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The many articles that attempt to explain just how to win at Magic can be broken down into two main categories: understanding the cards, and understanding yourself. I have nothing to add to Rob Hahn's masterful Mind Over Magic, so I will focus on the cards.

Early magic theory began in many ways with Brian Weissman, who stressed the importance of Card Advantage, or getting more relevant draw phases (they weren't steps back then) than your opponent, through cards like Jayemdae Tome, Disrupting Scepter, or the Moat/Blood Moon/Cop: Red "lock". Scott Keller expanded that theory when he declared that Everything is a Time Walk. Both of them were bringing us closer to a complete understanding of Magic. However, both of them were looking through the lens of games they'd played, to illustrate the fundamental resource(s) that players must manage. To go further than they did, we must first take a step back.

Instead of generalizing from games back to principles, we will approach from the opposite direction: the Comprehensive Rules. If you haven't read through that document, I encourage you to do so. It is extraordinarily well-crafted. For our purposes, though, we only need to focus on a few sections: starting the game, and turn structure. Between those two, we'll find everything we need to know.

Magic is, essentially, just a game of resource management. Everything else is flavor. By looking at the rules, we can see exactly what resources we have to work with, and what limitations are placed on their use. It may seem obvious to say that players begin the game with 20 life and seven cards in hand, but these fundamental constraints define half the game. The other half we get from turn structure. Turns essentially consist of two types of actions: limited ones, and unlimited ones. An example of a limited action is uptapping your permanents during your untap step; since you can only do this once per turn, untaps can be considered a resource. Anyone who has played against High Tide will already know that. Casting spells, however, is an unlimited action, because the game places no inherent limits on it. Here, then, is a full list of our starting and limited resources:

Starting Resources:
20 Life
7 Cards in Hand
0 Mana in Mana Pool
53 Cards in Library
15 Cards in Sideboard

Turn-Limited Resources:
Untapping Permanents
Drawing a Card
Playing a Land
Attacking

Throw in a few rules on how players win and lose, and you have the entire game of Magic.

Well, not quite. There is a little bit more to it. You see, Magic lets you convert one resource to another. Properly managing the rate and volume of these conversions is the key to winning a game of Magic.

A few cards are extraordinarily efficient at converting resources. There are the obvious ones, like Channel and Yawgmoth's Bargain, that explicitly trade life for mana or cards, respectively. Ancestral Recall is also pretty simple, trading U, a card, and a draw step for three cards and three draw steps. Moxes trade a card and a draw step for a land and a land drop. Balance is a lot more complex, but at its best, it trades two mana, a card, and a draw step for a large number of lands, cards, mana, and draw steps on your opponent's side of the board. It also prevents your opponent from converting future attack phases into damage. All of these cards are so phenomenally efficient that they've been restricted in Vintage and banned everywhere else.

Before exploring the differences between Vintage and other formats, though, I'd like to explain a point that's probably already confusing some readers, namely, why I'm talking about cards costing "a card and a draw step". After all, doesn't a draw step automatically give you a card? Shouldn't they be interchangeable? Not exactly. Drawing a card increases the number of cards in your hand, but it also increases your options. Some cards can do one without doing the other. Some examples will help illustrate what I mean:

Brainstorm costs you a card (itself), a mana (U), and a draw step (to draw it), but nets you one card and three draw steps. Under normal circumstances, though, your next two turns will add two cards to your hand, but give you no new draw steps - Brainstorm essentially trades U to get those draws immediately, without increasing your hand size. Combine Brainstorm with a shuffle effect (usually free on otherwise fairly costed cards), and you get more options on your next turns, too.

If you have Masticore out, you see a new card every turn, but your hand size doesn't actually increase. You're giving up the card, but not the options the draw step produces. In other words, you're getting draw steps, but not cards. Conversely, someone under a Trinisphere/Crucible of Worlds/Strip Mine lock is adding cards to his hand, but his draws don't give him any new options because he can't play any of the cards he sees - cards without draw steps. Finally, if your opponent has Solitary Confinement/Squee, she is neither adding cards to her hand, nor getting additional options each turn: no cards, and no draw steps.

In the words of earlier theories, the cards increase your card advantage, while the draws increase your card quality.

