In the
"What Happned to Combo?" thread, kirdape and Grand Inquisitor brought up the notion that the best players should play Mana Drain decks.
Now, I've heard the statement: "The best players should play Mana Drain decks because those sorts of decks allow them to outplay their opponents" multiple times before. The concept largely stems from other formats, where the best players should be playing "interactive decks" because those are the types of decks that allow them to outplay their opponents and use their superior skill to maximum advantage. However, other those statements are made largely about decks in other formats. Other formats have much more limited cardpools, and the brokenness factor is either moderate (extended), very low (standard), or in terms of one or two cards in your deck (limited). The other formats really are all about gaining small advantages through meticulous play and capitalizing on opponents' mistakes. You have to do that because you can't just rely on the fact that your deck is full of utterly amazing cards, because largely it's not. The same general concept applies in Vintage, but we have that huge brokenness, "oops I win," factor looming overhead. No matter how good you are, it is still possible to lose a round to your opponent just going utterly busted on you. A deck like Fish was successful last year because it applied the small advantage concept from other formats in a field of decks that were not nearly as broken as they are now. Right now, U/R Fish just doesn't have any game, because it doesn't do anything broken itself, meaning it can't recover from an opponent just going broken unstopped. In general, the sentiment is that a Mana Drain deck allows you to capitalize on your opponents' mistakes better than any other type of deck. However, I don't believe that this is necessarily the case. I think that the real fact is that Mana Drain decks allow
you to hide your own mistakes better than they allow you to exploit your opponent's. Now why is that?
Mana Drain often gets called "the ultimate tempo card" with good reason. Playing Mana Drain does not give you a small advantage. It gives you one hell of a huge tempo swing, depending on what you do with the mana you get. Burning gives you a small swing (same thing as if you had just played Counterspell instead), using the mana for card draw (in form of Thirst for Knowledge or Intuition for AKs) gives a pretty solid advantage, and using the mana for a huge restricted sorcery bomb--Yawgmoth's Will, Tinker, or even Mind Twist-- or Mindslaver activation just effectively wins you the game. The turns that follow after that are largely just a formality of somehow reducing your opponent to 0 life. That is not gaining a small advantage--it's not really even interacting so much. With Mana Drain, you can wait around for your opponent to mess up first, and then use the explosive power of Mana Drain to make him pay dearly for that mistake. Essentially, you can use the card not so much to outplay your opponent, but to ambush him. Not making mistakes and knowing when to/not to play something is a large part of skill, and Mana Drain can exploit that, but it doesn't have to, and most of the time it won't necessarily be doing that. Instead of maximizing your own skill, Mana Drain will often be exploiting the lesser skill of your opponent. This is an important distinction to make. Dark Ritual decks work off your skill, but Mana Drain decks often work off the difference in skill between you and your opponent.
If I make a small mistake with a Mana Drain deck, it generally won't cost me the game. I can make a series of small, subtle mistakes against a player of lesser skill and still win the game easily. Why? Because I have Mana Drain to save me. I can rely on the fact that the sum of several small mistakes will largely be negated by the huge advantage Mana Drain gives me. I don't have to play perfectly. If I do, gravy, then I'm just adding up several large advantages and not subtracting off anything for the times I messed up. This is not generally the case with non-Drain decks. Play the wrong lock component with Stax? Your opponent can easily build his board up so that you can never actually succeed in locking him down the way you want. Mismanage your mana with combo and waste spells in a set-up turn, and only be able to ramp the storm up to 7 the next turn, resulting in a non-lethal Tendrils? You might just take you too long to rebuild and your opponent decides to win in the meantime. The difference is that the latter two non-Drain decks only get one chance to do a specific thing--the game state changes too rapidly to get another shot at it. With a Mana Drain deck, you will probably play multiple Brainstorms, multiple Thirsts, even multiple Mana Drains. If you make the first one suboptimal, you get a good chance to make up for it with the next one.
When I'm playing combo (which is most of the time), and my opponent makes a mistake by tapping mana incorrectly, tapping out at the wrong time (completely forgoing a bluff), countering the wrong spell, tutoring for the wrong thing, etc., I am generally able to make my opponent pay for his mistake by winning the game at that instant or on my next turn (or if my opponent screws up in the middle of my chain, later in that turn). I don't use his mistake to gain a small advantage--I use to just plain win. There is often a limited window for me to react though. If I just don't have the juice in my hand to make something happen, which will happen more often with combo than with a Mana Drain deck, then I don't get to make my opponent pay. He can play sloppy and still beat me if I continue to mess up. However, all advantage in this is offset by the fact that if I make a mistake, it is much more likely to lose me the game than if I were playing a Mana Drain deck. Think about the trade off. If I am skilled with my deck and don't play like a douchebag that day, it is likely that I will make less mistakes than my opponents (and less costly mistakes), which means I should flat out win more games from my opponent's mistakes than I lose from my own mistakes. Is that necessarily the case with Mana Drain decks? I think to an extent, but the pay-offten comes much later in the game than with combo, for instance.
