so now I'm frustrated. I spent hours writing what I think is a really kickass article, only to be told its no good.
In late 2005, I wrote an article about the basics of card advantage. One of the claims I made in that article is that Cabal Therapy for 3 is often better than Ancestral Recall. The concept was obvious to some people, amusing to a few others, and highly offensive to the one guy who sent me hate mail about it (no kidding... I really get hate mail). Mostly it just annoyed people. Well, that's not true, what annoyed people was that I promised to explain below, and never referenced that example again. The moral of the story: all you budding writers out there should always explain your examples, and never bash the power nine.
That was almost 18 months ago. In the time since there's been a grand total of 1 HKKID article. My long absence is entirely because this article is so deep and profound that it took me a year and a half to write. It's also because I got distracted by a quest to find the most raunchy vidoes on the internet, and a desire to pass Thermodynamics. Actually... it was mostly just the video. Now that I've passed Thermo and found THE vid, I really had nothing better to do with Valentines day than write an article about the practical applications of virtual card advantage. [This is how we know HKKID desperately needs a girlfriend. ed.]
Hey, no comments from the peanut gallery... Besides, girls are just automatically repelled my my aura of ... [You could probably fix that aura if you took a shower. ed.] I hate smartmouth editors. Anyways on to magic theory, we're talking about Virtual Card Advantage today.
In magic, not all cards are created equally. No one who was given a choice would play Grizzly Bears over Wild Mongrel for example. That's because mongrel is a grizzly bear with a useful ability for the exact same cost. As Mark Rosewater once said, cards that are strictly more powerful than others "exist because they have to exist." (As an aside, that's the single best article MaRo has ever written, and I highly reccomend it). Not only are some cards better than others before the game even starts, the value of each individual card in your deck will fluctuate as the game progresses.
Here's a simple example: You're playing extended Feldman-Tron, and get the opening hand on the right. Do you keep it? I sure wouldn't, since it's got no lands! On the other hand, try this scenario on: It's late in the game, and you've got 2 million mana. You are digging for a way to finish off your hapless opponent, and your draw for the turn is... Adarkar Wastes. What a letdown. You didn't want a land in this scenario at all... what you really wanted was one of those high octane bombs from the hand you mulliganed. Notice how the value of land has changed? At the beginning of the game you want a steady supply of mana, because without it all of your ultra-bombs are worthless. However once you already HAVE the mana to play out your bombs, you want to draw them every turn and don't care if you never see another Cloudpost again.
What cards you need will vary from matchup to matchup as well. Sometimes, the only thing that matters is your defense. He's beating you down with creatures, and if you can't find a Wrath of God or Damnation soon you're going to die. Smother and Repeal can stall for time, and a Circle of Protection would be nice now that you mention it. Other times you're the one applying the pressure. You need something, anything to make sure it doesn't relent. A Call of the Herd for now now with the promise of another token to come, a Giant Solifuge to take the sting out of pernicious deed. A Decree of Justice... because even control players have to apply pressure eventually.
Sometimes though, it really is true that all cards are created equally. You don't really care what you're feeding Psychatog, as long as Dr. Teeth gets big enough to go lethal. Ditto if you're trying to get out of burn range by throwing stuff to Peace of Mind. The key concept I'm getting at here, is that the number of magic cards you draw really doesn't matter. What matters is the effect those cards have on your odds of winning the game. Drawing lots of cards is useful only if having more cards gives you a better chance at winning. It's the magic players analogue to the old saying about how "it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it". [In HKKID's case that's a theoretical statement. Everyone knows he never gets a chance to use it. ed].
Heh, as long as you're going to keep butting in, I hear you've got an incredibly small [chance of not reading the end of that sentence and editing it out of your article. ed.]. It was worth a try.
Back to magic theory. If we're going to get anywhere with our understanding of card advantage, we're going to have to take into account the fact that some cards are more useful than others, and how useful they are depends on what's going on in the game at that moment1. Let's start with terminology. Threats are cards that help you win the game. Savannah Lions is a threat, and so is Mindslaver. How important a threat is depends on two things: firstly, how much does your deck want to have a threat in play at this point in time as part of it's core strategy, and secondly, how easily can the opponent deal with that threat. Savannah Lions, for example, are a great threat out of a boros deck on turn 1. On the other hand, first turn lions looks like a really crummy threat coming from an Azor-Tron player. Whatever your deck is, turn 1 lions don't look that hot if the opponent plays turn 1 desert!
Answers, are cards that deal with threats (or sometimes answers to your threats). Counterspells are the most versitile of answers, but any sort of removal can be an answer. Duress for example, can answer Mind's Desire before it even gets cast. Your answer cards are only as useful as the threats they stop. Counterspell looks really worthless if you're getting killed by a Nantuko Monastary... wheras Sudden Death is less than stellar against a deck with no creatures. There is a third type of card that isn't really an answer or a threat. They don't have a common-usage name, but I've taken to calling them support or utility cards. Stuff like lands, Vampiric Tutor, or Thirst for Knowledge are support cards. It's impossible to win a game without drawing support cards, but at the same time, you'll definately lose the game if those are all you ever see. This may seem really obvious, but support cards are only as useful as the support they provide. If you've got 7 cards in hand, then Tidings isn't that appealing. On the other hand if you're in topdeck mode, it can swing the entire game.