This is an important distinction to make, as cards and draw steps are two of the most important parts of the game. This is because, under normal circumstances, they happen every turn, without fail. Land drops usually become sporadic after the initial turns, while attacks often don't begin until mana has been developed somewhat. Untaps only happen in a relevant way if you've managed to tap your permanents. Every turn, though, you get one new draw and one new card.

Now, back to the discussion of formats. As we saw, Vintage is full of restricted cards that convert resources in a shockingly efficient manner. This compresses the game to an extreme degree, because on turn 1 a player can make multiple land drops from moxes, gain the equivalent of huge numbers of draw steps with the card quality produced by tutors, draw multiple cards, and cap it off by gaining a whole new turn to repeat the process. Fortunately, the opponent can neutralize some of this by using Force of Will to convert an additional Blue card and 1 life into mana. The net results of this frenzy of activity, though, is that players get far fewer untaps and far fewer attacks than they do in other formats. This makes creatures almost hilariously inefficient, as creatures require an initial investment of mana and a card, while only to allowing you to convert future attacks into damage. If you're only going to get two or three attacks out of a creature, it's easy to see why only a select handful are playable in Vintage - and most of those are Goblin Welder, which converts untaps not into damage, but into mana and draw steps. Other popular creatures include Squee, Goblin Nabob, Worldgorger Dragon, and Darksteel Colossus, none of which players bother to actually cast in most games. Furthermore, card quality matters a great deal in a format where your next card could be Ancestral Recall, Yawgmoth's Will, or Island. Raw card advantage is great, but it often isn't worth it to invest, say 5UUU in Intuition, Accumulated Knowledge, Accumulated Knowledge, when you can see the same number of cards with Brainstorms, Thirsts for Knowledge, and the like, and then actually have the mana to play the ones you need.

The situation in Vintage is almost entirely the opposite of what players encounter in Limited. (As an aside, I'll draw most of my examples from 9th Limited, because it's such a clear format, with no confounding set mechanics.) In Limited, games are not compressed but expanded, with enough attack steps to make even one-power creatures into actual threats, and enough untaps to make ordinarily mediocre or expensive cards worthwhile. Moreover, card advantage is king, with card quality a distant second because it's worth it to invest the extra 2 in Counsel of the Soratami to just get both cards instead of trying to save mana with Sleight of Hand. Extra cards will win you the game, but two mana just isn't going to do very much. Really good cards like Thought Courier are obviously still worthwhile, but inferior to really good card drawing like Tidings. However, the heart and soul of Limited is creatures. They're simply the most efficient resource converters available, turning all your attack steps into potential damage to the opponent, for a relatively low initial investment. Furthermore, creatures provide excellent defense, preserving your life total, and therefore giving you more turns and thus resources. Finally, creatures tend to have very strong activated abilities. There are a few artifacts and enchantments that can compete, like Trade Routes and Icy Manipulator, but for tap-limited abilities, it's hard to beat cards like Orcish Artillery or Thought Courier.

The best cards in Limited, though, as any drafter will tell you, are not mere creatures, but the "bombs". Cards like Umezawa's Jitte, Phyrexian Processor, Pestilence, Empyrial Armor, and Meloku the Clouded Mirror all can win games and often tournaments practically by themselves. A quick look at all these cards, though, shows merely a bunch of highly efficient resource converters. Pestilence turns mana into damage (taking out creatures and your opponent). Empyrial Armor turns attack phases into absurd amounts of damage, and so on. Or, to take a favorite target of Knut's recently, Flame Wave converts a bunch of mana into your opponent losing his creatures, the resources he invested in them, and a big chunk of his life total. [And the game. F*cking Flame Wave. - Knut, tired of losing to that damned card] When you're looking at a new set for Limited, it may not be obvious what archetypes to draft or which commons will end up as staples, but if you look for efficient, powerful resource converters, you'll find the cards that will almost always win games, especially if any of the resources involved are creatures.

Unlike Vintage, though, cards that simply give you a one-shot mana boost, like Seething Song, are often quite weak, whereas cards that give you extra land drops, like Fellwar Stone, are much stronger. This is mostly because Moxes make land drops much less relevant, but also because Vintage games are short enough that another land in your hand may only give you a few mana starting on turn 4, but a Lotus Petal will give you a crucial second Blue mana on turn 1 for the Mana Drain that wins you the game. In Limited, that Lotus Petal will get you a turn 1 Grizzly Bears, and then you'll be short on mana and cards for the rest of the game.

