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How Card Advantage Works, Part 2: Picture of Consistency

Literally a picture of consistency… or in this case, inconsistency:

I have gotten a lot of comments about this screen shot.

What the heck is going on?

Why did I put that in the blog post?

Huh?

Imagine if you will that this was your hand and board, instead:

  1. You are attacking with a Firebrand Ranger.
  2. You have three basic Mountains in play.
  3. Your hand is two basic Mountains and an, um… Tribal Flames (there is no burn spell bad enough to use a stand-in).
  4. Your opponent is at 19.

Really?

How bad is it?

You would be hard pressed to win against a well-built sealed deck with those tools only.

And while “cards in hand” have a non-zero value if for no other reason than you can bluff, that is what was depicted in the previous post’s screen shot.

So why am I bringing this up? Surely there is something productive to talk about beyond “Blood Moon is good against Zoo.” And there is! Zoo is just a perfect example.

I told Josh today that I took out one of the Sacred Foundries from the Zoo deck I listed last time around and replaced it with an Overgrown Tomb. This was night and day better than the previous version, just one card different. Why would this be, and why would I have previously played two Sacred Foundries?

The bonus to this deck from having an overgrown Tomb is simply that it can run another set of “opposites” to cast spells. Zoo is a much more challenging deck to play that it seems at first glance, to a novice. The reason is that in most Zoo games you will have access to 10-13 mana total… That is over the course of the whole game. So you have to make sure you have lands that can cast your spells.

A two land combination that functions pretty well together is Sacred Foundry plus Overgrown Tomb; not the best, but pretty well. Ironically, Sacred Foundry ha[d] no natural partner. If you only have two lands, you are likely to have an extra source of Red, but be unable to play half your hand.

To wit:

Godless Shrine goes with Stomping Ground.

Temple Garden goes with Blood Crypt.

And now… finally…. You have the option to play Overgrown Tomb and Sacred Foundry. Of the three combinations, this is the worst. You can’t play Lightning Helix and you can’t pump Viashino Slaughtermaster. But the reason I didn’t have it is that I was phoning in my mana base reminiscing about pre-Berlin testing, when Overgrown Tomb couldn’t pump Figure of Destiny. It’s the worst land in the deck, but not applicable to this deck.

Anyway, point being, if you get the wrong lands early, even though you have access to ten to twelve taps… You don’t actually get to cast a lot of your spells.

And when you can’t cast a spell… It’s almost like it wasn’t there at all.

  • Why don’t we play Nicol Bolas in Zoo?
  • Why are fast decks with low mana costs consitently better performers than ponderous mid-range decks that play a lot of weird and expensive stuff?
  • Why did I cut some Incinerates from Naya Burn, replacing them with Tarfires?
  • Why does Cruel Ultimatum leave a bad taste in GerryT’s mouth?

The answers to these questions aren’t all exactly the same, but they are pretty closely related. In essence, the value of a card is very closely correlated with our ability to utilize it. We don’t play Nicol Bolas in Zoo because it is essentially impossible to cast; ever drawing it would be a mulligan.

Why are fast decks with low mana costs consistently better performers than ponderous mid-range decks yadda yadda yadda? Because if the slower deck stumbles, it loses more than a potential land drop: It loses the efficacy of the cards in its hands. On balance the fast deck “stuck” at two lands will usually be able to knock over an entire city, let alone slow mid-range opponents. Time is also an issue. It doesn’t matter if the slower deck is packing Future Sight or just Future Sight cards.

So card utility — an element on which card advantage inextricably relies — has to do with one three-letter word: Now.

We don’t play Nicol Bolas in Zoo because we can’t cast it now (well… in this case, ever).

Fast decks with low mana costs consistently out-perform ponderous mid-range decks because the fast decks can typically use their spells now whereas the ponderous decks often have their hands clogged, doing nothing, for many turns. When they are mana screwed, fast decks can usually still play a lot of their spells; on balance, the slower decks go from being unable to play their spells this turn to being unable to play their spells ever. Why? Because the game is over and they are dead.

Why did I cut some Incinerates from Naya Burn, replacing them with Tarfires? This one is subtler. I could usually play the Incinerates… But because the Naya Burn deck would often have to operate with only two or three lands in play, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to play the Incinerate and something else. That took immediate utility away from me (even a little bit)… But with three mana I might be able to play a Tarmogoyf and get a blocker out of the way with a Tarfire so I could get in for three the same turn. In a format like Extended — which is essentially all about racing, in so many matchups — not being able to play the right spell this turn might as well be like being unable to play that spell ever.

The thing that I like best about this line of thinking is that there are immediate practical applications.

The most obvious one is how it might affect your mulligan algorithm.

Now a lot of us play with general rules like “you have to keep every hand with two lands” … Let’s see how those theories work out when we think about how many cards we functionally have, based on our ability to cast our spells right now.

(These screen shots are all courtesy of my Domain Zoo deck. Deck list at the bottom.)

This opening hand is about all you could ask for. You go and get Overgrown Tomb with the Bloodstained Mire and lay out a 1/1. You are striking for three on turn two thanks to the Sacred Foundry. This hand can’t fundamentally pump the Viashino and can’t cast Lightning Helix… But you don’t have Lightning Helix.

This second hand isn’t too bad. I know that your instinct is to not Mulligan it. That instinct would be correct. But there is a very concrete reason why you wouldn’t mulligan it. When you mulligan, you are trading this hand for a six-card hand of unknown quantity. This is a six-card hand that’s actually pretty good (you have about a one-in-four chance of speculating it into a full-on seven-card hand with the right topdeck).

Six card hand? Huh?

To wit:

The “seven” card hand only has the immediate utility of a six-card hand. With an Overgrown Tomb the natural land to go and get is a Sacred Foundry. You can’t play Lightning Helix with those lands.

This next “six-card” seven-card hand is a little bit worse than the previous one. I’ve already grayed out the Might of Alara. You actually get to play Lightning Helix for the first time, but with no Green mana you can’t play the Might of Alara. I would not mulligan this hand because you actually have some action… But unless you get to Green, you not only can’t play the Might, you can’t pump the Viashinos (so you basically have some Firebrand Rangers). It goes without saying that the Tribal Flames is a mere Volcanic Hammer… But there’s nothing wrong with that, expressly.

