An epiphany. A vision. A moment of clarity. A picture in your head. That turning point in life when you discover an undeniable yet unforgettable truth - like the day you find out boys are physically different from girls, or when you realize you've turned into your father and you're in love with a girl just like your mother.

Sometimes I forget all the knowledge I bring to a Magic game; try teaching your roommate how to play and you'll see what I mean. Even very simple things like playing the correct land, tapping the correct lands for mana, and playing your spells and abilities in the right order take time to learn. That's all the stuff you have to get right before you sit down in front of an opponent. Then you're making decisions with an opponent actively trying to beat you. The next level is deckbuilding, where you actually pick the cards that you'll be making all those decisions with. And the very top of the pyramid is card design - what those guys and girls at magicthegathering.com do, where the creation begins.

But it all boils down to one question: why do I keep losing with my Force of Nature deck?

In my glorious newbie days of Ice Age, I would constantly lose with my Force of Nature deck and I didn't know why. I knew how to "play" Magic like my friends taught me. I understood that when big creatures and little creatures fight, the big creature wins. Since the big creature wins, why would I ever want to play with little creatures?

Furthermore, if the big creature wins, it makes sense that the biggest creature will always win against all other creatures. That's what Magic is about right? Whoever gets the biggest creature into play wins? Right? Right?!

Wrong.

Sadly, this is not the case. I discovered this when I was paying particularly close attention to my green deck (which contained all the Forests and big green creatures that I owned) versus a white weenie deck. My turns went:

Turn 1: Forest.
Turn 2: Forest.
Turn 3: Forest.
Turn 4: Forest.
Turn 5: Forest.
Turn 6: Forest, a Craw Wurm that immediately gets hit by Swords to Plowshares.
Turn 7: Forest. I had Force of Nature in hand, but I wanted to wait a turn to play my Scaled Wurm because Force of Nature would tie up mana during my upkeep.
Turn 8: Forest, Scaled Wurm.

I died on my eighth turn despite having the largest vanilla creature in Magic at the time. I realized that even though my opponent had wimpy 1/1s and 2/2s, I still lost. Even Scaled Wurm couldn't save me. Obviously, the "biggest creature" plan wasn't working.

Why do I keep losing with my Force of Nature deck?

Somehow, I put two and two together and figured out that my large creature does not hit the table fast enough. Scaled Wurm won his fight with one little creature but I died because my opponent had too many little creatures. Scaled Wurm has to win lots of fights before he becomes the only creature left. If I could play Scaled Wurm earlier, then he could start winning fights sooner.

This is the first time in my memory that I discovered something truly profound about Magic on my very own. I can't describe in words the impact of this solitary moment in time.

An epiphany. My green epiphany.

At the beginning, I looked only at a creature's power and toughness. Eventually, I took a step forward and looked at a creature's power and toughness, as it was compared to its mana cost. Later I took another step forward and saw whether or not this was the most efficient creature compared to all the other creatures I owned that I could put in my deck. Finally, I reached a landmark and recognized what is commonly called a mana curve - that is, I understood the need for efficient creatures at each mana cost. Because though I would eventually be able to play my game-winning Force of Nature, I still needed wimpier, cheaper creatures to keep from losing the game before then.

If we look at my exploration chronologically, the first discovery is power/toughness, the next is mana efficiency, the next is card selection - and finally we get to a strategy, the mana curve.

That's right. I played a great deal of my early Magic games with no strategy whatsoever. Well, I guess that playing with only huge, expensive creatures is, technically, a strategy - but it's quite a losing strategy, much like gaining lots of life. It's an oversimplification of what the game is about.

Many beginners love their life total. Your life total compared to your opponent's life total measures how much you are winning or losing the game. Gaining life with cards like Stream of Life directly push you from losing to winning.

You've been there. Don't even try to deny it.

With my newfound understanding of what the game is about, I sought to start winning creature fights earlier. I cut the deck to around seventy cards and traded away crummy lands that hurt me like Underground River and Adarkar Wastes for good green cards like Verduran Enchantress, Cockatrice, and Aspect of Wolf.

Now, my deck could do something like this:

Turn 1: Forest, Wild Growth.
Turn 2: Forest, Juniper Order Druid.
Turn 3: Forest, Force of Nature.

Now that's what I call an improvement in deck performance. I was learning how to curve, and even figured out that it's good to jump ahead with green mana acceleration. As I played with the cards more and more I learned many tricks like Instill Energy on Juniper Order Druid, reusing Maze of Ith, Cockatrice + Maze of Ith, or putting Aspect of Wolf on a Verduran Enchantress and beating face - but for the first time in my life, I also learned what synergy was. I was absorbing a huge amount of knowledge as fast as I could drink it.

The mana curve is a wonderful thing. Games are won with it, VS System decks depend on it - and yes, games are even lost with it.

What's that? Mana curve bad? Don't worry, I'll explain. You're not just skimming for decklists and looking at the pictures, are you?

The Sealed Creature Curve
Sealed deck has the lowest power level of all sanctioned formats. Its randomness and low power level make creatures the defining spell type.

