Hello readers! Welcome back for another episode of Common Sense. Today I bring to you a somewhat simple way of valuing your cards based on the matchup you are playing. I admit it is not groundbreaking news that cards gain or lose value depending on their roles in a game of Magic. Doom Blade has minimal value if your opponent’s game plan is to Empty the Warrens. Ancient Grudge becomes pretty stellar against an Affinity deck when it becomes equal parts Stone Rain and Terror. Rather than rehash what essentially would boil down to sideboard considerations and comparing your deck choices against the metagame at present, instead I intend to focus on the middle ground where value has to be earned by manipulating exchanges and lines of play.
This system I’m developing is called Conversion Theory. The goal is simple: Determine what resources are most important in a particular matchup and view each card drawn in terms of how it can be used to gain or “be worth” this particular resource. Allow me to begin with a most simple example to show the idea’s mechanics. Let us consider a Burn deck and how to convert cards into life.
Pauper Burn by _Lobezno_
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As you can see in this decklist here, the majority of cards chosen do 3 damage for 1 or 2 mana, allowing some exceptions like Needle Drop and Fireblast. On average, though, the player piloting this deck can expect to spend a card and 2 mana to deal 3 damage to the opponent. This means that an average starting hand of seven cards should contain 15 or 18 points of damage and one or two lands, to be a keeper anyway. If a hand contains three or four lands, it’s quite possible the deck slows down enough for the opponent to stabilize and shift into the attacking role.
Focus on What Matters
Considering the role of the hyper-aggressive Burn deck is to put pressure on the opponent, card advantage becomes a lesser factor in the outcome of these games. Instead, managing one’s life total becomes the contributing factor to success against such a deck, and at this point it should be an obvious conclusion: the key to victory is converting the cards in your hand into as much additional life as possible.
The prevalence of burn decks in previous states of the metagame almost necessitated the inclusion of cards such as Spellstutter Sprite, Aven Riftwatcher and Ravenous Rats to ensure decks could both play threats and combat burn spells. While these are no longer format staples, cards are often played to take their place because the Burn deck is so singular in its commitment to speed and linear play that it has to be accounted for.
Let’s cherry-pick a few examples from popular tournament decks. White Weenie often runs Lone Missionary to give the deck more time in a race in aggro matchups, but it has obvious applications here as well. Affinity and Goblins are both decks that run enough fast-paced creatures to race the Burn deck and effectively block Keldon Marauders and Kiln Fiend. Control decks play enough cheap countermagic to allow them enough time to reach four lands, which is where the decks can start casting two spells a turn and gain enough advantage to start looking for a win condition. Mono Black Control will drop enough Chittering Rats and Liliana’s Specters to tear down the Burn player’s hand until Corrupt comes online. Some decks even sideboard in options such as Hydroblast, Life Burst and Wrench Mind to limit how many Burn spells they will have to deal with.
Because of their efficiency and redundancy, the Burn deck’s spells make a good first dabbling into this theory because it illustrates the various methods a player can use to allocate their deck’s tools to focus on a given resource. Let’s look at some niche examples and then apply their thinking to the game as a whole.
The Difference between Value and Valuable
Some decks play threats that can’t be ignored, and finding value against these kinds of threats can often be key to winning games that otherwise would slip through your fingers. A prime example of this is the emergence of Atog into the Pauper card pool. Affinity has always been a powerful deck, and with the addition of metalcraft in Scars of Mirrodin, players were very aware that the options this deck had were so vast that it might take over as the premier aggro deck of the format. Amid the various powerful creatures the deck can play and its various new spells with additional boosts from the artifact lands, the true villain showed itself in a reprinting in the Master’s Edition IV boosters.
Atog gives the Affinity deck an additional avenue to win that syncs in so well that it’s possibly the most dangerous combo in the format. While the traditional Myr Enforcers and Frogmites draw out removal and trade with blockers, the threat of Atog can be lost and removal may be forced out to ensure the other cheap creatures don’t end the game on their own. This means that when the little red devil hits play (usually accompanied by a Disciple of the Vault), the defending player must scramble to find a way to take care of it before this interaction takes over the game.
This is a key fact I keep in mind when constructing sideboards; because the power level of this card is so high in its natural habitat that cards can be brought in solely to answer this creature. Most control decks run Hydroblast in the side because of the constant threat of aggressive red decks, but I often find myself making sure I have them in my board for Affinity as well. The card only counters two particular spells (the afformentioned Atog and Galvanic Blast) but because one of those spells is a contender for the most powerful interaction in the format, the blasts usually come in solely as removal for this threat.
This logic also applies to cards such as Dead Weight and Prismatic Strands. Normally these cards would have been considered too narrow in application and too fragile to be a consistently useful tool to ever see play against Affinity. Now, however, the Conversion Theory has shifted based on Affinity’s stance in the format, and what the deck presents must be reconsidered.