This hand is obviously poop. Clear mulligan – no action due to having no lands. Let’s examine the mulligan hand:

You would have to deeply consider going to five cards on this one. Of the six cards present, two are completely grayed out and I did a little half-thingie on the Wild Nacatls (no one is excited about a 2/2). I would be more inclined to keep this hand on the draw. 

Just something to think about:

  • You have a little bit better than a one-in-three to draw a land on your first pull.
  • Unless that land is a Blood Crypt or a Blood Crypt proxy such as a Bloodstained Mire or Wooded Foothills — NOT a Windswept Heath — the marginal utility nothing to write home about (by the way a Windswept Heath can’t get a Steam Vents, either). So now you are down to 16% to pull the land “you want” on your next pull.
  • If your hand doesn’t improve quickly, you are certain to lose to any competitive Extended deck.
When we talk about “doing the math” … This is what we are talking about. Are you better off with an unknown five-card hand or one of the above percentages? I would be hesitant to mulligan… It would depend on more than a screen shot in the abstract.

So when we talk about consistencyI think that these black-and-white images are what we are talking about. The decks we think of as less consistent play with functionally less card advantage, at least from an opening hand perspective. Now usually they are paired with greater power… There is no doubt that a Zoo deck that can attack for lethal damage on the third turn is “more powerful” than a ho hum Naya Burn deck that needs the stars to align very nicely in order to get a fourth turn concession (not necessarily kill), but at the same time, its ability to set up those kinds of draws with so many five-card openers means that it might have certain disincentives for play.

Think of the decks we complain about most in terms of “more mulligans” … A lot of those decks only play 20 lands (or not even 20 lands). Unless they are Elves (a deck of all one drops) these decks often have problems getting past Stage One (“basically manascrewed”)… And even a modest Stage Two deck will habitually beat a manascrewed opponent.

One more time for the road:

2 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Dark Confidant

4 Lightning Helix

4 Might of Alara
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Wild Nacatl

4 Kird Ape
4 Mogg Fanatic
1 Seal of Fire
1 Tarfire
4 Tribal Flames
4 Viashino Slaughtermaster

1 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Godless Shrine
1 Mountain
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Steam Vents
1 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
4 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills

sideboard:
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Duergar Hedge-Mage
4 Ancient Grudge
1 Volcanic Fallout
4 Ethersworn Canonist

Next:

How Card Advantage Works, Part 3: How All-in Red Works

That, or my deck for this weekend… One of the two!

LOVE
MIKE

How Card Advantage Works, Part 1: Bad Decks, Good Theory

Ironically these terrible decks I made last week will ultimately produce a very nice and useful model for card advantage that you may not be using at present. Really!

It might not be all-inclusive, but I am pretty sure it will change how at least some readers look at card economics.

To begin, I made some bad Extended decks.

Inspired by LSV in Kyoto, I decided to make B/W Tokens in Extended.

Really!

I mean B/W Tokens is a competitive deck in Standard, and recently the Philly 5K champion showed us that you can translate Block Kithkin to an easy Extended Top 4 (and if he hadn’t lost to Osyp’s infinite creature control, I’m guessing Corey could have beaten Josh and his Fae in the finals)… Fae is an Extended Deck. Kithkin can be one. Why not B/W Tokens?

Here is the first iteration:

3 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Bitterblossom
2 False Cure
1 Ghost-Lit Stalker

3 Beacon of Immortality
4 Eternal Dragon
4 Martyr of Sands
4 Path to Exile
3 Proclamation of Rebirth
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Spectral Procession

4 Fetid Heath
2 Ghost Quarter
4 Godless Shrine
2 Mistveil Plains
4 Plains
4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Windswept Heath

sideboard:
3 Relic of Progenitus
4 Thoughtseize
4 Kataki, War’s Wage
1 Proclamation of Rebirth
3 Wrath of God

I decided I wanted to hybridize three major principles:

1) Three-for-ones. Two-for-ones are so passe. I played many cards that can single-handedly trip a Windbrisk Heights, viz. Spectral Procession and Ranger of Eos.

2) Martyr Combo. I figured that as long as I was running Ranger of Eos for card advantage, I might as well go and get the bestest available ones, and splash in some copies of Proclamation of Rebirth. At last check, Fae was the most popular Extended deck, and I wouldn’t be frightened of Fae with Rangers, Martyrs, and Proclamations at my beck and call.

3) False Cure combo. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the combo is Beacon of Immortality + False Cure. I pulled this off one time, ever. In a game I was just going to win with Dragon beatdown anyway.

The dream was to get in there with Windbrisk Heights to complete the False Cure + Beacon of Immortality combo. This never fit together and I think I won a total of one match with the deck.

This version was going nowhere so I tried one with Ghost Council of Orzhova. I have a soft spot for the Guildpact mobsters (especially Teysa), so I tried to make it a little bit differently.

4 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Bitterblossom
1 Ghost-Lit Stalker

4 Ghost Council of Orzhova
1 Teysa, Orzhov Scion

4 Eternal Dragon
4 Martyr of Sands
4 Path to Exile
2 Proclamation of Rebirth
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Spectral Procession

4 Fetid Heath
2 Ghost Quarter
4 Godless Shrine
2 Mistveil Plains
4 Plains
4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Windswept Heath

sideboard:
3 Relic of Progenitus
4 Thoughtseize
4 Kataki, War’s Wage
1 Proclamation of Rebirth
3 Wrath of God

Like in my Pro Tour Charleston deck Teysa can do some damage with token teammates.

Between the two builds I don’t think I took down an actual match. That means they are probably pretty dismal.

But I decided I could try to resurrect a different old deck. This time I went for Gaea’s Might Get There.

2 Umezawa’s Jitte

4 Dark Confidant

4 Lightning Helix

4 Might of Alara
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Wild Nacatl

4 Kird Ape
4 Mogg Fanatic
1 Seal of Fire
1 Tarfire
4 Tribal Flames
4 Viashino Slaughtermaster

1 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Godless Shrine
1 Mountain
2 Sacred Foundry
1 Steam Vents
1 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
4 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills

sideboard:
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Duergar Hedge-Mage
4 Ancient Grudge
1 Volcanic Fallout
4 Ethersworn Canonist

Gaea’s Might Get There was a respectable deck, and Viashino Slaughtermaster is offensively just better than Boros Swiftblade in a deck like this one.

