because I am about to criticize Evan’s comments in response to Zvi’s post:
I’d love for you to do this more often, highlighting cards that you had issues with (good and bad) with development. Absolutely fascinating.
As for mistake? Jitte is a mistake. This is more like a calculated risk, albeit one we’re going to be living with for a loooong time.
And yeah, U/B is going to be absolutely bonkers in BOTH Standard and Extended. Dr. Teeth couldn’t have asked for a better tool.
The reasons all of this caught my attention is because something similar happens with every new set: open-ended speculation. People always start exclaiming when a new set comes out, “wow, how [good/bad] would [new card X] be for [existing card Y or deck Z]!” In fact, on the very day that I wrote this, someone came up to me at a City Champs event and asked, “so, what do you think of Planar Chaos so far? I like that new River Boa!” and another person in a Magic Online Premiere Event suggested, “Green aggro is insane now.”
With the increasing sophistication of online websites designed for spoiling new sets, you can now hear these sorts of questions weeks before the prerelease. It’s not all idle speculation, either; there will be many cards that never attain higher trade values than they do on Saturday afternoon.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. StarCityGames.com ran a preview article of its own a couple weeks back, and later this week our own Ben Bleiweiss will give the low-down on cards that he expects to attain high trade value this weekend. I myself will explore the mtgsalvation.com spoiler often this week, to make sure that I know what to expect at the prerelease.
However, I think certain types of speculation reflect the wrong sort of mindset, if you are looking to improve your play.
Mistakes were made?
Evan’s comparison of Damnation with Umezawa’s Jitte is very notable. Let me repeat it for emphasis: “As for [Damnation being a] mistake? Jitte is a mistake. This is more like a calculated risk, albeit one we’re going to be living with for a loooong time.”
Except that’s not exactly what Zvi was saying. He’s as aware as anyone that the Jitte (like Skullclamp before it) was a mistake born of last-minute changes and insufficient playtesting. He’s not saying that it is a mistake that could simply be solved by banning. He’s saying that the card is a mistake for the health of the game.
There are levels of mistakes. If, on one of my grad school exams, I slip on the last step of a complicated proof, I’ll get penalized but will probably still get an A. If, however, I don’t know that two plus two equals four, then I’m most likely screwed. Was the Jitte a “two plus two” mistake? It’s not so clear. It was pretty bad for Limited, since the artifact removal in the format was so poor… but on the other hand it was a rare, which balances the unfairness to a good degree. In Block Constructed, as it turned out, the Jitte was the only card that gave beatdown decks a chance. In Standard, the Jitte definitely obviated some strategies that people enjoyed playing, but the presence of Tooth and Nail did so also.
However, no matter what format you’re playing, losing to the Jitte is no fun at all, and designers and developers certainly have a responsibility to keep the game fun. In that respect, Jitte was definitely a mistake: losing to it was completely devoid of fun, and discouraging to the non-pro players who spend the most money on cards. It wasn’t as bad as Affinity in that respect, but it was still pretty bad.
This is what Zvi is talking about: the threat is not that Damnation could be banned, but that, much like the Jitte, it will be an un-fun experience to play against. The reason for that is mostly because of the color pie: the nature of Black is mostly to go one-for-one with its removal. The color has had mass removal before, but usually under some limiting condition (Mutilate, Infest) or at a discouragingly high cost (Decree of Pain, Plague Wind). Black’s ability to go X-for-one is usually tightly controlled, because if it can combine its abundant one-for-one ability with a sweeper, two things happen: (a) strategically Black has a large advantage over any other color, and (b) no one will want to play creatures.
This is why Black has mediocre card drawing ability – I doubt anyone would argue that Moonlight Bargain and Phyrexian Arena are much worse than what you could get if you paid the equivalent amount of Blue mana – and why every time that Black card drawing has gotten out of hand, the resulting decks have usually gotten out of hand. This is why White can have a Wrath without harm: because its one-for-one ability has been almost nil since Swords to Plowshares left print.
An example smaller in scale is Kamigawa Block Constructed. Once Saviors of Kamigawa entered the format, it introduced Kagemaro, First to Suffer. This was the best Black sweeper in some time. Kagemaro had a powerful effect on the format; previously Green-based splice decks, like the one with which Gadiel Szleifer won Pro Tour: Philadelphia, had a hard time winning within the fifty-minute time limit available to the PTQ player (remember, the Pro Tour had seventy-minute rounds). Even though the format developed some variety later in the PTQ season, most of the decks that emerged – Deck-X, Mono-Blue, and Critical Mass, to name a few – were anti-Kagemaro decks more than they were trying to beat any other card in the format, even the Jitte.