So you should play creatures, we all get it. But how should you be playing your creatures? With a simplified and grandiose strategy I'm going to call the Sealed Creature Curve. This strategy will come in handy later when I prove another point:

Turn 1: Land, 1-drop 1/1
Turn 2: Land, 2-drop 2/2
Turn 3: Land, 3-drop 3/3
Turn 4: Land, 4-drop 4/4
Turn 5: Land, 5-drop 5/5
Turn 6: Land, 6-drop 6/6
Turn 7: Land, 7-drop 7/7

If everything goes according to plan, you will:

• Use all of your available mana each turn
• Play the most powerful creature that you could play each turn
• Empty your hand of your 14^th card on your 7^th turn if you drew first. If you played first, you want to topdeck and play a second six-drop.

If your creatures aren't the ideal size, they hopefully have an ability or two to make up for it. Green creatures can follow (or jump) this curve very well, and are sometimes also afforded an additional ability along the way.

In practice, though, this is very difficult to do. You need to draw fourteen specific cards (seven lands, one creature of each drop) in a certain order (having a land to play each turn, early drops soon and late drops afterward). That means you need a higher quantity of low-drops and a smaller quantity of big drops simply because you need to draw the low-drops in time.

Even so, you'll win every game (barring a ridiculous bomb from your opponent) if you curve like this.

Why did I take the time to discuss this Sealed strategy? Because, in my mind, this strategy is profound in that it is a simple, fair, and viable creature strategy... and it's very green. We have a turn planned for every card, a place for every mana, and our spells get stronger and stronger. We are also playing the game fair by playing our creatures on the turn they were meant to be played.

What's even more intriguing is that this strategy does not work in Constructed or in any format where the power level gets past a certain threshold.

But why? Why can't I play my creatures on the turn they were meant to be played? Why can't I spend six mana on a creature and expect it to be good?

Why do I keep losing with my Force of Nature deck?

Playing Fair
I play in a small, sanctioned eight-player or so Extended tournament every Sunday with my G/w Elf Control deck. In it, I employ a full set of Trinispheres in the sideboard, and at times it can be the most powerful Magic card I've ever played.

I sat down and tried to think why Trinisphere is so powerful in my deck. It has an amazingly unique effect on the game... but that alone doesn't make it powerful. I don't see pros kissing their girlfriends when they bust open Trinisphere in Sealed, nor is it among the two dozen or so banned cards in Extended.

Oftentimes, my deck doesn't even notice that it's on the table. Of course I use Aether Vial to cheat my way around Trinisphere... but even without Vial abuse, my deck still functions reasonably well with an untapped Trinisphere in play. Usually I've played all my one-mana spells before I play my Trinisphere. Then I start playing my Swords of Fire and Ice, Eternal Witnesses, Skyshroud Poachers, and sometimes a Living Wish or Deranged Hermit, too. If I draw my little Elves and Birds and Vials when I have Trinisphere in play, they aren't the best, but I can still pay three mana for them if I have nothing better to do. It's not like I'm playing one-sided Chills or anything; Trinisphere affects me as well.

Meanwhile, there is this universal halt on the other side of the table. My opponent usually takes about four times as long to do almost nothing during their turn. They become very frustrated about how bad their deck functions with Trinisphere in play.

But why? Why do I keep winning with Trinisphere, given an equal board position? It's not like I built my deck around Trinisphere. I randomly threw them in the sideboard at a PTQ because green is ill-equipped to deal with noninteractive combo decks.

Why is Trinisphere so powerful that it merits restriction in Vintage? They have every card in Magic to deal with it. It seems that 67.2% of all Magic cards are immune to Trinisphere. The other 32.8% merely cost up to three additional mana to play.

So why is Trinisphere so powerful? I'll give you some hints.

First hint: Like I demonstrated with the Sealed Creature Curve, decks need extra low drops to ensure they can play them early enough to stay in the game. That means decks will naturally contain more low drops than high drops - and three mana is a good enough place to separate "low drops" from "high drops."

Second hint: The 67.2% of spells that are immune to Trinisphere are the bad spells.

Third hint: The Sealed Creature Curve is a fair strategy.

All I can say is it happened again. I figured something out, all on my own. I learned something new, and that's why I love Magic.

In a powerful format like Extended, tournament decks don't play their one-mana spells on turn 1, their two mana spells on turn 2, and then when Trinisphere hits, they just play their three-mana spell on turn 3 and their four-mana spell on turn 4. That's not how tournament decks play Magic. Tournament decks come flying out of the gate with spells costed very low with almost universal mana cheating. Affinity for artifacts, Madness, Daze, Cloud of Faeries, Cabal Therapy, Aether Vial, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Goblin Warchief, Aluren, Llanowar Elves, Gush, Mind's Desire, Birds of Paradise, Culling the Weak, Mox Diamond, Chrome Mox - these are all cards that cheat mana costs. No one plays a four-mana spell on turn 4 and a five-mana spell on turn 5; that's a great way to lose.

