Magic the Gathering

Theory

Magic : the Classroom — Part IV

By Dan Eckstein ⋅ November 11, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

In the past few weeks I’ve began a series of lessons designed to give insight into a way of eval­u­at­ing the lim­ited envi­ron­ment. I would sug­gest tak­ing a moment and brows­ing Part I, Part II, and Part III.

While Part I and II must have been pretty straight for­ward Part III really stirred the pot. Just to be clear to all, I LOVE the inter­ac­tion that comes from peo­ple mak­ing com­ments on these arti­cles! I encour­age EVERYONE to put their two cents in. It really makes us all bet­ter. Even if we are disagreeing.

The main gist of Part III was to eval­u­ate crea­tures based on their ‘Expected Turn of Play’ or ETP. We looked at Power and Tough­ness and Abil­i­ties and how each changes the ETP of the crea­ture. With the idea of max­i­miz­ing each and every crea­ture within our sealed deck.

How­ever, my words seemed to come across wrong. Some of the read­ers assumed that I was say­ing that a crea­ture whose Power and Tough­ness ben­e­fit equaled its ETP was supe­rior to all crea­tures that didn’t. If this were the case we would all be build­ing decks made of Llanowar Elves, Rag­ing Gob­lins, and Death­greeters. One soli­tary Pyro­clasm would be the end of us all.

The idea is to build a deck that effec­tively uses each turn to max­i­mum poten­tial. Hope­fully gain­ing enough of each ETP so that on every turn we can cast a spell wor­thy of our cur­rent mana sit­u­a­tion. Sadly we degen­er­ated into com­par­ing indi­vid­ual cards instead of see­ing the ETP of a card as a guide.

So this week we will look at the “sit­u­a­tion­al­ity” of a card. Every player can think of a time when they got really excited and pumped for a card only to find it under-perform? What leads to this? Why doesn’t this card work bet­ter? Most of the time it’s because the card is only use­ful given the right cir­cum­stances. If we truly want this card to be the “Bomb” that it could be we need to make sure our deck does every­thing to gen­er­ate the desired out­come. In sealed this is much harder than con­structed of course because we are lim­ited by the choice of cards in our pool.

Flex­i­bil­ity

Use the exam­ple of Guul Draz Specter. It has an ETP of 4 or 4.5 depend­ing on our mana base but only yields a 2/2. We expect to add a Turn for Fly­ing but the sec­ond abil­ity of the card can make a pro­found impact. If we can get our oppo­nent Hell­bent we now get a 5/5 for 4 with the fly­ing as a huge bonus. If our oppo­nent is plan­ning on hold­ing back cards we can make do with the 2/2 since it puts our oppo­nent in a Sta­tic sit­u­a­tion. Draw, get Hit, dis­card, draw next turn etc. It should be fairly obvi­ous that Guul Draz is a good card on his own but he also makes cards like Mind Sludge and even Des­e­crated Earth more tempt­ing to play. If every­thing went per­fect any­way. How­ever what is really likely to hap­pen is Guul Draz will draw out a removal spell or face a larger flyer and never really get the party going.

This is because Guul Draz is only a mod­er­ately Flex­i­ble card. He does what he does really well but doesn’t really play out more than a 2/2 flyer in most com­mon sit­u­a­tions. Don’t get me wrong I would still play him and I con­sider him one of the stronger choices in Zendikar Black. The poten­tial upside is worth the risk and if you con­sider him just a 2/2 flyer then your oppo­nent has to “waste” a removal on a lowly 2/2.

So some­times we want to grab a card that is use­ful in all sit­u­a­tions. Cards that are always usable and almost always have a strong effect on the game state are Sta­ble. Sta­ble cards max­i­mize their flex­i­bil­ity by doing what their sup­posed to do all the time. Blade­tusk Boar is a good exam­ple of a very sta­ble card. His ETP is high com­pared to what you get but he will always serve as a good aggres­sive card. When you play the Boar you know what you’re going to get.

A card that would be con­sid­ered inflex­i­ble would be some­thing like Beast Hunt. If you have a high crea­ture count in your pool and your crea­tures are all bet­ter than what you could have put in the ETP of 4 slot then it’s playable. But not really. The prob­a­bil­ity of get­ting the 3 for 1 is just too small. You’re really only likely to see one crea­ture on those three cards and mean­while you’ve spent your turn 4 doing noth­ing to effect the game state.

Time Line

The tim­ing of a card is also crit­i­cal in our eval­u­a­tion of poten­tial. Cards all have an ETP but that does not nec­es­sar­ily mean that their tim­ing has to be on that turn. A cards effec­tive­ness changes dur­ing the course of a game. Most play­ers under­stand the con­cepts of Early, Mid, and Late game but rarely do we think about these things for indi­vid­ual cards. Con­structed is pol­luted with decks that are made for each of these sce­nar­ios each seek­ing to max­i­mize its poten­tial while forc­ing their oppo­nents into the right stage of the game. We can’t exactly force our decks into one of these sce­nar­ios in Sealed but we can keep it in mind as we build.

