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Beginner’s Luck: Truths, Tempo and Resources
Posted on September 18, 2010 by Pete
Great thoughts about an important topic. As a chess player I can easily connect to your examples. I do believe that tempo is an important element in many other board games as well but often more subtle or hidden (resource management can be tempo in camouflage).
I am looking forward to your thoughts about card advantage because, as you already indicated, the connection is often not as straightforward as it seems.
nice article, I dont have much time to comment right now but I would say that my original article was supposed to be part of a series. I did an article on card advantage, the tempo one, and I had a third one that I had wanted to write about card quality. The goal of magic is to play the largest number of quality cards the fastest, how choose between these three different resources is what makes magic an awesome game. It also makes the game very resistent to theory, at least past the basics.
Thank you both for the feedback! I’m pleased this article went down well; it gives me the confidence to attempt something similar in future.
Ian- Great to hear from you! I hope I’ve not misrepresented your views too badly. I have read your article on card advantage (or at least, an article you wrote about card advantage), and our ideas seem pretty compatible on that score.
I’m glad to see someone writing on this topic. Your article has got me thinking about this. I’m not so sure from my own experience that I agree that tempo is a measure of your progress towards a point at which you can win in the way your deck is designed to. I think perhaps it is perhaps more a combination of presenting your opponent with inevitability and forcing them to expend their resources in a subotimal way that does not further your oppents win condition. Maybe an example to help my point is two people playing combo decks that do not interact with each other. In this case it is simply whoever assembles the pieces faster, however without the two sides interacting to prevent this I don’t think we can talk about tempo in this situation. Perhaps this is what you where saying and I misread you article, or maybe I’m way off base either way I would like your thoughts on this. Thank you, and thanks for writing this article.
This is an excellent article even if I will have to read it more then once to fully understand it. I believe it will greatly improve my deck building skills though. Magic theory is something I never new existed until just recently, and I am glad to find an article such as this to help better my understanding of it.