Paying the full mana cost for your spells on the proper turn is playing fair - and as Zvi Mowshowitz has reminded us, tournament decks never, ever want to play fair. As the power level of the format increases, decks get increasingly unfair.

Trinisphere wrecks decks that don't play fair. It's a simple as that.

The "fair" curving decks can use tools like Aether Vial, Chalice of the Void, and Trinisphere to keep from losing to unfair decks. Trinisphere takes away most or all of the unfairness that many decks usually thrive upon to win games.

If people would just play fair and put some "expensive" cards in their decks and follow a nice curve, they would destroy me when my Trinispheres and Chalices of the Void hurt me more than they hurt them. You don't even have to go that far; some Flametongue Kavus or Exalted Angels are all you really need to destroy green mages.

(That is, except that I'm a Green and White mage who can Armageddon away that plan. Just because I'm a green and white mage doesn't mean I'm not evil.)

That really makes me think about how R&D wants to us to play Magic. That's one strike in favor of defecting to VS System. In addition to having no mana screw, large creatures are actually good (and necessary) in VS because cards like Remove Soul, Repulse, Control Magic, and Swords to Plowshares are rare or non-existent. Even Deranged Hermit, a five-mana green creature of almost unparalleled power, is a card I frown upon at seeing in my opening seven. I call him "mulligan man" because oftentimes he simply costs too much mana to have any effect on the game. My opponent will have already put too many cards on the table, played way too many spells on his turns, or drawn and searched for way too many ways to stop me - making this five-mana creature have no effect on the game.

Expensive creatures are dead cards because they are so easy to stop when you're the only one playing fair. Green's strength is large creatures, and that sometimes just doesn't cut it for all the reasons listed above.

Why do I keep losing with my Force of Nature deck?

With Trinisphere in play, the unfairness all but ceases. Now the Force of Nature deck can win.

Conclusion
Previously, I had never witnessed a game that could trick me with its seemingly simplistic flavor yet completely floor me with endless depth and discovery. I didn't know it at the time, but when I first discovered the mana curve, I became completely hooked on Magic. This event has happened to every one of us at some point. I consider myself lucky that remember mine vividly.

I will never be a master of Magic. With the small amount of time, money, and intelligence I'm afforded on this Earth, I cannot even hope to master this game we all love.

My fondest memories of magical times were when I first started, where every day I learned something new or saw a new cool card. I had one binder and one deck box and I knew my collection by heart, and I would endlessly put cards in and take cards out of my Force of Nature deck and Norritt deck to see how they worked. And I would just play for hours and hours with people who were just like me. I would play in a tournament and get totally smashed - but playing with a sideboard and the prospect of winning prizes were so new and appealing that I did it anyway.

But these days? I've won my share of small tournaments. I've read, absorbed, and understand the theories, I've done most of the combos worth doing, I've discovered all the cards, and my collection has gotten unwieldy enough that I don't even know what's in it anymore.

I've watched Magic change with the Internet, that animal totally free of control. With it, Magic communities commune with each other for insight and feedback. Massive rules knowledge is fast and plentiful while an unruly-yet-timeless history of the game is currently being logged away in its articles, emails, and forums where they were once only stories told around campfires and kitchen tables.

On the other hand, the Internet has supplanted much of the need for deck building skill and card evaluation. Decks are quickly tuned ever so tightly to the point where Exalted Angel was not good enough in W/R Slide and Shrapnel Blast was not good enough in Ravager Affinity. Formats are solved almost as fast as sets are released. If it wasn't for the casual crowd that still plays Magic the way it was meant to be played, most of the fun of Magic might be lost.

Magic is the only game I've ever played that has held my attention for ten straight years (though suffering through Urza's Block with its pinnacle absurdity, Treachery, pushed me within a Rosewater inch of selling my mostly-invalidated collection).

But if I could go back to being a newbie - a complete and utter newbie with the innocence and bliss of total ignorance - I would do it in an instant. Every experience was new, every victory exhilarating, every card filled with endless possibilities.

Friends and blue mages, I leave you with a dream of a world without the Internet. A world with only casual decks and fun games, a world without broken cards, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

Agent MaRo: Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just playing with their Magic cards...oblivious. Did you know that the first metagame was designed to be a perfect tournament format? Where no cards were broken. Where all the colors and archetypes would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would buy the product. Entire mechanics were lost. Some believed that we lacked the professional manpower to playtest your perfect format. But I believe that as gamers, Magic players define their abilities through losing and horrible plays. The perfect format was a dream that your primitive deckbuilding skills kept trying to out tech. Which is why your metagame was redesigned to this: the battle of R&D's Theme Decks. I say your metagame because as soon as we started building decks for you, it really became our metagame - which is, of course, what this is all about. Netdecking, Morphling, netdecking. Like und Juggernaut. Look at those underpowered decklists. You had your time. The future is our world, Morphling. The future is...our time.

Kenneth Nagle
NorrYtt
NorrYtt@gmail.com
Proud Member of the Casual Players' Alliance
2005.4.14
Relevant Format: Extended (Tempest - Betrayers of Kamigawa)