Hilary Duff is way hotter than
pictures of magic cards.
One final thing about classifying cards: A lot of cards can fit into multiple categories. If the game is going to be decided by card advantage, then Thirst for Knowledge can be a legitimate threat. Sometimes Lightning Helix is used to answer an opponent's creatures, but other times you point it at the dome for three damage. Occasionally, you'll find cards that fill multiple roles simultaniously. Exalted Angel can answer opposing burn spells by taking your life total out of the red zone, while at the same time providing 4 damage per turn. Nekrataal will kill off an opposing creature, while leaving you 2 power on the board. For an extreme version of this effect, take a look at the likes of Draining Whelk or Mystic Snake.
Thus far, we've covered that there's three essential card types, threats, answers and supports, and some cards perform more than one function. We've also learned that the value of each card changes during the course of a game. (just a technical heads up, if the relative value of a card is zero [like say, any 2 mana card when there's a Chalice of the Void set at 2], it is common practice to call such cards "blanked" or "dead"). We've also learned that HKKID never gets a better chance than that to cut off the editor! While everything we've covered may be intuitively obvious (and most of it really is), it has profound implications for anyone who wants to design a deck.
For example, I'm playing Psychatog in extended right now. Having had some experience with 'tog in the past, I knew when designing my deck that I'd have some difficulty matching the tempo of quick aggro. A one mana counterspell can be a big help in this department (espescially when you're on the draw), so I decided to play 4 copies of Force Spike and 3 ofSpell Snare. Unfortunately, Force Spike is only good for the first few turns of the game. I'm not going to sit down against a boros player every round, and the spikes really look dumb against an opponent with 4 or 5 copies of Cloudpost (for those of you who don't play extended, they copy it with Vesuva). Here's a real dillema, I desperately need Force Spike maindecked to win certain matchups, but it's almost literally worthless in others. What did I do? Well, I decided I'd find a use for Force Spke other than casting it!
Psychatog himself is quite good at making otherwise useless cards do something productive. However, in a lot of matchups (well darn near ALL of them) I wanted to just "cycle" force spike, rather than trade it for 1.5 points of damage. In t2, tog players used Compulsion for this. In extended, things are a little bit more mana-efficient, so I'm using Thirst for Knowledge and Cephalid Coliseum.
Certainly if I was worried about discarding my own spells, I'd have never played those cards. I'd be using Think Twice and Island instead. However, why on earth would I? Thirst digs me 1 deepr than Think, and I'll probably never use that Force Spike anyways. Not only that, but thirst only costs 2U, whereas to cast and flashback Think Twice will cost me 3UU. Because I knew that I would have dead cards in my deck, I deliberately chose card drawing spells with "drawbacks" to let me cheat on the casting cost.
For a more extreme example of "blank" cards in action, consider the deck Trinket Angels. Meddling Mage comes down, and instantly blanks whatever spell is named. When used with Sensei's Divining Top, a Counterbalance can blank all cards of a specific casting cost, or sometimes two different costs! Pithing Needle blanks a card that is only useful because of it's activated ability (see also: Pernicious Deed, Grim Lavamancer and Psychatog). This strategy of aggressively attempting to blank the opponent's cards creates a huge Virtual Card advantage. Whoever the opponent is, they are going to be having a lot of dead draws, and that's just how the Angels player wants it.
In addition to influencing your deckbuilding, the concept of cards with variable value can effect your play decisions, and even your long-term strategy. Giant Solifuge cannot be targeted by spells or abilities, so there aren't very many ways to kill him. If I can force a Dralnu player to Damnation off my army, odds are he won't have enough mana left to counter the 'fuge. Now it doesn't matter if the Dralnu player is sitting on Deathmark, Last Gasp, Desert, Sudden Death, or anything else. In other words, I have a threat on the table, and my opponent's most effective answer cards can't even touch it. That drives the relative value of all his answers way down, because they can't stop my current threat. They can stop threats I might possibly play in the future... but only if he lives that long. [All 4 dirty jokes about lasting a long time, or just how long a specific orifice is have been edited out. ed.]
If I was playing the dralnu side of this same game, my strategy would be try to avoid just that scenario. I'd try to use all my spot removal spells and counters on the early critters to slow him down. Eventually I'd be willing to drop Damnation to sweep a few creatures, but not until I've got enough mana left over to counter the hasted insect. This way I preserve the relative value of my spot removal spells, and deal with the solifuge the best way possible; by never letting him hit the table.
This matching of my answers to my opponent's threats in the best way possible (or my threats to his answers if I'm playing aggro) is known as lineup theory. It's possible to write entire articles about lineup theory (if memory serves, when Zvi first developed the concept he wrote about 5 of them). I'm not quite that ambitious, so I'll just relate it to our topic of Virtual Card Advantage. Some cards (such as Giant Solifuge) are far more difficult to "line up" an answer to than other cards. Every "answer" card the opponent draws that can't deal with your threat (in this case, all of them that say "target creature", are dead draws. Literally, you've just earned virtual card advantage by resolving a Giant Solifuge!
