Winning More is Winning Less
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Josh Silvestri
4/29/2010
Next week I'll be revisiting some of the tenets from the testing article I wrote almost a month ago, but for now I wanted to cover a concept I see bandied around a lot without any real context. Win-More is a term used to describe cards when evaluating them for decks, typically finisher cards and also to express concern about percentages in a given match. A typical example of a Win-More scenario is adding card A to your deck, which will win you the game slightly less often than card B, but in a more spectacular manner.

Coming straight out of Compton, er... Rise, is Kiln Fiend; another potential two-drop for the Red Deck Wins deck. What does it bring to the table over cards like Kargan Dragonlord, Hellspark Elemental or many other Red creatures? The ability to deal 7 or more damage without investing additional mana or direct resources is quite appealing at first glance. I mean all you need to do is cast two Instant or Sorcery spells before Kiln Fiend attacks the opponent and you might dome him for what we in the biz call DI. When you accomplish this, Mr. Fiend looks like the best card in the world, better than Plated Geopede which was already the gold standard for Red two-drops! From that one success, it'll take at least five or more failures before they start questioning the initial result they got from that one great moment.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not above this and I don't believe anyone else is either. Looking at cool cards is part of the process of brewing and optimizing decks is a difficult process, made all the tougher by our impressions being slanted one way or the other due to how much fun a card is giving us. While you might be able to rid yourself of that trait on some level because you're trying to be competitive and play to the best of your ability, it'll never go away and a just about everyone with a heart still gets a warm and fuzzy feeling by pulling something amazing off.
Winning the game is the goal of you as a Magic player. Hence winning is a good thing. However winning by miles and winning by inches is the same exact thing in Magic. You don't get bonus points tacked on for style and there's no reason to play cards which only help your deck win more. My understanding of the concept of “Win more” was always that it was a mistake to run cards that would turn favorable matches into Slaughters or cards that won in spectacular fashion, but only when the stars aligned in a certain way.
So what's the main problem with having cards that lead to win more situations? There are three issues that come up from these cards. First off, they lead to situations which cloud your judgment and make it less likely to see the real issues with a given deck. If you play a card that needs to meet a bunch of initial conditions to be good, you really have to ask yourself if that's good enough. In the previous example I gave, the conditions that need to be met for Kiln Fiend to have the desired effect are the following:
1. You need to have at least one spell or more in hand and the mana to play them
2. The board must be clear of blockers
3. The opponent must not have a removal spell or effect to remove Kiln Fiend from combat
Now this isn't a huge number of conditions to be met, but remember that you have to meet all of these conditions to get any significant usage from your card. In addition, while conditions like 'keep the board clear of blockers' seem like something your deck would want to do anyway, it isn't realistic to assume you'll always be able to do so. Even worse, while other creatures have some value in combat, yours doesn't! Against any random Grizzly Bear he's going to be taken to task and trade-off with the opponent's creature. Even worse is that although it can become big enough to smash through a Wall of Omens without trouble, you've essentially wasted many of the resources that you needed to meet condition #1 with.
This isn't a blanket statement though, sometimes it's worth jumping through all those hoops to get a spectacular event to occur. What comes to mind for cards when I describe the following conditions?
1. Requires at least five other spells to be cast for a significant impact to be made
2. Requires a significant mana investment of six or more
3. Standardizes part of your decklist by default
So what did I just describe? Dragonstorm and TEPS (Mind's Desire combo) two of the most powerful options in their respective formats during a given era. Yawgmoth's Will also applies nicely as a card that requires a number of obnoxious 'if's' to be taken care of before the card could be considered good, yet it's one of the most powerful of all time. The key is to understand the restrictions certain cards effects place upon you in the context of a given deck. For meeting these conditions all the cards I mentioned led to winning the game.
The second point can be summed up thusly: Win more cards are almost always the sick tech people brag about before dismissing them as trash a week later after using them all of once at a given tournament. They tend to be bad cards that stand out over time as actively bad, i.e. not helping you to win the game in a high number of situations.
