"That's Trash"

[Duckay]

AdmiralMemo brought it to my attention that some people (myself certainly included) tend to give half-advice - explaining the changes that ought to be made but not the reasoning behind it. I wouldn't know where to start with a list of why I think X or Y card is good or bad... But I do trust myself to have a good hard go at explaining if asked directly.

So this can be the thread to ask one another to explain why X is good and Y is bad, and so on and so forth. Please try to make any explanations thorough, because this is meant as a teaching tool to indicate to people the rationale behind what makes a card playable or not, not just the bare facts of whether it is or isn't.

[Duckay]

Here's one that just came up for me in real life that I had to explain to someone, so I thought I'd post it here:

Harsh Sustenance

This card is brilliant in draft. However, it's not really good enough for constructed because of the prevalence of, for example, boardwipes in standard. If someone clears the board with Crux of Fate or End Hostilities and then plays a creature, Harsh Sustenance isn't going to do nearly as much for you as a Hero's Downfall, Ultimate Price, Utter End, or Murderous Cut would.

On the other hand, it's still excellent in draft because you don't have to worry about wrath effects nearly so much. They turn up from time to time but not with any kind of reliability. So, in that context, it's a very playable card.

[necargoface]

Here's one that just came up for me in real life that I had to explain to someone, so I thought I'd post it here:

Harsh Sustenance

This card is brilliant in draft. However, it's not really good enough for constructed because of the prevalence of, for example, boardwipes in standard. If someone clears the board with Crux of Fate or End Hostilities and then plays a creature, Harsh Sustenance isn't going to do nearly as much for you as a Hero's Downfall, Ultimate Price, Utter End, or Murderous Cut would.

On the other hand, it's still excellent in draft because you don't have to worry about wrath effects nearly so much. They turn up from time to time but not with any kind of reliability. So, in that context, it's a very playable card.

Actually, I think that the reason that harsh sustenance is not and will not see constructed play is that there isn't an archetype that fits with it. The only deck that would think about it is Mono-red aggro in standard, and that only sometimes fringe splashes green for Atarka's Command. It does NOT have room to also splash white and black for one only moderately good card.

[Kapol]

I think that Harsh Sustenance might be played if a W/B Warriors deck with something like Secure the Wastes becomes a thing. The big difference between it and normal spot removal is that you can hit the opponent with the damage. Using it after Secure the Wastes turns it into a Fireball that drains. But even then, it'll depend on the prevalence of control in the meta.

As for my own card to add to the conversation, let's go with the classic.

Fog (and all fog-based effects in Limited)

Maybe someone here knows the Limited Resources link where they talk specifically about fog. Because I have a hard time convincing people that it's bad myself. Everyone I talk to seem to have the same kind of mentality in their mind for it. "It let's me just get my opponent if they swing in to finish me. And if not, it'll buy me a turn."

First off, in limited, just how often does a game realistically come down to your opponent attacking with all of their creatures to finish someone off, while at the same time you have enough creatures to kill them on the crack-back? I don't think it's really that often. It seems like most games are either fairly one-sided at the end, or it's close enough in the end that there are only a few creatures on the board. I don't think there've been many times that I've swung in knowing there'd be a lot of trades or chumps and been dead on the crackback in case something went wrong.

And for the record, I'm actually asking how often that happens to people. I feel that's just a more commonly remembered situation that your average one. It's more exciting. But people remember those over the time whens any card that actually effected the board would have helped them much more than the fog does. Buying a single turn is not worth a card in most situations. The situations when it is are rare enough that I don't think that they overcome the situations when it doesn't do anything.

"It only costs a single mana (normally), so it's not that big of an investment." That actually makes it a big investment. At that point you're using up a space in your deck that could have been used by anything that would effect the board. Either you took out a low-drop that helps your early game, or you took out something in the late-game that could help you kill your opponent.

I think Fog is one of those fairly few cards that people overestimate because it can be good in constructed. Turbo-Fog decks are a thing. They aren't always bad, either. But you can't really build a Turbo-Fog deck in limited 99% of the time.