Sad to say I have only ever completed the turn three big swing one time, but stuck on two lands, was only capable of striking for 10. I lost that game to Swans when he locked me down with a Blood Moon the following turn (though I “got there” match-wise, eventually).

I am not hugely in love with this deck, and if you asked me today what I would play at the next PTQ, I would for certain speak the words “Naya Burn” … But this strategy definitely has legs. The reason I like it less than the somewhat similar (though admittedly “less powerful”) Naya Burn is an issue of consistency.

Consistency is a word that gets batted around a bit in Magic (especially with regards to opening hands evaluations)… And thinking about this consistency was the catalyst to this three (or so) part article set on card advantage.

Intrigued?

What do you think about this screen shot?

Fabulous winks!

LOVE
MIKE

michaelj’s Card of the Day: Portent (guest-starring Temporal Mastery!)

Please don’t assume that there will be more “cards of the day” entries every day, even if there are going to be (sometimes).
-The Management


Portent, from Ice Age

Something special?

Crappy Ponder?

Out of print for circa 15 years?

Why oh why are we talking about Portent today?

Let me dial you back those fifteen years to a tournament; a Standard tournament. A hard-fought tournament contested by some of the best players, ever; victoriously taken down by Our Hero, michaelj.

Yes, this was a side Standard tournament back at Pro Tour New York 1997. Yes, I scrubbed out of the main event PT; no, you probably weren’t qualified (unless you are Patrick, who was in fact qualified and also made Top 8). Don’t you dare raise an eyebrow! If you had taken down PT Finalist Tomi Walamies and Hall of Famer Alan Comer — even in a lowly side event — such a Standard triumph would be etched forever in your Magic memory, too.

This tournament was the first time — and one of the only times — I encountered / would encounter Portent being played as a Constructed card. Alan was coming off his historic, archetype-making Regionals with Turbo Xerox, the exemplification of his theory whereby you can Remove two lands for every two one- or two-mana cantrips you play. He ran only 17 lands and used his Portents, Foreshadows (combo!), and Impulses to get land early… but get spells later. Cha-ching!

He beat up my Frenetic Efreet in Game One with Suq’Ata Firewalker (I had rarely felt so out-classed). I got the second in a nail-biter where he didn’t have Force of Will, and kept 17-land deck manascrewed in the last one with Time Elemental and a tremendous amount of patience.

Ah, those were the days.

Okay, Portent: What’s up with Portent? It was a fringe card in 1997… Why care at all in 2012?

Most of you probably look at Portent and see a bad Ponder. Some of you probably recognize that you can Portent your opponent, and that keeping him in lockdown is probably nice. And of course there was the 1997 super combo twin set of Portent + Foreshadow and Memory Lapse + Foreshadow (and anyway, Foreshadow was just a highly playable cantrip in a format with Mystical Tutor, Enlightened Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, and so on); Magicians from Jon Finkel to Andrew Cuneo were enamored of that interaction as well.

So again, bad Ponder in 2012… What gives?

This is a SLOW-trip, right?

There is a lot of speculation today about miracle cards in Legacy. Brainstorm; Jace, the Mind Sculptor; the return of Sensei’s Divining Top… All these cards, especially played all together and interlaced with miracle spells like Temporal Mastery can make for an absolute symphony of under-costed fireworks. The [potential] down-side of miracles is that they are expensive when they are non-miraculous (but that is why we might play cards like Desolate Lighthouse or Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded to get rid of them), or in Legacy, cards like Brainstorm or Jace, the Mind Sculptor to put them back on top, where they can grow up to be miraculous in a turn or so.


Chase miracle Temporal Mastery is generating more conversations than the rumored pregnancy, fat-ness, or skinny-ness of Snooki from Jersey Shore. Which I don’t watch. Ever.
Focus, michaelj, focus. Portent.

Oh yeah, Portent. Slow-trip Portent. Crappy Ponder, we decided, right?

Only kind-of.

I am just spitballing here (but what is any of this stuff at this stage of the new set but spitballing?)… Can we make the slow-trip-ness of Portent an advantage rather than a disadvantage? A feature rather than a bug? Ponder is generally favored over Preordain in Legacy, even though Preordain was massively favored over Ponder in Standard. Digging for three for U is considered better than what Preordain offers for the same mana… At least when you can combo in a Scalding Tarn or Polluted Delta.

Portent does essentially what Ponder does (digs for three), plus gives you a whole different modality! Now in most decks that want to draw a card now Now NOW (as with when you are digging for land on turns 1-2, or playing a combo deck that wants to win immediately), the slow-trip Liability on Portent may be prohibitive… But what about if you are super concerned with top-decking miracles? Playing a progressive advantage deck? Setting up a draw on your opponent’s turn, and making that a miracle (as often as possible, if not every time)?

Halleluia!

Praise be!

Portent can Ponder for you, but give you a shot at going off (small-g / small-o) on the other guy’s turn. Here here for information!

No, I don’t know if this is actually going to be good enough for Legacy, which can be a notoriously extreme and superlative format; but I do know that I can’t stop thinking about Portent, and triggering miracles on the opponent’s turn without 1) wasting an extra mana, or 2) misplacing my beloved Sensei’s Divining Top (which actually intersects with the first point).

Presumably… just some weirdo thoughts that you didn’t have yourself [yet].

LOVE
MIKE

The Card is Druidic Satchel

Do you remember a few weeks ago when Evan Erwin said to get your Kessig Wolf Runs?

Your old buddy michaelj is going to do you twice that solid right now: Buy Druidic Satchel while it is less than a dollar. I myself bought 20 last night for about $.44 each!

You can get a Druidic Satchel on Amazon.com for as low as $.29!


This card is going to be one of THE top cards in the format for the next year or so, mark my words.