Oddly enough this also leads into my final point, win more situations with bad cards can cloud your judgments with regards to the cards that actually win the game. For my 30 Lands deck I was constantly trying to figure out the optimal kill condition in the remaining one or two open slots the that remained in the deck. I tried multiple answers including Iona, Shield of Emeria, Elspeth, Knight Errant, Rite of Replication and a host of other answers. Eventually what I realized was that while all these cards won me games in certain situations, including games I wouldn't of won with any other card, I could have won more games over time by playing a different card altogether. Instead of focusing on locking up late-games which I had problems closing around 5% of the time, I played the less splashy Path to Exile and began winning a number of games in situations I'd have written off as losses.
You can usually see "win more" cards from the get-go. Try if for yourself if you feel adventurous. Take a brew you've been working on or that a friend cooked up or even one off a message-board, I'll wait. Now question a card choice which looks awkward or just plain bad compared to the rest of the deck and suggest a superior card. More often than not, said person will then describe a scenario under which that win more car is superior or “irreplaceable”. Commonly these scenarios involve talk of combos, circumstances where in practicality they've won the game already or a very specific set of circumstances occurring within a short time frame. Congratulations, your card is going to win, after you've already won the game.
Now there are exceptions to every rule and while you'll save yourself a ton of time by being critical of a good many cards that do cool things under very specific circumstances, there are points where there are valid reasons to have them around. A modern example would be Iona, Shield of Emeria in WU Control, a card I originally felt was completely out-of-place and pointless. If you were resolving a 9 mana spell without incident, you should already be in sufficient control to win with Jace, Elspeth, Manlands or any number of other more useful cards. By definition Iona has to be a win-more card right?
Iona is a dead draw for the first seven turns of the game, isn't immune to removal since against WU if you name White, Jace, the Mind Sculptor can still bounce it to your hand and against Jund if you name Black to shut off removal you can still be overwhelmed by creatures. Iona isn't strong enough by herself to stabilize a board, merely locking down the opponent after you've already established a modicum of control over the board state. So what changed my mind? After playing the WU Tapout deck against a host of mirror matches with tweaks including counters, Elspeth and a host of other small differences I found the one constant was how solid Iona was in the match.
No matter what happened, the game would inevitably go long and mana would become a huge factor in determining the winner. What Iona did was force the opponent into a position where he absolutely had to respond right away or lose the game. While Iona was dead early, it was irrelevant since frequently each deck would have nothing relevant to do in the early game other than play mana sources. Iona also forced the opponent to keep in some amount of removal post-board where it was completely irrelevant, but if they didn't have it and Iona hit play, the game would be over. Just by reducing the amount of removal in the maindeck, it meant Iona could name Blue and have a far better chance of surviving until victory. If Iona was backed by Negate then the game win was practically assured as the opponent would typically die in two attack steps (With help from Knight of the White Orchid or Celestial Colonnade).
So while you can make the argument Iona is a win-more card, in this particular match-up Iona ended up being the most important factor in the match other than Mind Spring. If either player had a maindeck Iona and landed it, shutting down half the deck of the opponent meant a game-win in almost every single recorded match we had. It becomes a judgment call if that's enough of a reason to justify it's existence in the maindeck while being mostly dead in other matches.
Which brings us to the final point of the subject, when picking cards to fill final slots in your maindeck or sideboard, ask yourself what matches you'll have the biggest problems with. If UW Control is a tiny part of the metagame and I could dedicate those big bulky Iona slots to something that'll improve my matches against decks I'm having problems against, wouldn't it be better to accomplish the latter? You have to evaluate your tricky / cool cards on the basis of how much they hurt you versus help you. In the end you want the deck that gives you the highest winning percentage against the field at a given tournament, even if it means playing with the boring stuff.