Want another example? Look at Serra Angel from "back in the day" (read as: before I started playing magic). Beck then, white control players used to cast Wrath of God, drop a Serra Angel, and win the game. There's 3 reasons why Serra was so powerful, 1: 4/4 body. In an era of inefficient burn spells (Lightning Bolt was just about it), there wasn't very much that an aggro player could use to kill the angel. As we discovered with Solifuge, creatures that are difficult to kill can create VCA. Not only is she tough to kill, the 4/4 body is bigger than any of the aggro creatures of the era. Meaning, every time the aggro player tried to attack, Serra would kill one of his dudes. Which brings me to reason 2: Vigilance. With Serra always untapped, the aggro player has to "suicide" his most important creature every time he attacks. Makes it tough to get damage through. You want tough? Try eating HKKID's cooking ...
Not only does Serra play good defense, she also swings for 4. And that is point 3: Flying. I never played "back in the day" but from what I can tell, most aggro decks were composed of ground based beaters like Rogue Elephant or Kird Ape. It makes all the aggro critters completely worthless on defense, which by lineup theory grants Virtual Card Advantage to the player with the angel.
Look carefully for this sort of thing in your next game of magic. You were probably already aware of Virtual Card Advantage on some level, but I bet you never applied it to a Giant Solifuge or a Serra Angel. Any card that reduces your opponents options or increases your own can become a powerful VCA tool. Going out of your way to spot and use such "tricks" will make you a much stronger magic player, and much better at analyzing which cards are good and which cards are bad. Not only that, but you'll have a much better grasp of WHY you won certain games. No longer will it be he couldn't topdeck an answer to your Solifuge on time, now it becomes: he was outplayed and forced to spend his damnation too early. You punished this strategic error by riding a Solifuge and the resulting virtual card advantage to a win.
Be sure to stick around for my next article on magic theory: Tempo, level 1.
P.S. Here's a few interesting links for you magic theory buffs.
A (super short) Card Advantage article. The best part is, it wasn't even written about magic! While I don't play the WoW trading card game at all, if you replace the word "allies" with "creatures" and "elusive" with "flying" it makes perfect sense for magic players too.
Eric "Danger" Taylor and the article that launched the concept of Virtual Card Advantage.
1: This is the reason why Cabal Therapy hitting 3 Counterspells is better than Ancestral Recall. They both net a 3-1 advantage for the caster. However, the person who cast therapy just took 3 useful cards away from the opponent, whereas often the person who cast recall gets 3 random cards, and there's no guarantee that all 3 of them are useful. Return
You know the really funny part? I wasn't shot down for lacking original content, for submitting an article with nothing informative, or even that picture of Hillary Duff. As a matter of fact, I was flat out told that the article is entirely publishable, if only I was willing to take out the sarcastic quips by the "editor".
This frustrates me greatly, since I had specifically stated the editor comments are not optional. Without them the entire article is just a run of the mill VCA article, and is roughly as interesting as watching paint dry. I don't wanna waste all my time writing something that nobody is going to bother reading...
Mostly I'm just mad because that article took forever to write, and it was summarily dismissed by (of all things) a sarcastic editor.
I was told today that this kid on my team called 911 twice this morning and hung up both times. They called back and his dad answered. The reason the kid called 911? He got an erection and didn't know what to do. I wish I was making this up.
Give me a day or two. Salvation has a disclaimer saying that all article submissions become property of salvation. I've already asked for permission to publish elsewhere instead, and in the mean time I'm trying to see if that's enforcable in the first place.
I was told today that this kid on my team called 911 twice this morning and hung up both times. They called back and his dad answered. The reason the kid called 911? He got an erection and didn't know what to do. I wish I was making this up.
Travis...you got hosed! That article is great, minus the inability to use a spell checker!:p
I don't think that Salvation has the ability to enforce ownership of a writing submitted to non-corporate entity....or something like that. Unless that was written by the owner of the site somewhere, but even still I don't think they have that kind of power.
Not to bad Dux.....seems a little high to me but if you really wanted the cards and could spare the cash then it was good for you. Playsets of Damnations are pricey. You coulda asked me though...I got 4 non-foil and 2 foilFoil ones from 3 boxes that I've opened.:p:D
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"Talkin outta turn....That's a paddlin'. Starin' at my sandals....That's a paddlin'. Paddlin' the school canoe....You better believe that's a paddlin'!" --Jasper
Damn you jonski! :shakefist: I opened 2 boxes and got no damnation or red akroma's. :cry: So I bit the bullet and bought the singles.
I've had pain in my hip when moving/walking for the past 5 months and I got an MRI yesterday. They say that the blood is being restricted in that area and are sending me to a specialist. They also said steroids or excessive drinking can cause it, so that isn't good.
