#mtgtheory

(I'm sure I'm not the only one that's had this idea so if you've seen it before my apologies) MTG is totally cannon to our world and our plane is the most technologically advanced plane but no ever comes here cuz the most fucked up monsters are the people that live on the plane, not to mention our plan absorbs magic. So we're over here as like the one plane ever planeswalker has agreed "Yo if you don't fuck with that one no one is gonna think less of you"

The reason Storm Crow is so powerful is because he is Gandalf. 

Where do i get this you ask? Why it’s right there in The Two Towers!

Theoden, whilst under Saruman’s spell, greets Gandalf thus: 

Probably the most famous article ever written about magic is Mike Flores’ “Who’s The Beatdown?” from the Dojo in ‘99. The cards are different, but the point is the same, so if you haven’t read that yet, do it now. Flores wasn’t really thinking about 16 years in the future about a non-tournament singleton format, and the crossover between his audience and the EDH player base is small. My goal on this blog is to help translate articles like his over to the casual crowd in a way that makes their kitchen table games more enjoyable and lets them see and understand why their games go the way they do. 

The idea of the article in one sentence is that there are decks that, when faced with other decks, take the role of control or beatdown. There are going to be decks that perform better than yours as the game draws on, and there are going to be decks that perform worse than yours. Mono-red goblin rushdown is generally going to lose more of its games that go to turn 20 than Naya midrange goodstuff, which is going to lose more long games than esper control. EDH appeals to players who don’t necessarily care if they win even a single game they play in any given night, but understanding who the beatdown is should allow you to milk the most enjoyment out of the decks you already have in the games you play. 

The added decks in a multiplayer game mean that people are going to be less inclined to play low to the ground aggressive strategies. This should make sense; Goblin guy has to deal 120 damage to win the game with three opponents, but only has the standard amount of cards to do so. For every one of his cards, he has to deal with three opponent cards. One-for-one style counter based control decks have the same problem, as one counterspell doesn’t match up well against 3 opposing threats. In a world where nearly every game ends with an explosive finish where the total damage count is upwards of 500, it pays to find out how the game got to where it is using a short checklist. 

1. Find out who is building up the largest amount of mana

2. Find out who can generate the most card advantage in the cards they are playing

3. Find out who has the most explosive, hard to deal with finisher before you die

Then rank your deck amongst the others at the table, filling in information as you go. This bare bones checklist is done best when it’s done from top to bottom; usually people have to make mana before they net cards, and so forth. Even in a format of epic length matches and hours of durdling that some playgroups contend with, there will be a deck that tops out each metric, or sometimes all three at once. That deck is the deck that wants the longest game possible. By allowing the game to drag on, you facilitate that deck’s eventual big finish, and aid your own eventual defeat. The attitude in some groups is that turning creatures sideways is sacrilegious, because it makes the game ‘less fun’ if one or more players lose before everyone gets taken out in a comically large explosion fifty turns down the line. I can’t tell you what you find fun, but I can say that you do yourself a disservice by not grabbing the reins and striking when your deck is at the most powerful. If you realize that you are ramping slower, netting less cards, or have weaker finishers, you are probably the beatdown. If you want to win, you have to deal with your opponents in the order that serves you the best. Perhaps you and another deck that doesn’t score high on the metrics have to kill the combo player before he locks you out, but can allow the board wipe control mage to keep chugging along for the time being.

I want to get back into the habit of writing for y'all, so this article is going to be a little shorter than most, despite being about a topic which I think it extremely deep and relevant.

I was watching the finals of GP Prague yesterday, in a match between American Geist and UR Tempo-Twin.

Their deck lists can be found here: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/gppra14/welcome#1

The vods for the finals are nowhere to be found, but the coverage is here: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/gppra14/welcome#6

In game 3 of their set, the Twin player, Kachapow, has a Vendilion Clique in play, staring down Horvat's Restoration Angel. Both players are stuck on 4 lands, but two of Kachapow's are Tectonic Edges. Kachapow opts to attack Horvat's mana base, cracking both Edges with the first's ability on the stack to rob Horvat of two of his lands. Horvat proceeds to Lightning Bolt Kachapow's Clique, and the game ends a couple turns later as Restoration Angel's 3/4 body crashes in again and again, before the game is finally ended in the favor of the Geist player.