I got Druidic Satchel tech from Sean McKeown literally five minutes before New York States started, and I was super glad that I swapped my three main deck Frost Titans out for them (full deck list, report, and so on will be up on Star City tomorrow). Remember what Drew Levin asked about Frost Titan, and how much removal a Solar Flare opponent might have when we play our Titan?

When you swap for Druidic Satchel it is a non-issue.

Also, you can tap for Druidic Satchel on turn three in a lot of matchups and there is little-to-no risk. In fact, I played around in between rounds and most opponents — at least before they saw me play — just let it resolve even if they had a Mana Leak.

(not correct, BTW)

Druidic Satchel does so many things; and it does them well.

Sometimes it is a little bit Elspeth, Kight-Errant, and other times it is a little Ajani Goldmane. Much of the time it is kind of a cross between Jace Beleren and Garruk Wildspeaker… But most importantly, it is a “Planeswalker” that the opponent can’t actually attack.

The way the Thawing out land ability works, Druidic Satchel starts to pay for its own activations fairly quickly (which is awesome). It helps you against Control, and it helps you even more against Beatdown.

I tried to optimize for Druidic Satchel in my imagination over the past day or two… But I think I already had it right going U/R. Obviously you want to be playing Snapcaster Mage and Druidic Satchel (that much is obvious)… But Red not only has Brimstone Volley (another Top 10 if not Top 5 card in Standard), but is the only Control color that can legitimately / consistently mise an Ancient Grudge (you know, to win the Satchel fights).

Trust me, this is going to be important.

Some Druidic Satchel basics:

  1. Hitting a spell is great… Not only do you get two life (good in some matchups), but you know not only that you are drawing a spell (great mid-game!), but which spell it is.
  2. Hitting a land is great… Because now you are going to topdeck a spell (probably). Also you get some card advantage this way.
  3. Making a 1/1 sap is the best of all… Because you are going to mise a Snapcaster Mage in all likelihood. When I mise a little 1/1 guy, I will typically use Druidic Satchel again on my upkeep so as to make more and more 1/1 guys. These guys not only give you another way to win, but bodies to hassle or sacrifice in combat (which can help turn on Brimstone Volley).

Anyway… The “secret card” is Druidic Satchel.

On Saturday at New York States, I inquired about some at the end of the day, and they had been long sold out.

The next day at Comicon… The Troll and Toad booth didn’t have any, either.

Mark my words: The Internet may just not have caught up yet. Even if Druidic Satchel “only” goes to $1-2, since you can get them for less than a dollar now, you can make a nice ROI on the investment, if you choose to buy more than four.

[still] Coming Soon: The Now-Famous Supermodel NipSlip Incident of 1995
Coming Sooner: My Sunday at Comicon

LOVE
MIKE

Post Script:

As a kindergartener I recall being put in the thinking chair / corner / whatever and sitting quietly. Some boys were squirmy when put in the corner, made lots of noise, complained even worse than whatever they did to get there in the first place.

Not me — I sat quietly.

A year later, I hid from my mommy and daddy.

We “only” had two television sets, one of which was black and white. The grownups wanted to watch the Sunday afternoon football game, so I could “only” watch my television program on the little black and white set. This caused me to, you know, go apespit, and I hid under a bed, but did so with great discipline.

This is one of the clearest memories of my childhood: I had to summon up tremendous restraint in order to stay hidden, even as my mommy stressed and called the police station. Eventually I fell asleep, but my resolve eventually broke when it was supper time and my mom had made steaks for the company.

What was I thinking about when I was so quiet in the kindergarten thinking chair? My teacher assumed it was “about what I had done” but it wasn’t.

What show was it that had me so incensed that the thought of having to consume it in black and white fashion pushed me to the razor edge of six-year-old asshole-dom?

Wonder Woman.

I am pretty sure Lynda Carter was my first real celebrity crush.

Sigh.

I found some old photos of Lynda in her Wonder Woman getup and swiped them for some daily sketches.

Man, she was hot… for a chick who looks like she’s wearing a diaper.


Lynda

Part Two, Who Wants a Loxodon Hierarch?

In Part Two, we continue our thoughts on Captured Sunlight with more detailed discussions on longtime favorite Loxodon Hierarch!

First of all, great discussion from everyone. My favorite comment has to be from hudnall56:

Captured Sunlight into Kitchen Finks is the most mid-rangey thing I’ve heard of for a long, long time.

Which battles that of KZipple in a seething firestorm of violent controversy:

That isn’t nearly as midrangy as Foolkillers.

(If by “seething firestorm” we mean “soothing balm” given the subject matter).

So before we get into the specifics of what the most ridiculous thing that we can do with a Captured Sunlight is, I would just like to address the most mid-rangey thing hudnall56 could imagine:

So… four mana, six (really eight) life, and a 3/2 body… followed by a 2/1 body.

How does this compare to four mana for four life and a single 4/4 body?

This, my friends, sounds notoriously like a question of How Card Advantage Works.

Loxodon Hierarch and Card Advantage

On its face Loxodon Hierarch doesn’t generate any card advantage. Now if we move from on-its-face traditional counting to the more accurate world of interactive Magic, Loxodon sometimes generates card advantage. For example against a Black deck it isn’t going to generate any card advantage drawing a Terror, but against a Red Deck it can pickpocket an extra card when someone has to spend, say, a Tarfire and a Seal of Fire.

… Or is it just one more card?

The reason Red Decks hate Hierarchs is that they are fundamentally card advantage against Red Decks. Life gain is not advantageous in general, but against a Red Deck that has scads of different cards that do nothing but nug the brains for two… Life gain atually looks like card advantage; on top of any actual exchanges that take place on the board, a Loxodon Hierarch will undo a Red Deck’s next two Shocks.

Loxodon Hierarch… The Best Card or Constructed Unplayable?

At the time of the last Pro Tour Honolulu, chatter around the top of the game was that Loxodon Hierarch was the best card in Standard. A quick glance at the actual Top 8 decks from that tournament reveals… not a single Hierarch!

For the next Constructed Pro Tour that year, Charleston (the often discussed team Pro Tour), we approached the format with the notion that Loxodon Hierarch was the best card in the format. It was a warping card from our deck design perspective, more influential than any other single card in our crafting of our three individual decks. Interestingly, while almost every team played four Hierarchs… the winning team didn’t. Just sayin’.