*Goes back to fooling with his decks*
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Official Bath-Time Toy of the |Called|
Makin' sure the ladies are squeaky clean ..everywhere!!
Netdecking is piloting Magic.
Homebrew is creating Magic.
Are you a pilot or a creator??
Out of a crapload of boxes, I got 2 foils. One of them came in a box with 0 nonfoil, the other came in a box with 1 nonfoil. You're saying you got 2 nonfoil and 1 foil in each of two boxes you opened? I'm thinking the likelihood of that are about one in ten million. Or is it billion? You dork!
Oh and let me guess, you got the foils in packs that had nonfoils, right? HAH! Fibber!
Dave, that's ironically the exact price you could have got those cards from me. $20 per Damnation and $7 for the foil Mirri. But then you'd have had to wait a week to get your grubby paws on them. Cept, you'd have got a Called discount...
But I'm upping my Damnation price now to $22. I only have 7 left and I haven't even taken any for my own decks yet. I probably won't... I really can't afford to put cards that pricey into my decks. If I was making more profit, maybe... but right now I'm lucky if I don't start cannibalizing my own decks for Moxes to sell.
I'm at the house with the boys tonight but probably just for one night instead of two this week. They're going down to Seattle with their grandparents to visit their aunt and unborn baby which Gavin calls "Fluff".
Brian, I had a pt named Jai the other night. It was pronounced "Jay" and he's from Fiji. Not sure why I bring it up, just made me think of you.
I found a really sweet high resolution image of Hyperion (a moon of Saturn) which is very irregular in shape (kind of like a football or egg), full of deep craters (making it look like a sponge), and probably composed of a large amount of water ice, gravel, and dust all frozen together. It's about 360×280×225 km but one of the craters is at least 10 km deep. The rotation and orbit are irregular and hard to predict because its orbit is so close to Titan, another Saturnian moon which is about as massive as Earth. I made the image my desktop. I won't bother posting it because I have a feeling only Travis and perhaps Mike care about this stuff.
EDIT:
A couple more things!
1) Ceres is a very speherical 1000km wide "dwarf planet" which is a classication between planet and asteriod. It's orbit lies within the Main asteroid belt, further out than Mars but not as far out as Jupiter. At one point it was considered a planet, and then an asteroid for a long time, but the same convention adopted in 2006 that rendered Pluto a dwarf planet also rendered the same status upon Ceres. It makes up one third the total mass of the Main asteroid belt, despite there being thousands of asteroids, some 50km wide or more. The Dawn mission will launch this June, sending a robotic craft in a spiral journey outward, using Mars as a gravitational slingshot, before entering into orbit with Ceres (and a large asteroid called Vesta) in 2011 through 2015. It seems the outer mantle is mostly water ice, and the inner core is mostly rock and metal. Surface temperatures reach about -30C in sunlight (the "day"). It orbits the Sun once every 4.6 Earth years. It has a maximum magnitude of 7 which is just bright enough to faintly see under optimal conditions. So far only observation from Hubble and earthbound telescopes has been made, so we don't have a great photograph of it yet.
2) Charon (pronounced Karon) is either a very large moon of Pluto, or one member of a double dwarf planet with Pluto being the other. The two are only 20000 km from each other, always face each other's same surface, and rotate around each other. Their center of mass lies outside both bodies, and two small moons (Hydra and Nix) orbit that center of mass, not Pluto or Charon themselves. Charon is half as wide as Pluto (1200 km versus 2400 km) and about 1/8th the mass. They rotate around each other once every 6 Earth days. From what I've learned so far, I support the classification of double dwarf planets. In 2015 the New Horizons mission will reach the Pluto-Charon system, but until then, our best image is below:
(distance between the two is not to scale)
EDIT: Found a sweet Hubble image of the system, and it looks like this one's single shot and therefore to scale!
EDIT: Oh, sweeeet! This just in from Hubble - even shows Hydra and Nix!
Yeah actually...each of the Damnations came in boxes with non-foil damnations in them. I don't open my boxes...when I do I get nothing! I let my kids and wife open them...she has a gift for channeling the cards I need!
It works so I go with it.
I got 4 boxes...one was for my sone...he got a Damnation...non foil. The other 3 boxes had one Damnation in one and 2 in the other 2...1 non and 1 foil in each of those.
sorry.....ok no I'm not!:p:p:p:p:p:p
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"Talkin outta turn....That's a paddlin'. Starin' at my sandals....That's a paddlin'. Paddlin' the school canoe....You better believe that's a paddlin'!" --Jasper
Went to one of Aurelia's old school chum's parent's house for dinner tonight, had a really good time. . . funny how easy it is to get along with someone else's family. . .
Well, bad news. The hip specialist said I have AVN (Avascular Necrosis). I am going to have to have my LT Hip replaced. Yes, at 27 I will be having a hip replacement.
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Official Bath-Time Toy of the |Called|
Makin' sure the ladies are squeaky clean ..everywhere!!
Netdecking is piloting Magic.
Homebrew is creating Magic.
Are you a pilot or a creator??