Disclaimer-type thing:
Now, I suspect that some people in the community might suspect that I have a burning hatred for Mana Drain (since I speak so negatively about it all the time). This is not the case. I have owned Mana Drains since 1998 or so and played "The Deck" back when there was like 4 decks in Type 1: Keeper and a bunch of stuff that didn't beat it. It was nothing too competitive or serious, but I did play some variant of multi-color control for many years. Last summer, I gave that up, and haven't looked back at my Mana Drains with much enthusiam since. Clearly, Mana Drain has gotten a lot more powerful and versatile since then. Lately, I've just felt as though Mana Drain's growing popularity has transformed the card into a crutch that people cannot win without. Think about that. In general, even "the best players in the format" play Mana Drain decks exclusively. There are very few players who have had success with non-Mana Drain decks. Most notably, the only top player who consistenly plays something other than a Mana Drain deck and is very successful is Kevin Cron with Stax. Sure, other well-known players have taken non-Drain decks to large tournaments and done well with them: Steve with Doomsday at SCG III, Carl with DeathLong at Waterbury, Kowal with Dragon at the last SCG Richmond, etc. Even those players have largely gone back to Mana Drain decks, and, as such, it seems that everyone else has followed them. Lately, I think a lot of people have just developed a dependence on Mana Drain: they just can't play another type of deck and make it win for them. Not to say that these players are not skillful--quite the opposite I'm sure, its a matter of versatility. I just think
So why don't I play Mana Drain very much? I am pretty certain that I could be a lot more consistent if I played Mana Drain decks more often. First of all, I am a mathematician, so I enjoy playing more complicated decks that require complex analysis of the game-state and logical thought processes--i.e., combo or Stax. However, I also greatly enjoy "degenerate play" and just winning the game in an explosive fashion very quickly--that leads me to combo. Secondly, I think I learn a whole lot more about the game when I play a complicated deck. This past extended season, I played Desire--"a non-interactive deck"--the entire season, even in metagames where the right decision was to play something else. I didn't qualify, and was only close to T8 a couple times. However, I wasn't there to win the tournament. I was there to play Magic and just improve my game. I learned a lot about resource management that I am able to carry over into Vintage, and have some pretty savage stories about how I turned absolutely nothing into an amazing win--that resourcefulness has been extremely useful in Vintage. And I play Vintage because I like it. I want to do well, but I want to have a good time doing it. I would rather go to a tournament and narrowly miss T8 and have had an absolute blast all day than play a deck I hate and win something. Second of all, I think that playing non-Mana Drain decks makes you that much better at the game. As I said, you cannot make mistakes against good players with an unstable combo deck. Playing a deck that requires perfect play makes you analyze situations carefully and look at everything you might do and decide what's best from there. Having a deck that runs 38 different cards in the maindeck and 14 more in the sideboard makes it so that you don't have a lot of situations/hands that are repeated--every game you play is going to be different. You have to rely on intuition and experience to find the optimal play. I don't feel that's something you ordinarily do when you play a Mana Drain deck. Drain decks don't run that many singletons in general, so at various points in the game, you are often looking at a hand you've seen before at some other time. This leads you toward a rut, and you often make a familar play that has worked in the past rather than have to think in a whole different light and do something you've never done before. It is a mark of true skill to find those radical plays in strange situations, and that's largely what sets the best players apart from other skilled players. When I play a Mana Drain deck, I find myself looking at hands completely different from other players--sometimes in a good sense and sometimes in a bad sense (i.e., sometimes I consider a play I've made with one of my ridiculous combo decks and forget that I'm playing a Drain deck this time), and that can give me an advantage of unpredicability. I feel that that ability stems largely from the practice I've had with combo, and that my time playing combo, while not always great for winning prize, improves my game more than anything else I can do.
Wow, that was a lot more long-winded than I thought I was going to be. Maybe I really am "the second coming of Ric Flair..." This wasn't supposed to be like an article, but it sure seems to have winded up that way. Thoughts anyone?
-JD
