Subject: Article for the Dojo Date: 03 Nov 97 00:21:59 EST From: Michael.B.Rand@Dartmouth.EDU (Michael B. Rand) To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com Greetings, The nature of card advantage has been laid out since the beginning of time. Well, at least since Brian Weissman's "The Deck" showed us all how brutal overwhelming drawing and card denial power can be. As a younger Magic player, the phenomenon known as card advantage was most easily expressed in the adage, "He or she who draws the most cards will win the game." One aspect of the game which I feel is equally important is the theory of card quality. The definitions for these two terms will thus be as follows: Card Advantage (or CA from here on): the numerical value used to describe either the amount of cards drawn/discarded with relation to your opponent or the numerical value to describe the interaction between permanents in play (ie. a Nekrataal being summoned). This number can also be used to describe branch card advantage, which is card advantage played out over a set of scenerios. Card Quality (CQ): the subjective value used to describe the overall effect of library manilpulation effects upon one's deck. Clearly, the two aspects of the game are not one and the same and require different cards and strategies to implement them. As I will attempt to prove, however, the use of both card advantage and card quality enhancers in a deck provides the optimum deck tuning necessary. To prove my point, let me use certain decks from past and present: 1. Card Advantage: Let's see, what card has been the most blatant enhancer of card advantage in the past year? Necropotence. The card is sheer card advantage, plain and simple. Looking at a normal Necro deck, we see the following basic configuration from pre-Nov Type II: 4 Hypnotic Specter 4 Hymn to Tourach 4 Dark Ritual 4 Necropotence 4 Nevinyrral's Disk 4 Black Knights 1 Ishan's Shade 1 Sengir Vampire 2 Contagion 4 Strip Mine 4 Drain Life 1 Zuran Orb 1 Ivory Tower 2 Lake of the Dead 18 Swamps 2 Ebon Stronghold Very basic, not intended to do anything but prove my point. We see the two incredibly efficient card advantage enhancers: Hypnotic Specter and Necropotence. Necropotence is constructive card advantage, meaning it increases the number of cards you draw. The Hyppie is disruptive card advantage, meaning it makes your opponent discard cards. After a while, the sheer number of cards drawn by the Necro and denied by the Hyppie mean game, set, match. What happens, then, when Necro goes up against Sligh? One of the reasons that Necro had a traditionally tough time beating Sligh is that it could not find the key anti-Sligh cards, namely the Drain Life and the Zuran Orb, without expending a very important anti-sligh device (namely life through Necroing) to get them. As such, the Necro player was very much at the mercy of the shuffle against the Sligh player. Some people added Demonic Consultation to get around this problem (a card I will talk about with Erik Lauer's now famous Extended Necro deck). However, the real culprit was that the Necropotence itself never guarunteed that the cards you did draw would be better, it just let you draw more. 2. Card Quality To look at card quality, I have chosen a deck that I played at Type II states to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of card quality as the only method of card superiority in the deck. A Marogeddon deck: 2 Sylvan Library 3 Gaea's Blessing 3 Abeyance 3 Whirling Dervish 3 Maro 3 Uktabi Orangutan 2 Scalebane's Elite 1 Autumn Willow (man did it hurt having this Desertioned) 3 Swords to Plowshares 2 Disenchant 2 Gerrard's Wisdom 2 Armageddon 1 Wrath of God 4 Icy Manipulator 2 Serrated Arrows 4 Thawing Glaciers 4 Grasslands 8 Plains 8 Forests Sideboard not too important. Basically, what you can see here is the Sylvan Library/Thawing Glaciers/Gaea's Blessing synergy. Cast an Armageddon. Gets countered? Drop a Sylvan. Thaw a bit. Gaea's Blessing the Geddon back. Thaw some more until you find it. Against a counterpost player I geddoned 5 times in one game while dropping 4 City of Solitude (only had 3 in SB). The Sylvan Library afforded me great card quality, especially when teamed with the shuffling effects included in the deck. So where did I go wrong (only went 0-2 at states)? No card advantage. Simply put, I could only really drop one must counter threat a turn. Against a Counterpost player who beat me 2-1, the card quality worked great in the second game. However, in the first and third games, he just sat behind a protected Jayemdae Tome and countered everything I tried. Basically, for 10 turns in a row, I would either Geddon, drop a Winter Orb, drop a City of Solitude, or try to get through a Gaea's Blessing. Not one thing worked because I could only really cast 2-3 a turn without emptying my hand and running out of mana. The card quality was not very important because I could not outdraw my opponent, or more appropriately, draw more threats than he had counters/neutralization cards. Thus, card quality is good, but very rarely can it win games on its own. 3. Using both to make a great deck. As I mentioned earlier, the use of Demonic Consultation in Necropotence deck circumvented some of the lack of card quality in Necro decks. I believe that the best example to date is Erik Lauer's Extended Necropotence deck, or Lake Drain Necro. While I do not have a deck list with me right this momment, I believe it to be as follows: 4 Black Knights 4 Order of the Ebon Hand 1 IShan's Shade 4 Necropotence 4 Demonic Consultation 4 Drain Life 4 Hymn to Tourach 4 Lightning Bolt 2 Incinerate 2 Firestorm 3 Disenchant 3 Lake of the Dead 3 Gemstone Mine 4 Scrubland 4 Badlands 2 Bad River 8 Swamps Erik has said about the deck that he wanted it to work whether or not Necro was on the table. How does one do this in a Necro deck? By using Demonic Consultation. If the Necro was not in his opening hand, he could simply consult for it at the end of his opponent's turn. Card quality. If he did not have a Drain Life and needed one desperately, he could consult for it. Card quality. The second the Necropotence/Drain Life Synergy started working, he went into card advantage mode and outdrew his opponent, usually Draining them to death after reducing their hand size with numerous Hymn to Tourachs. Thus, Erik used both card advantage and card quality to establish a deck that could threaten on both fronts of card superiority. 4. Conclusion It takes both card advantage and card quality to make a consistently great deck. While certain decks will attempt to buck this trend (Prosperous Bloom being obvious, though it does use Vampiric Tutor and Meditate), the overall layout of championship caliber decks seems to suggest that by outdrawing your opponent and ensuring that the cards that you draw will be better than your opponent, you will win games. This is one reason that Thawing Glaciers was so great: you make sure that you get early game land/card advantage, while at the same time that your card quality will generally increase as the game progressed. Other cards to basically the same thing, and combos of cards can be formed to provide both card advantage and card quality. If anyone has any comments/criticisms on this post, feel free to post here or email me at michael.b.rand@dartmouth.edu. I am sure that some much better players than I (and there are a ton, believe me) would have a lot to add to the subject. Enjoy, and happy gaming! Michael Rand Dartmouth College Class of 2000 michael.b.rand@dartmouth.edu "I ain't good looking but I'm someone's child" Oasis