The key to answering Affinity is to convert the cards available into answers for the deck’s creatures. Although the artifact lands and baubles such as Chromatic Star allow for extremely cheap card draw and mana fixing, the key is the constant threat of creatures that are both inexpensive and versatile. Every creature in the deck needs to be accounted for because they are often built on one of two principles: aggressively costed dudes or unique abilities that can push through damage. If a player decides to focus on merely trading with Affinty’s eight 4/4s, then they leave themselves open to an Atog that must be blocked each turn or a Krark-Clan Shaman turning on Disciple of the Vault.
This philosophy alters what cards are boarded in and what uses a card may have because it shifts attention away from other lines of play. Ancient Grudge has always been a playable answer to Affinity but, unless the board warrants it, the Grudge may now be better used to eliminate creatures rather than blowing up lands. If you Ancient Grudge one of Affinity’s two lands, and they simply play another and follow that up with a Springleaf Drum, what have you really gained? Conversely, if the Grudge destroys a Frogmite and crushes another artifact to turn off metalcraft, this may allow your random 2/2 to gain a lot of value and trade for their suddenly Grizzly Bear-looking Carapace Forger.
The commitment to focusing on the premier or most threatening line from an opponent and converting cards over to this resource (that is, the resource of disrupting this line of play) is something every player does form time to time, but unfortunately may be lost when the aspect of the game that truly matters is muddled by things like card advantage, value plays, and ever-present fancy play syndrome.
Turn This into That
From here, we can now examine typically poor matchups and discern lines of play or top-priority threats to deal with, thereby stealing games from players who do not protect their most valuable assets. Through testing we can focus our efforts on controlling a particular aspect of the opponent’s available resources and look for angles to attack them that leave them vulnerable to the strengths of your deck.
Goblin decks have long been considered the traditional aggro deck because, when Pauper became a wide-spread format instead of a hobby on the side, Goblins was the first creature deck to break through the spell-based control strategies and piles of burn cards running amok.
As a control player, which types of creatures should we focus on eliminating? Does this change if we play an aggro deck instead? In actual testing, the threat most likely to cause problems for you is a group of seemingly inefficient 1/1s. Mogg Raider and Goblin Sledder pose a serious problem for opposing decks because they render blocking or removal spells seriously inefficient and allow the Goblins to push more damage through in the process.
I often find I burn removal spells immediately to deal with these little guys to ensure my blockers actually have value, but the question now becomes this: if I am aware that these 1/1 creatures are the root of my Goblin problems, do I start playing cards aimed directly at these threats as I had done with Affinity in the example above? Do cards such as Evincars Justice or Holy Light become powerful enough that I should be adding them into my sideboards specifically for this matchup? In addition, do these cards pull enough weight to be remotely valuable in other matchups as well?
This is something that testing will reveal, but as players continue to play and notice trends directly linking match results and a certain group or type of card in a deck’s overall strategy, perhaps new lines of play will emerge that allow us to realize that bad matchups may merely be unfavorable, or perhaps not bad at all.
Consistency Vs. Quality
For the third time I will note Affinity and its sideboard enemies, and again I would like to discuss the merits of Ancient Grudge. Only this time, I wish to review my opening statement where I noted a popular strategy is to Stone Rain one of their lands with Ancient Grudge. All things considered, it’s possible that this timely Grudge can net a delayed turn from the opponent or mana screw him altogether. My question is this: Although it is obvious when hitting a land is awful, and it is clear that it can also be a Time Walk in your favor, how do you as a player value this information when the situation is not clear? As mentioned prior, blowing up their second land when you are on the draw can be essentially moot or it can win you the game. How do you make this call?
A number of players hedge their bets and decide on this matter before even sitting down to play. Some will cite the possible advantage as being “worth it” while others will deny this play as it is “not worth the risk of wasting your second turn.” I believe the truth lies somewhere in between.
The fact of the matter is, tempo is a tricky metric to quantify. It is neither objective nor random, but it often relies on intuitive players making correct decisions based on probability and information gathered from the opponent. These reads can be even more difficult with Pauper because the Magic Online interface has no way to show facial expression or posture; you must glean any information from their line of play and their timing.
Something to consider before making the play is how much tempo you will lose if you guess wrong? Can you afford to spend your second turn blowing up a land if it doesn’t slow down the opponent? If you don’t slow them down here, will that cost you the game, considering what’s in your hand? Keep these factors in mind when using Conversion Theory and always take note of how much you will be set back by making an incorrect read. Over time and with practice you discover what angles to attack and how to attack them without leaving yourself vulnerable.
That’s all for this time! After some technical difficulties, I am committed to fixing up my video series and getting that out to you guys as soon as possible. Keep an eye out for this coming up, and again, if you would like to see a certain deck or type of deck in the series, leave me a comment below and I will see what I can do!