Part One: Two (Actually Three) Conflicting Models for Deck Design

In the "modern era" there are two three important models for making decks.

Hmm...

Well.

That was awkward. First sentence in and we're already at a strikethrough. Best get the first one (extra one?) out of the way first; first thing's first as it were.

The Linear Model

Basically R&D makes your deck.

Examples include Ravager Affinity and Standard B/U Faeries. Optimization around the linear model is quite different than around the other two models because the core is already set for you. For instance you likely didn't have a very good reason not to play black for Disciple of the Vault in your Ravager Affinity deck provided you were playing during that brief moment when all of Vault of Whispers Disciple of the Vault and Arcbound Ravager were legal; if you could play Skullclamp sure Skullclamp is in too. And in the alternative Cranial Plating.

If you were any good you played Aether Vial. Yes there were some decks that didn't play Aether Vial at the time but probably that was more a function of the other cards being so good that they could make up for how atrocious it was not to play Aether Vial.

Point being is that under the Linear Model many and most of your cards are spoken for and there is relatively little innovation that can be done. There's relatively little self-direction in a format where Linear Model decks are not just the best but where many players know they are the best.

Which is not to say that innovation is not impossible. Consider the decks that former StarCityGames.com Premium author Mike Clair used on his meteoric rise:

The card that sticks out like a sore thumb in Clair's list is Electrostatic Bolt. What's so special about Electrostatic Bolt? Well not very many other players played it. However they probably should have!

Electrostatic Bolt did basically everything you want a card to do in a format dominated by the Linear Model.

1. It was different. Difference is essential. If there's one thing you can learn from Patrick Chapin it's this: difference is essential! If you're doing exactly the same thing everyone else is it's really up to the luck of the draw. Only by changing some factor that you can control (like playing Electrostatic Bolt) can you put the necessary monkey wrench in the coin flip.
2. It dealt with every single breaker! Electrostatic Bolt killed Goblin Warchief (if that was important to you Goblin Warchief being the flagship of "the other" major Linear Model deck of the Skullclamp era). But in the mirror match it killed both Disciple of the Vault and Arcbound Ravager (or at least made it very expensive to keep Arcbound Ravager around). Really smart players of this era went with some varying€”not necessarily Shrapnel Blast€”red solutions. For example Atog to get around mono-artifact removal.

When you're stuck in a world of the Linear Model you generally have two choices: join 'em or figure out some way to beat 'em. But know that if you go the noble hero's route you will often find yourself exposed to other angles and will maybe still lose to the "prey" deck's nut draw.

Brian Kibler talked about our solution to this era in his Selesnya Week article.

Sometimes people ask me why I loved Caw-Blade so much (though I never myself played a Caw-Blade I super admired it) while I hated Faeries so much. Aren't they the same thing? If I could crystalize my feelings in a single paragraph it would be this:

Faeries is a reaffirmation of every possible failing of Development. I actually find the cards Mistbind Clique and Bitterblossom physically offensive. What's the point of printing a card like Volcanic Fallout to hose Mistbind Clique if Bitterblossom is itself a Faerie? I'm usually a huge cheerleader for R&D but this era was bad. On balance Caw-Blade is a reaffirmation of every possible triumph of self-realization and ingenious deck design. Part of the reason Caw-Blade was so overly successful was because R&D didn't initially realize how good Stoneforge Mystic could be in a deck with almost no creatures and almost no equipment!

Caw-Blade did the one thing every successful deck designer sets out to do: win the tournament it's designed to win. It won the Pro Tour! Everything that happened after was gravy; yet even as more and more players latched onto it it kept winning at statistically outlying rates! That's unheard of in the history of Magic: The Gathering! Caw-Blade was that special (compare to Faeries and Jund which won in Standard at something like 44%€”below average€”even as they were touted as boogeymen).

Anyway enough about the add-on.

The (Original) Ravnica Model: The Tier Two Metagame

The model of the original Ravnica era was the deliberate "Tier Two Metagame" of no Tier One strategies. Then Lead Developer Brian Schneider's model for the universe was to have many cards at similar power level. All the cards were meant to be "good" but none of them was meant to be so much better than the others. Think about a format with Lightning Helix. When I first saw Lightning Helix my eyes kind of bugged out. Lightning Helix is too good! Only it's not. It's very good at some very fair stuff and is relatively easy to cast when you are focused on being able to cast it. It is not offensive in the same way as a real format-cracking monster-in-the-closet.

The age of the original Ravnica gave us a world of many cards about the same power level as one another€”at again a good power level. Which is the best at dealing with threats between Lightning Helix Repeal and Condemn? How about we mix in Mortify and Putrefy?

Which is the best between Farseek Compulsive Research and Angel of Despair?

