Diversity vs. Focus: How do you like your threats?

[b-tings]

First off, let me say that, while this is not a deck discussion per se, I have been toying with the Intuition Tendrils deck since Richmond, and it is in this context that the ideas presented here were developed. As such, I will be making reference to the deck frequently. Please try to keep any discussion centered on the ideas, and not on the deck.

I'm no good at the whole research portion of this, and my time is cramped these days besides, so you'll have to take my word for it that Stephen Menendian once said that the best deck in Vintage was the one that best abused Yawgmoth's Will. In recent years, a number of dominant decks, and some very good decks besides, can be traced to this basic premise. Any Long varient, Gifts, and to a lesser extent TPS, and most Mana-drain based Control decks, tended more and more to end the game with a juicy Will.

What the first two did, that the latter two didn't, was refine themselves to abuse Will, to the point where their entire game plan revolved around setting up the game-breaking sorcery. Whereas a deck like TPS had draw-7s to conceivably storm up a lethal Tendrils without Will, and something like Control Slaver could simply weld in something fat and go to town, the former two would confine themselves solely to a single Tinker->Darksteel Colossus playas an altenative to casting Will.

Enter Intuition Tendrils at Richmond. The deck forgoes even this least burdensome, card slot-wise, alternative win. Even more telling was that it trimmed itself down to a single draw 7, forsaking a TPS-like saturation of bombs for a trimmer, more efficient Will deck. Almost every win I have gotten with the deck stems from Will, and in the few situations where it doesn't, one of two things has occured 95% of the time:

1) I could have done things more easily if I had gone for Will, but was concerned about Will-specific hate (e.g. Coffin Purge) from the sideboard
2) I had had Will cut off from me, and was forced to go for an alternative, harder route

Looking back at these two situations, I was mightily concerned. I decided, for the sake of science, to experiment, at first with some Goldfishes, and then with real opponents. I took the 60 card build from Richmond and ran it against a handful of average players with average decks online, with one small change to the decklist.

I took Will out.

No replacement card. I simply played with a 59 card deck. While this may harm mana ratios and have some other small effects, those numbers are irrelevant in light of the numbers I came across. In the span of no less than 20 matches, I won three games. Those games were mana-heavy hands that had just enough disruption to resolve Bargain, and got good draws from the resolved Bargain besides.

A deck which previously Goldfished between turns two and three with disruption backup sputtered to win by turn five without bothering with FoW or Duress.

This may seem perfectly obvious to all of you, and I certainly hope it does, but for those of you not in the know, IT sucks without Yawgmoth's Will. Intuition is quite frankly terrible when you don't get to cast the cards you dump in the yard. Grim Tutor for what? There's no way to recoup the mana from overcosted tutors. You're more or less forced to sculpt a giant hand of mana, usually containing one of your two mass bounce spells, and Tendrils.

But with Will in the deck, it puts up top 8s like it's nothing.

Focused? Or narrow?

Control Slaver has been declared dead by enough people enough times to make anyone's head spin, but it continues to put up impressive finishes in large tournaments. What Control Slaver has, that IT certainly does not, is diversity. Especially with the new Burning Slaver builds, the variety of ways the deck has to actually win the game is enormous. Setting up a gamebreaking Will is one, setting up Tinker is another, setting up Goblin Welder with TfK, or Mana Draining into a big threat. Playing against Control Slaver, you have to worry about stopping Will, Welder, and Fat Men from Heaven and it is damn near impossible to do all three with one card, or one strategy. Conversely, against IT, stopping the Will stops the deck, as my little experiment demonstrated fairly clearly.

IT is clearly a very powerful deck, and there's no denying that the designers did a fantastic job. They created possibly the most efficient Will deck since the original Long got LED and Burning Wish banned. The question I'm posing, in my own roundabout way, is: is the deck too good at one thing? Does the deck's focus on resolving Yawgmoth's Will make it too easy to combat? At what point are you trading too much resiliency for too little power?