Josh Silvestri
4/29/2010
Next week I'll be revisiting some of the tenets from the testing article I wrote almost a month ago, but for now I wanted to cover a concept I see bandied around a lot without any real context. Win-More is a term used to describe cards when evaluating them for decks, typically finisher cards and also to express concern about percentages in a given match. A typical example of a Win-More scenario is adding card A to your deck, which will win you the game slightly less often than card B, but in a more spectacular manner.

Coming straight out of Compton, er... Rise, is Kiln Fiend; another potential two-drop for the Red Deck Wins deck. What does it bring to the table over cards like Kargan Dragonlord, Hellspark Elemental or many other Red creatures? The ability to deal 7 or more damage without investing additional mana or direct resources is quite appealing at first glance. I mean all you need to do is cast two Instant or Sorcery spells before Kiln Fiend attacks the opponent and you might dome him for what we in the biz call DI. When you accomplish this, Mr. Fiend looks like the best card in the world, better than Plated Geopede which was already the gold standard for Red two-drops! From that one success, it'll take at least five or more failures before they start questioning the initial result they got from that one great moment.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not above this and I don't believe anyone else is either. Looking at cool cards is part of the process of brewing and optimizing decks is a difficult process, made all the tougher by our impressions being slanted one way or the other due to how much fun a card is giving us. While you might be able to rid yourself of that trait on some level because you're trying to be competitive and play to the best of your ability, it'll never go away and a just about everyone with a heart still gets a warm and fuzzy feeling by pulling something amazing off.
Winning the game is the goal of you as a Magic player. Hence winning is a good thing. However winning by miles and winning by inches is the same exact thing in Magic. You don't get bonus points tacked on for style and there's no reason to play cards which only help your deck win more. My understanding of the concept of “Win more” was always that it was a mistake to run cards that would turn favorable matches into Slaughters or cards that won in spectacular fashion, but only when the stars aligned in a certain way.
So what's the main problem with having cards that lead to win more situations? There are three issues that come up from these cards. First off, they lead to situations which cloud your judgment and make it less likely to see the real issues with a given deck. If you play a card that needs to meet a bunch of initial conditions to be good, you really have to ask yourself if that's good enough. In the previous example I gave, the conditions that need to be met for Kiln Fiend to have the desired effect are the following:
1. You need to have at least one spell or more in hand and the mana to play them
2. The board must be clear of blockers
3. The opponent must not have a removal spell or effect to remove Kiln Fiend from combat
Now this isn't a huge number of conditions to be met, but remember that you have to meet all of these conditions to get any significant usage from your card. In addition, while conditions like 'keep the board clear of blockers' seem like something your deck would want to do anyway, it isn't realistic to assume you'll always be able to do so. Even worse, while other creatures have some value in combat, yours doesn't! Against any random Grizzly Bear he's going to be taken to task and trade-off with the opponent's creature. Even worse is that although it can become big enough to smash through a Wall of Omens without trouble, you've essentially wasted many of the resources that you needed to meet condition #1 with.
This isn't a blanket statement though, sometimes it's worth jumping through all those hoops to get a spectacular event to occur. What comes to mind for cards when I describe the following conditions?
1. Requires at least five other spells to be cast for a significant impact to be made
2. Requires a significant mana investment of six or more
3. Standardizes part of your decklist by default
So what did I just describe? Dragonstorm and TEPS (Mind's Desire combo) two of the most powerful options in their respective formats during a given era. Yawgmoth's Will also applies nicely as a card that requires a number of obnoxious 'if's' to be taken care of before the card could be considered good, yet it's one of the most powerful of all time. The key is to understand the restrictions certain cards effects place upon you in the context of a given deck. For meeting these conditions all the cards I mentioned led to winning the game.
The second point can be summed up thusly: Win more cards are almost always the sick tech people brag about before dismissing them as trash a week later after using them all of once at a given tournament. They tend to be bad cards that stand out over time as actively bad, i.e. not helping you to win the game in a high number of situations.
