When it comes to building ships, the Vikings had it down. They knew what to build, how to build, and best of all - how to use the ships they built. In today's world, our ships are fat, fast and generally behemoths which carry more people than ever. The bulkhead is a vital piece for any ship, from the viking longboats to today's Queen Victoria. I'm not a sailor, but I do know something about ship design. See, I watched the movie Titanic and I know that if too many bulkheads go, so does the ship. Fairly simple when you get right down to it.

Decks are the same way.

You need bulkheads in your deck. They're the stop gaps, they're reset buttons, they're what allow you to regain your footing during the game. They're your Damnations or Wrath of Gods, or the cards which allow you to regain tempo like Pestermite or Yosei; the Morning Star. Even targeted removal is a bulkhead, like Condemn to Terror. These bulkheads are cards which either regain you tempo or gain you more tempo.

Tempo is a hard to define quality in a game, but it is something we've all experienced. It's that time when you find yourself waiting for your opponent to do something, maybe it's an attack or maybe playing a spell you think he has. If you're waiting, he's got tempo on you.

It's something that is much easier to define in chess where you can easily see how a move is determined. If I put your king in Check and your only response is to move out of Check, you've wholly given me tempo as I define the action of the game. Only when you are able to move without it being forced, or if one of your responses instead forces me to subsequently respond, does tempo change.

Consider this:

Tempo will remain with whoever controls it until an action forces it to change who it resides with.

Imagine a boxing match between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson. If Holyfield unleashes a flurry of blows and Mikey is left with his hands up in defense trying to dance away, Holyfield is clearly in control of tempo and it is now up to him to continue the aggression but the moment he lightens up and Tyson sneaks out a powerful jab knocking Holyfield back and stunning him, tempo swings immediately to Tyson and he can now define the action. Does he return with aggression or choose to hang back and regroup? It's his decision. If he chooses to hang back, it is harder for him to control the tempo because it gives Holyfield a chance to regroup.

Consider this:

Aggression is not required to define the tempo and who controls it.

Now think instead the person who is elusive. You can't hit what you can't reach. Think back to the ages of kings, of queens, of roguish thieves, and... no not Dungeons and Dragons, I mean the Middle Ages with their great castles, moats, hot tar and such other things. Before the invention of the siege engine those inside the castle walls were safe and only had to concern themselves with food and water, so long as that held out they were quite safe and tempo resided with them, they could send their Knights to the field of battle when they were good and ready and only then did they begin aggression otherwise it was up to the attackers to keep them under siege and not allow resources in.

There is tempo control in a strong defense as well. If you've got a hoard of 1/1 tokens and your opponent has just two measly creatures. Your opponent is obviously not going to attack because your token engine will gladly go kamikaze on his attackers killing X tokens to be sure that the attackers die, believing that the hoard will regrow faster than your side of the board. However a hoard army is difficult to marshall for an attack and most likely will wait until it can make a sweeping Alpha-strike attack rather than suffer the token attrition for a few points of damage. So the tempo is with the token army as it defines the action.

Chess defines three advantages a player can have, I don't really know if there are only three in Magic, it's for people smarter than me to decide. In Chess there are: material (the pieces,) position (the territory they control on the board) and tempo (the pace and control of the game.) I can directly relate these three to Magic, however there are at least a few more including life totals and resources (mana.) Of these, you see that tempo is really the only one which is intangible, the others have physical or documentible representations.

This is why tempo is the least understood, new players can't see it anywhere it is instead something which is simply felt.

The bulkhead is just a fun term used for a card which regains you tempo. It can regain you tempo by denying your opponent resources (mana) or killing creatures or building your defenses such as Martyr of the Moat.

So often I see new players building their decks without enough bulkheads, they focus instead on purely aggressive cards or reactive cards (counterspells or single creature kill) which do gain a little tempo while used correctly but not enough to really function as a full bulkhead. Indeed some formats or colors are denied the strongest bulkhead cards, but every color or deck can find one somewhere. This is why so few competitive decks are mono-colored, most need a splash to provide stability and bulkheads.

Just remember the lessons of the Vikings and of the Titanic and build your decks accordingly, and play with an eye on tempo.

-- Trick