A friend and I were talking about the Tectonic Edge play, and how when you're behind on board, (Clique isn't going to trade 1-for-1 with Restoration Angel), blowing up your own lands is an extremely risky play.  If the Geist player presents a removal spell off a new-found red mana source, your Clique (and thus your hopes of blocking and killing Restoration Angel with the help of a Bolt, a Grim Lavamancer, or an Electrolyze) evaporate. The play is defensible, if extremely risky, though Kachapow had complete knowledge of Horvat's hand from his Clique. If he deprives Kachapow of his red mana sources, he blanks the known Lightning Bolt and can guarantee (except for if a red mana source is drawn) that the Angel can't attack into the Clique without extreme risk.

The game state was complicated, and if you can find the video coverage, check it out. What I ended up thinking about, however, was that no matter how Kachapow sliced it, he probably had to 2-for-1 himself to kill the Restoration Angel. My friend objected immediately to that idea, stating that an Electrolyze combined with any other 2-3 damage card keeps the card advantage neutral, because Electrolyze draws you a card. That was when I started to think about other kinds of 2-for-1s, and in this case, the big problem is that Kachapow, in order to kill the Angel, would have to Mana 2-for-1 himself in addition to possibly 2-for-1ing himself in the traditional sense of card advantage, in order to overcome the Angel. Keep this in mind as I go on a long-ass tangent.

Game 2 (I didn't see Game 1, though the written coverage shows that it was fairly irrelevant to the point) was won and lost on mana and resource denial. Twin was constantly attacking Geist's manabase, and quickly gained a more pro-active position in the matchup, which is exactly what both of these decks ideally wanted to accomplish. Twin wants to disrupt mana and field development until it can randomly win the game. Geist wants to play a Geist and defend it until it wins the game. Both of these game plans are characterized by the term Tempo.

Tempo is a lot of things. Tempo is part mana-advantage. Tempo is part time-advantage. Tempo is part controlling the things that matter.

If you use your mana in an efficient manner each turn, by not letting any of it go to waste, you are generating a mana-advantage over an opponent who does not, because each turn they don't tap an available land for mana and utilize it, that turn's mana disappears forever.

Time-advantage is crucially tied to mana-advantage, and some theorists say it's the same thing. You're creating a time-advantage when you do something and your opponent isn't. If you play a creature, and your opponent plays a land, and you each do that for four turns, you've probably won the game. You're taking advantage of speed, or time, to start winning the game, presumably over an opponent who is not enacting their winning game plan as quickly.

If those first two points sound like an aggressive deck's winning mechanisms, ding, a prize for you! It's the third which creates the unique deck that is Tempo.

Controlling the things that matter is a tricky business. Decks tend to do it differently. Twin only cares about cards which impede their combo or directly result in it losing the game due to life loss. Twin is very concerned about beating cards like Path to Exile and Abrupt Decay while it is attempting to put a Splinter Twin on a Pestermite. A card like Batterskull, on the other hand, tends not to phase them until they're at just four life, because the life gain their opponents gain is irrelevant in the face of infinite damage. A deck like American Geist is far less bothered by a card like Abrupt Decay, which can't deal with Celestial Colonnade or Geist of Saint Traft or Restoration Angel. The things which matter to the Geist player are the things which kill their singular threats, such as an instant-speed Pestermite to block Geist of Saint Traft, or Tectonic Edge to deprive them of their ability to cast or protect their threats with expensive spells like Cryptic Command. Batterskull is a huge problem for a deck which likes to attack on the ground with Geist or in increments of less than 4 with Vendillion Clique, Restoration Angel, and Colonnade. Both decks must control the things which try to stop their game plan.

