Magic the Gathering

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From the Grave of Tempo: Momentum

By Dan Emmons ⋅ February 5, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Recently, the term tempo has come under fire as being incred­i­bly ambigu­ous and as a result, some­what use­less when used in the­ory dis­cus­sion. While I per­son­ally believe that tempo, as a term, is con­cep­tu­ally under­stood, the need to quan­tify it is present for the­ory buffs and play­ers try­ing to under­stand very com­plex board position.

Mana Use in Aggres­sive Decks

Let’s say you’re play­ing a reg­u­lar UW Con­trol on RG aggro matchup, with you as the con­trol player. Lets also assume you do noth­ing of rel­e­vance for the first few turns, and your oppo­nents turn 1–4 goes as such:

Turn 1: Stomp­ing Grounds, Kird Ape, Go

Turn 2: Swing, For­est, Kel­don Maraud­ers, Go

Turn 3: Swing, Moun­tain, Burning-Tree Shaman, Go

Turn 4: Swing, Land, Rum­bling Slum.

Clearly a good start for the Red-Green deck. I think, intu­itively, most play­ers can agree that the Red-Green player has started the game with a lot of tempo. Or, if we’re not using the word tempo any­more, let’s call it some­thing else. Thesaurus.com says that momen­tum is the only word close to tempo that even might fit in a Magic arti­cle, so I’m gonna go with that. What makes this a very high–momen­tum start, I believe is the effi­cient use of mana each turn. The RG player has a one, two, three and four drop. Not only did the RG player use all his mana, each of them is capa­ble of doing high amounts of dam­age for their costs.

Now, back up for a moment to good old Phi­los­o­phy of Fire and we remem­ber that if you aver­age all your burn cards in your burn deck, you come up with an aver­age dam­age value that your cards are worth. Given the fol­low­ing deck:

20 Moun­tain
40 Light­ning Bolt

You get your aver­age dam­age per card to be 2. This tells you, that, on aver­age, you need to draw 10 cards to have enough burn in your hand to deal twenty and win the game. Now, this is either turn 3 or turn 4, depend­ing on who played first. How­ever, you can’t actu­ally win the game on turn 3. You need not only an aver­age of 10 cards, but you also need the mana to cast seven Light­ning Bolts. Assum­ing you make a land drop turns 1–4, you have pro­duced 1, then 3, then 6, then 10 mana. A good momen­tum start for this deck would clearly involve 1 Bolt turn 1, 2 on turn 2 and so on until the oppo­nent is toasted. This deck uses its mana very effi­ciently; each time this deck taps a Moun­tain, it is to do three damage.

I believe that a deck’s momen­tum requires a corol­lary to the Phi­los­o­phy of Fire. Phi­los­o­phy of Fire tracks the aver­age dam­age per card. I believe that, for momen­tum, we also need to track the aver­age dam­age per mana. This applies specif­i­cally to mana spent for effect. In other words, if you aver­age out the amount of dam­age over the total cast­ing cost of all your spells (not lands), you should know about how much dam­age you should be doing every time you resolve a spell. In our first deck, the aver­age dam­age per mana is 3. Lets cal­cu­late the aver­age dam­age per card and dam­age per mana of a dif­fer­ent deck:

20 Moun­tain
20 Shock
20 Incin­er­ate

The aver­age dam­age per card is about 1.7, and the aver­age dam­age per mana is also, 1.7 ([20*2 + 20*3]/60), which is the total dam­age in the deck divided by the total con­verted mana cost of all your spells). This means that each time you draw a card, you have, in essence, drawn about 1.7 points of dam­age. It also means that each time you cast a spell, you are deal­ing about 1 point of dam­age per mana. There­fore, you can expect to need to tap 11.8 (lets round to 12) mana to win the game. As we have already dis­cussed, you don’t actu­ally have access to 12 mana until turn 5, and that’s assum­ing you have the abil­ity to uti­lize all your mana each turn.

The key to momen­tum, I believe, lies in the uti­liza­tion of your mana. If we can break down mana into being worth dam­age, we have a met­ric for wasted mana. Each time you did not tap mana this turn, you have slowed your dam­age deal­ing. If you waste enough mana, you slow the turn at which you gold­fish your oppo­nent. For exam­ple, in the Shock/Incinerate deck, you need to use 12 mana to win the game. If you miss your third and fifth land drop, your avail­able mana looks like:

Turn 1: 1 land

Turn 2: 2 lands (1 + 2 = 3 total mana)

Turn 3: 2 lands (1 + 2 + 2 = 5 total mana)

Turn 4: 3 lands (1 + 2 + 2 + 3 = 8 total mana)

Turn 5: 3 lands (1 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 3 = 11 total mana)

And on turn 6, you should have enough mana to win the game. This lack of mana has con­tributed directly to a loss of momen­tum, described most clearly by the fact that it has taken you a whole extra turn to gold­fish your oppo­nent. Now let’s say you get land flooded, and don’t cast a spell on turn 1, cast a Shock on turn 2, noth­ing turn 3, and an Incin­er­ate turn 4. You have effec­tively wasted a mana turns 1 and 2, three mana on turn 3, and two mana on turn 4 by leav­ing some of your Moun­tains untapped. This means that at the begin­ning of turn 5, you have only spent 3 mana, and still require another 9 to win the game, which means at the very least another two turns, assum­ing you have spells to cast.