Now recently Luis Scott-Vargas — a player who has recently transformed himself from a The Rock / Solar Flare kind of guy into a Pro Tour winner with Elves, then followed up with standout performances on the backs of decks like Swans and Storm, recently posted something I found quite controversial and thought provoking on his new site ChannelFireball.com:

I used to be a fan of Loxodon Hierarch type decks myself, and guess what? I didn’t win at the Pro Tour level. Midrange decks designed to pummel aggro may work during the Swiss at a PTQ, but you will usually meet your demise during the Top 8 to someone playing a real control deck. I learned my lesson the hard way, playing these sorts of midrange decks as recently as PT Hollywood in 2008. My Loxodon Warhammer plus Chameleon Colossus deck did well enough until I played against a bunch of Reveillark decks, which completely annihilated me. Turns out that a control deck with Cryptic Command and Reveillark is better than a control deck with Cloudthresher and Primal Command. I understand why people are drawn to decks like this, but all I can offer is my advice to put down the Finks and pick up Vendilion Cliques while there is still time.

As you can see, Luis writes almost like a religious convert!

The title of the piece?

Decks That Can’t Win Tournaments

Which poses the question… Do we even (ever?) want a Loxodon Hierarch?

My old Two-Headed Giant teammate Steve Sadin likes to talk about the time that he beat me in an Extended PTQ. Any kind of Magic friendships typically ultimately come down to bragging rights, but this was a special case (it’s not like he is still bragging about beating me in the finals of a mock tournament, Loam v. Haterator)… In the future PTQ he beat me Boros v. Haterator, in a matchup where I drew Loxodon Hierarch. The fact is, Steve won the flip, had the tempo, burned the right Birds, and minimized the awfulness of Loxodon Hierarch when it showed up. As a former Boros player myself, I can recall dozens of games where I just got by the Hierarchs with Manriki-Gusari, Boros Garrison, and Eight-And-A-Half-Tails… And that was Standard.

The point of Luis’s piece on ChannelFireball seems to be that we shouldn’t want to want Loxodon Hierarchs… Which is a different question than we are trying to answer when we talk about Captured Sunlight.

Because ultimately I think we can all agree that a Captured Sunlight into a Wooly Thoctar in Standard is probably pretty good (and generally better than a “real” Loxodon Hierarch). So what are some of the other scenarios we can project?

  • Kitchen Finks – I have never done this yet. But according to hudnall56, this is quite mid-rangey
  • Civic Wayfinder – This offers a fair amount of card advantage; I would not typically want to play an Exploding Borders… This effect is pretty similar (and probably generally better as you get a body out of it, and all things considered, gaining four life with no effect on the board is probably better than dealing four damage with no effect on the board). But like I said, I wouldn’t typically consider playing Exploding Borders.
  • Rampant Growth – Kind of miserable, actually. Worse in almost every way than the previous.
  • Lash Out – (and substitute any Terminates, Nameless Inversions, and so on that you like)… Could be pretty good depending on the board. If you have the only guy this is kind of miserable.

Most of the time this card seems underwhelming given its flip capability (I wouldn’t make the same statement talking about Bloodbraid Elf, which will often be flipping cards like Hell’s Thunder, Boggart Ram-Gang, and the like in an offensive haste deck. On balance, I have Captured Sunlight in a deck like this:

Four-color Cascade Ramp

4 Bituminous Blast
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Broodmate Dragon
4 Captured Sunlight
4 Enlisted Wurm
4 Kitchen Finks

4 Civic Wayfinder
4 Rampant Growth

4 Lash Out

3 Exotic Orchard
5 Forest
4 Jungle Shrine
2 Mountain
1 Plains
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Savage Lands
1 Swamp

sideboard:
4 Anathemancer
4 Cloudthresher
3 Path to Exile
4 Volcanic Fallout

Testing is super preliminary at this point, but the deck follows many of the same principles as previous Jund Ramp decks. Against Reflecting Pool control you have to rely on the extreme amount of card advantage to keep pace, then side in Anathemancer as a tremendous threat.

Faeries is a deck that seems like it has to be solved with the sideboard; those Volcanic Blowouts are also there for Boat Brew, B/W Tokens, and other decks that employ Spectral Procession.

… Which all together is a big chunk of the metagame.

That said, this deck can play pretty powerfully, the Standard Storm, kind of. I wasn’t initially a fan of Enlisted Wurm, but in this deck it can play like Mind’s Desire. The bonus on this card has been about 2.5 for me so far… You know, Enlisted Wurm flipping Bituminous Blast flipping Civic Wayfinder.

Just a jumping-off point, to be sure, but I think Loxodon Hierarch would be proud.

LOVE
MIKE

Alara Reborn – Spellbound Dragon

A king in Jund, a serf in Esper, a review of Alara Reborn Rare Spellbound Dragon.

Aesthetics:
First of all let’s look at that flavor text…

“A king in Jund, a serf in Esper.”

I love that flavor text!

Most of you don’t know this about me but I actively avoided drafting Black and to a lesser degree Red in Planeshift simply because I didn’t like the art (Bob Maher used to ask me if I had actually read what the Black and Red cards did); my favorite card flavor-wise is Form of the Dragon. I have always thought they did a fantabulous job of making you feel like you had transformed yourself into a dragon* (plus a good card).

Looping back to this card’s flavor text, you can see how a flyer like this one (which is obviously native to Grixis) might rule the sky in Jund… But is kind of a mope holding the bag in Esper where everyone is drawing cards, returing cards, and, you know, keeping ’em.

Okay. Game play. So how is this supposed to work?

Red for Dragon, Blue for Looter.

From the Dragon side, it isn’t much of a stretch for this to be 5/5 or better. After all you are playing cards like Spellbound Dragon, so 8/5 or so on offense is not much of a stretch.

The potentially counterproductive side is that typically “Looter” effects are meant to improve your hand… When you are chucking spells for damage, you are probably doing the opposite (you have already demonstrated five or more mana so what you are looking for is probably more action, not hoarding extra lands which is what is inevitably going to happen when you start chucking your Cryptic Commands to get in for seven). Then again, how long is the game going to last when you’re clocking with such a Dragon? The notion of relative hand improvement might therefore intersect with our as-yet unfinished explorations of How Card Advantage Works due to the opponent being up against a clock.