I'm wording my question poorly, but I hope the jist of it gets through.

[Vegeta2711]

You're abusing the best 'strategy' in the format in exchange for a vunerability to cards that most people don't even play (Go figure). It'd be a bad idea when more people chose to hate out that type of strategy. Just like all metagames.

[brianpk80]

IT is clearly a very powerful deck, and there's no denying that the designers did a fantastic job. They created possibly the most efficient Will deck since the original Long got LED and Burning Wish banned. The question I'm posing, in my own roundabout way, is: is the deck too good at one thing? Does the deck's focus on resolving Yawgmoth's Will make it too easy to combat? At what point are you trading too much resiliency for too little power?

This is an interesting analysis and experiment you've performed.
Although it has always been obvious, as you put it, that Yawgmoth's Will is the lynchpin and MVP
of most combo and Drain-based control decks, the statistics you've reported are so extreme that
it's easy to infer that negating Will absolutely cripples many of today's leading combo decks.  Real emphasis
must be given to the fact that it cripples them as opposed to merely annoying them or slowing them down.  
This reliance of so many decks on Yawgmoth's Will is the reason that, as I've heard echoed here before,
the future of Fish lies in builds using graveyard-hate (ie Tormod's Crypt) as a component of its disruption rather
than fussing with "hit and miss" Chalice of the Voids.  I run 2 Crypts maindeck in my current U/W Vial Fish
build and I'm rarely displeased to see them.  The g1 advantage v. Gifts, Slaver, Stax, Jester, Ichorid, Tendrils
Francais, Dragon, TPS, IT, Turboland, Tog, and occasionally Oath (which, while it can work around it more easily
than the others, still has an intrinsic dislike for seeing half its library RFGed) easily outweighs
the few circumstances where Crypt is a dead draw (Goblins, for instance, or any other Fish
not running Crucible of Worlds or Grim Lavamancer).  As a Fish player, I naturally find it more challenging to
play against decks with a diversity of win conditions.  A deck that relies too much on 1 kill is helplessly at the mercy
of finding their 1 or maybe 2 bounce spells when Meddling Mage or True Believer hits the table.  To illustrate, when
I play v. Gifts, my main goals are to neutralize its win conditions.  Traditionally, Tormod's Crypt and either a Meddling
Mage naming "Tinker" or a Bounce-critter (ie Waterfront) or Swords to Plowshares would seal the deal, but
builds incorporating the Flame Vault are more difficult to lock out if they run Burning Wish->Tendrils.  The
reason for this is pretty apparent: it would take great fortune for me to draw, within the first few turns,
enough disruption of the right kind to prevent all three wins: Colossus Beatdown, a hideous Will, or
a Vault/Fusillade and have all of it resolve (though Vial is great at that job).  Thus as an opponent,
I find that my own opponents fare better when they pack a diversity of win conditions rather than
only 1 narrow route (even if they are quite effective at it).  Slaver is a great example of a deck
that is versatile and excruciatingly difficult to lock out.    

Also, your findings also must have some bearing on the current discussion in the Jester's Cap threads regarding
the nature of limited vs. broad methods of win conditions.  If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend checking
it out.  Thanks for the insight and some numbers to back it up,

-Brian (BPK)

[Moxlotus]

My results from testing the deck are completely different--however they are more extreme than my teammates.  I frequently win without a Will.  In the Chicago lotus tournament a few weeks ago, I started off 3-0 in  matches and 6-1 games (I ended 4-2, but that's irrelevant for this point).  I successfully cast Will once during those games.  Post board the deck is not reliant on Will at all--there are 3-4 Tendrils and 4 Bobs.  Game 1s can be won without Will by abusing bounce, Bargain (necro usually wins via bounce if not will) or by a Tendrils/Remand combo.  Now during that tournament there were times where I could have got will, but thought for a bit and figured out how to kill without it--tutoring for Tendrils early (opponent thinks I got will), doing a bunch of stuff that they don't counter (Intuition, bounce, dark rit with enough mana already) because they are waiting for the will, then just cast tendrils.

