Magic the Gathering

Theory

Magic : The Classroom – Choices – Part I

By Dan Eckstein ⋅ October 21, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

“Our choices in life are made accord­ing to our sense of our own worth” — Kay­lan Pickford

This past week I made a choice that hit my Magic life pretty hard. My local Youth League, where my daugh­ter plays bas­ket­ball, needed a coach. I vol­un­teered and I am totally excited at it. Unfor­tu­nately, that hin­ders my Magic play­ing on the PTQ level. I live in a region that is rather lack­ing in PTQ’s any­way so I only get two or three in a sea­son that I would con­sider at a dri­vable dis­tance. Chart in my usu­ally hec­tic week­end sched­ule and I am lucky to attend one a sea­son. I had it all planned out, I cir­cled the date, I even had it cleared by my wife’s work sched­ule. We get our bas­ket­ball sched­ule and BLAM there is a game right on the only Sat­ur­day that I had a chance to get to a PTQ. So San Diego will have to go to some­one else. Cursed fate.

The dou­ble bum­mer is that Sealed is one of my favorite PTQ for­mats. While many peo­ple claim that it’s no fun because it is to luck based and there is no pre­dictable metagame. I find those facets exhil­a­rat­ing. The luck fac­tor is dou­bled since you have to deal with your assigned card pool along with the ran­dom­ness of shuf­fling that is inher­ent in the game, I find the chal­lenge of build­ing from scratch much more fun than fac­ing a bunch of net­decks all day long.

Sealed also has a spe­cial place in my heart for PTQ’s. When I just started play­ing I heard about a big tour­na­ment that was going to be held in my In-laws home town. We hap­pened to be plan­ning a visit any­way so I looked into it. At that time I was play­ing with another teacher’s extra cards and didn’t even know about Stan­dard or Extended or any for­mat for that mat­ter. I barely knew that the gold sym­bol meant rare. Any­way I was very excited when I found out that I didn’t need any cards to play in this tour­na­ment. In fact when I got my allot­ment of cards at the tour­na­ment it dou­bled my col­lec­tion at the time.

Dur­ing the day I was able to go unde­feated with one inten­tional draw in the last round. I actu­ally had to be explained how draw­ing would work and I did it even though it didn’t help me. It did help a guy that was nice to me dur­ing build­ing so he could slip into the top 8 so I felt good about it. Then I sat down to my first ever draft. That’s right, never even heard of Draft before that day. The Judge had to explain all of the rules to me. I didn’t mess any thing up so I was happy. I did lose in the first round in close games. So if you’re new to the PTQ thing this sea­son is the one I would recommend.

When you build your deck in Sealed deck you’ll be mak­ing many choices your­self. How you make those choices will greatly influ­ence your results. What I would like to do today is talk about the value of those choices.

First thing that we need to get out of the way is that rar­ity is of no con­se­quence. The rar­ity of cards affects draft since we need to real­ize the prob­a­bil­ity of see­ing a card we may want for our deck ‘theme’ but in Sealed the cards you get are what you get. The fact that a card has a gold or black sym­bol only mat­ters as we try to antic­i­pate our oppo­nents moves dur­ing a game. It does not affect our build­ing deci­sions though.

I can’t tell you the num­ber of times that I’ve seen a per­son play a rare just because it’s a rare. “I was going to run Green/Red but all my non-Green rares were in White so I went Green/White instead” was actu­ally said at my local store. After play­ing, he shared his card list with me. The white pool of cards where just bad with the major­ity of his avail­able removal being in Red. At least he was right on the fact that his Green was good. I was happy to take the easy win.

At that PTQ I was rem­i­nisc­ing about ear­lier, my final deck con­tained no rares. That’s right. NONE. After I was out and I was sali­vat­ing over the mas­sive amount of prod­uct I received for my 5th –8th place fin­ish a local player with pro points asked to see the deck I had built. I had already sorted it back to col­ors but I let him see what I had. Based on my rares he thought I had gone with two com­pletely dif­fer­ent col­ors and was amazed when I told him what I really played.

When you build a Sealed deck you have to make many of your choices on Card Val­ues. This does not mean the cash worth of the cards but instead their impact on the game ver­sus there cost to our­selves. Sure you might crack open a foil Misty Rain­for­est that will eas­ily pay your entry fee but if you not in Green or Blue and you have min­i­mal Land­fall­ers it isn’t worth play­ing in your deck.