I'm back from a series of travels in the Twin Cities and surrounding area. I'll post about them later. For now, I just wanted to chime in and say, "Daron, that is some cool stuff! Where were you reading about it?" I'm very much into space-nerdism.
Going to the Extended PTQ today with my boy! Gonna be really fun cuz I haven't played extended in a couple of years!:D
Daron....they got here yesterday Bro....YOU DA MAN!
Just a friendly reminder to all.......Page 13 here......someone make the new thread....witty title....no Nips...unless it's totally great :D....and remember all the info from page 1!:O
I'd do it today...but I'm leaving on a train bound for Rockville.....and I was told back in the 80's not to go back to Rockville....huh??
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"Talkin outta turn....That's a paddlin'. Starin' at my sandals....That's a paddlin'. Paddlin' the school canoe....You better believe that's a paddlin'!" --Jasper
In late 2005, I wrote an article about the basics of card advantage. One of the claims I made in that article is that Cabal Therapy for 3 is often better than Ancestral Recall. The concept was obvious to some people, amusing to a few others, and highly offensive to the one guy who sent me hate mail about it (no kidding... I really get hate mail). Mostly it just annoyed people. Well, that's not true, what annoyed people was that I promised to explain below, and never referenced that example again. The moral of the story: all you budding writers out there should always explain your examples, and never bash the power nine.
That was almost 18 months ago. In the time since there's been a grand total of 1 HKKID article. My long absence is entirely because this article is so deep and profound that it took me a year and a half to write. It's also because I got distracted by a quest to find the most raunchy vidoes on the internet, and a desire to pass Thermodynamics. Actually... it was mostly just the video. Now that I've passed Thermo and found THE vid, I really had nothing better to do with Valentines day than write an article about the practical applications of virtual card advantage. [This is how we know HKKID desperately needs a girlfriend. ed.]
Hey, no comments from the peanut gallery... Besides, girls are just automatically repelled my my aura of ... [You could probably fix that aura if you took a shower. ed.] I hate smartmouth editors. Anyways on to magic theory, we're talking about Virtual Card Advantage today.
In magic, not all cards are created equally. No one who was given a choice would play Grizzly Bears over Wild Mongrel for example. That's because mongrel is a grizzly bear with a useful ability for the exact same cost. As Mark Rosewater once said, cards that are strictly more powerful than others "exist because they have to exist." (As an aside, that's the single best article MaRo has ever written, and I highly reccomend it). Not only are some cards better than others before the game even starts, the value of each individual card in your deck will fluctuate as the game progresses.
1 Mindslaver
2 Decree of Justice
1 Razormane Masticore
1 Sundering Titan
1 Fact or Fiction
What cards you need will vary from matchup to matchup as well. Sometimes, the only thing that matters is your defense. He's beating you down with creatures, and if you can't find a Wrath of God or Damnation soon you're going to die. Smother and Repeal can stall for time, and a Circle of Protection would be nice now that you mention it. Other times you're the one applying the pressure. You need something, anything to make sure it doesn't relent. A Call of the Herd for now now with the promise of another token to come, a Giant Solifuge to take the sting out of pernicious deed. A Decree of Justice... because even control players have to apply pressure eventually.
Sometimes though, it really is true that all cards are created equally. You don't really care what you're feeding Psychatog, as long as Dr. Teeth gets big enough to go lethal. Ditto if you're trying to get out of burn range by throwing stuff to Peace of Mind. The key concept I'm getting at here, is that the number of magic cards you draw really doesn't matter. What matters is the effect those cards have on your odds of winning the game. Drawing lots of cards is useful only if having more cards gives you a better chance at winning. It's the magic players analogue to the old saying about how "it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it". [In HKKID's case that's a theoretical statement. Everyone knows he never gets a chance to use it. ed].
Heh, as long as you're going to keep butting in, I hear you've got an incredibly small [chance of not reading the end of that sentence and editing it out of your article. ed.]. It was worth a try.
Back to magic theory. If we're going to get anywhere with our understanding of card advantage, we're going to have to take into account the fact that some cards are more useful than others, and how useful they are depends on what's going on in the game at that moment1. Let's start with terminology. Threats are cards that help you win the game. Savannah Lions is a threat, and so is Mindslaver. How important a threat is depends on two things: firstly, how much does your deck want to have a threat in play at this point in time as part of it's core strategy, and secondly, how easily can the opponent deal with that threat. Savannah Lions, for example, are a great threat out of a boros deck on turn 1. On the other hand, first turn lions looks like a really crummy threat coming from an Azor-Tron player. Whatever your deck is, turn 1 lions don't look that hot if the opponent plays turn 1 desert!
