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not a thread that has anything to do in particular w/ zendikar i just wanted a pun. card evaluation is hard and even people who are good at it get poo poo wrong. there are a lot of things to consider and i think some discussion that won't get derailed by someone's fnm bad beats story is a good thing. poo poo we could talk about - best case scenario mentality - the idea of "strictly better" and metrics to compare cards w/ similar effects - "dies to removal" or the jace/doomblade test - what makes a card of a given type good - analysis of specific cards - LR's quadrant theory thing here's the post from the main thread that made me post this Serperoth posted:A Strictly Better Post
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Mar 25, 2015 15:46
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Oh wow, I've been wanting to write that post for a while, and I still feel it's missing something. Any recommendations on what to add/change? Bear in mind it was written at 1am so it could be more lucid.
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Mar 25, 2015 15:53
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i think the key thing is that we're limited on card slots when deckbuilding and discussions of strict superiority/inferiority are really around that point. in essence, putting a card in your deck is incurring some change in your EV. this is true outside of this discussion, if i put another land in my deck it has an effect on how well my deck achieves its goals/responds to other decks whether that's positive or negative. the metrics in your post are good ones to identify when considering two cards in the same role which one is giving you a positive change to EV. lightning bolt and shock are both removal cards that go to the face. there are scenarios where it's better that you have shock than bolt but they are few and far between, largely where the card is performing something other than it's intended role. so when slotting a card into the deck that wants bolt or shock, playing shock to hit those fringe scenarios is losing you a ton of value in the normal scenario. in fact i'd say in all decks looking for red removal that can go to the face, the value of playing bolt is greater than the value of playing shock. saying bolt is "strictly better" than shock is in reference to this fact imo, that across the board decks looking for that effect would rather have bolt. you could maths out this poo poo but who has the time amirite
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Mar 25, 2015 16:11
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Waste Not is still 2x the $$$ of Genesis Hydra. Same with Keranos/Athreos vs. Polly-K. ~magic~
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Mar 25, 2015 16:21
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since the other thread shifted onto "dies to removal" i will also blab about that some. there's two aspects to that i think. one is that removal is generally a tempo positive play (in constructed, in limited wotc has been moving removal away from that) compared to creatures that "die to removal". doom blade is good because it deals with a 5 mana threat for 2 mana, netting you 3 mana worth of tempo. so you want your creatures to either maintain parity even if they eat removal, or provide some value when you cast them in order to recoup some of the tempo disadvantage. like your opponent abrupt decaying your tarmogoyf is nbd because they spent two mana and a card to counter your two mana and a card. the second is that there is a nonzero chance that your opponent doesn't have removal, especially as the game goes long (or that you can deal with the removal). there are a lot of creatures that saw play (and see play) without gaining value ETB or being tempo neutral/low in tempo loss compared to removal (or tempo advantageous even) because if your opponent doesn't have removal that turn, you'll gain value. in my head the canonical example is baneslayer angel. does nothing until you untap, but when you untap with it you're in a commanding position. that one can be slippery to evaluate and is somewhat meta dependent, but it's something to consider when talking about whether stuff dies to removal.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:23
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Toshimo posted:Waste Not is still 2x the $$$ of Genesis Hydra. Genesis Hydra was in a dual deck which is probably keeping it's price down.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:28
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Strictly better isn't a useful term because there are so many cards that there will inevitably be a named case where a card isn't the best option, aside from the very rare equivalents of bolt vs shock. When people read the phrase "strictly better" or even "better" they should imagine that the cards being talked about are being compared in a realistic situation in an existing metagame, or in an existing deck. Like sure Judge's Familiar is better than Cursecatcher in a vacuum, but no one plays magic by comparing two cards and deciding the winner, Merfolk is a deck so Cursecatcher is The Better Card even though the text on it doesn't indicate that at all. Being able to look at a card and decide if it's good in a vacuum is a useful skill, but it's far more important to be able to throw that card in a functioning deck. Toshimo posted:Waste Not is still 2x the $$$ of Genesis Hydra. Pretty sure Polukranos was in at least one supplemental. Also a large set that got drafted through the entire format rather than a small set that didn't.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:29
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"Dies to removal" is a good argument for some stuff, but terrible for others. The way I see it, in deckbuilding, the question is "Do I want to trade this guy for a piece of removal, in general?" Obviously, you aren't going to be playing cards JUST to draw removal, but there's value in having a card that says "Remove me, or I do stuff" and at the same time not having that card be your 'goal' card. In the current Standard for example, a Rabblemaster can win a game by himself, but Bill Polukranopoulos is a potent 4-drop, so even if Rabbles dies, that's one less Downfall that can hit my big guy. VV: The plural of "Keranos", presuming Greek roots, would be "Keranoi". 
