Last week I wrote about my ideas for Marginal Mana. The system is primarily designed to deal with tempo, which I will talk a bit about next week. This article on card advantage may cover a lot of old material, but I hope that it will be useful for those who have never seen it collected in one place, or, for those who have, will at least provide a different perspective.

Card Advantage has become one of the basic pillars of Magic play and design the moment Brian Weissman formulated the idea. The reason is simple – it is a very good means of utilizing the resource of cards.

First, a definition. What is Card Advantage? Card Advantage is when a player uses any number of cards (usually one), to either draw cards or destroy, nullify, or otherwise render ineffective cards an opponent controls. This is useful because it gives you more options than your opponent.

An analogy to explain the effect of Card Advantage and the power of drawing cards we return to finance, an analogy used in last week's article as well. I explained before that cards are like money. In this view, the goal of Magic is to make money, whether by acquiring more assets (cards on the board), or more currency (cards in hand). In real life, if you want to make money you have to spend money. In Magic, if you want to win the game you have to spend cards. In real life it is frequently profitable to invest money in a stock or bond with the intention of selling it at a profit to create more cash. This is, in effect, what you are doing with card drawing. You are investing a resource in the here and now for promise of more of that resource in the future.

There are essentially two kinds of card advantage, hard and soft. Hard card advantage is your typical two for ones (or three for ones, four for ones, etc.) Soft card advantage is what most people term "Virtual Card Advantage." I'll get to that, but let's start by looking at hard card advantage.

There are two main ways of generating hard card advantage – Drawing cards and using one card for more than one of your opponent's cards. Because cards have an inherent value associated with them (due to the options they represent), having more cards in hand via drawing cards is good.

Let's take a look at a baseline draw spell – Concentrate. You pay 4 mana for 3 cards. Within my system of Marginal Mana, this is worth 4 mana (-2 from losing Concentrate, +6 from drawing 3 cards). This is, in principle, the same gain you get from playing Hill Giant, which is why Concentrate is a good baseline draw spell. Note that since it was printed, many different variants have been printed of it (Compulsive Research, Harmonize, to name but a few.)

The problem with drawing cards is, of course, that card draw doesn't affect the board. Thus Hill Giant and Concentrate may have the same Marginal Mana value, but they affect the game in different ways. The bonus from Concentrate represents the options that you have and the ability to further develop your board position with the extra cards in hand. But there is a real tempo cost associated with playing Concentrate. It gives your opponent the opportunity to develop their board, or hit you with creatures (gaining Marginal Mana and thus tempo via reducing your life total).

The life total function demonstrates why drawing cards is usually a good idea though. Because each card's inherent value is two, with the added benefit of potentially generating more advantage, it is generally profitable to draw cards unless you are at a very low life total. This matches very well with in-game experience. Jace's Ingenuity is a pretty strong card as long as you aren't about to die.

There are, of course, spells that generate card advantage by interacting with the board. Sweepers are the centerpieces of this group of cards, but other cards like Maelstrom Pulse, Agony Warp, and Bloodbraid Elf also generate two for ones. These cards are so powerful because of the large change they generate in board state. A Day of Judgment that destroys a Noble Hierarch, Rhox War Monk, and Knight of the Reliquary is worth a lot of Marginal Mana (10 at worst valuation, probably in the 12-15 range depending on the size of the Knight). This is clearly very strong. It is a theory that Jund uses heavily and is the reason why Jund is so strong. Let's take a look at some of Jund's most popular cards from a Marginal Mana standpoint:

Bloodbraid Elf – 3/2 Haste + free card (4 Marginal mana + whatever the free card is). Considering the value of most of Jund's cards, this is going to regularly be around 7 Marginal Mana even without an attack.

Blightning – 3 damage + discard 2 (This is worth 4 Marginal Mana + the life total damage, so on average probably around 5 when played early, a lot more when played late.)

Bituminous Blast – 4 damage to a creature + 1-2 free cards (2-5 Marginal based on the value of the creature you kill + the value of the cards. This is going to be between 5 and 10 Marginal Mana based largely on whether or not it cascades into BBE).

Just these three plays demonstrate the strength of Jund and the idea of Incremental Card Advantage (a subject to be covered at a later date). Jund generates large Marginal Mana swings with most of its larger plays, comparable to many of the plays of more powerful decks. You can see how a large number of spells worth about an average of 6 Marginal Mana and costing about 4 would be pretty strong.