[Duckay]

Actually, I think that the reason that harsh sustenance is not and will not see constructed play is that there isn't an archetype that fits with it. The only deck that would think about it is Mono-red aggro in standard, and that only sometimes fringe splashes green for Atarka's Command. It does NOT have room to also splash white and black for one only moderately good card.

Perhaps I should clarify. I wasn't talking about it slotting into an existing top-tier deck in standard. Black/white warriors is a fringe concept in standard but harsh sustenance IMO is still not good enough to make the cut, definitely not as a 4-of, because it's so easily blanked.

[phlip]

Finally, an excuse to bring out The Phlip Explanation of Card Advantage and Tempo. I've been thinking about how best to explain the way I think about these ideas for a while, and this thread seems like a good excuse to see what people think.

Words, lots of words, lots of words, lots of words, yeah words - Click to Expand

In Limited Magic... and even in Standard reasonably often, depending on the metagame... the primary thing that determines who wins is the creatures on the board. I can be at 50 life with my opponent at 1, but if I have no creatures and my opponent has half a dozen, then I'm in trouble. It's largely the only thing that matters. My opponent in that situation would prefer that we were both at 20 rather than 50 to 1, as there are more potential cards I could draw to turn it around, and I'll have more time to draw them... but even so, they're still way ahead. and have a pretty good chance to win.

Which is nice and all, but while "have a good boardful of creatures" is a nice goal, how do we get there? What are the things that we need to do at the immediate-scale in order to build up to our big-picture view of this goal? Well, for that we need to break down the game to its fundamentals, of resource management.

Any strategy game is going to be a battle of resources... abstractly speaking, there's going to be something in the game that stops you from just doing everything you want to do all at once. If you can just do everything, then it's not really a strategy game... but if you're limited in what you can do, then it's in chosing where you want to spend those resources where the strategy comes in.

In Magic, there are two main resources that constrain your options: mana and cards. Having lots of cards in hand will do you no good if you don't have the lands to play them, while having lots of mana is useless if you're empty-handed. Typically, in the early game you're limited by mana (and still have a hand full of your opening 7) while in the late game you're limited by cards (plenty of lands but empty-handed). Exactly when you'll switch from being constrained by mana to being constrained by cards is a very fuzzy line, and it varies from one game to the next, but usually it's around turn 5 or 6 or so (too much earlier and you would call yourself mana-flooded, too much later and you'd call yourself mana-screwed).

So, to take these one at a time... starting with the late-game, because it's a bit easier to get your head around. Say we've gotten into the late game, and there's not a lot going on... we've each played some lands, a few creatures, most of the creatures have traded off or eaten removal spells, and now the board is pretty much empty (maybe a couple of creatures staring off at each other unable to profitably attack) and both players are topdecking. Our main constraint in the game is the cards we're drawing off the top of the deck... if we draw a creature and play it, then we're one step closer to being able to attack... but then if our opponent draws a creature to block, or a removal spell to kill our creature, then we're back to square one. On average, us and our opponents will be drawing these at about the same rate.

But if we play a big creature that our opponent has to use two cards to deal with (eg a double-block that trades for both, or a block and a burn spell) then that gets us ahead - we only had to use one draw step to make that creature, while our opponent had to use two to get their answer... leaving us with an extra draw step to potentially draw something else useful to get us ahead on the board. Or we could play a draw spell like Divination, to get two cards... the Divination itself doesn't affect the board at all, but the two cards we get will let us play things that do affect the board faster than our opponent - even if we can't play both this turn, if we play one this turn and one next turn (plus our draw step next turn) that's still us playing 3 potentially-board-affecting things in the time our opponent has only drawn 2.

Of course, not every card is the same. A lot of them are going to be lands, and there's not a lot you can do about that beyond making sure your land/spell ratio is right. But the spells you draw, because you and your opponent are only drawing one a turn, you're hoping that yours will outclass theirs. It's at this point that you really don't want to draw your, say, Aven Skirmisher, because that's probably going to be worse than whatever your opponent played. The best it's probably going to do is maybe get in for a couple of points of damage if you're lucky, and then chump-block or team up to double-block something, and now you're down a creature. While something big and splashy like a Hornet Queen or a Treasure Cruise can get you a lot of cards (or trade for a lot of your opponent's cards) and put you way ahead. So card selection is also valuable - getting a better card instead of a worse card can put you ahead, and drawing a spell instead of a land when you've already got all the land you'll ever need almost puts you effectively up a card. This is the strength of things like Sigiled Starfish or Sultai Ascendancy... as long as you have a way to make the game go long enough that the repeated card selection outweighs the fact that you just spent a card just to get that effect (the starfish's 0/3 body helps that a little, but the Ascendency as an enchantment doesn't help at all) then it'll help you out a lot in the long run.

