In General: Engines and Investment pt. 3

Welcome back Zoners, this is the third and final part of my series on Investing in games. If you missed them, take a look at Part 1 and Part 2. Today, we have the prestige, as it were; the big reveal. We are going to find out what investment cards are good and which ones are bad and how to tell. First, a brief description of the resources we need to invest.

In Magic there are a lot of key resources. Most people will tell you that there are three: life, mana, and cards. That is a dramatic underestimation. Just look at some of the costs for your spells, some require you to mill a certain number of cards, so the size of your library is a resource. Some take more than one turn to set up, so time is a resource. Some investments only work in a particular situation, so we need to dedicate a lot of the slots in our deck to cards that help us reliably set up that specific board state. People often just call this "synergy" and think about it as a consequence of and requirement for good deckbuilding, but synergy is a resource AND an investment itself, because it requires effort on your part to create. For the purpose of this discussion, everything that can potentially translate into a resource, is itself a resource. E.g. cards in deck eventually become cards in hand, so "cards" as in the card advantage that we discussed above, are just part of a big value chain. Eventually cards in hand become cards in play or cards in the graveyard, yet another resouce...you get the idea.

Characteristics of Healthy Investments

Liquidity

The biggest sticking point that I want to stress about resources is, again, that they can be converted into a different resource. This isn't always easy though. Sometimes the transition requires an extra cost. If you pay 2U and discard the Divination, you can turn two cards in your deck into two cards in your hand. If resource has high liquidity, then you can change it into something else quickly and cheaply. If you cast a Grizzly Bears, you easily change mana and a card in hand into a card in play. This is a fairly liquid transaction, meaning not much of your resources were lost in the transition. In fact, only the mana is gone. The card just went from one bank account to another. So, in effect, the net transaction was: pay two mana and get two damage on each of the subsequent turns where you can attack.

The moral here is: we want to invest in things that either take advantage of the liquidity of our resources or increase the liquidity. 

Return on Investment

Here we are looking to expand out total resource base. We want to translate a small amount now into a larger amount later. Remember that exchanging resources has a cost. We can mitigate the effect of that by simply having an excess amount of some resource. To illustrate this, let's look at a combo:

So, this sets up an infinite loop. We bought a Queenie and the Altar and now we can create a creature and kill it an arbitrary number of times. This is the Magic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. You provide the inputs and it runs forever on its own. Now that isn't incredibly impressive, once we have infinite something, we can pretty easily turn that into infinite anything. Let's add another piece into the mix:

BOOM! Now we have infinite creatures and colorless mana. This is the Magic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. You provide the inputs and it runs forever on its own. THIS is the Magic equivalent of a free-energy device. You tipped off a chain reaction that will spiral out of control producing an ever-increasing amount of value. Don't get too excited though. You might have gotten infinite return on your investment, but you spent a lot of resources to build this monster and that is a problem...

Smallest Initial Outlay

We don't begin the game with an infinite amount of resources, we have only a small amount. It is important to pick an choose what to use those resources on in order to maximize our chances of winning. That decision making process is what this whole article is about. Having a small initial outlay gives us a great chance of coming out ahead on our investments. There are less moving parts so there is less that our opponent can target to disrupt us and even if our investment doesn't pan out, we didn't lose much anyway. Most games are won and lost on this series of small, incremental investments. You don't need to go bigger than your opponent, you need to commit what you have to the right place at the right time. Example: Ponder.

This is a very small investment. One card, one mana. We never see that mana again, but we trade our card for a better card. This marginal enhancement in card quality is HUGE because not all cards in Magic are equivalent. They don't do the same thing so just having more doesn't necessarily mean that you have the right one. Cards like Ponder give you a card off the top of your deck that is better than the average random card because you get to choose from a larger selection of random cards. Using your skill and contextual information you can turn your Ponder into the best card in that situation, which is why is is so widely used in Legacy decks as a way to smooth draws and dig for gas. Incidentally, Ponder also offers a huge return on investment.

Time-Value

Every resource has a time value, which means that it becomes more or less important at particular stages of the game. A good example of this is your turn. In the early turns, not much gets done, but later in the game when you can cast multiple spells, attack, and substantially impact the board, the value of taking a turn goes up dramatically. In general, each action you take increases your likelihood of winning the game (actions that don't are what we in the business call mistakes). Any turn where you take more actions is more valuable. This is the driving force behind awesome cards like Time Stretch. In the late game, you have a ton of mana and probably have used way more cards than you started with, but with access to all these additional resources a single turn can mean a huge swing in the state of the game. As often is the case with this card, if you take an extra turn or two, you will often win on the spot.

The Final Word

As I stated in the previous segment, the best way to evaluate an investment is to compare it to the opportunity cost. "A good investment always beats it's opportunity cost." This means that the best investment you can make is the Highest Value Alternative. It gives you the highest return on your investment, requires the smallest initial outlay, maximizes the time value of your resources, and maintains or increases the liquidity of those resources. That is it. Keep in mind everything that you are spending and everything you are getting; the best cards just put you ahead no matter what. Here is an example of a perfect investment:

Four mana for a land and a creature is a modest price to pay. If you deal or prevent any damage with the body, the value will increase over time. It is also very difficult for your opponent to interact with Solemn without giving you even more value on your investment. Do they trade a creature? Well, you already got the land and you will also get to draw the card. It is just impossible to come out behind in the resource advantage game if your deck is stuffed full of things like this.



Now let's see some bad investments:

These are expensive, unpredictable, take a long time to generate any value, generate only minimal value at all, don't help exchange our resources fluidly, and do almost nothing if our opponent disrupts or destroys them. That's all the time I have for today. I hope you enjoyed this series on investment. If you love it/hate it demonstrate it! Leave a comment on this or anything else. Next week I will be back with a post on a related subject: vehicles!
-GG