In General: Powerful Answers, In theory

Well hey there Zoners. A while ago I penned a piece about what makes a threat powerful. The characteristics of the card as well as the mechanics of the mechanical nuances of the game that allow for those characteristics to make threats better or worse within the context of the game. I received some good feedback about that article, but it seemed to leave people with more questions. I seem to have a way of doing that. I have a long list of topics that I have promised to write on, but that list is apparently going to be growing even longer now.

Today, I am going to be following up on that previously mentioned article by giving a different signature piece of the game: answers. What makes a good answer? Why do they matter? Wish me luck as I try to answer the question: what makes an answer powerful?

Answers
Below is a list of the characteristics I want my answers to have if I am going to include them in my decks. To help illustrate these points I am going to include an example card that clearly demonstrates what we are looking for. These ideas are presently loosely in order of importance, but the more of these criteria a card can meet, the better.


1. It has to work.

In Magic, the player with the last threat standing usually wins. Failing that, the player who can keep more threats in play for longer is more likely to win. Because of this many games end with the following situation: Your opponent has a good creature that is giving you a real beating. You need to top deck a removal spell in order to just stay alive. Having answers that are hard to interact with gives them a better chance of working. That is the most valuable thing an answer can be: successful. Things like uncounterability, preventing regeneration, exiling or tucking, side stepping protection or Shroud, and Split Second make sure that your answer does what it is supposed to do, every time. Problem solved; no questions asked.

2. It is good when you draw it.
There are three major categories under the umbrella of 'answer'.

• Disruption: proactively stopping your opponent from using their threats through things like discard, land destruction, Pithing Needle, Slaughter Games, etc. These only work if you can use them before threats are presented. If your opponent has Progenitus in play, they won't mind you blowing up a few of their lands.
• Counters: these stop your opponent's threats from ever hitting the table, but still allow your opponent to chase the goose around trying to set up the right play. Unfortunately, the window for this type of disruption is even smaller; it must be on the stack! This typically means interacting with opposing spells, but don't overlook the ability to stop activated and triggered abilities like Voidslime.
• Removal: As the name suggests, these cards remove threats that have already made it to the battlefield. The window to use removal is always going to be open as long as you still have some life left, so you don't have to be quite so johnny on the spot. In exchange for this, we must often sacrifice flexibility. Removal often comes with targeting restrictions like only dealing with particular card types or subtypes. E.g. Doomblade.

You probably knew all of that already, even though it doesn't hurt to spell it out. But what is the point? Well the point, as stated above is that good answers are good whether you draw them early, on time, or late. Take a look at CC here. It can be used to bounce lands or key permanents to slow your opponent down. It counters spells on the stack. It taps creatures help solve problems on the board. If you ever find yourself in a spot where Cryptic isn't good, you can draw a new card to look for something more appropriate. This card is the poster child for utility. I can't recall a time where I was disappointed by it. It does something relevant in every situation.

3. It is flexible.
It is interesting to me that, theoretically, I rate flexibility as the third most important characteristic of an answer, however, it is the primary criterion by which I select answers for my decks. If you need to kill a creature, most creature removal will do in a pinch, so number one is only rarely absolutely necessary. There are so few cards that can actually achieve number two that you won't be able to stock your deck full of them; eventually you will have to include more narrow answers. So, in reality, finding good answers is a search for the least narrow answer.

That is flexibility in a nut shell. It hits the highest percentage of relevant targets. The trick to selecting narrow answers is being able to more clearly define 'relevant'. For that, you need a good read on the metagame; both the format in general and your local decks. What is your specific deck weak too? What do you need to be able to stop? That is going to define what answers you play. To help with that, it is nice to have cards like Vindicate that pretty much do it all. Kill target thing. It's old. It's good. Nothing beats it...yet. Hero's Downfall comes close, but I think it will be a long time before we see a card that is better than Vindicate, Maelstrom Pulse, Boomerang, AND Karn.