Having outlined the basics of tempo, when two tempo decks collide, if both players attempt to stick to their tempo-based strategy, the player who is the most mana-efficient, the most time-efficient, and controls the most important things is going to win. Card advantage, which normally stands as a counter to Tempo-like game plans, doesn't figure into the equation.

Restoration Angel became a problem the Twin player cared about when he decided to use both of his Tectonic Edges on the Geist player while he was staring down the Angel. By setting both himself and his opponent back to the Mana Stone Ages, the Twin player made the choice to deny both players the ability to do mana-inefficient or expensive plays. He did this while losing the war of time-efficiency: Restoration Angel is far more likely to survive, by nature of its four toughness, than Vendilion Clique with just one toughness, and thus continue to pressure his opponent's life total. What Kachapow discovered, much to his horror, was that while his opponent could deal with his threat in an extremely efficient way, he had no tools of his own that could do the same to Restoration Angel. He was going to need two cards, but more importantly, two cards worth of mana, to beat the Angel, and by depriving himself of the mana he needed, he lost control of the things that mattered in the game. Something which wouldn't have normally been a big deal, like a Restoration Angel, became a game-ending threat because Kachapow could no longer mitigate its effect OR win the game, because the Splinter Twin combo requires 7 mana over 2 turns.

He needed to be able to make a mana and card-inefficient play in order to keep the game at parity and kill Restoration Angel, but loss sight of that reality because he mis-evaluated the things that mattered, fixating on the same land-domination that worked so well for him in game 2. Without a clear view of what he really needed to control, he lost his ability to control anything, a problem which his opponent exacerbated by a follow-up Tectonic Edge on the Twin player's constrained red sources as Restoration Angel rained down destruction. 

What I don't want to do is villainize or attack Kachapow, though, because while he almost certainly made a mistake, he understood his alternatives could conceivably be quite rough. With no combo pieces at his disposal, Restoration Angel would be something which would demand him to make plays that could put him intensely far behind in terms of cards, mana, and time, and thus swing him into a position that would let his opponent have a potentially game-dominating grip of the things that mattered: his life total, which spells get to resolve, and when his mana is tapped and untapped.

Maybe Kachapow saw what lay down at the end of the road that started with a mana 2-for-1, where an Electrolyze and a Lightning Bolt on his own turn against a tapped-out opponent slowly but surely turns into a total loss of control of the game, and the top of Horvat's not revealing a land was an ultimately better line?

Hey all! I know it's been something ridiculous like over half a year since I last posted, but I'm interested in writing this again, so I'll try to have some content for y'all out in the next few days.

In the meantime, enjoy the map of Modern in the link above!

For those who've been wondering what I'm playing in Standard right now, I have Mono-Blue and Mono-Black devotion totally assembled. My love for Sphinx's Revelation decks has fallen dramatically by the wayside in light of their shift away from pro-active wincons and the resurgence of the evil Andrew Cuneo-style Elixir of Immortality lists.

In Modern, I've finally succeeded in assembling the entirety of Jund, which I intend to pilot at the Grand Prix in Richmond, come March. I'll be doing periodic updates on matchups involving the deck and about Modern theory in general, because the format is so deep and vibrant that I actually can't get enough of it.

Expect articles about all three decks some time in the near future.

"What about decks without good, proactive plans? The much-loved Mono-Black Control archetype jumps to mind. Mono-Black Control was a powerful deck during the era of Torment when it had access to cards like Mind Sludge, Nantuko Shade, Cabal Coffers, and Skeletal Scrying. I played Mono-Black Control in that Block format, and my deck had an exceptionally powerful game plan of using Mind Sludge to tear my opponent's hand apart followed up by using the mana generated with Cabal Coffers to chain Diabolic Tutors with Mirari and bury my opponent under card advantage and card selection.

That's why Mono-Black Control was good then—it had a cohesive, powerful, and, most importantly, proactive game plan that was good no matter what the opponent was doing. A deck full of Mutilates and other removal may seem like a good idea in a creature-heavy metagame, but how does its plan hold up when it plays against anything else? What is its plan, even? Mike Flores touts the "Destroy All Monsters" school of thought, but that's not a realistic plan in anything but the most tightly defined fields. Your deck needs to be working toward something rather than just answering what your opponent does.