Different playgroups (all pros) had each of the following Ravnica era cards as the best card in Standard at one time or another: Remand Vitu-Ghazi the City-Tree Life from the Loam Wildfire Dark Confidant and Loxodon Hierarch.

Can we even name the best creature in this mix? Which is superior for a Gruul four-drop Giant Solifuge or Rumbling Slum?

The "Tier Two" Ravnica Standard metagame which stretched from Kamigawa until Planar Chaos was in large part a different€”and deliberately different€”game than most of us have been playing since the second set of Time Spiral and the planeswalker era.

You probably have heard the phrase coined by Osyp Lebedowicz at the time which guided my deck design (and the finishes of those who worked with me during this productive time) around tapping out for Keiga and Meloku. What could the opponent do that was better than Keiga and Meloku?

Were Keiga and Meloku the best? Maybe. Often they were better than what the opponent was capable of€but it was unlikely the opponent could do something better. Notice the difference there. Ultimately we tried to play non-interactively and "over the top." After all many of our opponents thought that the best cards in Standard were two-drop Bears that hurt them or lands that tapped all your mana to eventually deal one damage.

Optimization in the Tier Two Metagame went like this: R&D made most or all of the cards about the same power level but not exactly the same power level. The goal then was to find inefficiencies that broke the fundamental expectations of the game. Examples included:

1. "Budget Boros" - Playing Boros Garrison in an aggro deck (trust me this was a very controversial innovation when it first happened). Boros Garrison was kind of like two cards in a deck with no card drawing plus it put a card back in your hand and allowed you to play a little light on lands so you could fit more guys and burn which was kind of a passive aggressive card advantage.
2. Difference again - Do play cards like Firemane Angel when other U/R/W decks are focused on Lightning Angel (they can't kill you fast enough); don't play cards like Remand if you can't actually capitalize on the tempo you [might] steal. The room you save on Sacred Cows like Remand buys you the room you need for Firemane Angel or say the fourth Demonfire.

The Tier Two Metagame model might be somewhat tedious for newer players but it's important to understand if we're moving out of...

The Haymaker Era Model

The printing of Damnation in Planar Chaos marked the spiritual end to the Tier Two era. Zvi Mowshowitz claims it was the greatest failing of his short tenure in R&D that he couldn't prevent Damnation.

Tarmogoyf in the very next set closed the viability of Tier Two for quite some time. How could you even have a conversation about Keiga or Meloku when it was possible to play a 5/6 on turn 2 in your otherwise B/U control deck? You could play Tarmogoyf on turn 6 (like you might Keiga) but with lots of mana open or you could variance it out on turn 2 to steal some extras (like a Miracle deck today).

Next came planeswalkers like Jace Beleren and Ajani Goldmane (and then even more powerful planeswalkers in future sets) and the hinges came completely off the doors. Bloodbraid Elf is the quintessential card of the Haymaker Era.

I actually feel like I've been an even more effective deck designer in the Haymaker Era than the [original] Ravnica Era which might be surprising to some readers. It's during this era that things like The Top 10 Cards in Standard became "a thing" and a hotly contested thing at that.

Optimization around the Haymaker Era is relatively simple: figure out the most powerful cards you can play. Play as many of them as you can.

How is this possible if information is equal (as this is almost kinda sorta like the Linear Model with R&D laying stuff out for us)? The answer is that if you have better evaluation criteria for cards you will have a better Top 10 list than the next guy. Now go figure out how to play the most best cards.

Bloodbraid Elf was a powerful card and at least prior to the printing of Jace the Mind Sculptor easily the best or second best card in Standard. It's hard to order exactly where Bloodbraid Elf Baneslayer Angel and Ranger of Eos all sat for me. Baneslayer Angel was better than Tarmogoyf in Extended and Bloodbraid Elf wasn't played in Extended while Ranger of Eos was. This would seem to imply Baneslayer Angel > Ranger of Eos > Bloodbraid Elf in Standard but that's definitely not certain.

No one thought of Baneslayer Angel as a villain. Eventual StarCityGames.com podcasters and SCGLive stalwarts Joey Pasco and Bigheadjoe even called for the banning of Bloodbraid Elf (which is part of how they got famous).

Interestingly in Standard there was essentially only one implementation of Bloodbraid Elf: Jund.

By the World Championships most of the best players had in fact given up. Jund it is!

Go back and read their tournament reports. Most of them either wanted to just play a stock Jund list as best they could or tried to do minor speed and / or end game power tweaks like Rampant Growth and / or Siege-Gang Commander to win the mirror.

We took a different route:

Naya Lightsaber quite simply played nine of the Top 10 cards in Standard. It didn't play Blightning (Jund could have Blightning unfortunately) but if you controlled for Bloodbraid Elf and Lightning Bolt they had Blightning whereas we had Ajani Vengeant Baneslayer Angel Ranger of Eos and arguably the greatest creature of all time: Noble Hierarch.

