I write my articles from back to front, meaning that the sentence that you’re reading now is pretty much the last sentence that I’ll be typing. I wouldn’t normally mention this, but you should know that according to Word, it has taken me six hours and forty-one minutes to write this article.*
Why is this relevant? Well, it explains why I never reject an article lightly, since I assume it takes people the same amount of time to write theirs. They spent half a day valiantly committing their thoughts to paper, and I’m saying, "Flush that work down the toilet!"
And yet reject I do — because as the guy who’s currently in charge of the Casual and Multiplayer section, it’s my job to keep it good. But in recent months, I’ve noticed a backslide in the quality of the multiplayer submissions — a steady flow of articles that make the same erroneous assumptions about what it means to throw your deck up against a gang of eager players. They treat multiplayer as if it were some weird form of duelling, or they’ll make The Assumption That Kills.
Apparently, you’ve forgotten what I told you. Okay, admittedly I told you four years ago, but when I started writing for this site I specialized in Multiplayer Theory and outlined its core concepts. Still, that was back at a time when the dinosaurs were settling into a peat bog in the hopes that some Saudis would dig them up years from now, and it was stretched over the course of about twenty articles… So I guess I can’t blame you.
So I thought I would condense my old writings into a sort of Greatest Hits of Multiplayer Theory, going over the basic principles in order to tell you why I couldn’t publish your article.
Beats the hell out of a form letter, huh?
Anyway, let’s start with the metagame. In duels, you have the usual triad of Aggro, Control, and Combo. Control beats Combo, Combo beats Aggro, and Aggro beats Control.** But what happens when you bring those old stand-bys into multiplayer?
Aggro Is Bad.
The classic Aggro strategy goes something like this:
"Ladies and Gentlemen! In the right corner, we have a classic blue/white control deck, weighing in at a slim sixty cards that feels more like forty due to deck manipulation! Innntroducing… Control!
"And in the left corner, we have OW! Hey! What are you doing? I haven’t finished — you can’t — oh, never mind, Control’s down. You win."
That’s right; the Aggro strategy is to knock your enemy out before he can put his plans into action. You come out of the gates blazing with a horde of small but efficient creatures, making him play the ol’ "Defend or die" game. By turn 5, you’ve done fifteen or sixteen damage and can mop up the last few points with a targeted burn spell. Efficient in a duel.
But doing sixteen damage on turn 5 looks a lot less impressive when you have to chop your way through a hundred life points. Yet that’s precisely what happens when you face five other players; every extra man showing up adds another twenty life you have to burn through before you can declare victory. And that’s not even counting lifegain.
Furthermore, there’s the Inverse Wreckage Rule, which goes something like this: The chances that a player is holding a global removal spell increases with each additional player. You might be able to get away with a "Big critters smash face argh" strategy in a three-person game, but eight-player free-for-alls are frequently nothing more than a series of global destruction effects. They may not even be targeting you, but that won’t save your critters from hitting the bin.
Put another way, we have Rule #1:
The larger the game, the shorter your creatures’ lifespan.
Thus, the likelihood that you can win through attacking decreases as your playgroup swells. With every new player, you have to do an extra twenty damage, and the chances that someone will cast Wrath of God on turn 5 are almost a near-certainty in a large group.
The attack phase becomes irrelevant. Aggro is about the attack phase. Therefore, Aggro is dead.
Control Is Bad.
You’d think that with Aggro dead, Control would run king, but this simply isn’t the case. You see, there’s another Rule of Multiplayer:
Rule #2:
More players = more threats, but you have the same number of cards.
In a duel, you can pack your deck with Counterspells and have a reasonable chance of countering all the threatening spells — or even the ones that could be a threat. That’s because your opponent isn’t going to draw a threat every turn; he’s going to hit land pockets, or draw cards that don’t help him now. (And if he does draw a threat every turn, chances are you’ll run out of Counterspells quickly and lose.)
But as more people start gathering around the table, the chances of a threat being cast each turn rises, once again, to a near-certainty. Someone is going to cast something dangerous — and there’s a good chance that two people might cast something sketchy-looking before you can untap again.
Given that every turn will bring a threat, there is no way you can stop them all from hitting the table. You’ll simply run out of counters. Or discard. Or land destruction. Plus, people have an irrational hatred for counters and discard and land destruction, seeing them as "not fun" strategies, and will beat the crap out of you for trying.
The classic tournament strategies simply don’t work here. Thus, Control is deader than Aggro.
Combo Is King.
With Control and Aggro gone, Combo rules the roost. Going infinite (or near-infinite) is the only way to deal an unbounded amount of damage — and the only way to do that consistently is with some set of strange cards.