In general, the more cards available in a format, the faster it tends to be. And, as formats speed up, card selection and one-shot mana production goes up in value, while "invested" cards like creatures go down in value. The historical speed continuum of Vintage - Legacy - Extended - Standard - Limited illustrates this effect fairly clearly, with only minor variations when a block mechanic distorts one of the smaller formats or a set like Urza's Saga is released. Vintage has historically shown this trend as well, speeding up slowly but almost continuously as new cards are released and (ab)used, then slowing down with each restriction.

The "speed" of a format, however, refers merely to the speed of the best decks in that format, the ones you will have to overcome to win a tournament. Of course, you'll never play against the field, just against individual decks and individual draws. Understanding how fast you need to be in any given situation is thus crucial, because speed comes at the expense of other resources. If you know that your combo deck must win on turn X to be competitive in the format, that doesn't mean every game is a race to turn X. You really want to win on the last possible turn, to maximize your draw steps, untaps, and land drops. Of course, in Type One, that "last possible turn" may be turn 2 on the play, before they get UU up for Mana Drain, but against Food Chain Goblins, it's the turn before their draw would kill you, which could be as late as turn 4 or 5 if you Force of Will something important. Extended Desire, though, could often be a lot more flexible, sometimes having essentially unbounded turns against Life, but it required a much more focused effort against something like Aluren. In general, if you have a strong combo deck that is naturally very fast relative to the format, you will often get more turns than your goldfish games take, which means you get to draw more cards and take fewer risks. This goes back to Zvi's concept of a Fundamental Turn: if your FT is sooner than theirs, you will usually win, because their lack of effective pressure basically gives you extra turns

At this point, I'd like to turn to a paragraph that Stephen Menendian wrote in his recent article on Illusions/Donate in Legacy. As an aside, I should note that this paragraph contains revisions that didn't make it into the article, because Steve asked me to use this version:

"What determines whether a deck wins or loses? If winning were an equation with "W" being the dependent variable, what is balanced on the other side of the equation? There are a number of obvious variables which determine whether a match is favorable and, more generally, whether a deck is good. Foremost among those are the power of the cards included in the deck, the consistency of the deck, the effectiveness of the card choices in the metagame, and strategic and tactical superiority/inferiority. However, some decks have a je ne sais quoi that gives them an edge. This observation probably reflects the fact that Magic is a complicated game and insufficiently theorized. It may have to do with interactivity (the idea being a deck that forces another deck to interact has an advantage) or it could be that these decks have an inherent synergy with the very structure of the game itself. Whatever it is, there is an undefined quality that favors some decks as much as it makes other decks lose which are lacking this element.

Illusions-Donate has this X factor in spades. This deck has winning ways."

When I first read that paragraph, specifically the line about "an inherent synergy with the game itself," I knew that I'd have to address this when I finally got around to finishing this article, because Steve's point is extremely accurate. Decks that take advantage of the fundamental rules of Magic will do better than decks that try to fight those rules.

One example of the latter that springs almost instantly to mind is Meandeck Tendrils. If you're unfamiliar with the deck, check out Steve's two-part primer here and here, and Justin Walter's excellent article on playing the deck here. The basic premise of the deck is to convert your opening hand into nine storm and 2BB and then cast Tendrils of Agony. Unfortunately, the deck is very slightly inefficient at converting mana to cards and there aren't quite enough of the truly broken cards to mana converters to rely on them. The deck fights the turn structure imposed by the game by attempting to go off turn 1 when possible, and often doesn't gain much from waiting a few turns, because it simply cannot use additional draws and untaps at maximum efficiency without risking the nine storm and 2BB gameplan. The deck can certainly win, as Justin's Waterbury performance showed, but every game is a struggle as you attempt to fundamentally break every rule of the game.