So, that's the long game... what about the short game? Games where you're trying to win before all this late-game card-advantage stuff really kicks in... or where your opponent is trying to win quickly, and you need to stop them quickly.

That's where tempo comes in. Broadly speaking, it's a measure of how much on-board advantage you can get, quickly. If your opponent plays a turn-2 bear, and you play a turn-2 Kalonian Tusker, then you're ahead on the board. If your opponent plays a turn-3 Morph, and then you play a turn-3 Shock and a 2-drop creature, you have a creature and they don't. If you can play two spells in a turn that your opponent only played one, you're ahead... even though they still have one more card than you do in hand, if you can win before they get a chance to cast it, then that just doesn't matter. Jon Loucks put it on LR once as something along the lines of "the easiest way to get up 5 cards in the card-advantage battle is to win while your opponent still has 5 cards in hand".

It's a bit harder to quantify this... for card advantage you can get a reasonably-good idea just by counting cards, but tempo is a bit more nebulous... it's hard to accurately put a number on how strong your boardstate is. But since your limiting resource here is mana, you can get a good approximation by just adding up the CMCs of all the creatures you control. For a second-level approximation, take into account how much you'd expect to pay for the creatures you have... like, if you have a Shaman of Spring out, part of that mana cost is just going towards you drawing a card... once you've done that, what you have left is a virtual-vanilla 2/2, which is about 2 manasworth of creature. But all of this is a very loose approximation, and with enough practice playing the game you begin to get a bit of an intuition about "these boards are roughly at parity" vs "this player is ahead/behind", even if you can't put actual numbers on it.

This is why Divination isn't very good to play on turn 3... if you play a turn 3 Divination and your opponent plays a turn 3 creature, then you're significantly behind on the board... even though you have more cards in hand, at this rate you may not have time to play them all before your opponent attacks you to death. On the other hand, cards like Unsummon or Frost Breath or Act of Treason put you behind on cards, but get you ahead on tempo - your opponent will eventually be able to replay/untap their creatures, but in the meantime you've gotten them out of the way, and gotten to get some attacks in, for less mana than it cost your opponent to play them out (so you still have some mana left to develop out your own board).

A lot of cards have these tradeoffs between cards and tempo, one way or the other, and it's important to know whether your deck wants to win quickly or go long before you put them in your deck... if your deck has the tools to go long, then you're fine losing a bit of tempo to get ahead in cards in the late game... but if you want to win quickly, then you're ok throwing cards away if it puts you far enough ahead on tempo.

The really strong cards are the ones that get you ahead on tempo while maintaining parity with card advantage, or vice-versa, or ideally even both. Cards like Mist Raven that bounce your opponent's creature but stick around without putting you down a card. Cards like Crippling Chill that get your opponent's creatures out of the way, but replace themselves. Cards like Shaman of Spring that put you up a card while still developing your board (if slightly slower than if you were just playing vanilla creatures). Cards like Flurry of Horns that get you two creatures that you'd be happy spending individual cards on, from a single card, directly into play, putting you ahead on both cards and tempo. These are cards that you can have in your tempo-aggro deck, without putting you behind should your aggro plan fail and you end up in the late game anyway. But when you can't get cards like that, and have to pick cards that trade one for the other, make sure you think about whether the trade is worth it, and is something your deck wants.