I don't think you'd have gotten many dissenters if you'd asked whether Baneslayer Angel was better than Sprouting Thrinax or not. It's just for some reason good players other than Andre Coimbra didn't try playing them all together in one deck.

Here's the difference (there's that difference again): imagine everyone just tries to play as many of the Top 10 cards as they can. Where can they get an edge? Aren't we back to Linear Template?

Kinda and not really.

You just have to have better evaluation criteria for cards. Look at this one:

I went undefeated at New York Regionals with this Grixis Hits deck about a year after Naya Lightsaber. It's just Naya Lightsaber. Again I just figured out the best cards and played all of them. Lightning Bolt Spreading Seas Cruel Ultimatum Jace (probably should have had the fourth Jace) went back and forth with Gerry on Vampire Nighthawk (I think I ended up right) and Countersquall.

Yes...Countersquall!

Most people didn't' have Countersquall anywhere near their Top 10 lists but the card is unbelievable. In the pre-Mana Leak format it was Electrostatic Bolt again:

1. It did everything you wanted (as in this deck you rarely really had to Counterspell a creature strategically).
2. It was different and defied expectations. When I knocked a Superfriends opponent out with a Countersquall on Jace and a consecutive Countersquall on Ajani his eyes bugged out. "Of course!" he said sarcastically. Are you really going there...on Countersquall? The deck had base three damage from Blightning Lightning Bolt and Sedraxis Specter (aka Blightning five through eight). A bunch of threes add up to eighteen. Among other things Countersquall was then a Time Walk Tinker.

The same thing happened again last year with U/R Exarch Twin. I played all the best cards Caw-Blade did: Preordain Into the Roil Tectonic Edge Mana Leak and Jace. Similar "best cards" but I got more free turn 4 wins.

This is a long-winded intro I know but it's important to stretch our collective understanding to What Happens Next.

Part Two: Are We in a Ravnica Era or a Haymaker Era?

This is really the only interesting question we can ask ourselves as deck designers.

If we are in a Haymaker Era the task should be to figure out what the Top 10 cards are and try to play as many as possible. Luckily Farseek is one of the Top 10 cards.

What I think may have been my mistake at States was that I thought we were still in a Haymaker Era when we might actually be transitioning into a Ravnica Era with you know Return to Ravnica.

It's hard to imagine two more trademark cards of a block than Umezawa's Jitte and Gifts Ungiven easily #1 and #2 in some order of their block. But when Mirrodin block gave way to Ravnica: City of Guilds Jitte was blunted by cards from Lightning Helix to Putrefy to the point that it was relegated to the most part to winning sideboard fights between beatdown decks. Is that what happened to Delver of Secrets?

If we are [back] in a Ravnica-type era that means that cards are more on par with one another rather than standouts like Delver of Secrets and Snapcaster Mage making everyone else look bad. If you look at some of the performing control decks currently they don't even have four Snapcaster Mages!

Is Thragtusk really the best threat in Standard?

I'm pretty sure the answer to that question is yes.

If a five-mana three-toughness can-actually-still-be-countered GREEN CARD is the best threat in a format... What does that say about the format?

Part Three: Insanity

I hope you've enjoyed the first section's modeling and the second section's questioning because now we're in weirdo-ville.

The fundamental precept of Magic deck construction is that 60 cards is the optimal number for almost any deck. If you look at super successful decks from Mono-Red Goblins decks with Wooded Foothills to Caw-Blade with Preordain or High Tide with Impulse the goal has been to get to smaller and smaller numbers than 60.

This precept was challenged back in 2006 by Jeff Cunningham who proposed if memory serves a 70-card Gifts Ungiven deck.

I was initially puzzled at this as if your key card is Gifts Ungiven (i.e. you're not playing a highly redundant deck) you'd want to minimize your card count ergo maximizing your chances of hitting Gifts Ungiven early.

An apparently fictitious battle of greater-than-60 Gifts Ungiven deck versus less-than-sixty Gifts Ungiven deck for "a bucket of fried chicken" was contested in the imagination of Patrick Chapin. Cunningham's Gifts Ungiven deck was...Cunningham's deck. Patrick's Gifts Ungiven deck was:

1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Lightning Serpent
2 Blazing Shoal
2 Myojin of Infinite Rage
1 Mountain

Now what do you think about the fundamentality of the 60-card deck?

60 cards is arbitrary not optimal. THE RULES say to play 60 so we play 60. There's nothing Magical about that number. If you look at Patrick's deck it wins on the first turn every time if not stopped. Can you "build a deck to beat" Patrick's deck? Obviously. That's not the point.