Oddly enough this also leads into my final point, win more situations with bad cards can cloud your judgments with regards to the cards that actually win the game. For my 30 Lands deck I was constantly trying to figure out the optimal kill condition in the remaining one or two open slots the that remained in the deck. I tried multiple answers including Iona, Shield of Emeria, Elspeth, Knight Errant, Rite of Replication and a host of other answers. Eventually what I realized was that while all these cards won me games in certain situations, including games I wouldn't of won with any other card, I could have won more games over time by playing a different card altogether. Instead of focusing on locking up late-games which I had problems closing around 5% of the time, I played the less splashy Path to Exile and began winning a number of games in situations I'd have written off as losses.
You can usually see "win more" cards from the get-go. Try if for yourself if you feel adventurous. Take a brew you've been working on or that a friend cooked up or even one off a message-board, I'll wait. Now question a card choice which looks awkward or just plain bad compared to the rest of the deck and suggest a superior card. More often than not, said person will then describe a scenario under which that win more car is superior or “irreplaceable”. Commonly these scenarios involve talk of combos, circumstances where in practicality they've won the game already or a very specific set of circumstances occurring within a short time frame. Congratulations, your card is going to win, after you've already won the game.
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| Iona, Shield of Emeria |
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Now there are exceptions to every rule and while you'll save yourself a ton of time by being critical of a good many cards that do cool things under very specific circumstances, there are points where there are valid reasons to have them around. A modern example would be Iona, Shield of Emeria in WU Control, a card I originally felt was completely out-of-place and pointless. If you were resolving a 9 mana spell without incident, you should already be in sufficient control to win with Jace, Elspeth, Manlands or any number of other more useful cards. By definition Iona has to be a win-more card right?
Iona is a dead draw for the first seven turns of the game, isn't immune to removal since against WU if you name White, Jace, the Mind Sculptor can still bounce it to your hand and against Jund if you name Black to shut off removal you can still be overwhelmed by creatures. Iona isn't strong enough by herself to stabilize a board, merely locking down the opponent after you've already established a modicum of control over the board state. So what changed my mind? After playing the WU Tapout deck against a host of mirror matches with tweaks including counters, Elspeth and a host of other small differences I found the one constant was how solid Iona was in the match.
No matter what happened, the game would inevitably go long and mana would become a huge factor in determining the winner. What Iona did was force the opponent into a position where he absolutely had to respond right away or lose the game. While Iona was dead early, it was irrelevant since frequently each deck would have nothing relevant to do in the early game other than play mana sources. Iona also forced the opponent to keep in some amount of removal post-board where it was completely irrelevant, but if they didn't have it and Iona hit play, the game would be over. Just by reducing the amount of removal in the maindeck, it meant Iona could name Blue and have a far better chance of surviving until victory. If Iona was backed by Negate then the game win was practically assured as the opponent would typically die in two attack steps (With help from Knight of the White Orchid or Celestial Colonnade).
So while you can make the argument Iona is a win-more card, in this particular match-up Iona ended up being the most important factor in the match other than Mind Spring. If either player had a maindeck Iona and landed it, shutting down half the deck of the opponent meant a game-win in almost every single recorded match we had. It becomes a judgment call if that's enough of a reason to justify it's existence in the maindeck while being mostly dead in other matches.
Which brings us to the final point of the subject, when picking cards to fill final slots in your maindeck or sideboard, ask yourself what matches you'll have the biggest problems with. If UW Control is a tiny part of the metagame and I could dedicate those big bulky Iona slots to something that'll improve my matches against decks I'm having problems against, wouldn't it be better to accomplish the latter? You have to evaluate your tricky / cool cards on the basis of how much they hurt you versus help you. In the end you want the deck that gives you the highest winning percentage against the field at a given tournament, even if it means playing with the boring stuff.
Josh Silvestri






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