Subject: Library Manipulation Article Date: Fri,23 Jan 98 13:20 GMT From: Jacob Busby To: An overview of Library Manipulation Jacob Busby 01/23/98 ----------------------------------- -------------------- This document intends to examine the relationship between the various deck manipulation cards in MtG, their effects upon the game and to what extent they should be considered when constructing a deck. Taking a broad perspective we can see several types of card which either directly manipulate our library or approximate a similar effect. There is the Tutor, with the ability to draw one or more specific cards, there is the draw card, a card which allows you to draw one or more other cards, thus speeding up your the rate at which you might find a particular card, there is the buyback spell, a spell which is not wasted upon casting, and there is the Search Engine, a card which allows us to examine and/or manipulate the top of your cards in our library. As ever in Magic there are cards which break the rules and fit into more than one of these categories and judgement should be used when applying any kind of classification. Tutor Tutelage -------------- A Tutor is defined as a card which collects one or more cards of a specific type. The type of card sought can be very broad (Vampiric Tutor) or very narrow (Goblin Recruiter) but, if you have a card of the appropriate type which can help you in your current predicament, the Tutor will enable you to collect this card. Many Tutors have specific weaknesses to counteract the evident advantage that they offer. The most obvious disadvantage is that many Tutors are restricted in their card choice, hence if that type of card is rendered impotent then so is the Tutor. A Worldly Tutor and Ball Lightning are valueless in the face of a Moat/Gravity Sphere combo. Likewise both Enchantments and the Enlightened Tutor are devalued if there is an Aura of Silence in play. Perhaps more subtle is that nearly all Tutors cause a loss in card advantage. In and of itself a Tutor does nothing (exception: Goblin Recruiter), it merely fetches a more appropriate card from the library. For instance if you use a Worldly Tutor to fetch a Rootbreaker Wurm and then your opponent plays a Terror to bury the Wurm then you lose two cards to your opponent's one (and that's before any other payments such as life or mana) To overcome this fault it is recommended that Tutors are used to find cards which hinder your opponent and devalue his cards. Energy Flux, for example, will devalue all of your opponents artifacts, making it more difficult to play or rely upon them. In essence this allows you to sideboard during your main game, and during the next game the ratios can be altered to incorperate more anti-atifact measures. We should also take note that the usefulness of a tutor depends upon the number of cards which it can fetch. Adding three Worldly Tutors to a deck whose only creatures are two Scragnoths is asking for redundancy. Tutors should be allocated to decks to increase their flexibility and are especially useful for collecting utility cards to cover holes in a decks defences. Adding Aura of Silence and Pacifism to a deck which already contains an Enlightened Tutor broadens your options, allowing for anti-Artifact, Enchantment and Creature defence. Quick on the Draw ----------------- Draw Cards, surprisingly enough, allow you to draw one or more cards. There are two varieties of Draw card, the permanent Draw card and the temporary Draw card. Each has different strengths to note. The most basic example of a permanent draw card is the Jayemdae Tome, a card, which in return for a small consideration of four mana, allows you to draw a card. This effect is reusable, and thus allows the controller to build up significant card advantage. More complex Draw cards of this type include Necropotence, Howling Mine and Sindbad, each having a payment or penalty associated with it. These cards typically find their best use in the mid-to-late game. Early on in the game one has not developped a broad enough mana base and excess cards may be discarded or used at inopurtune times. For this reason, many of these cards are neutered by anything which hinders mana development. Even if they themselves require no mana payments (Necropotence for instance) the cards they fetch often do. Unless you plan on filling out a your Necropotence deck with Spinning Darkness, Contagion and Ornithopters, a solid mana base is required to make best use of the cards Necropotence allows you to draw. The alternative to the Permanent draw card is the temporary draw card. The simplest example of a temporary draw card is Braingeyser. Every point of mana spent in excess of the initial downpayment of two blue mana nets you one card. Such excessive draw cards are an excellent way of gaining card advantage, but are alas one-shot. Once more, drawing many cards is of little use without the mana to use them, so beware of mana-deprivation techniques when considering these cards. Even though you may draw several lands you can only play one per turn, and are thus limitted. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that these cards are one shot - once they are used up they are gone. Hence packing several cards which allow for their reuse is a recommended strategy. Using a Braingeyser to draw five cards, then casting Relearn to bring it back to your hand, can quickly allows you to recast 'Geyser once more. With enough "Big Draw" cards, and enough graveyard digging cards, you can approximate a Permanent draw card with a higher rate of turnover. On a smaller scale than this, there is the cantrip. The cantrip is a card, which for a small mana payment, produces a (usually) minor effect and allows you to draw another card. What has been said about mana-deprivation applies especially to cantrips, as they cost themsleves in mana instead of cards. Cantrips are a good way to increase turnover of cards, and thus speed the arrival of more powerful cards. Despite this cantrips should be avoided unless they serve a particular purpose in your deck, as Tutors provide a far more effective way of locating key cards. Use of a Wordly Tutor in a Green Speed mana/Big creature deck is far more effective than adding a Pyknite. One merely gives you a 1/1 creature and a chance of drawing a Crash of Rhinos, the other guarantees you will draw them. Nevertheless cantrips are suited to some decks due to the lack of an appropriate Tutor or that the effect of the Cantrip fits into the deck. In general, unless a Cantrip requires a specific timing (Eg. Arcane Denial) you should cast it as soon as possible rather than waiting, as this speeds your draws and thus increases your chances of finding a key card. Given time and luck, Draw cards will ultimately locate specific cards As they are not limitted to specific card types, Draw cards are particularly suited to diverse decks, which might not have enough cards to suit any specific Tutors. Draw cards are also a good way of recapturing card advantage. The expense in mana of most Draw cards should be accounted for when considering these cards for a specific deck, and makes these cards most valuable during the mid-to-late game. The Payback of Buyback ---------------------- A Buyback spell is a spell which allows you to cast it for at two different costings. The first costing is the base cost of the spell and if paid the spell has its regular effects. The alternative, and generally steeper, costing of the Buyback has an additional effect, that should it be paid, and the spell is successful then the Buyback spell is retained in hand. Hence Elvish Fury grants one creature +2/+2 for G, however if G4 is paid then that creature gains +2/+2 and Elvish Fury is kept in the hand, rather than sent to the graveyard. A few proxy-Buyback spells do exist, most notably, Hammer of Bogarden and Death Spark. In and of itself a Buyback spell does little for Library manipulation However, with a little consideration a Buyback straddles the fence between the Cantrip and the Tutor. Treat a Buyback spell as a Cantrip where you know that the next card you draw will be a copy of that Buyback spell. A Buyback spell offers reliability, whereas when you cast Flare your next card could be that game-winning Fireball or it could be yet another mountain, when you succesfully cast Searing Touch (at an inflated price) you can guarantee that you will recover Searing Touch once more. This reason demonstartes why the buyback costs of many spells are more expensive than their cantrip counterparts. With the exception of Whispers of the Muse, Buyback spells do nothing to shrink your deck. Instead, Buyback spells offer a consistent reource, such as damage prevention, invulnerability or a minor source of damage. Buyback spells cannot locate specific cards within your deck but they can maintain the presence of certain abilities once they are found. Once more Buyback spells are expensive in mana. One is given some lattitude in this matter as Buyback spells can be cast at a lower cost if one is willing to forgo their return. Because buyback spells will be re-used during a game the increase the utility of cards which either benefit when a particular circumstance arises (such as Ivory Cup or Lightning Cloud) or cheapen the cost of spells (such as Stone Calendar or Ruby Medalion) Additionally Buyback spells can be foiled with countermagic or the sacrifice of their intended targets and a deck relying heavily on Buyback spells should take this into account when it is constructed. Seeking out Search Engines -------------------------- A Search Engine is a card which, upon the most basic of levels, allows you to examine the uppermost cards of your library. The majority of Search Engines go further than this and allow you some sort of manipulation. To some extent it can be argued that the Tutors are just a sub-category of Search Engine, that they allow you to look at all of the upcoming cards in your library and manipulate your library so that one card is put to the top. The majority of search engines do not search this deep however. Depth, durability and manipulation abilities are the most important factors when considering Search engines. My personal experience recommends Ancestral Knowledge as the best Search Engine, its depth of ten cards and its manipulation powers are second-to-none. Other strong contenders for good Search Engines include Soldevi Excavations (as a land it is difficult to kill unless you opponent uses Armageddon or the Orb), Sylvan Library (also durable, can function as a Draw card if you are high on life) and Scroll Rack (excellent manipulation abilities but dependent on the number of cards in your hand - best bolstered by Draw cards) Search Engines work particularly well "Guess-the-top" Draw cards and Tutors. In the first instance you can use your knowledge to draw additional cards and increase your card advantage, in the second instance you can wait until your the cards on top of your library are of low utility and then utilise the Tutor to shuffle your deck. Search Engines are also an effective way to keep Instants and Sorecries safe from