Here’s the thing: You are paying a mana, a card and two life to get rid of one card in hand, for which the opponent has not paid anything (most of the time). There’s even a strong possibility that the card is dead later in the game or even harmful, if you only gain information by paying all those costs. How can this possibly be beneficial?
Note: I understand that you can never get exact numbers, but that is not the point. The point of this is to give you an idea on how to think about sideboarding, because it is easy to make mistakes with it.
Here’s a question: How many sources of green do you need in your 99 cards to make sure (100%) that you have at least one of them in your opening hand of 7? The answer: 94.
You hear this question from new(ish) players every once in a while: Why is Preordain
banned in Modern, but not Serum Visions
? Sure, they are close, but they are not the same. That ordering changes the card quite a bit. Also, they have to draw the line somewhere. [Note: Preordain has since been unbanned in Modern.]
Okay, so if Preordain is stronger than Serum Visions, does this mean you should always scry first, if you have the opportunity to choose? Well, that depends.
Here’s the new rules, if the test in London is successful: Scry is out. Instead, you always draw your full seven and after that you put as many cards on the bottom of your library as you’ve taken mulligans. For example, when you’re going to five, you still draw the seven, but now you put two of those cards on the bottom of your library.
A good curve is something that is often brought up in deck design, but I don’t often see explanations for it, except maybe the reasoning that you should have something to do in each part of the game. Well, its a bit more in-depth than that.
There’s been a nice influx of new players on the scene in our FNM, and I noticed they play lands whenever they can, so I thought this might be an interesting topic to discuss as a sort of primer on the subject, because it might not always be clear when to keep those lands in hand.
A month of so back I lamented on how people don’t really design decks anymore, so I guess I have to do it myself.
Of course, I’m not a real expert on the subject, but I do have some experience on. Furthermore, I am quite experienced in the field of software development and teaching. These two disciplines are actually quite similar and use a lot of the same principles.
I’ll be using an example of current standard, which might not be very timeless, but it is a way to showcase the process (or at least a process, because there are obviously many ways to do stthis).
I was at the Nordic Judge Conference this weekend and slow play was one of the topics raised most often. Its a difficult area and there are no hard lines you can follow. PV wrote an excellent article on the subject of the inherent problems (with very good examples), so I’m not going go deeper into that, but I’ll offer my ideas on how to avoid going into time.
The intricacies of the Stack came up yesterday again in our EDH games. To me its natural, but that’s probably because it was actually a big part of my education. However, since not everyone has a master’s degree in software engineering, I think this is something that needs a bit of explanation. It is probably the most difficult part of the rules that you actually need to know.