A card like Gob­lin Guide is crazy good in the Early game. His draw­back is liv­able when your oppo­nent has a full hand. But he starts to fal­ter come midgame as his Power/ Tough­ness isn’t all that big any­more and your oppo­nent would love to fil­ter his draws any­ways. Come late game he is almost a waste but he does have a lit­tle poten­tial since the life points ratio is so low in most long game sce­nar­ios. IF our oppo­nent has low life AND has allowed a clear board then a Guide can some­times haste his way in for the win.

While Terra Stom­per is at the other end of the game. Basi­cally it is unable to be cast in the early or mid stages so it is rel­e­gated to the late game. Once he sticks though your oppo­nent is on a fast clock. In many late games he is almost overkill how­ever but that’s okay just be cau­tious pick­ing too many cards like Stom­per. It will do you no good to have this card in hand as your oppo­nent beats you before it’s even cast.

Liv­ing Tsunami is an inter­est­ing study in Mid-game cards. On turn 4 or 5 when it is expected to be played it is a power house. 4/4 fly­ing should hap­pen at best on turn 5 or 6 most of the time but here we have a poten­tial turn 4. But that is why there is a draw­back and it is a time stop­per. Ignor­ing other effects like Har­row we have basi­cally tied our­selves to our cur­rent num­ber of lands for the rest of the time we want to keep the Tsunami. Before using the Tsunami we need to know that we will be con­tent stay­ing in midgame while our oppo­nent con­tin­ues to grow his mana poten­tial. Of course there are syn­er­gies out there with some lands but that will need to be in a future lesson.

The card I love the most for all stages of game is Vam­pire Nighthawk. It comes into play poten­tially dur­ing the early stages (though at the end) and at that point he is the school yard bully harass­ing all of the other poten­tial fliers that may stop him. In midgame he can be both aggres­sive and defen­sive depend­ing on the board. And still in the late game he rep­re­sents removal with some very val­ued life gain at a time both play­ers find their totals dwindling.

Action Ref­er­ence

Another view­point that we need for our cards is what type of action they are designed for. While the action of a game is con­stantly in flux our abil­ity to assess and play accord­ingly is crit­i­cal. Ever reader of Magic should have read “Who’s the Beat­down” by Mike Flo­res. If you haven’t you should. In this arti­cle Flo­res describe how crit­i­cal it is to know your role as a player in the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. I would say it’s just as crit­i­cal to know the role of your cards and what game action the would be best in.

For ease of dis­cus­sion we will look at 4 basic sce­nar­ios for our pos­si­ble actions.

Offen­sive Action – If you’re in this role you are the “beat­down”. You find you self ahead in the red Zone and use this to your advan­tage. Crea­tures with high Power and good eva­sion are best for you. The Blade­tusk Boar men­tioned ear­lier def­i­nitely shines in this type of role.

Defen­sive Action – Just the oppo­site. Here we want crea­tures that can halt our oppo­nents early attacks so at some point in the future we can get to our higher ETPs and start our dom­i­na­tion. Giant Scor­pion is a good card for this type of game. His 3 tough­ness allows him to sur­vive a lot of sce­nar­ios while his death­touch will often stop your oppo­nent from risk­ing a bad block­ing sce­nario so there­fore will hold his forces back.

Stand­still Action — At some point a good defen­sive deck will need to go into offen­sive mode to win the game. The stage where nei­ther player feels com­fort­able attack­ing because of the pos­si­ble ram­i­fi­ca­tions is called the Stand­still. Dur­ing this stage both play­ers are wait­ing to draw some card that will tip the scales in their favor. This is where a card like Bold Defense can truly shine. With­out the kicker it tips the scales a lit­tle in your favor. If you can man­age to kick it you will break through almost any stand­still situation.

Race Action – Some­times both decks feel they are the beat­down and instead of stop­ping their red­zone antics they just take turns bash­ing face with the hopes that their deck will push the oppo­nent to Zero first. As a spec­ta­tor love to watch games like these develop. I always find it inter­est­ing to note that if the game field was sta­tic one player is the obvi­ous win­ner. The slight­est bit of math would show this. Then why does the los­ing player stay in the race? Because the game isn’t sta­tic. One well timed removal or a card like Crypt Rip­per with its Hasty super Growth can tips the math in your favor. How­ever in Sealed we need to know how many cards we may have to tip the scales. If we don’t have these cards then we should avoid the race.

That con­cludes today’s class. I real­ize that many of the con­cepts dis­cussed today are open to inter­pre­ta­tion and vary sig­nif­i­cantly in actual game play. It is my hope that you have gain some insight from this dis­cus­sion and can also develop the intu­itive feel for the cards as well. For you home­work post a sit­u­a­tion and say what card in Zendikar would serve you best at that moment.

Go ahead a sneak out a lit­tle early today. Just be quiet down the hall so the Prin­ci­pal doesn’t get mad at me.

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.

Useful Author Links Read more by this Writer! Subscribe to this Writer's RSS Feed

Last 4 posts Magic the Classroom – Multiplayer Magic the Classroom – Free Time is Test Time Magic the Classroom – Tax Man Cometh and Naya Fog Magic the Classroom – Extended Excitement