Answers, are cards that deal with threats (or sometimes answers to your threats). Counterspells are the most versitile of answers, but any sort of removal can be an answer. Duress for example, can answer Mind's Desire before it even gets cast. Your answer cards are only as useful as the threats they stop. Counterspell looks really worthless if you're getting killed by a Nantuko Monastary... wheras Sudden Death is less than stellar against a deck with no creatures. There is a third type of card that isn't really an answer or a threat. They don't have a common-usage name, but I've taken to calling them support or utility cards. Stuff like lands, Vampiric Tutor, or Thirst for Knowledge are support cards. It's impossible to win a game without drawing support cards, but at the same time, you'll definately lose the game if those are all you ever see. This may seem really obvious, but support cards are only as useful as the support they provide. If you've got 7 cards in hand, then Tidings isn't that appealing. On the other hand if you're in topdeck mode, it can swing the entire game.
Hilary Duff is way hotter than
pictures of magic cards.
One final thing about classifying cards: A lot of cards can fit into multiple categories. If the game is going to be decided by card advantage, then Thirst for Knowledge can be a legitimate threat. Sometimes Lightning Helix is used to answer an opponent's creatures, but other times you point it at the dome for three damage. Occasionally, you'll find cards that fill multiple roles simultaniously. Exalted Angel can answer opposing burn spells by taking your life total out of the red zone, while at the same time providing 4 damage per turn. Nekrataal will kill off an opposing creature, while leaving you 2 power on the board. For an extreme version of this effect, take a look at the likes of Draining Whelk or Mystic Snake.
Thus far, we've covered that there's three essential card types, threats, answers and supports, and some cards perform more than one function. We've also learned that the value of each card changes during the course of a game. (just a technical heads up, if the relative value of a card is zero [like say, any 2 mana card when there's a Chalice of the Void set at 2], it is common practice to call such cards "blanked" or "dead"). We've also learned that HKKID never gets a better chance than that to cut off the editor! While everything we've covered may be intuitively obvious (and most of it really is), it has profound implications for anyone who wants to design a deck.
For example, I'm playing Psychatog in extended right now. Having had some experience with 'tog in the past, I knew when designing my deck that I'd have some difficulty matching the tempo of quick aggro. A one mana counterspell can be a big help in this department (espescially when you're on the draw), so I decided to play 4 copies of Force Spike and 3 ofSpell Snare. Unfortunately, Force Spike is only good for the first few turns of the game. I'm not going to sit down against a boros player every round, and the spikes really look dumb against an opponent with 4 or 5 copies of Cloudpost (for those of you who don't play extended, they copy it with Vesuva). Here's a real dillema, I desperately need Force Spike maindecked to win certain matchups, but it's almost literally worthless in others. What did I do? Well, I decided I'd find a use for Force Spke other than casting it!
Psychatog himself is quite good at making otherwise useless cards do something productive. However, in a lot of matchups (well darn near ALL of them) I wanted to just "cycle" force spike, rather than trade it for 1.5 points of damage. In t2, tog players used Compulsion for this. In extended, things are a little bit more mana-efficient, so I'm using Thirst for Knowledge and Cephalid Coliseum.
Certainly if I was worried about discarding my own spells, I'd have never played those cards. I'd be using Think Twice and Island instead. However, why on earth would I? Thirst digs me 1 deepr than Think, and I'll probably never use that Force Spike anyways. Not only that, but thirst only costs 2U, whereas to cast and flashback Think Twice will cost me 3UU. Because I knew that I would have dead cards in my deck, I deliberately chose card drawing spells with "drawbacks" to let me cheat on the casting cost.
For a more extreme example of "blank" cards in action, consider the deck Trinket Angels. Meddling Mage comes down, and instantly blanks whatever spell is named. When used with Sensei's Divining Top, a Counterbalance can blank all cards of a specific casting cost, or sometimes two different costs! Pithing Needle blanks a card that is only useful because of it's activated ability (see also: Pernicious Deed, Grim Lavamancer and Psychatog). This strategy of aggressively attempting to blank the opponent's cards creates a huge Virtual Card advantage. Whoever the opponent is, they are going to be having a lot of dead draws, and that's just how the Angels player wants it.
In addition to influencing your deckbuilding, the concept of cards with variable value can effect your play decisions, and even your long-term strategy. Giant Solifuge cannot be targeted by spells or abilities, so there aren't very many ways to kill him. If I can force a Dralnu player to Damnation off my army, odds are he won't have enough mana left to counter the 'fuge. Now it doesn't matter if the Dralnu player is sitting on Deathmark, Last Gasp, Desert, Sudden Death, or anything else. In other words, I have a threat on the table, and my opponent's most effective answer cards can't even touch it. That drives the relative value of all his answers way down, because they can't stop my current threat. They can stop threats I might possibly play in the future... but only if he lives that long. [All 4 dirty jokes about lasting a long time, or just how long a specific orifice is have been edited out. ed.]
If I was playing the dralnu side of this same game, my strategy would be try to avoid just that scenario. I'd try to use all my spot removal spells and counters on the early critters to slow him down. Eventually I'd be willing to drop Damnation to sweep a few creatures, but not until I've got enough mana left over to counter the hasted insect. This way I preserve the relative value of my spot removal spells, and deal with the solifuge the best way possible; by never letting him hit the table.