The notion of having the smallest possible deck blurs quite a bit as cards get to be more and more in-line with one another's' power levels. Remember all the "what's better Lightning Helix or Compulsive Research" from up there? If you aren't playing first turn Delver of Secrets and setting it up with Ponder or using Preordain to dig to Stoneforge Mystic or Deceiver Exarch attitudes can loosen up a bit.

And for God's sake if Thragtusk is the best threat?

What does that say about this card?

Whatever else you want to say about Battle of Wits I think we can all agree a five-mana card that just says "win the game" grants a powerful effect especially if we're envisioning that the best (really next-best) thing is a five-mana 5/3 Beast.

Kinda puts it all into perspective doesn't it?

Now I'm not under any illusions that the next SCG Standard Open will be won by a Battle of Wits deck and there are certain logistical reasons why maybe it shouldn't be (prohibitive though not impossible to shuffle it really is The Most Expensive Deck in Standard). But I don't know that those reasons particularly outweigh that it's 1) a more powerful five-drop threat than the consensus "best threat" in the format which is also a five and 2) probably the most rewarding (and most opponent punishing) strategy available.

What do I mean about that last point?

One of the things I'm really interested in is personal productivity and value generation. The highest rated employees in the United States excel in a surprising area: uncertainty. They tend to be able to produce value in situations where either they have no particular directions to follow or can "step up" when the world is shuffling and jumbling around them.

Battle of Wits€”in particular with Increasing Ambition€”rewards players who can thrive in moments of uncertainty. You know why? Because your deck is so big that if you can access Increasing Ambition the answer is probably there somewhere!

At the same time a deck with so many tools and access to so much manipulation (just because we are 244 cards doesn't mean that we don't play the same "get smaller" games that Goblins Caw-Blade and High Tide did) punishes opponents who aren't sure what's going to happen next. Earlier this week I played against a Jund opponent who played Farseek then apologized at trying Slaughter Games main predictably going for Battle of Wits. He saw I had Thragtusk and got those on his next go-round.

€ Which basically means that he tapped eight mana and discarded two cards to have no effect on the board. Meanwhile I pretended I was the 244-card version of Todd Anderson.

If you're interested here are my three-color Battle of Wits builds:

The concept here was that you could get Battle of Wits (again an above-the-curve threat if everything else is about equal) and still play both Farseek into third turn Jace Architect of Thought and Thragtusk + Restoration Angel (the Chapin duo of powerful stuff).

I liked doing the things this deck does but its major failing was... How do I put this? It didn't win overmuch. There's a lot of manipulation but most of it is land-grab so I'd often stabilize with a ton of resources...and then flood out.

I actually went on a savage win streak early with this build. It's basically a Destroy All Monsters deck€that has Battle of Wits.

I think I won roughly as much with Nicol Bolas as I did with Battle of Wits which would probably make my boy Huey Jensen proud. It's less fun to play than Bant Battle of Wits though.

One of the cool things I learned about with these generations of Battle of Wits decks was how playable the Keyrunes are. I'm not the biggest Keyrune fan but three curves nicely into five especially when your five wins the game immediately.

This is my current Battle deck which combines the fun of Bant Battle of Wits with the ability to run Increasing Ambition and Diabolic Revelation. Diabolic Revelation kind of goes all Next Level when you combine it with cards like Ranger's Path.

A lot of the small choices in this deck are nods to Diabolic Revelation: two Swamps two Golgari Guildgates for Gatecreeper Vine to find. Overgrown Tomb obviously works great with Farseek and Ranger's Path. Probably I should just play Forbidden Alchemy in this version if Lingering Souls is good enough for me and Curse of Death's Hold if I feel like I can cast Diabolic Revelation.

You also get a fair number of miracle wins which is hilarious (but usually frustrating for your opponents).

The one uber-rewarding thing about Battle of Wits is that you get to play all the cards that other people wish they could play. You want to play Sphinx's Revelation? Accelerated Sphinx's Revelation? Go ahead and play four. How many of you have ever run a Staff of Nin? Because it's freaking awesome! And yes you can do all the tricks as Bant: Farseek into Jace Thragtusk into Restoration Angel. You might be surprised at the unexpected€”and hence surprisingly and richly rewarding€”situations that a 244-card deck can put you in.

That said no I don't know that a Battle of Wits strategy is more better than any other strategy in Standard. But as far as I can tell we don't have a dominant Apex Predator yet which leads me to believe we are more Tier Two today than Haymaker (which I think I would prefer). If that in fact ends up being true then 5: Win the Game might just be the best thing we can do in which case our job per all the things we've chatted about waxed on and learned in this here article...

Is to figure out the best way we can do that.

LOVE
MIKE