Serperoth fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 16:38
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Toshimo posted:Same with Keranos/Athreos vs. Polly-K. Keranos has eternal format prospects while Polukranos is going to more or less fall off the face of the earth come October. It sits at the same cost as Thrun without the advantages of being Thrun. Polukranos was in the fall large set and Heroes vs. Monsters, while Keranos's sole outing was Journey into Nyx. There are a lot more Polukranoseses out there than Keranosi. Keranos also is a god which is a million hella times more radical than being a particular hydra. In fact I'd say the combination of godhood and being a 3rd set mythic would explain Athreos too. It's not entirely about standard viability, you know. Otherwise Serra's Sanctum would be a dime instead of 300 dimes.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:39
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black potus posted:the second is that there is a nonzero chance that your opponent doesn't have removal, especially as the game goes long (or that you can deal with the removal). there are a lot of creatures that saw play (and see play) without gaining value ETB or being tempo neutral/low in tempo loss compared to removal (or tempo advantageous even) because if your opponent doesn't have removal that turn, you'll gain value. in my head the canonical example is baneslayer angel. does nothing until you untap, but when you untap with it you're in a commanding position. that one can be slippery to evaluate and is somewhat meta dependent, but it's something to consider when talking about whether stuff dies to removal. I actually can't think of a ton that fit this. Baneslayer yes, but Baneslayer is such an enormously powerful card against aggressive strategies that it's able to get around being an unprotected 5 drop that doesn't protect itself. In the 6 or so years, the line seems to be around 4.5 mana. 4 drops that are enormously efficient can get see even if they don't protect themselves or provide instant value(for example, Polukranos or Hero of Bladehold), but for 5+ the only one I can think of offhand that doesn't is Baneslayer, and even Baneslayer was meta dependent.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:43
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:Keranos has eternal format prospects while Polukranos is going to more or less fall off the face of the earth come October. It sits at the same cost as Thrun without the advantages of being Thrun. There is also the perception that the Theros Gods are going to rise in price after rotation but something like Athreos that has never been played in anything has a hard time justifying that price tag...
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Mar 25, 2015 16:44
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can we not talk about price in this thread, the stuff gang sines is mentioning is much more interesting
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Mar 25, 2015 16:47
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mcmagic posted:Dogshit McPost I'm still trying to figure out if this thread is a place to quarantine you, Angry Grimace, and Count Bleck, or if it is supposed to be the Platonic Ideal thread where you guys get told to get packing.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:50
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Toshimo posted:I'm still trying to figure out if this thread is a place to quarantine you, Angry Grimace, and Count Bleck, or if it is supposed to be the Platonic Ideal thread where you guys get told to get packing. Oh look. More completely uncalled for and unprovoked assholishness. Nice.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:53
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Love this thread idea. A lot of card eval moves on two basic axes. There are a lot more but there a lot of the nonsense around a card boils down to two things: 1) How impactful is this card when I use it 2) How easy is it to achieve that impact I mean I am dumbing it down to the absolute extremity here but I think that's a useful way to think about it. For instance, Door to Nothingness when used properly wins you the game on the spot, but doesn't see any play because of how many hoops you have to jump through to get to that point. A card like Lightning Bolt has a small-to-moderate impact but is very easy to use. These at least are easy calculations because this is the most bare-bones model of card evaluation that can exist but it can be generalized to a more complex form. You can take this structure and apply it to the whole "dies to removal" argument. Rabblemaster is a card that can be very impactful but is also trickier to use than "pay 2R, get Rabblemaster" because frequently it will eat removal and die immediately. On the other hand Siege Rhino is a card that can rumble effectively in combat but also scores a little better on the second question because unless it's countered you get some impact right away. This is an incredibly wide topic and I'm really glad to see this thread. I myself make many mistakes with card evaluation due to existing biases: I play mostly Limited, I try to imagine non-traditional uses for cards, and I overvalue best-case scenarios a lot. This last one is a common problem but you can, again, reduce it to the two questions above: best-case-scenario problem is a problem of overestimating question 1 and ignoring or minimizing question 2. On the other hand you can go too far in the other direction and you get the typical MTGSalvation garbage of "dies to removal" which has been used to dismiss everything from Tasigur to Tarmogoyf. Love the thread.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:57