4. It is fast.
I could go on and on for about a month on why Instants are superior to Sorceries. I don't think this is the time or place for that. I already insulted the intelligence of my audience by explaining the difference between disruption, counters, and removal. For now all I really need to say is that I would much rather have an Instant. It takes a lot of extra value or flexibility for me to consider playing Sorcery speed removal. There is a reason that Swords is considered the best kill spell in Legacy and Cube, which is a big accomplishment considering the only removal spell banned in Legacy is Chaos Orb.



5. It is efficient.
The final characteristic I am going to discuss is efficiency. This spans the idea of multiple resources. It can be argued that being an Instant allows you to conserve tempo, but I don't really have an opinion on that discussion. Back on point, efficiency means expending less resources than your opponent while dealing with the threat that they have presented. Specifically, the resources we are looking to conserve here are:

• Cards: In my book, an answer can't really be called an answer unless it trades one for one. Sometimes you have to use multiple cards to get the job done. It might be an ugly hack job, but if you don't kill say...Kira, Great Glass Spinner you are going to regret it. I list this first because cards is most often the capital resource in a game of Commander. Obligatory plant for future article: want to know more about what it means for something to be the capital resource and how to find out which resource is in fact capital? Stay tuned my friends...soon.
• Mana: This is the most easy resource to demonstrate. Creatures are expensive; removal is cheap. There are 5623 creatures in the game of Magic. Of those, Doomblade costs less than or equal to 5078 of them. This is actually a very close approximation of the general trend: the removal spell you are casting is going to conserve mana about 90% of the time. This is important because it affords you more opportunities to do things since mana is often the limiting factor on how many actions you can take, particularly early in the game.
• Tempo: This picks up directly where the last point left off. You generate the interaction advantage by being able to do more relevant things than your opponent on any given turn. The more you can do in the same amount of time and the more time you give yourself to do things, the better. The absolute best decks in Commander are STRICTLY tempo based. They present a legitimate clock, backed up by an impenetrable wall of disruption. They essentially steal all the tempo by acting quickly and then denying their opponent the ability to act at all. Depending on the size of the threat they present you may have several turns until the game ends, but you will rarely be able to do anything productive with those turns. In order to take back the tempo advantage you have to stop their disruption, remove their threats, AND stick a threat of your own. Good answers are the key to both the success of Aggro-Control and to defeating it.
• Life: The last resource I am going to talk about conserving is life. There are certainly more than these four; things like deck speed, threat density, and reach can certainly be assets within a game, but we are trying to keep this discussion purely theoretical. These four are common to all decks and they are special because each deck and each player starts the game with an equal amount of them. With respect to conserving your life total, we are generally talking about the necessity of cast removal spells before you have taken too much damage. Counterspell will help you conserve more life than Reciprocate. 

I chose a slightly complex example to demonstrate efficiency. Let's take a look at Thoughtseize. It always uses one card to take away one card from your opponent, so it conserves cards. Check. It only costs one mana, so it is going to be cheaper on mana than basically everything your opponent could play. Check. It conserves tempo by answering cards proactively and, as stated, it is cheap so you can often cast more than one spell in the same turn. Check. Here is the million dollar question: Thoughtseize deals you damage, so does it conserve life or not? The answer depends on how much damage the cards you take would have caused you. Sometimes that is unclear because you can take opposing answers or heck, innocuous ramp spells. The general trend though is that an opponent's best card is going to end up causing you much more of a headache than losing two life over the course of a whole game, especially when you start with the full forty. So, in short: CHECK. Thoughtseize is pretty dang efficient, which is why it is a shoe-in to Black decks in nearly every format. Addendum: Answers that generate extra value like drawing cards or gaining life are the holy grail. They are more than conservative, they actually create a resource advantage.

With my final thoughts I want to emphasize that this order is much less significant than that which I presented in the Powerful Threats article. In Magic, it is much easier to find cards that blend these characteristics elegantly. I appreciate you guys sticking with me through another long article, although that is pretty much par for the course at this point. Leave a shout out to let me know what you want to hear about next, although I am basically priced into doing fulfilling a mile long list of promised articles already.

-GG