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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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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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LordSaturn posted:This leads us to perceive the downside of 1CD as less onerous, because we can just move into D But note that even this statement makes assumptions (which currently come naturally to us, certainly, but aren't inherently true) about the ease of moving into D. When there are literally 12+ lands in the format that will access D while also accessing C, so that you're never at a risk of getting screwed out of C, then yeah the splash is a no-brainer. And incidentally, a deck that's just splashing by making use of the aforementioned surfeit of dual lands won't mind 1CC either. It's when you're actually trying to spread yourself between 2 or 3 colors, the way a lot of decks now do, that the tension against 1CC comes up even when mana is off the hook.
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Mar 25, 2015 22:28
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LordSaturn posted:Which, yeah, points out that the resources to splash D on top of C always exist. My real question is this: When, in what format, did those resources not exist? Is that scenario worth considering? Honestly? In most Standards prior to Invasion, and to a lesser extent since then until around Alara. Those where when you had the transition into more than 4 and more than 8 playable dual lands, respectively, for a given color pair. And that's if you wanted allied colors; if you were playing enemy colors you had zero "good" lands before Apocalypse and didn't get more than 4 until RAV/9th standard. Obviously I'm not including City of Brass in any of these assessments Note how Magic back in those days was an unfun hellhole where all the decks sucked, creatures weren't playable and nobody was enjoying themselves (please note that this sentence is a sarcastic exaggeration). Also most Block formats, of course.
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Mar 25, 2015 23:57
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