Magic the Gathering

Theory

The Magic Walkthrough – The Philosophy of Firewalking

By Lauren Lee ⋅ January 25, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Most peo­ple I ask would say Kor Fire­walker is a good card. Before I go any fur­ther, let me show it to you again. This is ManaNation’s own exclu­sive spoiler card.

It’s prob­a­bly a good card since most peo­ple agree that it is. But what MAKES it a good card? What does it DO exactly? How does it com­pare to other sim­i­lar cards like Vedalken Out­lander, Bur­ren­ton Forge-Tender, or Sil­ver Knight? This is what I’m going to dis­cuss today.

In order to fully under­stand a card like this, as decep­tively sim­ple as it is, I think an entire phi­los­o­phy must be under­stood. This card has a back­story that stretches through much of Magic lit­er­a­ture and theory.

It encom­passes the bat­tle between White and Red, two enemy col­ors with a long hatred for one another. White has had many crea­tures in the past that hate on red.

These have seen play in the past but only accom­plish a frac­tion of what Kor Fire­walker can accom­plish. What makes Fire­walker dif­fer­ent? The life­gain aspect? We’ve seen that in a card, too.

This card has seen fre­quent use in mono-red side­boards for the mir­ror. And it looks sig­nif­i­cantly worse than either of the two crea­tures above, but it’s prob­a­bly more effec­tive at what it’s sup­posed to accom­plish. What makes this card worth run­ning at all? It looks like pure card dis­ad­van­tage. It doesn’t “do any­thing” other than gain you life.

The Phi­los­o­phy behind why Dragon’s Claw is a good side­board card against red decks is what Mike Flo­res and Adrian Sul­li­van described as The Phi­los­o­phy of Fire. The Phi­los­o­phy of Fire, as Flo­res stated, “speaks about the rela­tion­ship of trad­ing cards for your opponent’s life. Specif­i­cally, the goal will be to trans­late a hand into a dead man.” But it can be gen­er­al­ized even fur­ther, as I will demonstrate.

To under­stand the Phi­los­o­phy, one must under­stand how a red deck works. The entire goal of a mono-red aggro deck like Red Deck Wins is to use as many resources, as effi­ciently and as quickly as pos­si­ble, to get the oppo­nent to 0 life. This means every mana spent, every card spent, and every turn has to get trans­lated into dam­age some­how in order for the red deck to win. And hope­fully after all the resources are spent, your oppo­nent has died.

Tak­ing some com­mon exam­ples from a RDW deck­list, I’m going to show how each card trans­lates into a set of resources equiv­a­lent to an amount of dam­age. For crea­tures like Plated Geo­pede, the amount of dam­age trans­lates into a range (if I knew the EV of a turn-two Plated Geo­pede I would put that in the table). There’s no real telling how much dam­age a Geo­pede is going to get in for, but we’ll see how it com­pares to the other spells in a bit.

There is an addi­tional cost that I left out from the table. In each of these sce­nar­ios, assum­ing you have mul­ti­ple options, if you play one card, you lose the oppor­tu­nity to play a dif­fer­ent card given your resources. The option you didn’t choose is the oppor­tu­nity cost you paid to play the card you did choose. “In gen­eral”, it’s just best to max­i­mize your mana effi­ciency by try­ing to use as much of your avail­able mana each turn. This doesn’t always hold, but if you go by that guide­line, you prob­a­bly won’t lose that much in terms of oppor­tu­nity cost.

Play­ing crea­tures is inher­ently dif­fer­ent from play­ing burn spells when you’re under the Phi­los­o­phy of Fire. Crea­tures are like the “mid­dle men” of deal­ing dam­age. They have to pass a few more obsta­cles on the ground, namely block­ers and removal spells. How­ever they come with a bonus – they have no tech­ni­cal limit to the amount of dam­age they can do. One Plated Geo­pede can hit for 0, 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, et cetera, depend­ing on how unop­posed it is and how many fetch­lands you have to crack.

In essence, a crea­ture that stays on the board has the poten­tial to be equiv­a­lent to mul­ti­ple burn spells. In this way, they act as inher­ent “card advan­tage” for the red player. The red player wants to max­i­mize dam­age using as few pos­si­ble resources, and crea­tures are thus a good invest­ment. For a Plated Geo­pede, you only pay 2 mana and spend only one card, but the amount of dam­age this one card can pro­duce is “lim­it­less”. (In order to unleash this poten­tial, red play­ers often “give up” cards like Light­ning Bolt, which nor­mally trans­late to 3 dam­age, to use on oppos­ing crea­tures to clear the way.) Of course Plated Geo­pede has other lim­its – you only get one attack phase per turn, and the size of Geo­pede changes based on the lands that enter your side of the field. It also doesn’t have haste, so it takes a turn to start working.