discard decks. By continually storing the best cards on top of your library until they are needed you can ensure that your best cards are to hand when you need them, but will not be lost to discard effects. Search Engines do contain several inherent weaknesses. Their effects are dulled in the presence of Library destruction cards. Like Tutors they do not serve as a road to victory in themselves, they merely help you to locate cards that will win the game for you. On many occasions if you have more than one Search Engine out they may work at cross purposes. Nevertheless Search Engines are particularly potent when backed up with Tutors and Guess-the-top draws and by their very nature can be utilised to prevent you from drawing further Search Engines. Use of Library Manipulation --------------------------- So far we have concentrated on the different varieties of library manipulation available to us. It is now time to consider the effects of library manipulation upon the game. This can be done by considering the following very simple model. Imagine we are trying to construct a Green-White creature-based deck with various colour hosing creatures to aid our efforts. Our intial creature choice might look something like this: 4 Freewind Falcon (Vs. Red) 4 River Boa (Vs. Blue) 4 Scalebanes Elite (Vs. Black) Obviously this is a very simple illustartive model and in real-life we would chose creatures which would cope best against certain deck archetypes (Eg. Sligh, Stompy, Forgotten Orb, etc.) Nevertheless we can note that against a non-red deck we face our River Boas and Scalebanes Elite face a decreased utility. By using a few library manipulation cards however, we can "buck the odds" Consider the following model: 3 Worldly Tutor 1 Freewind Falcon 1 River Boa 1 Scalebanes Elite Now we still have 4 chances to get the best card to do the job, but we have limitted our chances of drawing inefficient cards by 75 percent. Furthermore we have freed up an extra six slots in the deck for other cards and creatures. Before we continue it is important to add a note of caution. Several points need to be addressed. Firstly, reliabilty is only one reason for putting four cards of one type within your deck. A second reason for doing this is to have spares available if the original is eliminated. For this reason it is a good idea to add a little graveyard retrieval to your deck. A good way of filling out those six slots you have created would be to consider this model: 3 Worldly Tutor 2 Freewind Falcon 2 River Boa 2 Scalebanes Elite 3 Elven Cache Our chances of drawing "the right card at the right time" have increased from our starting model, the chances of drawing a low utility card have dropped and we have backup in case anything goes wrong. If we get out a Falcon and our Red opponent Disks it away we have three to four chances of drawing either a Tutor or another Falcon and three chances of drawing an Elven Cache to recover the Falcon - and this is before we consider the possibility that we have one of these cards in hand. In the above example we have considered cards which decrease in power when not against key decks, but are not completely useless. Even if you draw a River Boa against a non-blue deck, you will still have a 2/1 Regenerator for service. Let us examine what might happen with an Enchantment hoser. Let us propose our initial deck had the following arrangement: 4 Reclamation (Vs. Black) 4 CoP: Red (Vs. Red) 4 Choke (Vs. Blue) In this set of circumstances several cards in our deck will be dead cards if our opponent is not playing the correct colour. What good is a Circle of Protection: Red against a blue opponent? To counteract this we must diminish our chances of drawing negative cards to a minimum and provide a back-up use in case we do draw them. Good options in this circumstance include Stormbind and the Jalum Tome. The "Enchantment" variant of our deck should look like this: 3 Enlightened Tutor 1 Cop: Red } A second draw of any of these cards would be 1 Reclamation } a wasted draw, as would the draw of a 1 Choke } valueless card. 3 Elven Cache 3 Jalum Tome Once more we have only "spent" 12 slots but we have broadened the flexibility of our deck, maintained the chances of drawing the correct card and minimised our chances of drawing an inappropriate card. The effect of adding Draw cards to your deck is to increase your card advantage over your opponent. In a fast deck - like a Swarm style deck you can recover swiftly from opponents deck mass-creature destruction and play your creatures faster than your opponent can deploy his creature destruction. In a defensive blue-white Weissman clone you are able to draw your defenses swiftly and hence can react to whatever threat your opponent poses. In either case increased draws lead to you having more options than your opponent, ultimately increasing your chances of overcoming them and thus winning. In terms of finding that key card for your current predicament if you have a Jayemdae Tome (for example) and use it once each turn you have doubled your throughput of cards and consequently doubled your chances of finding the card you need. Little more need be said on Draw cards as most people are familiar with the nuances of Card Advantage already. Search Engines, the subsection of our examination, are also the most difficult to adjudge. With a reasonable variety of Search Engines to choose from we shall consider the Sylvan Library, although much of what is said here can be applied to other Search Engines. The Sylvan Library, much like a card with cumulative upkeep, is