Interesting thing is that you of course have options. No reason (other than flash, flair, and probably clock) that you can’t call the Spellbound Dragon your lead and use the Looter half to hold said lead… Just that most of the time that is going to be at odds with the desire for damage.

All in all I really like this card…

But I’m not sure what deck I would play it in.

Where can I see this fitting in?
Well I kind of just said… I don’t know who wants a Spellbound Dragon. There is no present Standard deck that can cast it that would really want it. Interestingly this card defends pretty well against the Standard-standard Broodmate Dragon, but on balance can’t really attack into one unless you are willing to pitch a five (or you have say a Cryptic Command you plan to resolve).

Aesthetically I think the card is built for sky racing (think tap out Blue)… I think it could be reasonable in that kind of a deck but for the fact that that kind of deck is so clearly out-classed at this stage by Quick’N’Toast style Reflecting Pool Control.

One thing I didn’t mention that is quite obvious is that if you can toss cards like Reckless Wurm and Fiery Temper you look like a rock star and bonk like a porn star… But I doubt that is any kind of a real deck.

Hell of a first pick though… But that should be obvious from the intersection of card type and rarity.

Snap Judgment Rating: It’s not Constructed Unplayable, won’t be a Staple or any kind of a format defining card, so I guess that leaves Role Player. I would be very interested to see Spellbound Dragon producing maybe a year from now when the Quick’N’Toast / Reflecting Pool Control competition dies down. Seems like it would be good friends with Volcanic Fallout (provided control decks still want to play that in a post-Faeries format).

LOVE
MIKE


 
* This is basically 100% random but the idea of turning yourself into a dragon reminded me of this Troy Denning book I read back in high school. When I was in high school — close to 20 years ago — I was a big time dice-thrower (you know, before Magic: The Gathering I played me some Advanced Dungeons & Dragons). So I was all into the novels for some of their product releases.

The book I remembered involved some sorcerer-transforming-himself-into-a-dragon action and I recall it being pretty compelling (especially for the genre).

It is by Troy Denning who is actually an excellent writer, one of the best who puts out Star Wars and other licensed properties paperbacks. I did some digging and if you are in the market for some paperback Dungeons & Dragons-style SiFi / Fantasy, I remember enjoying The Verdant Passage.

Update!
I did some digging on ye ole Amazon.com and found Verdant Passage for a penny plus shipping

The Verdant Passage, new & used

So if you can afford, um, a penny, I think you’d enjoy the book (provided you like, you know, dragons).

Have fun everyone gaming on tomorrow! (Unfortunately I have to miss… again 🙁 )

All Alara Reborn

Deckade Proofs Have Been Approved!

… Apparently.

It was news to me!

For those of you who didn’t know we have been sold out of Michael J. Flores: Deckade for a little while now but Matt and Brian have apparently completed the next order (at least according to this blog post over at our best friend blog Top 8 Magic).

… And you know what that means!

That’s right: Clear and unrelenting hard-sells from YT post-in and post-out 🙂

Speaking of posts, I have a nifty two- or three-parter coming up starting, um, tonight I think.

It’s about how card advantage works (and here you thought you knew).

More later.

Best.

LOVE
MIKE

Weekend Update

weekendupdate

Concerning:

  1. The Moral Victory of 16 Thumbs and 7 Toughness
  2. The Destiny of 4 Kalonian Hydras
  3. The Next Level of The Next Level

So I was gone at the Star City Games Invitational in Somerset, NJ Friday through Sunday, and basically missed a whole bunch of stuff. Some of it is important; other stuff, simply awesome. Hence, this after-the-weekend Weekend Update.


Top8Magic on ManaDeprived Update

First of all, thank all of you cats who went over and liked our first podcast on ManaDeprived, “Save or Delete”.

In case you didn’t know, we posted another podcast last Friday.

Let me ask you a question: DO YOU WANT US TO DO THESE EVERY WEEK?

Is that like asking if the world needs more TAUNTING JON BECKER?

Answer in the comments below but I assume the answer(s) is / are em effin’ yes. If so, I need y’all to click over to ManaDeprived and Like the bejeezus out of this. Our first podcast over there got 10x the usual likes of a ManaDeprived podcast, but “The Moral Victory of 16 Thumbs and 7 Toughness” has to date garnered a pathetic 3 Likes. I don’t know what kind of Up North operation KYT has at ManaDeprived but I assume his servers are made out of maple tree twigs and run on a hydraulic system of syrup and snow. Go click over to ManaDeprived and break that thing! Come on BDM fans! Let’s go!

And / or…

Listen here:

Download and listen later…

But most definite, DEFINITELY, subscribe on iTunes:
http://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/mana-deprived/id489782347


Kalonian Hydra Update

In case you were wondering what happened to those four Kalonian Hydras I picked up [but did not play] for the Invitational, they found a fine home in the Zvi Mowshowitz-designed G/W Elves deck piloted by our good friend William “Baby Huey” Jensen:


William Jensen with YT’s four Hydras!

G/W Elves

4 Garruk, Caller of Beasts
4 Kalonian Hydra
4 Elvish Mystic
2 Loxodon Smiter
4 Wolfir Silverheart
4 Craterhoof Behemoth
4 Avacyn’s Pilgrim
4 Gavony Township
4 Arbor Elf
4 Sunpetal Grove
4 Elvish Archdruid
4 Elvish Visionary
4 Temple Garden
10 Forest

Sideboard
4 Strangleroot Geist
2 Ranger’s Guile
3 Garruk Relentless
3 Tree of Redemption
3 Acidic Slime

Huey Made Top 8 of last week’s Standard Open with U/R/W Control but did poorly in the Invitational. He switched it up to the G/W deck for the Somerset Standard Open and crushed his way all the way to second place. I have thought about playing against this deck with a variety of strategies and I think it is both counterintuitive and tough from the control side. At first glance this is the classic deck you crush with Ratchet Bombs and Supreme Verdicts but I don’t think it is ultimately that cut-and-dried. You can’t screw up. You can’t give them operating mana for too long. You certainly can’t let them level up repeatedly with Garruk, Caller of Beasts. I played a Quicken + Planar Cleansing deck in the Invitational and Open specifically to crush Jund decks that had been accumulating Planeswalker-based battlefield advantages but I don’t think that works against Garruk-six. The last thing you want to do is to tap for Planar Cleansing, clearing their board… But leaving them with seven cards in hand (most of which are sweet threats).