Some prefer a Kokusho-based recursion engine, using deck-filtering and Patriarch’s Bidding. Others long for the classic Pandemonium/Saproling Burst trick, throwing in a Replenish and a Furnace of Rath to deal tons of damage. Others like Elf-based combos using Proteus Staff, or funny Windfall shenanigans. But whatever way you go, Combos are it.
Combos also have the bonus of getting better as more people show up at the table. Everyone else will be concentrating on killing the biggest threat, or trying to protect themselves from the biggest threat… But Combo decks allow you to hide in plain sight, laying back and not doing much until you whip out the Ultimate Beast and decimate them all in a turn. Creature combo decks that allow you to pretend to be Aggro until you suddenly assplode into twenty damage are even better.
Yessiree, combos are the best. Well, except for…
Control Is King.
"Wait," you say. "Didn’t you say Control was bad?"
Well, yeah. But I lied. I do that sometimes. What I meant to say was that classic Control is bad, since classic Control is mostly devoted to stopping threats before they hit the table, with a few backup sweeps and targeted removal spells thrown in to clean up the strays.
Control mutates in interesting ways come multiplayer, shifting from proactive to reactive. Whereas a lot of classic Control won if you could overload it with threats, multiplayer Control actually assumes that you will overload it. Since you can’t stop everything from being cast, you load up with reactive removal and protective effects (as opposed to proactive measures like discard and counterspells) to protect your route to victory.
The idea is not to prevent every threat. Instead, you shift into a twofold pattern of handling the critical threats, and discouraging people from targeting you.
This is why Pernicious Deed is perhaps one of the best cards in multiplayer — it not only pinpoint-eradicates whatever you need it to, when you need it to, but it also discourages people from messing with your stuff.
In a duel, you’re the only store in town; if someone wants to purchase a victory, they’re going to frequent your establishment, no matter how painful it is. But in multiplayer, there are several other places you can go, and thus we present the Car Alarm Theory of Multiplayer:
Rule #3:
You don’t have to make yourself invulnerable. You just have to make yourself inconvenient.
By telling people, "Hit me and you’re in a world of pain," you not-so-gently suggest that they go elsewhere. And given that there are other targets, they may well do so if it’s going to cost them too much.
(This is terrible play of, of course; the proper response to a Pernicious Deed is "get them to pop it as soon as possible," because time = power. But a lot of players are timid and won’t take any pain, living — but only temporarily — under the fatal illusion that they’ll handle the Pernicious Deed guy later. In reality they’ll never get the chance, since the only way to win is to apply constant pressure on the leading players… But that’s a theory for another day.)
Multiplayer Control is more interesting, because you cannot prepare for big fatties, hordes of small fatties, enchantments, artifacts, and combo all at once. (Not effectively, anyway.) Instead, you need to split your various threats into two basic categories:
Lethal, But Not Interfering.
If you’re coming up with an enchantment-based deck, a horde of Goblins may kill you but they won’t destroy your plan. In this case, you must have a card ready to deflect them to another player — whether that’s an early creature (a lot of people won’t attack into anything) or something like Ghostly Prison.
Game-Stoppers.
Goblins may kill you, but multiple Tranquilities can guarantee that your enchantment deck never wins. Thus, you need to put in cards that can neutralize the cards your opponents will use to neutralize you — though the precise method varies. You can wear them down via recursion, you can go for the last-minute save with a limited countering ability, you can protect them from spot removal, or you can use global removal to sweep blockers aside before you go for the kill.
(The other popular method is to go for the one-turn kill so you don’t have to worry about protecting your resources over an extended period of time — but then you’re stepping into Combo territory.)
Whatever you do, however, you need to assume that people will cast spells to wreck your win conditions, and you’ll either have to save your cards from these assassination attempts or recover very quickly.
Coalition Is God.
There’s one other caveat that comes up when you’re playing multiplayer; people working in conjunction. Two players with decks built to synergize will almost always beat two independently good decks. Three players with decks built to synergize will almost always beat a two-player deck. I shouldn’t really have to explain this; three players means three times the draw, three times the mana, three times the protection of the victory method, and three times the redundancy.
This is why the Emperor format is so broken in Magic Online. (Okay, the one-person range helps encourage some ridiculous unbreakable combos as well.)
Thus, the most efficient possible deck is a three-player combo deck.
What’s The Net Result?
Well, the funny thing is that the metagame in multiplayer is actually more restrictive than the metagame of a duel. You play combo, or you play control, and that’s it. Furthermore, you have to play certain kinds of control to win.
Wow, multiplayer sucks.
The Evolution Of Groups
Of course, this all assumes we’re dealing with pure efficiency. Note that the question I’m asking here is not, "What’s the most fun?" but rather "What decks win the most?" If you want to win large games in groups who are out to win, you play control or combo.
But that assumes that all groups are equal. The metagame in Constructed tournament play has pretty much equalized no matter where you are, thanks to the prizes and the spread of sites like — well, the magnificent StarCityGames.com — which pretty much allows everyone to know what the "best" decks are. There are a couple of luddites who don’t scout the decks, sure, but they generally don’t win.
