Qualitatively judging a decks plan + random magic truisms

Magic is like many other games of incomplete information. There may be different rules and victory conditions, but the path to victory is all the same. The goal in magic is to create imbalance, to push instead of being pushed. A corollary to this is to be able to distinguish between a push and a last ditch effort. In magic, it is important to understand why your opponent makes a move in order to justify your counter.

If you can threaten you opponent with superior card draw over the course of a few turns, he/she will most likely turn on the heat in order to force you to respond with on board action. If no one presents a game threat early on, both will seek out ways to win the long haul. The goal in deck creation and play is not to win convincingly, but to force your opponent on their metaphorical heels and squeeze. Your tools are not just limited to your cards and the particular draw; they include your gestures, your opponents gestures, your ability to read in-between the lines, trickery with any of the tools, and your understanding of the intricacies of the rules.

In type one, there are far more resources available than any other format, and as such, they should all be capitalized on if possible. The old theory of broken cards makes broken plays is still applicable, but not to the extent it once was because although loading a deck with the most broken cards can be advantageous at times, the level of consistency will fall terribly. The more modern thought of extreme consistency has weaknesses for the opposite reason, namely, if every game you can present the same less powerful threats at the same rate, your opponent will inevitably run into something to trump you hoard of 1/1s. A third and equally moving force in type one is synergy. If many of your cards benefit each other and can stand alone in bringing threats to the game, then you have more effective threats than those not applying this philosophy to their decks.

Ultimately, it comes down to risk vs. reward. If you decide to play 2-land belcher at your next tourney, you are risking a lot (first turn trinishpere, fow, and consistency problems) for the real threat of first-third turn victories. If you decide on UW landstill, you are giving up on game ending early threats for consistent card draw and resilient answers. I could go down the list of tier one and tier two decks, but that would eventually lead to a long and pointless list that has been done before.

One topic that has been a hot button for the last few years has been the tier status of any given deck. With larger numbers of larger tournaments and more publicized results we have been able to effectively illustrate which decks do better and top 8 more often. However, I found that large lists of top 8s only show part of the story. To all of those listening, I think that a truer story of good decks would include proportions of entrants playing the deck. For example, Hulk is without question a tier one deck. It has more top 8 finishes than any other deck right now. Unfortunately, if 85% of the field consisted of different versions of Hulk, then the numbers it has in top 8s would be misleading. I know that no large tournament has ever been so single deck dominated, but I would like to know if there was a higher % of Hulk in top 8 than in decks registered for these large tournaments. Granted that the percentage will still probably be higher in top 8, but I would like to see those numbers, as they tend to be as revealing as the top 8 lists or possibly more so.

My concluding thoughts on the tier status of a deck are as follows. In a medium sized tournament (30-60), anything within the “agreed upon” first two tiers has about (give or take a few percent (read one to 5) wherein the best deck’s percent is converted to be 20 percent and all other tier one and tier two decks are then recalculated given the conversion factor if the top deck) chance of making top 8. What distinguishes a tier one deck from a tier two deck goes back to risk vs. reward; tier one decks do one of the following three: reward their players with better threats for the same risks than the tier two counterparts, they reward their players with comparable threats for less risk than the tier two counterparts, or reward their players with slightly better threats and risk slightly less than the tier two counterparts. (Please note that the threats referred to in the previous sentence are cards that create imbalance.)

Thanks for reading this somewhat random post.
One last and final note is that playtesting is the tool that provides incite into all of these topics. If there is any piece of advice that I have been given in the time I've played that has always held true, it is the value of good playtesting.