This matching of my answers to my opponent's threats in the best way possible (or my threats to his answers if I'm playing aggro) is known as lineup theory. It's possible to write entire articles about lineup theory (if memory serves, when Zvi first developed the concept he wrote about 5 of them). I'm not quite that ambitious, so I'll just relate it to our topic of Virtual Card Advantage. Some cards (such as Giant Solifuge) are far more difficult to "line up" an answer to than other cards. Every "answer" card the opponent draws that can't deal with your threat (in this case, all of them that say "target creature", are dead draws. Literally, you've just earned virtual card advantage by resolving a Giant Solifuge!
Want another example? Look at Serra Angel from "back in the day" (read as: before I started playing magic). Beck then, white control players used to cast Wrath of God, drop a Serra Angel, and win the game. There's 3 reasons why Serra was so powerful, 1: 4/4 body. In an era of inefficient burn spells (Lightning Bolt was just about it), there wasn't very much that an aggro player could use to kill the angel. As we discovered with Solifuge, creatures that are difficult to kill can create VCA. Not only is she tough to kill, the 4/4 body is bigger than any of the aggro creatures of the era. Meaning, every time the aggro player tried to attack, Serra would kill one of his dudes. Which brings me to reason 2: Vigilance. With Serra always untapped, the aggro player has to "suicide" his most important creature every time he attacks. Makes it tough to get damage through. You want tough? Try eating HKKID's cooking ...
Not only does Serra play good defense, she also swings for 4. And that is point 3: Flying. I never played "back in the day" but from what I can tell, most aggro decks were composed of ground based beaters like Rogue Elephant or Kird Ape. It makes all the aggro critters completely worthless on defense, which by lineup theory grants Virtual Card Advantage to the player with the angel.
Look carefully for this sort of thing in your next game of magic. You were probably already aware of Virtual Card Advantage on some level, but I bet you never applied it to a Giant Solifuge or a Serra Angel. Any card that reduces your opponents options or increases your own can become a powerful VCA tool. Going out of your way to spot and use such "tricks" will make you a much stronger magic player, and much better at analyzing which cards are good and which cards are bad. Not only that, but you'll have a much better grasp of WHY you won certain games. No longer will it be he couldn't topdeck an answer to your Solifuge on time, now it becomes: he was outplayed and forced to spend his damnation too early. You punished this strategic error by riding a Solifuge and the resulting virtual card advantage to a win.
Be sure to stick around for my next article on magic theory: Tempo, level 1.
P.S. Here's a few interesting links for you magic theory buffs.
A (super short) Card Advantage article. The best part is, it wasn't even written about magic! While I don't play the WoW trading card game at all, if you replace the word "allies" with "creatures" and "elusive" with "flying" it makes perfect sense for magic players too.
Card Advantage Level 1, the first article in this set.
A very good article by Mike Flores. He covers more than just VCA, but it's a rather good read.
Eric "Danger" Taylor and the article that launched the concept of Virtual Card Advantage.
1: This is the reason why Cabal Therapy hitting 3 Counterspells is better than Ancestral Recall. They both net a 3-1 advantage for the caster. However, the person who cast therapy just took 3 useful cards away from the opponent, whereas often the person who cast recall gets 3 random cards, and there's no guarantee that all 3 of them are useful. Return
You know the really funny part? I wasn't shot down for lacking original content, for submitting an article with nothing informative, or even that picture of Hillary Duff. As a matter of fact, I was flat out told that the article is entirely publishable, if only I was willing to take out the sarcastic quips by the "editor".
This frustrates me greatly, since I had specifically stated the editor comments are not optional. Without them the entire article is just a run of the mill VCA article, and is roughly as interesting as watching paint dry. I don't wanna waste all my time writing something that nobody is going to bother reading...
Mostly I'm just mad because that article took forever to write, and it was summarily dismissed by (of all things) a sarcastic editor.
Mafia Stats
@Rian: Not that it really matters, but, I also submitted GA as #1.
Mafia Stats
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Huzza
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Homebrew is creating Magic.
Are you a pilot or a creator??
I don't think that Salvation has the ability to enforce ownership of a writing submitted to non-corporate entity....or something like that. Unless that was written by the owner of the site somewhere, but even still I don't think they have that kind of power.
Not to bad Dux.....seems a little high to me but if you really wanted the cards and could spare the cash then it was good for you. Playsets of Damnations are pricey. You coulda asked me though...I got 4 non-foil and 2 foilFoil ones from 3 boxes that I've opened.:p:D
I've had pain in my hip when moving/walking for the past 5 months and I got an MRI yesterday. They say that the blood is being restricted in that area and are sending me to a specialist. They also said steroids or excessive drinking can cause it, so that isn't good.
*Goes back to fooling with his decks*
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Homebrew is creating Magic.
Are you a pilot or a creator??
You're so full of it! I opened dozens of boxes and counted the number of Damnations in each box. It went something like this:
1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ... etc
Out of a crapload of boxes, I got 2 foils. One of them came in a box with 0 nonfoil, the other came in a box with 1 nonfoil. You're saying you got 2 nonfoil and 1 foil in each of two boxes you opened? I'm thinking the likelihood of that are about one in ten million. Or is it billion? You dork!