That said, one of the philosophies behind the deck was the old TPS adage--play 1 bomb and protect it.  Well, there's no better bomb than Will so if you just do a damn good job at protecting it you don't need to run many other less powerful bombs that can fizzle.

[b-tings]

Vegeta: Was that a specific reference to Coffin Purge? I was just throwing out something off the top of my head that I had had to play around in the past. It's possible that my reduced comfort level with the deck (after all, I had never seen it before Richmond, and I'd been more or less on hiatus since the summer prior to picking it up) and the metagame caused me to tense up at possibilities I didn't have to worry about. I still find that I will occasionally set up over multiple turns, which makes Tormod's Crypt a concern.

Brian: I did consider putting in a bit about Jester's Cap; however, that has more to do with strict numbers than with diversity. Having four of the same threat is not necessarily a problem against Cap, even if you only have one path to victory.

MoxLotus: I did not test post-board, so Bob and the additional Tendrils weren't relevant. I figured for this sort of experiment, it was best to test this deck in a more "natural" form.

Was Remand in your maindeck? I copied it down hurriedly. I might have missed something.

The bounce does help, but I never seem to draw 2-3 artifact sources and the bounce spell to make it enough. It's possible I'm dropping a mox here or there that I shouldn't on auto-pilot, but I'm usually pretty good at balancing playing around Chalice and holding enough for storm. It's possible that I was too aggressive shuffling the bounce spells away in this experiment, because I'm used to not needing them to win, and without the right colour moxes I find they have a tendancy to leave me with 4 mana too many and U or B too few.

Keep in mind I am by no means presenting a conclusion based on my experiences. I'm sure the results had as deep a grounding in lack of sleep, experience, and playskill as in anything. But it brought to mind a possibility I felt was worth exploring. Also, as much as I talked about IT specifically, I am more curious about the theory behind diversification/focus than it's applications to one specific deck.

[Smmenen]

I played against Becker twice and I always felt that Tormods Crypt was not that effective against him.  Certainly Will made things easier for him, but I don't think it really slowed his deck down more than a turn or so. 

[Imsomniac101]

I think you guys are losing focus on the question posed. What b-tings is asking is "is it better to play a wide range of threats (and risk cluttering up the deck) or to focus the deck on one goal (and risk losing to single hate cards)"

There really isn't a straight answer to this. Part of it comes down to playstyle, and part of it can be attributed to your metagame. Let's compare two decks; Control Slaver and Gifts. One is like a Swiss Army knife, a diverse range of threats; the other is like a focused precision tool. To me, Gifts seems like the better deck, cuz i feel like CS is too cluttered up with jank, the same jank that others put in to diversify the threats in the deck. To others, CS would feel a lot more familiar to those used to the Swiss Army knife approach to Magic.

I probably should elaborate further, but I'm going out soon, so I'll leave it at that. But you get the general idea of my post......

[hazard]

I would concur with Insomniac...whether you are playing a deck with focused or diverse threats is highly dependent on on playstyle and metagame, along with deck choice and pilot comfortability.

To me, this is a part of the paper, rock, scissors part of this game that would make your threat/win condition strategy similar to a mutual fund investment.  If you are running a deck with a single threat, that is definitely high risk (having your sole Tendrils Extracted/Will RFG'ed), high reward (turn one kill possibility).  Obviously, the risk level is not determined solely by the number of threats, but many players would agree that carrying a single win condition in a deck is a risky choice (but not unpopular).

Building a deck whose goal is to win by taking away an opponents win condition(s) is difficult.  Sometimes your hate can cause an autoscoop, but other times it's like removing one bullet from a magazine of ammo.

I think the key is balancing your risk (of losing to singleton hate cards) with the protection of your number of threats/win conditions.  A control deck cannot (with ease) simultaneously run Leyline of the Void, Arcane Lab, Back to Basics, and Sacred Ground.  Regardless of your number of threats, your opponents will have to choose what they will hate from their main deck and their sideboard.  This throws us back to a metagame prediction determining whether or not you run that bounce or that second Tendrils in the board.