[AdmiralMemo]

Thank you, Phlip. You have both explained objectively why certain things are better than others, and also have crystallized why looting feels bad to me (whether it actually is or not). People are like "Well, if you've got your 7-drop on Turn 2, it's not helpful, so it's better to loot it away." And, objectively, that might be true. But then comes the question, "What are you going to play on Turn 7 (or whenever you get 7 mana), then?" Particularly, if it's your only 7-drop. You just threw away your bomb, and if the game goes long, you've got nothing to show for it. Sure, you can play a 3-drop and a 4-drop on the same turn, but that's 2 cards, putting you behind in the card-advantage side. It seems I'm a very Timmy/Johnny hybrid, with a specific penchant for themes and combos. I want to choose cards that do something, and throwing them away doesn't feel like it's doing anything with them (even if, in the long run, it is, on the scale of the whole game). Here's an example: I'm running Boros colors, I'm at parity, and I have just a Wrath of God in my hand. I have 5 Mountains and a Plains, and for some reason, I just can't seem to draw a second white mana producer. If I have a way to loot it away, like Rummaging Goblin or something, that's objectively better, right? But... if it were me, I'd want to hold it, because I want to play it, and maybe my next turn will net me another Plains. Or what if I do loot, and the next card I draw is that Plains? Then, I either have to throw away the Plains, and still not be able to cast Wrath, or I throw away the Wrath, play the Plains, and be left with no cards in hand.
The argument for looting is that the next card could just as easily be an Ember Swallower or a Forgestoker Dragon or Awaken the Ancient, which I could play and break the parity. But, I argue that it could just as easily be an Akroan Crusader, or an Ashmouth Hound, or an Angelic Wall, or another stupid Mountain. If I know that I have the Wrath, I can hope I can just be patient enough to cast it, vs. what I might get if I loot. (I guess it's just that I don't like to gamble.)
You know, that's probably what I like about Scry so much, come to think of it... It's kind of like looting, but without the "throwing away" part. Downside is that you don't actually get it in your hand this turn. And, you know what... if all the looting cards had me putting the card on the bottom of my library instead of in my (usually inaccessible, unless I'm playing black) graveyard, I'd probably be playing the heck out of them without question, and not even be talking about this.

So, I think I'm going to have to change my mind-set and instincts, I guess, but I don't know how to do that, and that's my problem.

In Magic, there are two main resources that constrain your options: mana and cards. Having lots of cards in hand will do you no good if you don't have the lands to play them, while having lots of mana is useless if you're empty-handed. Typically, in the early game you're limited by mana (and still have a hand full of your opening 7) while in the late game you're limited by cards (plenty of lands but empty-handed). Exactly when you'll switch from being constrained by mana to being constrained by cards is a very fuzzy line, and it varies from one game to the next, but usually it's around turn 5 or 6 or so (too much earlier and you would call yourself mana-flooded, too much later and you'd call yourself mana-screwed).

I think one of the key determining factors in where that line exists is your curve. If your curve tops out at 4, with a high amount of 2-drops and 3-drops, the line's going to be earlier. If your curve tops out at 8, and you're heavy on 4-drops, the line's going to be later.

[hascow]

The thing about looting is that it's not always good. It's good a significant portion of the time, but sometimes, you just don't want to loot, because everything in your hand is good right now or is something you absolutely need. If you're happy with everything in your hand as the board currently sits, you can just wait for whatever you're waiting for. If your only card in hand is a Wrath and you NEED to cast it, and you're a Plains short of casting it, you do not loot, because you can't actually get a better hand by looting. It's either just "mill the top card of your library" or "replace this Wrath of God with a card that's a little bit better for the situation" and you probably don't have the card that's better for the situation.

I have something to say about this too:

You know, that's probably what I like about Scry so much, come to think of it... It's kind of like looting, but without the "throwing away" part. Downside is that you don't actually get it in your hand this turn. And, you know what... if all the looting cards had me putting the card on the bottom of my library instead of in my (usually inaccessible, unless I'm playing black) graveyard, I'd probably be playing the heck out of them without question, and not even be talking about this.

Is the bottom of your library actually accessible? How often do you go through the entire library? How is a card being on the bottom of your library actually better than it being in the graveyard?

[korvys]

It's important to note that Rummaging Goblin is not looting, it's rummaging. (To be fair, neither thing is actually a keyword thing, but they are differnt).