Oh and let me guess, you got the foils in packs that had nonfoils, right? HAH! Fibber!
Dave, that's ironically the exact price you could have got those cards from me. $20 per Damnation and $7 for the foil Mirri. But then you'd have had to wait a week to get your grubby paws on them. Cept, you'd have got a Called discount...
But I'm upping my Damnation price now to $22. I only have 7 left and I haven't even taken any for my own decks yet. I probably won't... I really can't afford to put cards that pricey into my decks. If I was making more profit, maybe... but right now I'm lucky if I don't start cannibalizing my own decks for Moxes to sell.
I'm at the house with the boys tonight but probably just for one night instead of two this week. They're going down to Seattle with their grandparents to visit their aunt and unborn baby which Gavin calls "Fluff".
Brian, I had a pt named Jai the other night. It was pronounced "Jay" and he's from Fiji. Not sure why I bring it up, just made me think of you.
I found a really sweet high resolution image of Hyperion (a moon of Saturn) which is very irregular in shape (kind of like a football or egg), full of deep craters (making it look like a sponge), and probably composed of a large amount of water ice, gravel, and dust all frozen together. It's about 360×280×225 km but one of the craters is at least 10 km deep. The rotation and orbit are irregular and hard to predict because its orbit is so close to Titan, another Saturnian moon which is about as massive as Earth. I made the image my desktop. I won't bother posting it because I have a feeling only Travis and perhaps Mike care about this stuff.
EDIT:
1) Ceres is a very speherical 1000km wide "dwarf planet" which is a classication between planet and asteriod. It's orbit lies within the Main asteroid belt, further out than Mars but not as far out as Jupiter. At one point it was considered a planet, and then an asteroid for a long time, but the same convention adopted in 2006 that rendered Pluto a dwarf planet also rendered the same status upon Ceres. It makes up one third the total mass of the Main asteroid belt, despite there being thousands of asteroids, some 50km wide or more. The Dawn mission will launch this June, sending a robotic craft in a spiral journey outward, using Mars as a gravitational slingshot, before entering into orbit with Ceres (and a large asteroid called Vesta) in 2011 through 2015. It seems the outer mantle is mostly water ice, and the inner core is mostly rock and metal. Surface temperatures reach about -30C in sunlight (the "day"). It orbits the Sun once every 4.6 Earth years. It has a maximum magnitude of 7 which is just bright enough to faintly see under optimal conditions. So far only observation from Hubble and earthbound telescopes has been made, so we don't have a great photograph of it yet.
2) Charon (pronounced Karon) is either a very large moon of Pluto, or one member of a double dwarf planet with Pluto being the other. The two are only 20000 km from each other, always face each other's same surface, and rotate around each other. Their center of mass lies outside both bodies, and two small moons (Hydra and Nix) orbit that center of mass, not Pluto or Charon themselves. Charon is half as wide as Pluto (1200 km versus 2400 km) and about 1/8th the mass. They rotate around each other once every 6 Earth days. From what I've learned so far, I support the classification of double dwarf planets. In 2015 the New Horizons mission will reach the Pluto-Charon system, but until then, our best image is below:
(distance between the two is not to scale)
EDIT: Found a sweet Hubble image of the system, and it looks like this one's single shot and therefore to scale!
EDIT: Oh, sweeeet! This just in from Hubble - even shows Hydra and Nix!
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Yeah actually...each of the Damnations came in boxes with non-foil damnations in them. I don't open my boxes...when I do I get nothing! I let my kids and wife open them...she has a gift for channeling the cards I need!
It works so I go with it.
I got 4 boxes...one was for my sone...he got a Damnation...non foil. The other 3 boxes had one Damnation in one and 2 in the other 2...1 non and 1 foil in each of those.
sorry.....ok no I'm not!:p:p:p:p:p:p
Went to one of Aurelia's old school chum's parent's house for dinner tonight, had a really good time. . . funny how easy it is to get along with someone else's family. . .
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Homebrew is creating Magic.
Are you a pilot or a creator??
"Daron, that is some cool stuff! Where were you reading about it?"
I'm very much into space-nerdism.
Daron....they got here yesterday Bro....YOU DA MAN!
Just a friendly reminder to all.......Page 13 here......someone make the new thread....witty title....no Nips...unless it's totally great :D....and remember all the info from page 1!:O
I'd do it today...but I'm leaving on a train bound for Rockville.....and I was told back in the 80's not to go back to Rockville....huh??
/Official "White and Nerdy" Poster Boy of The Called\
Good Movie Mafia - Townie - Survived - Win
Mortal Kombat Mafia - Mafia - Lynched - Loss
Star Wars Mafia II - Townie - Exploded - Loss
Newbie Mafia 11 - Townie - Survived - Loss
Don't Fear the Reaper Mafia - Solo Mafia after day 1 - Survived - Win
Unluckyville Mafia - Townie - Survived - Win
View Askew Mafia - Townie - Survived - Win
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=68543
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