There really isn't a straight answer to this.

[Implacable]

Will just wins games.  I very much agree with Brian when he says that the future of Fish lies in graveyard denial builds.  However, I would take it a step further.  The future of the format, in many ways, seems to revolve around finding a way to neutralize Yawgmoth's Will consistently and efficiently.  Why are slow decks infrequently played?  Because they lose to monster Will's (by slow, I don't mean CS; I mean Keeper or Parfait-slow).  Should Will even be allowed?  What kind of format has Extract as a good card?

[brianpk80]

Will just wins games.  I very much agree with Brian when he says that the future of Fish lies in graveyard denial builds.  However, I would take it a step further.  The future of the format, in many ways, seems to revolve around finding a way to neutralize Yawgmoth's Will consistently and efficiently.  Why are slow decks infrequently played?  Because they lose to monster Will's (by slow, I don't mean CS; I mean Keeper or Parfait-slow).  Should Will even be allowed?  What kind of format has Extract as a good card?

That's an interesting question, "Should Will even be allowed?"
Since the mid/late 1990's when the DCI was on a happy banning/restricting spree (even seriously considering banning Library of
Alexandria and the then "game-breaking" Mirror Universe), they have now pursued a more liberal approach to Vintage Magic.  Several examples come to mind, including the unrestriction of Mishra's Workshop, Earthcraft, Mind Over Matter, Candelabra of Tawnos, Berserk, and more notably, the unbanning of Channel and Mind Twist.  Interestingly, these all occurred before the Renaissance of T1, largely attributable to the proliferation of X-Proxy tournaments.  The impression I had from the unrestrictions and unbannings was one of hasty resignation, as though the DCI considered T1 a helplessly broken format so, "why even bother."  Now, however, with increasing interest in the format, it's possible that the DCI may take its role more seriously and begin to evaluate whether there are certain cards that do justify a banning.  Clearly, Mind Twist and Channel would not be the targets.  But I can think of several plausible arguments in favor of banning Yawgmoth's Will, Tinker, and even Tendrils of Agony, the silver bullet of every serious combo deck (barring Belcher).  We know as a fact that the DCI's most recent ban/restrict criteria focuses not so much on cards that are intrinsically broken but rather with cards that make the game "un-fun" (for those who weren't following T1 then, this was the express basis for restricting Trinisphere).  That given, it's not difficult to see how sitting across from someone who indulges in a 10 minute long first turn and then storm-kills you for 24 life qualifies as disengaging and very "un-fun."  Still, if combo gets any further out of control (it's already over the edge in my opinion), an alternative might be to print a few explicit hosers, much like Mangara's Blessing in Mirage was an attempt to temper the T2 Necro decks in 1996.  I wouldn't mind seeing Arcane Laboratory as a 1/1 creature for or perhaps something cheap and untargetable that allowed you to, for instance, "Pay 5 life:" or "Discard two cards: Counter target sorcery" (not the Tendrils of course, but the Yawgmoth's Will, Burning Wish, or Timetwister, that kindles the storm count.  Notably a card like this would also thwart a broken Tinker or Flame Fusillade).  Thus, before we see bannings, I would expect they might be preceded by less extreme measures, like printing strategy hosers.   

And finally, I do agree with your point about graveyard removal.  Any deck can benefit from a method of neutralizing its opponent's graveyard, since graveyard abuse is the driving force behind most top Tier T1 decks.  I wasn't intending to suggest that graveyard removal should be limited to Fish.  My point was that when thinking about Fish, my experience has shown Tormod's Crypt to be consistently more disruptive than Chalice of the Void.  Whether the Crypt trumps Null Rod is an open question.  They are mutually exclusive and because I've been using Vials and a bit more acceleration than standard Fish, I don't run Null Rod and can't comment on it firsthand.

-Brian