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Price used to be a pretty good way to talk about the valuation of a card in standard - the classic parable was what happened to Baneslayer Angel's cash value when the Titans were printed. I still remember my friend refusing to play the one he opened in his sealed pool. (Casual event, no sleeves - he was allowed to use a proxy.) But Wizards has been so good about jamming chase rares into supplemental products, price no longer measures demand the way it used to. We could also talk about Dies to Countermagic and the subtle difference between that and removal. The titans had to be so loving spicy that you'd play them around Mana Leak, not to mention having ETB triggers that shrug off the tempo hit from removal. mcmagic posted:Oh look. More completely uncalled for and unprovoked assholishness. Nice. You provoked him by being garbage. Stop being garbage.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:57
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mcmagic posted:There is also the perception that the Theros Gods are going to rise in price after rotation but something like Athreos that has never been played in anything has a hard time justifying that price tag... They're cool as hell, unique as hell, and specifically tied to the flavor and mechanics of Theros as hell, so yeah, I can see a combination of their appeal and the difficulty of reprinting them would give them a steady incline in price. Elyv posted:can we not talk about price in this thread, the stuff gang sines is mentioning is much more interesting How about the worst possible thing to be relevant when evaluating a card: synergy?  A 3-drop with double strike that gives other creatures double strike. Warrior is the only type in standard with any real support. It's pretty easy to imagine a Chief of the Edge swinging for 6 on turn 3, before hitting for 12 on turn 4. It's also easy to imagine them just getting murdered by a Drown in Sorrow, because the warriors in standard are either tiny or lacking in impact relative to their mana costs. Or are in RUG so as to preclude the BW-centered warrior support cards.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:04
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Death Bot posted:Strictly better isn't a useful term because there are so many cards that there will inevitably be a named case where a card isn't the best option, aside from the very rare equivalents of bolt vs shock. It's a useful term when people aren't intentionally obtuse about it. It's useful to be able to look at Marang River Skeleton in the spoiler and say "Oh hey, they made a strictly better Drudge Skeletons" and everyone knows what you mean even if some of them will inevitably concoct an elaborate scenario where Drudge Skeletons is better just out of spite.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:04
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Entropic posted:It's a useful term when people aren't intentionally obtuse about it. It's useful to be able to look at Marang River Skeleton in the spoiler and say "Oh hey, they made a strictly better Drudge Skeletons" and everyone knows what you mean even if some of them will inevitably concoct an elaborate scenario where Drudge Skeletons is better just out of spite. Yeah, while I think a lot of people use "strictly better" to mean "better, but also you should think I'm smart", the phrase still has descriptive power if you don't get bogged down in pedantry. I like this thread, cool idea
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Mar 25, 2015 17:06
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LordSaturn posted:Price used to be a pretty good way to talk about the valuation of a card in standard - the classic parable was what happened to Baneslayer Angel's cash value when the Titans were printed. I still remember my friend refusing to play the one he opened in his sealed pool. (Casual event, no sleeves - he was allowed to use a proxy.) Thing is, price told you whether a card is good, not why. This thread is supposed to be more about the why, I think. Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:
Synergy is an important piece of evaluating cards as well, but it's much harder than evaluating cards on their own. It's extremely hard to tell whether all the synergies combine to be powerful enough or whether the card is going to be Knight Exemplar. If I had to try, I would say it depends on how powerful and numerous the synergies are and how much you have to sacrifice to get them to work, but that's incredibly wishy-washy and hard to nail down. Elyv fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 17:07