I actually think that you want both lots of sweep but need Need NEED permission to fight Garruk, Caller of Beasts here. I would consider siding in Negate just to fight that six. The creatures are not particularly resilient exclusive of dealing massive damage in one big attack. You really need to keep them off their combination of acceleration and card advantage or you are going to eat a Craterhoof, I fear.

Anyway, great weekend for Huey, who made back-to-back Standard and Legacy Open Top 8s.


NEXT LEVEL DECKBUILDING Update

Are you living under a rock or something?

Biggest of the big that happened this past weekend was the release of Patrick Chapin’s new book NEXT LEVEL DECKBUILDING on Star City Games. Patrick is one of my best friends and as a writer, an inspiration. He was one of the driving forces that got me off my butt to do THE OFFICIAL MISER’S GUIDE and I wish him all the luck with NEXT LEVEL DECKBUILDING.

NEXT LEVEL DECKBUILDING is huge — some 472 pages — but I haven’t been able to put it down all day. It’s beautifully laid out by the ebook elves at Star City Games; the content is one-of-a-kind and often quite hilarious (more on that later in the week). I haven’t read it all yet but I am absolutely loving much of what I have so far. Don’t go out and immediately buy NEXT LEVEL DECKBUILDING before you buy THE OFFICIAL MISER’S GUIDE or anything silly like that; but if you are in the market for awesome Magic books… This one is pretty awesome. I’m going to be recommending this for years I think. Again, more deets later.

Okay friends!

Lots of stuff to do!

Action Items!

nldb

LOVE
MIKE

How Far We’ve Come (1/2): Teremko Griffin and Guerilla Tactics

This post is inspired by the Guerilla Tactics I found digging around my parents’ basement last week; you may have read about this expedition here.

guerillatactics
Among other things, Guerilla Tactics.

And in case you were wondering, I sadly found only four regular Gaea’s Cradles upon returning to New York 🙁

Guerrilla Tactics returned to the playable conversation when Patrick Sullivan publicly bought a playset from Star City Games prior to Grand Prix Denver. He got to showcase them against the many Liliana of the Veil decks in matches like his successful feature against Former #1 Apprentice (and GP Denver Top 8 competitor) Joshua P. Ravitz.

This tale of Guerilla Tactics is a story, a lesson really, from my first Pro Tour. You may have read here, here, or elsewhere that I won an Ice Age/Alliances PTQ with a B/R Necropotence deck. In college in Philadelphia I had a great group of friends with whom I played as many as fifty hours of Magic with per week. We played draft, Standard, PTQ formats, and ground dozens of matches of Arena League. We played local Philadelphia tournaments together (though I was the only serious-serious one) and adventured to reasonably close PTQs within ~2 states, usually via public transportation. The most talented player in our group as Albert Tran (the only player other than myself to win multiple Blue Envelopes when we were in college) but unlike most of the rest of us, altran was wasting his college years on a string of cute Asian girls so was very off and on in terms of how seriously he took Magic at any given time. Ergo the effective best player in the group was, unfortunately, YT.

Being the best player in your community is mostly terrible. You play for more hours than most people have jobs, and consistently win no matter how badly you execute. If your only goal is to be king of the kitchen table this can make you the local Alpha Nerd; if you actually want to become a World Class Magic player you have little opportunity to tear up bad habits and build up myelin. When I was competing hard with The ‘Pile o’ Bitches the next year — my first standout deck design and when I first got serious about writing tournament reports — we were concurrently grinding Mirage/Visions Constructed in the store Arena League. The best deck at the Mirage/Visions Pro Tour was the proto-Storm Combo deck Prosperous Bloom; I was dominating our local league with my Teremko Griffin deck:


Like you, my 1997 opponents didn’t understand how Banding works.

Not only was a turn three combo deck available, Nekrataal was probably the most played creature… and, again, I won the Arena season with 2/2 Banding Weapon of Choice 🙁

Nevertheless, I was lucky enough to have contacts in a wider world. Worth Wollpert came down to Philadelphia from Penn State to test for the Pro Tour with me; Worth was training up to become a member of Team Deadguy after impressing Chris Pikula et al in the East Coast cash tournament series of that era with his “Demonic Consultation for Channel” gambles to set up the lethal Fireball.

I am sure that to Chris — who, among his immeasurable contributions to the game even then was a Top 8 coverage commentator and one of the faces on ESPN — I was at best a barnacle wannabe hanger-on at the time, but luckily Worth took care of me like his annoying kid brother. We came up from the same store in Ohio, and helped each other Q early on. As such, I got to play essentially the same Necropotence deck as Chris (Top 4) and Worth (Top 16) at Pro Tour V (139th if memory serves).

Our conception of sideboarding strategy was not then what it is now. Of the three of us, Chris was the only one to have Anarchy for Circle of Protection: Black, Circle of Protection: Red, or Karma (Matt Place destroyed me with the Place/Weissman U/W Control deck); Worth and I played a single Final Fortune; and of the three of us, only I had Demonic Consultation (tested with Erik Lauer the night before).

What sucks when you hit your second-turn Hymn to Tourach?

Guerilla Tactics!

So I am up in the Necropotence mirror in maybe my first ever match as a Pro; my opponent hits a fast Hypnotic Specter. I look at my hand gleefully… My sided-in Guerilla Tactics!


Cool things were dangerous even then.

Now I can make a pretty clean play on my turn: Just play my land and Guerilla Tactics the Hypnotic Specter, right?

However by drawing my sideboard card in the proscribed spot (against my opponent’s discard mechanism) I found myself in a serious The Danger of Cool Things moment. Do you see it? You probably don’t, thank God.