a card which loses utility as play progresses. This is best demonstrated with an example. Consider the following fairly average green creature deck. 24 Forest 10 One mana creatures (Rangers/Ferrets/Mtenda Lion) 8 Two mana creatures (Bears/Dervishes/Archers) 6 Three mana creature (Centaurs/Armodon) 5 Four mana creatures (Apes of Rath/Ernham Djinn) 2 Sylvan Library (Manipulation) 5 Cheap utility spells (Emerald Charm/Giant Growth) 4 Game-winners (Overrun/Hidden Path) N.B. This isn't a great deck - it's just meant to be an example. Suppose you draw a Sylvan Library in your opening hand. By playing it on the second turn your can shift your game-winning cards and large creatures back until you have the mana base/support cards to implement them, thus moving low utility cards back and speeding up the arrival of high utility cards like Forests to supplement your mana base and cheap creatures to improve your offense. Later in the game the utility changes, cheap creatures drop like flies and with six forests out you don't need any more. At this point in time Game-winners and large creatures gain utility and the Library can be used to accelerate these potential game winners and decelerate the arrival of low utility cards. Relative utilities continue to change throughout the game, dependent on players actions. If your opponent casts Armageddon then all your Forests rise in utility and your expensive spells drop in utility once more. Sooner or later, however, you clog the top of your library with low utility cards. At this point in the game the utility of the Sylvan Library plummets. The point of the Library is to find high-utility cards and if it is prevented from doing so then its utility falls. To offset this disadvantage it is necessary to reset the Library by shuffling (or otherwise manipulating) your deck - which is why the Library works so well with Tutors. Nevertheless there is the further consideration of the overall utility of the Library, and once more this decreases the longer the Library has been in the game. To demonstrate this imagine we use the deck above to play against another average deck. Let us presume that your opponent is not playing with any mana inhibiting cards, consequently the longer the game goes on the lower the utility of any lands we draw. Thus by the late game we have nine high-utility cards in our deck (The 4 Game Winners and the 5 big creatures), with careful use of the Sylvan Library we have drawn and played 3 of these (which have either met with a Counterspell or a Terror) before the top of our deck becomes clogged with Forests. Using a Nature's Lore (Tutor) to shuffle our deck we recover some utility for our Sylvan Library, however, having pulled 3 of our high-utility cards from the deck we have diminished the overall effectiveness of the Library as there are only 6 high-utility cards left to find - we might find, say 2 more, before we need yet another shuffle. Hence the Sylvan Library has a decreasing utility the longer the game goes on. To counteract this drop in utility several things can be done; a deck can be built out of high-utility cards which are nearly always useful whenever they are drawn (Eg. a burn deck), one can use Draw cards, along with something to feed them to, to increase the utility of otherwise worthless cards (Eg. Rowen plus Stormbind), or one can play for a quick game in the hope that the decreasing utility of the Library is ultimately negligible. With regards to finding key cards the analysis of the Search Engine is somewhat simpler. Presuming that the Search Engine allows you to reorder your deck so that the key card is on the top of your deck, a Search Engine operates in the same way as a Draw Card. Sylvan Library, for instance, lets you see the top three cards, and consequently allows you to draw the 'Key' card two turns earlier. Each time the library is reset (ie shuffled, or possibly Millstoned) it is as if you have re-cast the Library and hence can 'draw' the top three cards in your deck once more. Conclusion ---------- Like mana ratios in Magic, different decks require different levels of Library Manipulation. A fast deck, like a Swarm or possibly a Sligh deck, might only need a draw card or two in case the game lasts too long and extra cards are needed to provide that final kinesis. At the opposite end of the scale combinatoric decks like Turbo-Stasis and Prosperous Bloom require extensive library manipulation in order to get the right cards in hand as soon as possible or they would simply be too unreliable to be a viable tournament deck. The general conclusion seems to point to the fact a deck where all the cards have more or less the same prominence needs only a small amount of library manipulation, whereas a deck which derives its strengths from some combination(s) of cards, requires a large amount of library manipulation, either to find the combination, or to quickly build its defences against faster decks. When considering how many cards should be put into any deck one can either analyse the content of the deck and surmise the general strengths and weaknesses of the deck, thus noting where Library Manipulation might be important to cover holes in the offense or defense, or one can start at a general level and get a "feel" for how heavy the manipulation should be, in much the same way that some players do for mana ratios. ^ _________ __ ___ ____ _____ ______ _______ ________ /__ __/ /__ __ ___ ____ _____ ______ _______ ________ __/ / / . / __ ___ ____ _____ ______ _______ ________ /___/ /____/ __ ___ ____ _____ ______ _______ ________