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Also when it comes to "dies to removal" there are a couple of other factors. The tempo gain you get from removing an expensive creature with a cheap removal spell means nothing if you can't take advantage of it. I mean it feels nice to Doom Blade a Baneslayer but if you passed your turn with Abyssal Persecutor in hand and 5 untapped mana, spent two of it to Doom Blade and did nothing with the remaining 3, you didn't really gain tempo-- you took your whole turn and a card to kill your opponent's turn and a card. There's nice things like being able to keep your opponent guessing by holding up mana so it's not like it was a strict double time walk or anything but it's a lot better when you can, say, Night's Whisper, hold up mana, Doom Blade their answer and now suddenly you're a turn ahead in a meaningful sense. Another factor is what kind of removal it takes. Seeker of the Way dies to drat near every piece of removal in the format whereas Siege Rhino gets hit by Murderous Cut and Hero's Downfall and now Roast and that's it. If a hypothetical opponent has a removal suite consisting of Terminate, Abrupt Decay, Ultimate Price and Doom Blade, by playing something like Creakwood Liege you dodge 3/4 of their removal. Finally we can talk about the card does if it's NOT removed. Bob (in Modern) and Rabblemaster (in Standard) die to every piece of removal that's commonly played but also take over games if left unopposed. A creature like Great Sable Stag is a lot harder to answer but also doesn't really win the game on its own. DAD LOST MY IPOD fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 17:10
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LordSaturn posted:
My post was a completely on topic response to the one before mine. Go gently caress yourself.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:12
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Attorney at Funk posted:Yeah, while I think a lot of people use "strictly better" to mean "better, but also you should think I'm smart", the phrase still has descriptive power if you don't get bogged down in pedantry. That's why I made the post, to have a reference for "yes this is STRICTLY better"/"This is what STRICTLY BETTER means". Glad people are liking it.  Elyv posted:Thing is, price told you whether a card is good, not why. This thread is supposed to be more about the why, I think. Price is good and all, but there's other factors in the price. Candelabra is triple digits, and I don't think it's used anywhere other than High Tide (correct me if I'm wrong though, I didn't look into it). Synergy is basically card evaluation outside a vacuum. Yes, Cursecatcher is not as good (strictly speaking) than Judge's Familiar, but one of them is a Merfolk, and synergizes with other Merfolk in the Merfolk deck.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:12
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Serperoth posted:That's why I made the post, to have a reference for "yes this is STRICTLY better"/"This is what STRICTLY BETTER means". Glad people are liking it. A lot of Magic prices are from price memory. Athreos took forever to drop because he looks super sweet and is really obviously powerful (he just didn't really fit in anywhere) so he was worth a ton at first. Especially in sets that weren't opened very much, there's not a lot of downward pressure on the prices.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:13
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Serperoth posted:Price is good and all, but there's other factors in the price. Candelabra is triple digits, and I don't think it's used anywhere other than High Tide (correct me if I'm wrong though, I didn't look into it). Oh absolutely, but if you look up the quote chain the stuff about price specifically refers to Standard, where cost is largely determined by the distribution of good cards in the set(if there's very few, that stuff is going to be more expensive since otherwise it becomes positive ev to just start cracking packs). Anyway, let's try to take the cost stuff out of this thread; it can be interesting too, but I feel like it's not the point here.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:18
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Here's how I evaluate cards: 1. Does it draw me cards on the cheap 2. Does it do things if i draw a lot of cards 3. Does it win me the game if this is the only card that wins me the game in the deck Joking aside price should be irrelevant here, we should be looking at how useful cards are going to be and what are useful frameworks for discussing this instead of spitballing ideas and being smug when one of your 200000 guesses ends up correct by the law of large numbers. Anyway wrt dies to removal the points are 1. Does it die inefficently? 2. Does it die at all? These cover a lot but they are all angles to look at, I mean it's like why siege rhino is good vs why some other fattie i can't think of (let's say butcher of the horde people love that guy for no good reason) is unplayable. Also why PLA/Aetherling own.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:31
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yeah if someone wants to post a finance thread go for it but i'd rather talk about why cards are good than why cards cost money
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Mar 25, 2015 17:39
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Basically Card A is strictly better than another Card B if it can do anything that Card B can do in any reasonable* situation and do at least one of the following: - (at least some of the time) provide additional upside while doing those things - (at least some of the time) do the same thing for a cheaper price/less downside - (at least some of the time) do the same thing for a cheaper price/with less downside *This excludes narrow hatred/synergies from specific other cards such as Meddling Mage/Muraganda Petroglyphs and effects that allow opponents to control your actions. Some of these cards may be prominent enough in a format to make you run a strictly worse card to avoid/use them.