Many decks use some aspects of the rules to their advantage, but few do as effective a job as current Vintage Stax lists. For reference, here's Roland Chang's report of winning the Vintage World Championship with a good example of modern Stax. Stax is a marvel of synergy, combining powerful effects with each other and with the rules of the game to create enormous resource advantages. First of all, Stax runs upwards of nine restricted artifact mana sources, four Mishra's Workshops, and a Tolarian Academy, essentially ignoring the one land per turn restriction and getting maximum value from its untap steps. In addition, cards like Gorilla Shaman, Karn, Silver Golem, Wasteland and Strip Mine, Sphere of Resistance, Sundering Titan, Trinisphere, and Balance all prevent the opponent from maximizing their land drops and thus untaps, while Tangle Wire directly shuts down two or more full untaps. Crucible of Worlds also restricts land development in conjunction with Wasteland, Strip Mine, or Smokestack. By employing such a punishing mana denial strategy, Stax prevents the opponent from maximizing their untaps, their land drops, and even their draw phases. Additionally, by slowing down the game, Stax takes full advantage of its own draw steps and of incremental advantages like those of Crucible of Worlds, which ensures that you never run out of land drops to make. Additionally, Stax employs Goblin Welder, who not only generates phenomenal amounts of mana by casting expensive artifacts that were discarded to Thirst for Knowledge, but also helps you get even greater advantages out of cards like Tangle Wire and Sundering Titan, while preventing opposing counterspells from interfering with your game plan. Finally, Stax runs plenty of tutors and card drawing, which provide plenty of cards and draw steps to fuel the rest of the engine.

Stax can be a very hard deck to beat. It combines power and synergy to limit your options and ultimately lock you down entirely. However, if you understand how Stax abuses the rules in its favor, you can attack it quite effectively. First, you must make sure that you can use all your resources. Oxidize, Rebuild, and Sacred Ground are all popular choices to ensure that you can play your own game despite Stax's interference. Fighting Stax solely on its own terms, though, is a recipe for failure. You have to take the battle away from where Stax is prepared to fight. For some decks, this just means making strong use of the attack step. Fish is a good example of a deck that can fight some of Stax's resource denial, get its own cards on the table, and start quite literally attacking Stax's weak points. Other decks can beat Stax by totally bypassing its control over land drops, simply Tinkering out a Pentavus or Oathing up an Akroma. Finally, Goblin Welder is a hugely effective weapon against Stax, because it not only stops them from stopping you, but also lets you cheat on mana costs, which obviates the limitations they impose.

Comparing current control-prison builds of Stax to the earliest combo-prison lists, such as the one originally presented by Steve and Matthieu Durand here, we see that Stax has adopted numerous new and efficient artifacts that move it from playing an explosive lockdown approach to a decompressed game. The lock components no longer have synergy merely with each other, but now take full advantage of the extra turns they generate. Although Stax is a fairly unique case in this respect, it is always important to keep the fundamental rules of the game in mind when you're updating an old deck or building a new one. This will be especially crucial in the developing Legacy format, where we have the unique opportunity to update old decks using both new and very old cards. Understanding what rules a given deck exploits, and how, will be key to successfully transplanting old decks and ideas to the Legacy cardpool.

Now, all this talk about explaining Magic from the rules up may sound cool, but if you're already pretty familiar with the game, I haven't told you much that you don't already know. That's why I decided to spend the last part of this article finally explaining just what Tempo really is, using the paradigm I've outlined.

To begin, a little history. Card Advantage was always the poster child of magic theory, both because it's so simple to understand, and so easy to apply. If we each get the same number of cards, and I can either get more or trade a few of my cards for many of yours, then I have an advantage. Tempo, though, has always been a little more obscure. Two articles, "Tempo and Card Advantage" by Eric Taylor, and "Everything is a Time Walk" by Scott Keller, form the backbone of our current understanding of tempo. Both of those decks touch on the basic rules and resources of the game, but don't quite make the final leap to concretely define tempo. Mike Flores's comparatively more recent article, "Tempo is Really Interesting", also tries to take on the term, but Mike shies away from any kind of clear definition, even though in some ways he offers the clearest picture of what Tempo is.

Just to refresh your memory, the following resources are turn-limited:

• Untapping Permanents
• Drawing a Card
• Playing a Land
• Attacking

Now, let's break that statement down. We'll begin with the most important word in the definition: future. Tempo cannot be explained by looking at a static board position. You must take the future turns into account. This is generally where previous theories have fallen short. Additionally, because Tempo depends so heavily on what is going to happen, rather than on what has already happened, you can find yourself losing Tempo before you had any chance to exploit it.

