Subject: Re: [long] School of Card-Disadvantage Date: Fri, 05 Jun 98 17:09:11 GMT From: jsternal@nospam@spss.com (Jeff Sternal) Newsgroups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.strategy Bennie Smith wrote: [stuff about card disadvantage] Hi Bennie - sorry to snip your article, but I want to add my voice to the growing chorus of objections on a more general level. Basically, none of these cards are card disadvantage cards, in any meaningful sense of the term. If we define "card advantage" as "holding lots of cards in hand", you might be right, but that's not what card advantage means. I think a good summary of CA is: having access to more effective cards than your opponent. Whether you get that edge by drawing more cards, by destroying their cards, or by rendering their cards useless (no creatures versus Wraths, etc.), you get the same result. What does effective mean? You also have to consider the goal of a deck. If it's to kill your opponent, you need more cards that can damage your opponent and more ways to stop them from killing you. This is true even of the Donais 5CU deck - you want to make sure that you are the only player who can do damage; to make sure that you are the only player who can inflict damage. You do this with many-to-one destruction spells, and a Torch (or whatever) backed up by countermagic. As others have pointed out, Cursed Scroll often grants card advantage. That one's easy. To go through a couple other cards you mentioned (and a few you didn't): Ensnaring Bridge - it's only good when it's a card-advantage card. That is, when it neutralizes a number of your opponent's cards (creatures). In the right deck, it's a one- to-many card: a card-advantage machine. In the wrong deck, it's bad. Scalding Tongs - the question here is, how much damage will it do? Consider the best mana investment / damage spell in the game right now: Incinerate (disregarding for the moment spells like Firestorm, which have other costs). The 2/3 ratio means that, if you can get 3 damage for two mana, you're in good shape. That's one reason why creature enchantments are making a comeback; If a creature with Unholy Strength gets through once, the US was as good as a Shock. If it gets through twice, the US has broken the type 2 damage ratio limit (one mana for four damage). US is only a card-disadvantage card when the creature that's hosting it cannot do damage. With Scalding Tongs, it's a mildly harder sell. To reach the damage efficiency of Incinerate, it requires three turns. But if your opponent can't stop it, if it's doing damage, you've got yourself one effective card. Because of the environment (Sex Monkeys aside), Tongs are often a card-advantage machine in the sense that many decks can't defend against them because they produce colorless damage that doesn't come in the form of a creature attack. The cards you're mentioning do encourage a different style of play that we're used to - by rewarding a smaller hand, but that doesn't really have anything to do with card advantage. Cheers, Jeff