Magic the Gathering

Theory

Would you play the Angel?

By Lee Steht ⋅ January 6, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Dur­ing my hia­tus from writ­ing Trick told me I must write an arti­cle soon or I would lose my only fan. Since I am all about sat­is­fy­ing and sup­port­ing oth­ers, espe­cially my sole devo­tee, I thought I’d write a lit­tle pas­sage dis­cussing a sit­u­a­tion I’ve been dis­cussing with a few others.

Dur­ing my last PTQ qual­i­fier for Pro Tour Kyoto I was dis­cussing a sce­nario with my table­mate, here’s the setup:

So far dur­ing this match every play has been even. You both have not missed a land drop and you are even with crea­tures. Nei­ther of you have taken dam­age or rel­a­tively lit­tle dam­age. It’s now turn 5 and you have lain your fifth land. Within your hand you hold a Bat­tle­grace Angel and a Cav­ern Thoc­tar but NO 6th land. Your oppo­nent has mul­ti­ple unknown cards in hand. Also keep in mind nei­ther one of you has gained par­ity or card advantage.

The ques­tion I ask is, “Do you play your Bat­tle­grace Angel?”

Sur­pris­ingly, I asked twenty dif­fer­ent play­ers dur­ing that PTQ and 14 of them said “Yes, you should.”

In the­ory: You play the Angel and have an attacker gain +1/+1 and Life­link both of which are obvi­ously some­thing that can turn the game into your favor. How­ever, in this sce­nario, what you may not know is that if your oppo­nent does build decks like the “aver­age” pro. Chances are that he/she will have an answer to your Angel. Look­ing at many of the lim­ited deck­lists from Worlds, Pro Tours and GPs the stan­dard is 13 to 17 crea­tures, 7–10 spells, with ~17 lands. An open­ing hand of 7 would likely have 2–3 lands 2–3 crea­tures and 1–2 non-creature spells.

So, the ques­tion you should be ask­ing is “What are the chances of my oppo­nent hav­ing an answer?” What are the chances that the ONE card in your opponent’s hand is the Sil­ver Bul­let to your plan for VICTORY? Through 200 games of lim­ited Magic, I have kept record of the first ten turns of the games for both me and my opponent.

Keep in mind that there is a siz­able per­cent­age of play­ers miss­ing a land drop between turns 1 and 6 AND that not every­one has a Bat­tle­grace Angel.

So what I’m really try­ing to rep­re­sent is the life expectancy of a crea­ture (with tough­ness of 4 or higher) that is dropped on turn 4–6.

From my analy­sis: 74% of the time the FIRST major threat you play is dealt within 2 turns.

So, in the sce­nario where you played your Angel, your Angel, sta­tis­ti­cally, dies by Turn 7. You will net 2 life gains from attacks before it’s dealt with. Which is hardly game win­ning, sure it can some­times make the dif­fer­ence but it isn’t by any means a nail in the cof­fin. Now based on this infor­ma­tion, IF your Bat­tle­grace Angel is your BEST crea­ture, you might want to think twice about send­ing her off into bat­tle so early.

Next, con­sider this, AFTER your oppo­nent has deliv­ered death to your first crea­ture of 4+ tough­ness and you decide to lay your sec­ond beast:

From my analy­sis: 35% of the time the SECOND major threat will be dealt within 2 turns.

Now what this means is that (bar­ring Wrath effects) there are very few “Sin­gle Card” removal spells in this format.

Bant Charm
Bone Splin­ters
Executioner’s Cap­sule
Grixis Charm
Obliv­ion Ring
Soul’s Fire (sit­u­a­tion­ally)
Resound­ing Thun­der
Vio­lent Ultimatum

That doesn’t mean that your oppo­nent can’t dou­ble block or uti­lize a com­bat trick to kill your threat. It just means that when you lay your first major threat you MUST con­sider the like­li­hood of removal. Now in games 2 and 3 you should have much more infor­ma­tion to drive your deci­sions. Unless you have sev­eral major threats in hand and you don’t mind los­ing them, one after another, you MUST think about your oppo­nents options as well as your own. If you see 4 mana open and 1 of them is a white source, you may want to rethink attack­ing into Resound­ing Silence.

One way to assist in your deci­sions is by know­ing the answer. I’ve seen many peo­ple play with Onyx Gob­let yet very few play with Thought­cut­ter Agent. Now I’m not say­ing you should start pick­ing the Agent within your first 5 picks in a draft, but that many peo­ple under­value him. I’m say­ing that a sin­gle acti­va­tion of the Agent can tell you a great deal. And the added bonus to gain­ing this infor­ma­tion is that your oppo­nent loses life!

Ok, now back to our orig­i­nal sce­nario. With no 6th land in sight and a Cav­ern Thoc­tar or Angel await­ing bat­tle, what do you do? Let’s look at the like­li­hood of draw­ing the nec­es­sary mana.

At turn 6 you will have drawn 5 or 6 cards in addi­tion to your open­ing 7. If you’re on the play you’ve got 12 cards and if you’re on the draw you’ve got 13. If you’re run­ning the stan­dard 17 out of 40 land count you will have drawn 29% of your lands. This means that 44% of your remain­ing deck is land so you have less than a 50% chance of draw­ing your 6th land on your next draw. But the sta­tis­tics say you will draw a land within the next 3 turns. Could you wait?

Ide­ally, you play the Thoc­tar on turn five, then play the Angel on six and send your Cav­ern Thoc­tar to bat­tle with a guardian Bat­tle­grace Angel at his back, and you face ME in the finals only to lose because I killed your Turn 5 Angel.

–Lee