Now let's move on to Virtual Card Advantage. Virtual Card Advantage operates by rendering an opponent's cards useless. There are three main avenues of doing this:

1. Rendering your opponent's cards uncastable
2. Rendering your opponent's cards ineffective
3. Rendering your opponent's cards unusable

The prime avenue of #1 is land destruction, although cards like Meddling Mage and Iona also do this. Land destruction can be so powerful because it can literally cripple your opponent's deck for an extended period of time. By rendering the majority of their spells useless you effectively give your opponent a smaller pool of cards to work with. This is the pillar of Ponza.

Avenue #2 is accomplished by playing proactive answers to probable strategies. Examples of cards that do this are Leyline of Sanctity, Moat, and Baneslayer Angel. These cards operate by not removing opposing cards from play, but rendering most possible uses of them not profitable. For example, playing Moat against Goblins renders many of their creatures useless, since very few if any of them will fly and most of them have to attack to be productive.

Essentially there are two tiers of utility within cards that accomplish #2. There are cards like the aforementioned which render swaths of an opposing deck ineffective. There are also cards like Wall of Omens that severely reduce the effectiveness of smaller portions of an opponent's deck (Goblin Guide, Hellspark Elemental, Sprouting Thrinax, to name a few). The card advantage generated by these cards is virtual because if the card generating the VCA is removed, the cards it was holding back immediately become useful again.

Rendering your opponent's cards unusable (option number 3) usually comes from deck design. Terminate is useless against Pyromancer Ascension combo, for example. This is also an element of Card Advantage, since although your opponent technically has a Terminate, it might as well not be there, since Terminate generates no profitable interactions.

It is important to consider all three aspects of Virtual Card Advantage when building and playing decks, as all three will come up. Since the third occurs largely outside of games it is more important for designers, but it also will come up during sideboarding. UW decks with no creatures boarding in Baneslayer Angel is a good example of this, since the presumption is creature removal will be boarded out since it is largely unusable.

Virtual Card Advantage is strongly related to tempo because generating tempo inherently generates VCA, normally by rendering cards ineffective or unusable. Consider the following scenario:

Me: 4 lands in play.

Opponent: 3 lands in play, 6 cards in hand, 18 life.

It is my first main phase and I've made my land drop. I play Bloodbraid Elf and cascade into Boom/Bust holding the following cards – Stone Rain x2, Lightning Bolt, and two lands (one of which produces ). I cast Boom/Bust as Bust, destroying all lands in play, then I attack with Bloodbraid Elf, dropping my opponent to 15. Any card that is above CMC 3 in my opponent's hand is basically useless at this juncture. Why is this? My opponent is on a four-turn clock (4 attacks + bolt). In addition it is very likely that I will draw a third land to be able to cast both of my Stone Rains, meaning that he will not actually have four lands in play for another 6 turns. This is a great example of VCA in action, since every single card in his hand above CMC 3 might as well not be there.

The primary thing about VCA is that it can be reversed, and reversed quite dramatically. This is why LD decks often suffer by not drawing pressure. Even if you blow up 8 lands, eventually your opponent will draw enough lands to cast their spells, and then all of your VCA that you generated by blowing up those lands will be reversed. If your opponent finds a way to destroy your semi-soft lock he can gain a potentially huge swing because of the reversal of VCA.

Marginal Mana deals with VCA by treating cards that are not useful as if they don't exist. I didn't mention this exclusively for cards on the board last week, but that is how cards like Moat should be evaluated. This of course, leaves positions open to large swings in Marginal Mana through the destruction of certain cards, exactly like in-game situations.

It is important to remember that Card Advantage is not the end-all-be-all. It's necessary to remember that the cost of hard Card Advantage is generally tempo. The principle idea of Card Advantage is to give yourself more options relative to the opponent by either drawing more cards or rendering your opponent's cards ineffective. The problem with this is that you must have the time (tempo) to make use of those additional options. If you aren't given that time, it doesn't matter how many draws you have. If you are at three and I am tapped out but holding Lightning Bolt, I don't really care how big your Mind Spring is.

What I am getting at is not that Card Advantage is unimportant. Card Advantage is clearly important; it is the fundamental metric for the utilization of one of the three core resources in Magic – cards in your deck. Nevertheless, as will become obvious in later articles, it is important to make sure your cards, your options, are actually doing something. If not, all the card draw in the world cannot save you.

May your Igneniousness always be productive,

Chingsung Chang

Conelead most places and on MTGO

Khan32k5@gmail.com

Next week – Tempo