I’ve shown that by the same mea­sure we equate dam­age to cards, we can equate dam­age to mana. It takes a cer­tain amount of mana to win the game as the aggres­sive deck. There­fore, avail­able mana, being a fixed quan­tity, is equated to a mea­sure of time.

So, to summarize:

• Momen­tum is the mea­sure by how quickly your deck is win­ning the game, assum­ing at that point in the game you are the beat­down. A deck wins quicker by effi­ciently using mana (time). In essence, momen­tum is a mea­sure of time.
• Mod­el­ing Momen­tum for Con­trol Decks (or who­ever is NOT the beatdown)

Thus far, we have defined momen­tum in terms of an aggres­sive deck try­ing to win the game as fast as pos­si­ble. But the deck that is assigned the con­trol role in the matchup has a dif­fer­ent goal all together. While the aggres­sive deck is try­ing to do twenty to the dome as fast as pos­si­ble, the con­trol deck is try­ing to sur­vive to make the game go long. Put a dif­fer­ent way, an aggres­sive deck attempts to make their oppo­nent lose twenty life, while the con­trol deck attempts to lose only nine­teen life. Clearly, life gain changes that equa­tion, but the point still stands.

The deck that falls under the con­trol role in the matchup attempts to dis­rupt the opponent’s momen­tum by inval­i­dat­ing their resource use. Let’s use the fol­low­ing deck as an example:

40 Shock
20 Moun­tain

Dam­age per Card: 1.33; Dam­age per mana: 2; Mana to win game: 10.

Now, left alone, let’s assume this deck will gold­fish on its turn four. What hap­pens when the mono-white player plays an innocu­ous Kabira Cross­roads? All of a sud­den, the mono-red player needs 11 mana and (about) two more cards to win the game. What about a Coun­ter­spell? It more or less does the same thing to the Shock deck. It requires the burn player to wait another turn and draw another 1.33 cards. The dif­fer­ence lies in card advan­tage. Card advan­tage and how it relates to momen­tum is a whole other topic that will require a whole arti­cle. Another day.

Let’s look at Remand. Remand is the quin­tes­sen­tial tempo card; let’s look at four sce­nar­ios involv­ing Remand. Both play­ers have one Plains and two Islands on the Bat­tle­field, and one card in hand. Yours is Remand, and your oppo­nent does the following:

Sce­nario 1: Oppo­nent casts Savan­nah Lions and you Remand it.

Sce­nario 2: Oppo­nent casts Youth­ful Knight and you Remand it.

Sce­nario 3: Oppo­nent casts Pega­sus Charger and you Remand it.

Sce­nario 4: Oppo­nent passes the turn.

The first thing that must be done is estab­lish who the beat­down is, but we can assume since you are play­ing remand and he is play­ing crea­tures that you are the con­trol deck. In each case where you cast Remand, you are actively gain­ing two life, because you are delay­ing the crea­ture by a turn, and there­fore pre­vent­ing it from swing­ing for one turn. I believe the momen­tum you gain is NOT based solely on how much your oppo­nents crea­ture costs. If you Remand the Lions he draws Coral Mer­folk, then you haven’t gained any­thing other than the two life, because your oppo­nent is able to tap all of his mana next turn for the Mer­folk and the Lions. The same thing hap­pens if you Remand the Youth­ful Knight and your oppo­nent draws Zephyr Sprite. How­ever, if you Remand either the Youth­ful Knight or the Pega­sus Charger, and your oppo­nent draws Coral Mer­folk or any white crea­ture, you have not only gained the ini­tial two life from delay­ing the orig­i­nal crea­ture, you have gained an addi­tional two life because you delayed the sec­ond crea­ture from get­ting played on this turn. Depend­ing on the con­tents of your oppo­nents deck, you would have to make the choice of whether or not Remand­ing the crea­ture chews up a rea­son­able amount of your oppo­nents momentum.

Momen­tum is a met­ric defined by who the beat­down is. The beat­down player attempts to increase his momen­tum in the course of the game, while the con­trol player tries to dis­rupt the oppo­nent. This directly means that the con­trol player wants the game to go long, and the beat­down player wants to end the game as soon as pos­si­ble. What momen­tum does is give us a mea­sure for how our plays help us to achieve the goals of whichever role we find our­selves in.

Sign­ing off,
Dan Emmons
Dan Emmons Magic gmail com