Multiplayer, however, may or may not be about efficiency. Tournament Magic has financial and fame-based rewards to go for the throat, but multiplayer offers nothing but a nebulous "fun."
Winning is the Yoko to multiplayer’s Beatles.
See, for some people, efficiency is fun. For others, interactivity is fun. Unfortunately, the two are at odds; the less interactivity your opponent has, the better your efficiency. If you want to win, you don’t want to give them a chance to do something. (Did you learn nothing from Sligh?)
Yet some people arrive at the table precisely to do something. Which is why one of the most common things in multiplayer is group fragmentation, as people climb up the trail of efficiency and leave people behind. We all start out with aggro decks (and bad ones at that), which encourage a lot of interactivity because, well, they take forever to win. Then people start going for more control, creating lockdown decks that shut down the combat phase and/or creatures. If someone has an Internet connection and is at all inclined, they then discover that delightful little gem known as "the combo deck," to get around Mister Peacekeeper, and whoops goes the baby.
If half of you want to play for efficiency and the other half for interactivity, you will no longer playing multiplayer… At least if there are less than five of you.
Thus, many groups force an uneven metagame by pretending they haven’t discovered fire. "Raw meat good," they grunt, hunting deer with the same chipped flint knives they’ve used for years. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Hey, if it’s enjoyable, go for it. I don’t like playing in groups that are purely efficient, mainly because I do like to do stuff.
But when you write for StarCityGames.com, you can’t write articles based deck that beat artifically handicapped groups. And that, my friends, is The Assumption That Kills — the idea that your low-powered deck could take on all comers. It’s like some guy writing to a karate magazine, talking about this awesome technique that totally schooled Stephen Hawking. You have to write about a deck that, if not purely efficient, is at least efficient enough to not rely on a group that only plays aggro in order to win. Or is so amazingly original that I think people can run with the concept.
There are an infinite number of ways to suck, but only a few ways to be good. We have to publish what’s good. The seven zillionth "Here’s a green fattie" deck isn’t particularly good, and it’s not original enough to share as a raw idea. You’ve got to present a deck that could beat a reasonably competitive group, and you’ve got to be honest about how good your group really is.
(That said, remember the old "amuse the editor" rule; you don’t have to be good if you can make me laugh. Ask Rizzo or Romeo. Really.)
Anything else causes me to give you the ol’ "I’m sorry, but I must decline." And I don’t wanna do that. Because this article took me seven hours and forty-eight minutes to write***, and I don’t want to throw your work away.
So don’t make me. Okay?
Excuse Me While I Whip ‘Dis Out
I’d also like to take this moment to respond to recent feedback on the quality of our non-Premium content.
"You guys need better non-Premium articles," you type, using a keyboard with very large letters, all the while conveniently forgetting that these articles don’t just spring forth from Zeus’s forehead. You seem to believe that the articles arise from the frothy loam of the HTML; they don’t.
Articles come from people just like you getting down to business and writing them.
When we experience a drought (as we always do in the down time before a new block release), it’s because people are not writing them.
You are people. You can help solve this problem. In fact, nobody else can, because although Ted and I do our best to stay after people and get good stuff in here, we do not write this ourselves.
We rely on you.
Most of the non-pro authors on the site started here because they were a reader, just as you are now, and said, "You know, I should contribute." I know I did. And I made the site more like what I wanted it to be. In the process, I became a better player, got paid more, and eventually found a dream job.
That may not happen to everyone, but being a writer has a lot of rewards; I never got fan mail when I bought bulk pens for Corporate Express, but I get ’em from StarCityGames. It’s kinda nice.
We want people to write. Maybe you should try it. We want to hear what you have to say. It’s not always easy meeting our standards, and you may get rejected…. But at least you gave it a shot. For that, we thank you.
StarCityGames.com is a business, but it’s a business built on community. We started out bringing people together, and we still do. It’s difficult to understand these days that what you’re looking at right now is the equivalent of a high-tech Amish barn raising crossed with Norman Mailer, but that is the case. Magic writing isn’t just some distant thing; it’s a gestalt of the contributions of everyone who plays.
The front page of the site is little more than the reflection of the thoughts of the people who read us. StarCityGames.com is the mirror, and all we can do is polish it.
Step in front and let everyone see you.
Signing off,
The Ferrett
The Here Edits This Here Site Here Guy
[email protected]
* – I took some time off in the middle for a porn break and a shower, but Word doesn’t know that. Still, call it a good four hours.
** – Or Aggro beats Combo. Depends on who you talk to. I’m sure Flores will correct me if I’m wrong, since he lives for that.
*** – My daughter called while I was writing. Good thing Pete doesn’t pay me by the hour, huh?