An ele­gant demon­stra­tion of the Phi­los­o­phy of Fire is encom­passed in the card Gob­lin Guide. A num­ber of play­ers ini­tially shunned the Gob­lin Guide because of the sick­en­ing amount of card advan­tage it could pro­vide the oppo­nent. But red play­ers fol­low­ing the Phi­los­o­phy of Fire didn’t care. Because it cost them one mana and one card for a huge amount of poten­tial dam­age start­ing as early as a red deck can start, turn one. For red decks, this is a rel­a­tively good deal. The draw­back was real, but it didn’t con­flict with the red player’s main inter­est – killing the oppo­nent quickly.

Red Deck Wins basi­cally com­bines all the most effi­cient card dam­age spells and crea­tures and crams them together in a deck. This is how it wins. Now, let’s take the same chart and assume a Kor Fire­walker is on the field to block.

Of course, Kor Fire­walker can’t pos­si­bly block all of the crea­tures on the field by him­self. So pre­sum­ing it’s not block­ing every crea­ture, just the one deal­ing the most dam­age, the red deck can get some value out of the rest of its spells. But that doesn’t change the fact EVERY spell the red player plays will be reduced in effec­tive­ness by one point of damage.

Every point of life gained with Fire­walker is equiv­a­lent to gain­ing a frac­tion of a red player’s card. On top of that, the life gain from Fire­walker costs no mana, while the red player is spend­ing all the mana he can to deal dam­age. The amount the white player has to invest in Fire­walker is WW and one card, and for the rest of the game, Fire­walker accu­mu­lates value with no added input. The red player has to put in mul­ti­ple cards and lots of mana to negate the life Fire­walker gains and dam­age he prevents.

It’s hard to find another card that com­pletely shuts down an archetype’s strat­egy so effi­ciently. It’s pos­si­ble that the red player can still some­how man­age to scrounge up the addi­tional resources to kill the white player even with a Fire­walker on the board. This would require a bit of luck, but it might hap­pen. Unfor­tu­nately, white, given some time, can sta­bi­lize very eas­ily in the mid to late game, when the Phi­los­o­phy of Fire stops being nearly as effec­tive. Red needs its win­dow of oppor­tu­nity in the early turns before oppos­ing decks can sta­bi­lize. Time is of the essence. Kor Fire­walker can start work­ing as early as turn 2, barely giv­ing red decks a chance to get any dam­age in before all their spells get a lit­tle worse for their cost.

So how does Kor Fire­walker do against other decks run­ning red, namely Jund?

Jund doesn’t really care about the life gain part so much; it never tries to trans­late its cards directly for dam­age. Jund would rather accu­mu­late as much card advan­tage as pos­si­ble. But a lot of its favor­able trades come from being able to remove per­ma­nents effi­ciently. In Jund, the only card that removes Kor Fire­walker is Mael­strom Pulse, which costs more than than the lit­tle “BearClaw.” Given that, there is no doubt the Fire­walker can seri­ously impact Jund’s abil­ity to push through dam­age or its abil­ity to race against a life-gaining, nearly unblock­able crea­ture – which, in a white deck may be more threat­en­ing than just a 2/2. I expect it to be decent but not game-breaking like against mono red decks.

The answers in gen­eral to Kor Fire­walker are kind of inef­fi­cient. The best option is prob­a­bly Death­mark if you have access to black mana. For pure red decks, you sim­ply have to run Unsta­ble Foot­ing and hope they block with it. In response to blocks, you can stop dam­age from being pre­vented and kill it. For a while, I thought Blaz­ing Torch could be an answer, but in that case, the crea­ture is doing the tar­get­ting, so a red crea­ture can­not tar­get a pro-red one, even if the dam­age is col­or­less and would kill it. Mono-red may have to resort to splash­ing another color for a bet­ter answer.

Lauren Lee, editor of Mulldrifting, has been playing Magic competitively since Conflux and in that time has developed a strong passion for the game and in teaching others to be the best players they can be. Sightings of her have been recorded at various events around NYC.

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