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Mar 25, 2015 17:41
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Zoness posted:These cover a lot but they are all angles to look at, I mean it's like why siege rhino is good vs why some other fattie i can't think of (let's say butcher of the horde people love that guy for no good reason) is unplayable. Also why PLA/Aetherling own. IMO, PLA/Aetherling are inefficient (mana-wise) because it makes up for their evasiveness. Rhino is on a similar axis, but it isn't evasive at all (besides having a big butt), so he's very efficient. black potus posted:yeah if someone wants to post a finance thread go for it but i'd rather talk about why cards are good than why cards cost money 
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Mar 25, 2015 17:41
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Elyv posted:I actually can't think of a ton that fit this. Baneslayer yes, but Baneslayer is such an enormously powerful card against aggressive strategies that it's able to get around being an unprotected 5 drop that doesn't protect itself. In the 6 or so years, the line seems to be around 4.5 mana. 4 drops that are enormously efficient can get see even if they don't protect themselves or provide instant value(for example, Polukranos or Hero of Bladehold), but for 5+ the only one I can think of offhand that doesn't is Baneslayer, and even Baneslayer was meta dependent. i do think this scenario is rare especially with the push in creature quality. you can get such good value with a lower tempo investment (especially relative to removal) nowadays that i don't think this scenario shows up in constructed. in limited this shows up more i think, with limited being rarer, more expensive, and less tuned to a meta. all this said i think it's a line in which cards are playable even though they ostensibly die to removal. hero is something i'd class like this, it coexisted with removal like doom blade and go for the throat so you could spend half as much mana to deal with it (vs like hero's downfall now to deal w/ polukranos), but untapping with it put you really far ahead. you're positive on value overall (across games) because the value gained when you stick it is so huge that it eating removal is a reasonable risk to take. i do think the threshold is fundamentally going to tie to the cost/quality of removal in the format. maybe that's a better way to state it.
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Mar 25, 2015 18:28
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As someone who helped ignite the whole "strictly better" derail I think it's possible to draw the line of "strictly better" in a way that only takes into account situations that actually influence your hypothetical decisions during card selection (either deckbuilding or deciding what play to make on a given turn). This might be a bit of a copout from the literal definition but I think it's preferable to having a term that is utterly pointless except as a bad joke. I'm actually having a hard time thinking of an example aside from ABUR duals vs. basics, now that I think about it. For example, I think most people already acknowledge that Tarfire isn't strictly worse than Lightning Bolt, because even if the possibility of including Tarfire isn't worth a moment's thought in pretty much any constructed format right this minute, anybody can imagine a scenario where it would be. When it comes to edge cases about casting cost, one real-life example might be the time period when Mental Misstep was legal in Legacy and, IIRC, there actually was a perceptible shift away from 1-cost spells as a result. The thing is that people didn't actually seem to just play "worse" versions of the same cards, like Distress instead of Thoughtseize or what have you; instead they just switched to already good cards at a different casting cost, like going Mox Diamond into Bob/Goyf for example.
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Mar 25, 2015 19:19
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If I say something like "there's no reason to play Anticipate in Legacy, because Impulse is strictly better" you know exactly what I mean and if you try to concoct some elaborate "BUT WHAT ABOUT MEDDLING MAGE" scenario you're being intentionally obtuse. The main problem with the term was never those kind of dumb "what ifs" anyway, it was people misapplying it horribly by trying to compare very different cards, like saying Brutal Hordechief is "strictly better" (or worse, I've heard both) than Hellrider.
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Mar 25, 2015 19:29
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With regard to the original duals vs. basics, it's also interesting to note that there wasn't any nonbasic land hate in ABUR. There were cards that hated on land types but those didn't really exert special pressure on the duals, they were color hosers. Blood Moon in The Dark was the first but past that I can't think of a card that punishes nonbasic lands before, like, Tempest block. They had to essentially print nonbasic land hosers in the same way that they had to print Rest in Peace or Stony Silence.