So, Zvi is not saying that Damnation is a mistake because “Dr. Teeth couldn’t have asked for a better tool.” He’s saying that Damnation may well be a fun-killing mistake, like Kagemaro was for Kamigawa Block Constructed… but an order of magnitude worse. No one card is to blame, but rather the nature of what Black is supposed to be able to do with respect to the other colors.
It’s worth noting that Zvi could also be wrong. Just because he was right about Yawgmoth’s Bargain and Invasion Block Constructed does not mean that the guy is infallible. Since I just finished talking about the Jitte, I should point out that Zvi did not give that card the highest rating in his set review. More recently, regarding Aethermage’s Touch, Zvi wrote that it was one of those cards with “enough potential that you want to run out, buy four copies and start breaking formats.” Obviously, that has not turned out to be the case, although there is still plenty of time.
The Big Picture and You
So Umezawa’s Jitte may or may not have been a mistake, Damnation may or may not be a mistake, and Zvi may or may not be wrong about both of them. Am I ever going to say something concrete, and assuming that I do, what will it mean for you?
The key here is not the cards themselves. You almost never look at a card in a vacuum; even Yawgmoth’s Bargain needed a little help from Grim Monolith and Academy Rector. It’s much more valuable to consider the set as a whole, or the format around a card, if you want to speculate about its value (especially its trade value).
A good example lies with the split-second cards from Time Spiral. As Psychatog was quite good for most of the past Extended season, a natural reaction is to think, “well, Sudden Death and Sudden Shock means Tog is over and done with.” However, it’s more important than that: Wild Mongrel, Arcbound Ravager, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Goblin Legionnaire, and others all join the Tog in suffering from Sudden Shock Syndrome.
With Krosan Grip and Wipe Away in the format also, it becomes clear that activated abilities became a lot less important. You still see them, mainly in decks where they are not essential but provide a powerful supplemental effect (Affinity, Scepter-Chant), but Wild Mongrel and Psychatog have both felt a powerful impact. Conversely, since Boros was one of the best decks available last year, Sudden Shock was clearly the most important of the Split Second cards, and the one that I tried to make sure I soonest obtained the most copies of.
With that in mind, what effect will Damnation have in Standard? It’s a powerful out against Teferi, which is certainly a format-defining card. However, the fact that Green is the “new” haste color in Planar Chaos is very important, given its mana acceleration and the Giant Solifuges it already had. Also, Red receives a bounce spell and a Giant Growth, which when paired with Red’s aggressive nature, could make sorcery-speed removal a lot worse.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to get your hands on four copies, or that you shouldn’t be trading them away for high value. It is, after all, the cheapest Wrath effect since the original, and the original has been one of the essential cards for everyone to have in their collections since the beginning of tournament Magic. I just wouldn’t let myself get fleeced over it.
This is all an imperfect science, so much so that the word “science” doesn’t really even apply. That’s why I gave this article the title I did: it refers to the big differing factor between Zvi, Evan, myself, and the people who type “Green aggro is insane now” in Magic Online chat rooms. I wasn’t really thinking about the issues in this article until I read Zvi’s post; many of you might not have thought about them at all.
Zvi, however, has been thinking about Magic cards like this for a decade. That kind of thinking works equally well as when you’re looking at a spoiler, as when you’re designing decks for a brand-new format, as when you’re metagaming against the regulars at Friday Night Magic. The good players are doing it, even if they may not be aware of it: although my Tuesday teammate Jamie Wakefield claims to be the sort of guy who just likes to bash with Green creatures, you can bet he was thinking this way when he hit upon Secret Force as a workable deck in the format.
It’s not just about fitting a new card together with an existing deck, or liking a new card because it plays the same way as your favorite old cards. It’s about the format that you are attacking, about the strategy you want your deck to have, about the roles that the colors are taking against one another. In short, it’s about the Big Picture.
Postscript
Our Scouse editor said yesterday that “I’ll let the columnists tell you all about the cool stuff they have planned” for the new weekly format. I wish I had some kind of awesome master plan, and maybe at some point I will, but for now it’s going to take some getting used to writing weekly. Next week I have planned a primer on Ritual Desire in Extended; beyond that, if there’s anything you’d like to see that you think is in my wheelhouse, let me know! My contact information is below.
This article written while doing lots of different things, but it was finished while I was Top 8’ing a Momir Basic Premiere Event on Magic Online.
Later.
mmyoungster at aim dot com
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