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

The Stack #26- Sometimes There's Flavor

Hey there Zoners!

Not every card in the Multiverse needs to have good flavor, but it's always better when it does.

Today, we're going to salute a little bit of both. The gang and I have quite a few flavor points to talk about as we inch closer to the essence of flavor on this week's Stack.

Here goes nothing.

THIS IS THE STACK!

VENSER'S JOURNALIST'S PICK

Venser's Journalist- THUMBS UP
While not the best in flavor, this Zenith I think has high marks for summing up the essence of Blue mana. It's an instant for one, which means it can be played in response to something (like foiling somebody's Mirror-Mad/Laboratory Manic combo). I like the words "Target player" because it gives this card more freedom than Mind Spring (a good blue card nonetheless). Drawing cards is always helpful in blue decks, something I know I've mentioned multiple times.

I really feel that this is such a great blue card though. It can be the basis for a combo (imagine a lot of mana and a Psychosis Crawler on your battlefield) or it can break a combo, in my experience, the aforementioned self-mill combo. The card is utilitarian. It is not a win-con by itself, yet can bring you just the right cards you need. Perhaps it is pricey, but Stormtide Leviathan (another well-flavored card) is definitely not cheap either. Blue is about being patient, planning ahead. What better way to plan a takeover than by sticking seven fresh cards in your hand?

Johnny Confidant- THUMBS DOWN
It's Funny, You like a card for what it does then upon review you find that in regards to flavor it's a swinging a huge miss. GG made a solid point about how a blue sun wouldn't rain down the cards, but if cards are to the library and the library is to your mind, then the Blue sun must radiate some kind of brainwave enhancer. As for the White and Green sun, you're on your own for that relation.
 

Grandpa Growth- THUMBS DOWN
I am going to swing it like this: Good flavor gets the thumbs up. Bad flavor will receive no such honor. This card has no flavor. When the blue sun of Mirrodin reaches its highest point in the sky...you get to draw cards? Oh, but then you forget about it and it gets filed back in your library with the other stuff you don't have time to think about right now. This is THE recipe for bad flavor. Take a flavor concept and force-fit it onto an established mechanical concept. Werewolves transform. Makes sense. Drawing cards was already a concept within the flavor AND mechanics of the game. Now, we are going to overwrite player expectations by dramatically altering what drawing cards means in the 'story' of the game. Unless I am meant to believe that staring at the sun gives me tons of great ideas, then this is a flavor fail. Also: kids, don't stare at the sun. It is really, really bad for your eyes...like, so bad.

Uncle Landdrops- FLAVOR THUMBS DOWN
I really like this card. I play it quite a bit because of the reasons VJ mentions. It works, I just agree with GG- it just doesn't have flavor. It's part of a cycle of cards from the Scars block that are just supposed to function as a representation of the power of each of Mirrodin's Suns. If Mirrodin were real, it's just hard for me to believe that one of its suns would be responsible for a spike in the 2/2 cat population and cards would be "falling from the sky."  Now, Red Sun's Zenith... I could actually believe that a Red Sun would get super-hot at its highest point and kill something. If I knew very little about Magic though, and someone asked me what I thought Blue Sun's did, I'd have no idea.

GG's Unsubstantiated explanation of White Sun's Zenith: The Leonin prides have a communal festival that brings them all to Taj-Nar on the longest (with respect to the white sun) day of the year, giving you a few new litters of cats. Why this is an instant I don't know. It would obviously be on the calendar far in advance.
 
GRANDPA GROWTH'S PICK

Grandpa Growth- THUMBS UP
Not a stellar card. It's actually a sub-marine card if you'll excuse the pun. I could do this all day. I could also talk about flavor and how generally awful it is all day. This is just fine flavor-wise. Wizards has been making progress towards a more top-down approach to card design that has resulted in cards with flavor that is easier to digest (I am a horrible person, I know this). My bone is with Islandwalk. Whales, not even big ones, can cross over islands. What makes this guy unblockable even to other see creatures? What happens when one of these swims by a Tidal Kraken or an Inkwell Leviathan? Does their collective water displacement not interfere at all? Final thought, this creature reminds me of a song...a story really.

Venser's Journalist- THUMBS (AND PERISCOPE) UP
This whale is pretty darn good if I do say so (and I do). Islandwalk is a good choice for flavor because, like UL mentioned below, it's more about the water surrounding the island less than the actual island. As far as other sea creatures not being able to block it, you'll have to bring that up with Wizards. Maybe in M15 they'll implement a rule that will make Islandwalk more like blue Fear.