I was toying with Mono-Black Control toward the end of the last Standard block, using a plethora of removal and discard to try to keep myself alive and eventually win with something like Sorin or Griselbrand, but I frequently lost games that seemed under my control simply because my deck didn't do anything. Too many of the cards I drew were entirely reactive in nature, and many of them could line up poorly with my opponent's threats. My "plan" boiled down to trying to survive until I could play Griselbrand, which wasn't consistent or realistic enough. A far cry from the days of Mind Sludge and Cabal Coffers. Compare this to a more recent incarnation of Mono-Black Control, the deck played by Conley Woods to a Top 16 finish at Pro Tour Gatecrash. While I'm not sure if the deck is actually any good, he had a much more proactive plan. Instead of focusing on using all of his cards to answer what his opponents played, he planned on using Crypt Ghast to power out huge threats early like Griselbrand and Rakdos's Return. His plan relied on a very fragile 2/2 creature for four, so it may not be stable enough to work in the long run, but at least he had a vision in his head of what he wanted his deck to do and built toward that." -Brian Kibler, from a recent Premium article, linked here: http://www.starcitygames.com/article/25833_The-Number-One-Rule.html

Kibler is brilliant, and the rest of the article has made its way into my library of resources. As usual, I can't espouse enough the value of Premium, blahblahblahfanboying.

That being said, he makes a truly phenomenal point succinctly here. I myself have struggled with the Mike Flores School of Monster-Slaying. It feels like it should work; it just does: but it doesn't. Kill All Monsters is a naive plan in a complex metagame, and the reason for this is it's not a proactive gameplan, and it doesn't have the resources to become proactive. Kill All Monsters doesn't have a goal in life: it just sort of rolls with the punchs until it dies or until it wins. And that's not good enough, most of the time.

It's no secret I'm addicted to Sphinx's Revelation. The sheer potency of the card has made it all but impossible for me not to play it. But... Esper grows old: the problem with such a delightfully consistent and powerful deck is it gets a little boring after a while. And, I'm the world's worst Flash player, so the popular American-color decks are sort of out of the equation. I've been hankering lately for some Geist of Saint Traft: he's not fair in any way, shape, or form, and I love him to little itty bits. I toyed around with American Midrange decks, but none of them felt quite right (though mainboard Unsummon, Snapcaster Mage, Geist of Saint Traft, and Blind Obedience is delicioussssssss). I've also experimented with Esper Midrange and Hexproof-Enchantment builds, and while Obzedat is very good, those decks are not.

So I went down the third path, where Loxodon Smiter does his best Knight of the Reliquary impression, Geist of Saint Traft does the "Kill-You-Dead" thing, and Thragtusk and Restoration continue their sordid romance. Centaur Healer and Wolfir Avenger allow us flexibility to switch roles in the aggro and control matchups, and Dead-Eye Navigator and Zegana provide a level of power and flexibility in the midrange mirror that is practically unheard of. We also get the second best removal spell in the format, Azorius charm, a couple of safe copies of Supreme Verdict, and the Greedy Mana Base Glue, aka Farseek. Kessig Wolfrun is every control deck's nightmare, and post-board, you play 7 inherent Flash creatures, as well as Alchemist's Refuge, because there's nothing quite like EoT Thragtusk into Zegana.

Zegana is Sphinx's Revelation with legs. (She's also MTG's Shakira, because Oh Baby When You Draw Like That~) I can't praise her highly enough. In a deck like this, she represents a looming, ever-present threat to bury your opponent in advantage. You can Sphinx's Rev EoT against control, and either you get to draw cards or they counter it: then you play Zegana. It's worth noting that you must be careful when you play Zegana: your opponent removing your only creature in response makes a 6 mana 1/1 that cantrips. Thragtusk's synergy with Zegana is powerful: your opponent might be able to keep you off drawing 6 with a removal spell, but unless they remove the token, you draw at least 4, which is a 7 mana value off Sphinx's Rev.