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Putting It All Together: Time and Tempo in Magic

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I’ve already been over what I feel is the basic resource structure in Magic. I want to spend some time discussing what I feel is the most important derivative, or secondary, resource—time. This is one area where I feel most Magic players, even many pros, are completely and utterly lacking. This is likely because most of them never bothered going through the stage of being “aggro players.” This is true, of course, of most Magic players. Because they have never tied themselves to a specific archetype, preferring instead to learn matchups, decks, or formats, many Magic players have not seen the connectivity of a single archetype across a variety of Standard formats. This is particularly true of aggressive decks.

Aggro is not “Step 1: play dude, Step 2: burn face, Step 3: profit.”

Aggro is fundamentally about the use of tempo and time to your own benefit. Aggro is the union of the concept of tempo and the Philosophy of Fire. Aggro is about making time work for you.

So, what is time as a resource in Magic? How do we use it to our advantage? Well, let’s start at the very beginning, because I hear that’s a very good place to start.

What Is Time?

Time, in Magic, is turns. It is that simple. By this definition, you can see that time as a resource is something that every player is going to generate as long as he is playing the game. In general, this is a good thing. I mean, with every new turn, you get to draw a new card, play a new land, and cast some more spells. Those are things you generally want to be doing in a Magic game.

So, what are the essential qualities of time as a resource? Time has two important central qualities—the first is that it is consistently generated automatically by the game. The second is that the effect of any individual unit of time (and whatever you use that unit of time for) atrophies as the game goes on, since more time is generated.

As an example of the second aspect, consider that you played Concentrate on turn four. Assuming you were on the draw, you have now drawn four more cards than your opponent. When he takes his fifth turn, you will have drawn eight cards to his four, which is twice as much. However, if the game continues and neither of you proceeds to draw any more cards, by his thirteenth turn, the card count will be sixteen to twelve in your favor, which is still an advantage, but a much less substantial one. Thus, over the course of turns five through thirteen, the effectiveness of your turn-four Concentrate in generating advantage has atrophied.

Both of these characteristics are important to any attempt at using time. The first is important because it generates a sort of paradox—how do you make an automatic, self-generating resource work for you? The second is important because it points at one of the strangest aspects of time as a resource in Magic.

Bringing Time to Bear

So, how do we use the first aspect of time, the fact that it automatically generates itself? The answer is simple—we put our opponent in a situation where our time is better than his. If you can generate a position where ensuing turns are likely to be more valuable to you than to your opponent, you have generated a situation where time is working for you.

For example, if you have successfully beat your opponent down to 3 playing mono-Red, but you both have no cards left in hand and nothing on the table except for some lands, your time is likely much better than his. Your opponent has to find a win condition and kill you with it before you draw a burn spell to finish him off.

Using the second aspect of time involves extending the game when your time is worse than your opponent. This is, in most cases, intuitive to many players, but is still somewhat fundamentally strange. If your time (turns) is worse than your opponent, it is up to you to extend the game as long as possible. This makes sense from a “play-to-not-lose” perspective. However, the real reason you want to extend time is because it will atrophy whatever advantage your opponent has gained.

Of course, if you find yourself in a position where your time is better than your opponent’s, you have to do something to maintain it. After all, it will atrophy naturally if you don’t. This is important to remember in actual play because it teaches you that advantages must be pressed. Sitting back on any advantage you have gained will lose you the game in the long run.

Time and Beatdown

I firmly believe that every serious Magic player should begin his or her development by playing the “Red” deck, whether it is good or bad. He or she should enter event after event playing a simple, Deadguy Red deck. This is because there is no better way to provide a player with a visceral understanding of how time operates in Magic. Why? Because beatdown is 100% about time.

The funny paradox of beatdown (and thus, by extension, most tempo decks) is this—you are a time deck, yet your time is almost invariably worse than your opponent’s. You are a deck designed to use time as a resource, and yet your ability to actually use time sucks.

Think about it this way. Goblin Guide is the best aggressive 1-drop ever printed. I would argue that Goblin Guide is almost too powerful. However, how many cards printed make Goblin Guide look silly? How many Wall of Blossoms, Kor Firewalkers, Condemns, even Perimeter Captains, Wall of Woods, Kraken Hatchlings, and Cinder Walls exist?

There is only one Goblin Guide, yet there are hundreds of Magic cards that are capable of making a Goblin Guide look absolutely silly. This is because Goblin Guide, by itself, is actually a fundamentally bad use of time. It is a card that has very little impact on the board alone. This is, in fact, true of most small creatures designed to accomplish their goals by attacking.

Why? Because you start the game with 20 life, and the only point that is important is the last one. Thus, Goblin Guide applies very little actual pressure to your opponent from a time standpoint. Taking five hits from a Goblin Guide across four turns still leaves you with half your life total to work with, and you have probably drawn two to three cards for your trouble. In the abstract, this really isn’t that great of a trade.

So, why are aggro decks successful? What makes them tick? How can they use such “bad” time cards to be a time deck? The answer is focus.

Every card in the aggressive deck is focused on a single goal. There is absolutely no comparative equal in all of Magic. There is no other archetype where the deck list is lands and cards that do one specific thing. Every other type of deck is built around strategic interactions and/or specific cards. Aggro decks are built around redundancy and having each of their cards do the same thing. After all, what more do you want from your aggro deck other than another Lightning Bolt?

This is the core of the Philosophy of Fire. The aggro deck is designed to trade cards for life points and accomplish nothing else. The only thing that matters is the exchange of cards for your opponent’s life points, both in the short and long run. Every card in your deck should be geared toward that functionality.

This is why the design of aggressive decks is so crucial. Aggressive decks really only have better time consistently in two places—turn one and turn two. After that, most decks are going to start dropping more powerful cards. I mean, Stoneforge Mystic comes online on turn three, and can then start dumping awesome equipment into play. People play Jace Beleren on turn three, which is a better use of 3 mana than everything in any aggro deck ever, except maybe Cursed Scroll.

Thus, it is of absolutely crucial importance for aggro decks to seize that advantage in the early turns and press it, something they are designed very well to do. Essentially, the natural time-development curve works against an aggro deck. The aggro deck is trying to create a tipping point where this curve flips to work for it. However, this is no easy task. Fighting the natural development and progression of the game takes a lot of effort.

This is honestly why it is nearly impossible for the aggro deck to be the “best” deck. The aggro deck isn’t just fighting their opponent, but the game of Magic itself. All the defensive player has to do is to slow down the aggro deck sufficiently and allow the natural properties of Magic to win him the game.

Of course, there are many subtleties to the actual application of this type of idea in any given format, but the core principles are the same. Just as an illustration, let’s look at a pure illustration of the Philosophy of Fire:

So, let me ask you, in functionality, how different is the deck above from this deck?

[cardlist]

[Spells]

40 Lightning Bolt

[/Spells]

[Lands]

20 Mountain

[/Lands]

[/cardlist]

The answer is, not very much. This is essentially what every aggro deck is trying to do. Any peripheral card selection is only made to increase the efficiency at which the aggro deck is able to make its “cards for life” trades. This is aggro in every format. The strategy as a whole has its nuances, and there is definitely room for adaptation and play, but as a core, the aggro deck is trying to generate a single situation—your opponent’s time is working against him because he can’t kill you before you draw the lethal Lightning Bolt.

After all, what do you really want, other than another Bolt?

Chingsung Chang

Conelead most everywhere and on MTGO

Khan32k5 at gmail dot com

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