There are two more key aspects to this definition: the value of your turn-limited resources, and that last clause, "relative to your opponent." We'll look at the latter first.

Everyone recognizes implicitly that all advantages in Magic are relative. Having five cards in hand is good, unless your opponent has six or more (given the identical board positions). Killing two of your opponent's creatures seems like card advantage, but not if you had to spend four cards to accomplish it. Even killing your opponent is relative - if you're dead too, it's not like you won the game. Tempo is no different. You could have Mishra's Workshop and a Mox on turn 1, but if they drop Mox, Sol Ring, Tolarian Academy, you're behind. Likewise, a turn 1 Jackal Pup is nice, unless they play Oath, or even just Silver Knight. However, if they respond to your Jackal Pup with "Thawing Glaciers, go" and you have a Wasteland, you're in really good shape. As I said, it's all relative.

This means that tempo can only be discussed in the context of given board positions. You cannot say "Wasteland is a Tempo card," or "Stroke of Genius is not a Tempo card" without some kind of context. Tempo is situation-specific.

Now, we move on to the most concrete part of our definition: "an increase in the value of your future turn-limited resources." What does this mean? Let's take each resource individually, and then return to the statement as a whole. First, though, I want to note that this does not say "an increase in your future turn-limited resources". It says an increase in their value. That distinction is crucial.

Resource One: Untapping Permanents
Every turn you get an untap step. All your cards untap for free! That's a pretty sweet deal, on the whole. When we ask, "how do we get more value out of this resource?" we can immediately see two basic approaches: untap more permanents, and make your opponent untap fewer permanents. Either one gives you a Tempo advantage. For example, a turn 1 land, Mox makes all your future untaps worth at least two mana. To get value out of this, though, you need to actually untap your Mox and land - which requires tapping them first. Using all your mana every turn is a great way to build Tempo, because it makes every untap very strong. Likewise, playing creatures and attacking with them is great, because then you're really maximizing your untaps.

Making your opponent untap fewer permanents follows the same lines: either make sure he has fewer permanents period, or make sure those permanents aren't tapping to do anything useful. The Stax list we examined earlier shows us some great ways to do both. Smokestack and Crucible of Worlds/Strip Mine are great ways to keep your opponent down on permanents, while Sphere of Resistance and Tangle Wire are good for making your opponent's cards either tap for no benefit, or simply don't tap because they can't cast any spells. Furthermore, Karn, Silver Golem and Gorilla Shaman eat Moxes, which not only shrinks their mana, but amplifies the effects of the other lockdown cards. In formats without Moxes, Winter Orb is great for reducing the value of your opponent's untaps, provided that you can handle its effects yourself. An interesting note is that many of these denial cards (Wasteland, Sphere of Resistance, Winter Orb) are ostensibly completely symmetric - the advantage comes in the relative effects, as your deck is designed to have powerful untaps even with these cards in play, while your opponent may not be so lucky.

Or, if you don't want to take the Stax approach, you can just Wrath away their creatures, and leave them with nothing particularly useful to untap. The classic example of Man-o'-War and Repulse not only prevent the opponent from untapping the creature in future turns, they make him waste more mana to replay it again the next turn. Those are not productive lands.

Resource Two: Drawing a Card
It may sound like I'm talking about Card Advantage here, but I am not. Remember, we're increasing the value of your draws, not the quantity. How do we do this? In many ways it's the same as increasing the value of your untaps. If you're drawing spells, you want to cast them, and that means getting mana on the table. Likewise, if you can keep your opponent at low mana, his draws aren't as good, since he cannot even cast all the spells he's holding. What's more important, though, is making sure your draws are relevant, and that your opponent's draws are not. For example, if your opponent is playing a burn deck, and you suddenly gain 1,000,000 life, it doesn't matter how efficiently she uses her resources, because she cannot win the game. All her future draws are worthless, as are her lands and cards in hand. To take a slightly less extreme example, Blood Moon can make it very hard for an opponent to draw anything useful, as they're stuck playing spells off of their one basic Island.