What really matters about the Colossal is that it eats things! Look out Pinocchio and Geppetto!

Johnny Confidant- not available for comment

Uncle Landdrops- THUMBS UP
I love this card. Everyone knows how much I love it. As far as Islandwalk goes, I tend to think less and less that Wizards uses the word Island as an actual Island. More and more it has become about being the Ocean, and if that's the case, there is no flavor problem. 

JOHNNY CONFIDANT'S PICK

Johnny Confidant-  THUMBS UP
My Pauper Gruul loves this little guy. For two he ramps and pings which is the main theme of my deck. Zur-Taa Druid is an excellent flavor mix of both Red and Green without the Haste I'd like, but then he'd probably be an uncommon.

Flavor aside this guy has very niche placement in deckbuilding. Edh would rather run Birds of paradise than a "poke per mana" dork. Although I'll say that Budget 60, pauper, and Peasant do enjoy this little guy.


Uncle Landdrops- THUMBS DOWN
This is a cool card, but I don't see how this has flavor. Not every druid is supposed to make mana. Also, Gruul cards are more concerned with combat damage.

Grandpa Growth - THUMBS DOWN
I have a hard time believing that any creature would really be able to damage a planeswalker. I dig the card and the design style of stapling two sweet cards like Fireslinger and Llanowar Elves, but we are talking about immortal, multidimensional, all-powerful wizards here. It would make more sense in a game like Hearthstone, where the heroes are still mortal beings occupying a single world; able to attack and interact with creatures directly. Even when planeswalkers fight each other they don't really die all that often.


Venser's Journalist- THUMBS UP
So he's a druid that taps for mana. Makes sense. He's also of the Gruul Clan, so he deals damage whenever he taps for mana. Also makes sense. His flavor is mechanically great;
the flavor text, not so much.

UNCLE LANDDROPS' PICK 

Uncle Landdrops-  THUMBS UP
This card really has your simple Giant Spider-level of flavor for a Magic card, of which I'm a big fan. KISS isn't just four Jewish guys from the Bronx who like to put on face paint, play rock music, and sell every kind of product they can with their name on it to make money. Though they've stolen the ultimate business acronym and life credo, "Keep It Simple, Stupid," it fortunately doesn't make the phrase any less true.

Thoughtseize is and has been a pretty big card along competitive decks ever since its first printing in Lorwyn and it's not just because it does exactly what it says it does. It's because what it says it does is GREAT. Thank the sweet gods we got a reprint too- because we're going to need it to combat the amalgam of other strange multi-card-type nonsense in this new set. I can't wait to get myself a copy.


Johnny Confidant- THUMBS UP (For Flavor)
Turn one Swamp -> Thoughtseize is a strong strategy to both see what your opponent's got planned and shut down their current game plan. While this is strong in Modern, 40-50 dollars is too much for a Duress or Despise without limitations and for someone who plays Multiplayer Edh, I'd rather buy 40 copies of Syphon Mind or Unnerve, but that's just my preference.

If I pull one from my Theros Fat Pack though, I'll try it out.

Grandpa Growth - THUMBS UP
I am like 70% on board with the flavor of this card. The fey come in the night to steal your dreams. Dreams have been used as a flavor concept for drawing cards on several previous occasions and nightmares have been used to represent discarding them so I am willing to allow the stretching of this definition to Inception/Extraction processes. The only part I don't understand is the life payment. Does the Clique charge a fee of blood for this kind of work? Does Oona have a tax on the dream trade?

Venser's Journalist- THUMBS UP
Power at all costs, say the Black-mana players. Fortunately, 2 life isn't too high a price to pay. "It's cheap, but it's not free," Donald Fagen of Steely Dan once said, but I think he was referring to something that wasn't Magic. Anyway, this is a solid flavor card; but, functional as both a turn one slap to the face or a late game win-con remover. Many cards like this exist, but this one stands above Duress or Despise in my books.

Hope you guys are keeping up with the Theros Spoilers. Now that a big amount of the first set has been spoiled, look for us to start sharing our thoughts over the next week or so.

Until then, do all that you can to keep the gods happy. The last thing you'd want is for Liam Neeson to release another Kraken. Or call you on the phone with a death threat.

-UL and the TGZ Staff