Before we get to deep into Card Value we need to under­stand that not all cards are cre­ated equal. Mananation’s own Vam­pire Nighthawk is far supe­rior to Kabira Evan­gel. While both have the same mana require­ments, power and tough­ness Nighthawk far out­shines the Evan­gel in Lim­ited play. This makes the Nighthawk’s CV (card value) higher than white Ally. Notice the rar­ity of these two cards. If you went by just the color of the expan­sion sym­bol the Kabira would win.

For today’s les­son I want to look at the first phase of Card Eval­u­a­tion. In future lessons I will dis­cuss how to com­pare the ben­e­fits of the cards. The final Card Value is weighed by com­par­ing our costs to the expected benefit.

There are three basic types of cost inher­ent in Magic. Mana, Cards, and Life. Mana of course is the most preva­lent resource with a minor­ity of cards cost­ing our­selves life or extra cards to play.

Mana require­ments are actu­ally very inter­est­ing. In fact I have heard of peo­ple apply­ing Eco­nomic struc­tures to the use/supply of Lands dur­ing a sin­gle game. The scarcity of land in the open­ing turns and our need to cast greater value spells in the early when com­pared to our desire to NOT draw a land in the late game because we would rather have spells that could effect the game. So land cards go from the most needed cards in our open­ing hand to being all but worth­less in late game makes for quite an inter­est­ing Supply/Demand curve. Find­ing the opti­mal num­ber of lands so that we have enough to con­sis­tently play our cards while not hav­ing so many that it hin­ders our game devel­op­ment is prob­a­bly the hard­est thing to do in any For­mat. And this speaks to the value of fetch lands as they allow you to thin the deck by remov­ing two land cards from the library.

Here is the point when it comes to mana. Count­ing the total con­verted mana cost (CMC) is not good enough. We really need to look at it terms of Expected Turn of Play (ETP). In a mono col­ored deck the CMC is equal to the ETP for less expen­sive cards. But cards with higher cost the CMC and ETP begin to vary with the ETP falling behind. Iona, Shield of Eme­ria for exam­ple would not be expected to hit the table on turn 8 very often even though her CMC is 8. In fact for our deck to hit all 8 land drops for the first 8 turns we would need to nearly half our deck to be land. While Blood Seeker in a mono black deck will be able to hit the table on turn two as long as it’s in your hand so its CMC is equal to its ETP.

In Sealed how­ever mono col­ored decks almost never hap­pen. The major­ity of decks are two col­ored or two with a third splash. For right now let’s think in terms of a two col­ored deck with a per­fect mana split so each land is exactly half of our deck. Now an inter­est­ing thing hap­pens. A sim­ple one drop like Hedron Crab actu­ally has a slightly higher ETP than CMC because it’s pos­si­ble that we may not hit a blue source in our hand but the other cards make it viable enough we won’t mul­li­gan. But as early turns progress our chances of hav­ing a blue source for a card like Goma­zoa increases so the ETP for Gomez is nearly the same as its CMC. The late game 7 CMC still applies but the dif­fer­ent col­ors of the deck become less relevant.

Beware of the hid­den cost of dou­ble col­ored spells. Let’s say I built a Black/White deck that had both Vam­pire Nighthawk and Kabira Evan­gel in it with equal num­ber of Swamps and Plains (8 of each). While both have a CMC of 3 the Nighthawk has a higher ETP because of the dou­ble black in its cost. In most games with 16 lands out of a 40 card deck you can expect to see 4 lands by turn 3 so we’ll have enough mana. The odds of hav­ing 2 Swamps in those lands is less than hav­ing one of those lands being a Plains.

Basi­cally, the larger the ratio of col­ored to non col­ored mana require­ments the more the ETP is affected. Ele­men­tal Appeal is an extreme exam­ple of this. 100% of Ele­men­tal Appeal’s mana cost is col­ored so while his CMC is 4 I would play him at an ETP of 7. There­fore a com­mit­ment to putting the card in my deck is the same as play­ing an Enor­mous Baloth or a Plat­inum Angel. Both are eas­ily more valuable.

If you begin to think about ETP you can hope­fully choose bet­ter cards that will have a more rel­e­vant impact on the game. I can already tell you that this will be a mul­ti­ple class les­son as I have only begun to talk about the things that I wrote in my notes before start­ing. Hope you tune in for more.

I see that class time is almost over. Remem­ber to drop any com­ments you like. I really appre­ci­ate ALL feed­back from the readers.

See you next week. Don’t be tardy or I have to turn you into the principal!

There’s the bell.

Dan is a High School Teacher who does everything he can to squeeze Magic into his schedule. Between being a Father, Husband, and Coach it’s pretty hard. Articles by Dan focus on tips and lessons for beginners that he has learned while teaching his students how to play their best. As a player Dan has a propensity to go Crazy For Combos so occasionally these articles happen as well.

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