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Mar 25, 2015 19:29
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Entropic posted:If I say something like "there's no reason to play Anticipate in Legacy, because Impulse is strictly better" you know exactly what I mean and if you try to concoct some elaborate "BUT WHAT ABOUT MEDDLING MAGE" scenario you're being intentionally obtuse. I don't think that the phrase strictly better does anything in this thought that "better" doesn't do by itself. Also yeah Meddling Mage or any other card naming [cardname] is the dumbest poo poo, and on par with "Eldrazi are strictly better than every other creature just in case my opponent is trying to mill me out"
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Mar 25, 2015 19:44
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Attorney at Funk posted:They had to essentially print nonbasic land hosers in the same way that they had to print Rest in Peace. They printed nonbasic hate because Ken Nagle hates fun?  Joke aside, evaluation in a metagame is more important than strict "better" or "worse", for deckbuilding. Meddling Mage doesn't factor into that, since it affects all spells regardless of which one you're carrying. At the same time, a prevalence of 3-toughness dudes in the metagame does make an argument in favour of Searing Spear rather than Shock. Death Bot posted:Also yeah Meddling Mage or any other card naming [cardname] is the dumbest poo poo, and on par with "Eldrazi are strictly better than every other creature just in case my opponent is trying to mill me out" See, there's an argument. If you're making a deck for a metagame, and it requires any random CMC 10+ fatty for whatever reason. Maybe a spell that says "Does 2X damage to the opponent where X is the fatty's CMC" or whatever. In that case you can say "Emrakul is better than Draco FOR THIS DECK, because it protects me from being milled, and this metagame is mill-filled"
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Mar 25, 2015 19:47
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Serperoth posted:Same thing, easier to cast I actually disagree than 1CC is easier to cast than 1CD - in any multicolor deck supporting CD(EFG) deck the 1CD deck is usually easier to cast than the 1CC because it allows you to properly diversify your mana over the first few turns. Attorney at Funk posted:With regard to the original duals vs. basics, it's also interesting to note that there wasn't any nonbasic land hate in ABUR. There were cards that hated on land types but those didn't really exert special pressure on the duals, they were color hosers. Blood Moon in The Dark was the first but past that I can't think of a card that punishes nonbasic lands before, like, Tempest block. They had to essentially print nonbasic land hosers in the same way that they had to print Rest in Peace or Stony Silence. There weren't non-basic land hosers but there were cards that blew up / punished every land type, plus stone rain and sinkhole, and a card that makes a land into a swamp, phantasmal terrain, and Armageddon in ABUR. There was a lot of land destruction in the early game. The reason non-basic hate became so important is that they finally had printed a critical mass of color fixing lands such that they needed to punish playing those lands without punishing playing all lands, and thus non-basic hate became the norm and we started seeing the slow shift away from tons of land destruction. Sigma-X fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 19:48
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Death Bot posted:I don't think that the phrase strictly better does anything in this thought that "better" doesn't do by itself. Strictly better, at its best, strictly speaking, is demonstrative. I can say that Ponder is a better card than Jackal Pup. I could make and defend arguments to that effect. But that's not the same order of evaluation as saying that Lightning Bolt is better than Shock. I can claim that Lightning Bolt supersedes Shock; a deck that runs Shock would do the exact same thing in the exact same way but quantitatively better if it could run Lightning Bolt in those slots instead.
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Mar 25, 2015 19:54
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Sigma-X posted:I actually disagree than 1CC is easier to cast than 1CD - in any multicolor deck supporting CD(EFG) deck the 1CD deck is usually easier to cast than the 1CC because it allows you to properly diversify your mana over the first few turns. That's a pretty fair argument, a good point in how deckbuilding and play mesh together. I was thinking more along the lines that the fewer colours in the deck, the harder it is to get manascrewed.
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Mar 25, 2015 19:57
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Serperoth posted:That's a pretty fair argument, a good point in how deckbuilding and play mesh together. I was thinking more along the lines that the fewer colours in the deck, the harder it is to get manascrewed. This is a good point. I think that it depends on what assumptions you make about the default. If we assume that the default is a mono-color deck, then of course 1CC is going to be better than splashing to cast a card for 1CD. On the other hand, if you are going to be playing those two (or more) colors anyway, then 1CC will often be worse for the reason Sigma mentioned. I think that right now (and this is obviously another of the drums I like to bang) the default assumption is so skewed in favor of already easily playing 2+ colors that we can say that 1CD is going to be strictly better for any practical purposes, insofar as ease of paying the colored portion is our criterion for strictly better. That's another reason why I don't think you can discount the factors of metagame, format, etc. entirely when you're determining betterness--without saying "okay, manabases are generally one color" or "manabases are 2+ colors" we simply don't have the information we need to make the evaluation; it's not defined. JerryLee fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 21:32
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The downside of 1CD in a mono-C deck is qualitative. If I'm in C, I have to move into D to support it. The downside of 1CC in a CD deck is quantitative. If I'm in CD, I can support 1CC, but I may not be able to do it efficiently. This leads us to perceive the downside of 1CD as less onerous, because we can just move into D - after which it's roughly as easy to cast as 2C or 2D. 1CC will always be difficult if we're not mono-C. The resources to splash D always exist, but the resources to splash D and efficiently maximize C are harder to come by. LordSaturn fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 22:18
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