When a control deck stabilizes, they gain a huge advantage, because their draws are still relevant, while their opponent is stuck drawing lands or useless small creatures. It is usually this, and not whatever card advantage the control deck has managed to conserve up to that point, that spells doom for the aggressive player. Nullifying future draws is a key aspect of true control decks, and in fact formed the basis of Weissman's original "The Deck."

Resource Three: Playing a Land
One easy way to use this resource is quite simple: have a land in your hand, and play it. However, most decks tend to run out of land in hand at some point, because they don't play thirty lands. That's normally not an issue, because land drops tend to become much less valuable as the game reaches its conclusion. To revisit the Stax example, though, that deck prolongs the game to make later land drops relevant, and uses Crucible of Worlds to make sure it never misses a land drop.

The other way to take advantage of land drops, of course, is to make sure your opponent doesn't get to make enough of them. Anyone who has seen Limited Resources at work in multiplayer will understand this principle, but the easiest way to implement it is to just trade with their first few land drops (Wasteland is a common weapon here), and then keep playing lands while they run out. This differs from untap advantage because you aren't developing your own manabase either (although if you can do both, great). Neither of you are getting productive untaps, but soon you'll be the only player making land drops. Alternatively, if you start doing this after both players have a few lands out, if you can operate well on that mana and your opponent can't, then trading land drops makes him waste turn after turn playing land, only to see it leave play.

Finally, you can gain huge advantages here by having mana that isn't lands. Moxes each give you a free land drop, while cards like Dark Ritual or Black Lotus let you pretend you made a lot more land drops this turn than you really did. The one land per turn rule limits how much mana you have available, and circumventing it can lead to huge tempo boosts.

Resource Four: Attacking
This is the most straightforward aspect of Tempo. You can gain either by playing creatures and attacking with them, or by neutralizing your opponent's creatures, through removal, bigger creatures, or the like. Creatures thus offer both high risks and huge rewards here - playing too many can lead to serious punishment from the opponent (mass removal), while playing too few doesn't put on enough pressure (inadequate use of the attack phase). Finding the right middle ground depends a lot on what creatures are available and what the good answers to them are. In Limited, you basically want to run every decent creature you have, and pretty much any actual removal, whereas in Vintage you need major disruption (Fish) or acceleration (Oath) to make creatures viable. The decks basically devolve into nearly pure disruption, using creatures like Meddling Mage or Spiketail Hatchling, or nearly pure combo, with Tinker, Oath, or Goblin Welder pulling out some huge beast. There's no need to neutralize your opponent's attackers by playing blockers - you either kill all their threats, or just kill them. In Limited, blocking is key to preventing your opponent from going crazy on the attack. Creatures that you can't block, thanks to flying, fear, or trample, let your opponent just keep swinging, provided he has adequate defense against your ground guys. The other formats are, as usual, somewhere in between, depending on how many attack phases you get in the average game.

Okay, now let's return to our definition of Tempo. Once again:

If you want one key word to summarize Tempo, that word is investment. You invest your resources in Tempo to reap future gains, or you attempt to remove or neuter your opponent's investment. Card Advantage provides one resource, but Tempo increases the value of every turn-limited action you take. That gives you a fundamental advantage that you can ride to victory, with the opponent wondering why he never felt like he was in the game at all.

A bonus note on giving up Tempo: in many formats it is possible to give up early Tempo, often for Card Advantage. Whether it's Counsel of the Soratami in Limited, or Intuition-Accumulated Knowledge in Vintage, this is a risky tradeoff to make. If you spend too much time drawing cards and not enough investing in Tempo, you will be too far behind your opponent to have any chance of recovering and winning the game. This isn't always the case, and Card Advantage is often crucial for control decks to preserve their Tempo advantages, but it is an important trap to watch out for. I've seen too many Vintage decks that try to pack in upwards of 16-20 draw spells, and then just keep drawing cards until they lose. If you can convert all of those cards into some ridiculous Tempo, fine, but if your basic gameplan is the same as another deck, you may need more answers to slow your opponent's Tempo, instead of just more card drawing.

That's all for now. Join me next time when I'll have my Richmond Vintage report, Legacy report, and a discussion of the decks I played in the context of this analysis.

Jacob Orlove
Team Meandeck
Moderator, TheManaDrain