If you're hand is looking pretty ok, looting is fine. Draw a card, then get rid of the worst one. Rummaging (discarding a card first, then drawing) means you ditch your current worst card, but if the card you drew is worse, then that was bad. Unless you have completely useless cards, rummaging is more risky.

In your hypothetical Wrath scenario, whether I could loot or rummage would affect my decision, and the rest of the board state also. How many cards does my opponent have in hand (i.e. what can I imply about his ability to rebuild after a wrath)? What is in play (i.e. is Wrath the only way I will live, or am I in no danger)? What kind of deck is he playing (i.e. what are the chances the situation will change dramatically)?

For example, you said you're at parity, but there's a few situations that could be. If there were no creatures in play, and no cards in his hand, I would definitely loot. Wrath is no use to me here, even if I can cast it. It's a nice insurance policy, you can get a lot of value, but winning is worth infinite value.

On the other hand, full boards, but a board stall, I would wait. Even drawing 1 more card makes your looting better (more options on what to pitch), and that Wrath might be very useful.

Unless he has a full hand of cards, in which case he'll be able to recover from the wrath faster than you can. In which case looting is what you're going to want to be able to do in general, so wrathing away your looter is bad, and wrath is bad, so loot away.

It's complicated.

hascow is also making the exact point I made in the other thread. The bottom 20 cards of your library are basically irrelevant is most matches. Yes, if you're playing the right kind of deck, they can matter, but putting a card on the bottom of your library, with no shuffle effect means it's gone for good in 99% of your games. Very few cards will allow you to win if you draw them as the last card, if you weren't going to win that turn anyway.

[steric hindrance]

To be fair, some Limited formats have shuffle effects like Lay of the Land or Evolving Wilds, so the bottom of the deck isn't necessarily a complete blank.

[Duckay]

You're also going to know when you put things on the bottom (in this format, for instance, with Anticipate) whether you have access to shuffle effects. If I have an Evolving Wilds in hand when I cast Anticipate, I feel very differently about the cards I'm shipping to the bottom than if I know I'm not running any.

[AdmiralMemo]

You know, that's probably what I like about Scry so much, come to think of it... It's kind of like looting, but without the "throwing away" part. Downside is that you don't actually get it in your hand this turn. And, you know what... if all the looting cards had me putting the card on the bottom of my library instead of in my (usually inaccessible, unless I'm playing black) graveyard, I'd probably be playing the heck out of them without question, and not even be talking about this.

Is the bottom of your library actually accessible? How often do you go through the entire library? How is a card being on the bottom of your library actually better than it being in the graveyard?

Conceptually, it isn't different, but that's what I was saying in the whole comment. It feels different, even if it actually isn't, in most scenarios. But it also seems to me that, in non-black colors, there are more shuffle effects than there are graveyard retrieval effects, so there is a chance you could Scry away something, crack an Evolving Wilds, shuffle up, and get it right back. (Though, if you're Scrying it away, you probably don't want to have that happen immediately, but you might want it later in the game.)

hascow is also making the exact point I made in the other thread. The bottom 20 cards of your library are basically irrelevant is most matches. Yes, if you're playing the right kind of deck, they can matter, but putting a card on the bottom of your library, with no shuffle effect means it's gone for good in 99% of your games. Very few cards will allow you to win if you draw them as the last card, if you weren't going to win that turn anyway.

Emphasis mine. There are plenty of shuffle effects in the game, and that makes the difference.

[korvys]

Right, there are, in all of Magic, and it makes a difference if you have one. But do you have one? Most people don't in limited. (There are 8 non-rare shuffle effects in DDF, 3 or 4 of which aren't very good cards).

The ability to correctly judge the value/power of a mechanic, and how it changes in different decks and different formats, is a valuable skill in Magic. Looting is generally good. In a really quick format it becomes less good (games don't go long enough for the selection to matter as much). In a slow format they become more good (you draw better cards overall than your opponent). In a Jeskai/Ojutai deck, they're less good. In a Sultai/Silumgar deck, they're more good (Delve fuel).

[Duckay]

Realistically, are there? That's something you're going to have to assess with each limited deck you put together.

Today, I played two different limited decks. One of them had 2 shuffle effects. The other had 0.