I am probably one of the top 100 players in the world at this point and this is what is going through my head:

If I let him hit me with that Hypnotic Specter, I might [randomly] discard it and hit the Specter for 4.

Can you even imagine fathoming this in 2013?

This was the first few turns of the game; There wasn’t even a positive likelihood he was going to randomly hit the Guerilla Tactics! Still, I passed.

Worse: I didn’t even make a turn two play! I mean it would be one thing if I stuck a Black Knight or something and lucked into the Tactics while tapped, right? Nope.

It wasn’t over. Maybe he was going to draw Hymn to Tourach or Stupor me prior to attacks. Maybe I would get to discard Guerilla Tactics and punish him as a freebie! Now that would be both cool and validating! Nope.

It still wasn’t over! I could have thrown banana peels at his Specter* prior to damage and saved myself two points. Still… Still nope.

This is what happened:

He attacks.

I discard [not Guerilla Tactics] — literally throw a card into the garbage can and give up two points.

He does something and / or passes.

I Guerilla Tactics the Hypnotic Specter.

Can you even imagine fathoming this in 2013?

So whenever I see a Guerilla Tactics; this is what I think about. Cool things; a game poorly played… And my first Pro Tour 🙂

But I can also see, in a world with a resurgent Guerilla Tactics, how far we’ve come. I think about myself, then such a strong player [relatively speaking]… with such a poor systematic understanding of the game; versus the baseline level that competitive players are all at today. The glory of this story is that few (if any) of you would have made the same kind of fumble, or even seen it as a possibility. Let’s list just a few of the reasons why:

  • Classical v. Romantic approaches to common situations… Perfection versus subjective or personal criteria in evaluating a play.
  • Appropriate pricing – How much does this effect cost? How much does this cost me? What is scarce here? Life / mana / cards / what? What do I actually need in this game?
  • Tight play – What play will give me the best result, on average, if I do it each and every time?
  • Philosophy of Fire – Would I ever give up a free Shock (let alone a Shock and a card) after 1999?
  • Removal on your own turn / when your opponent’s mana is tapped – Because the last thing you want is to eat a Giant Growth

To sum it all up, the idea of springing a Guerilla Tactics on the attacking Hypnotic Specter was exciting. I was excited, emotionally, by drawing the card I wanted to see against my opponent’s aggressive discard deck. I saw the possibilities in the card, perhaps remembered being spanked by its anti-discard ability to smack for four in my own testing. Perhaps that excitement confused me for a moment… Did I really want to hit the Specter, or did I just want to hit the opponent, punish him for his arrogance, his devotion to The Skull? Likely I had this combination of excitement, the exhilaration of playing on my first Pro Tour, and the stress of playing against my opponent’s best hand all at once. Certainly I didn’t have the modern ideas of focus yet; nor had Jon delivered either of his two famous edicts (nor did he have the reputation yet, that anyone would listen).

A Hypnotic Specter is just a 2/2. We only need two damage to deal with it. If we don’t deal with it, it is going to generate a ton of card advantage for the opponent while whittling away at our life points. This is really super bad for us! There is a reason that first turn Hypnotic Specter is the scariest play in the format!

How did I forget that, myself?

It can be tough comparing Magic in 2013, with all the things you already know, and the vast canon of Patrick Chapin, Zvi Mowshowitz, and Frank Karsten that has come before to draw upon… And try to imagine a world almost 20 years ago, when USENET was the pinnacle of the strategic universe, perhaps THE DUELIST, which came out once per month. Succeeding back then was easier in the sense that the “haves” had a lot more than the “have-nots”… But in another sense, getting to be a “have” took a heck of a lot more work.

LOVE
MIKE

* Sorry, wrong kind of “gorilla” [guerilla]. Very pun-ny.

Thea Steele’s Five [with Flores] Favorite Lana Del Rey Songs

My bud Thea Steele (formerly of the Darksteele Cube over on Star City Games) recently shamed me into updating This Here Blog on multiple social media fronts.

Thea is a big fan of Lana Del Rey and suggested I review her five favorite Lana Del Rey songs.

Aside: Why Review Anything?

I can’t say that I am entirely sure. Any of you have a good idea?

I actually told my friend Mark Young not long ago that I thought reviews (Mark is the keeper of the Movie Klub blog, and hence our resident reviewer) tend not to be value-added.

I think reviews tend to be best when 1) you are going to buy / consume something anyway and just need to know which to buy / read / listen to (product reviews on Amazon, or movie reviews, many times) or 2) you actually just want to share something you love. I don’t know to what degree you would consider my gushing about Locke & Key, Young Justice, or Sons of Anarchy count as “reviews” but dozens of Top 8 Magic listeners have thanked me for recommending these.

This is kind of in diametric opposition to what I once thought I was going to do with my life. At age 23, full of stock options at The Dojo, I assumed I’d be a cash millionaire at 24, and would just kind of spend the rest of my career reviewing comic books (I founded PsyComic, which like The Dojo, was acquired by USA Networks back in 2000); neither of those things ended up being facts, BTW. I learned something from Randy Lander, the great comic reviewer (whom we brought in from Texas)… Randy saw our job as comics reviewers as being in service to comics readers. I mean who else is interested in reading a comics review? Or worse, what if a non-regular comics reader reads a negative review? All we can do by spreading frowns is shrink an industry and art form we ostensibly love.

So our best angels must be to lift up and point out the things that we love… You know, kind of like the top-left hand of this website.

/ end aside.

I. Video Games

This was the first Lana Del Rey song I listened to from Thea’s list. I tend not to like music the first time I listen to it (rare exceptions would be Jill Sobule’s Pink Pearl, Loreena McKennitt Live, [which are the only two albums I’ve ever bought, while browsing the store, that I had never heard before] or of course “anything” Rilo Kiley [my favorite band, introduced to me by Josh Ravitz]), so I listened to a bunch of these almost obsessively, and in a row, to see how they grew on me.

Which is kind of appropriate, as “Video Games” is itself a song of obsession.

I am not sure I would categorize it as a “love” song as I am not convinced the fella on the other side is particularly in love with Del Rey’s speaker, back.

“Video Games” depicts a character that is perhaps less cheery than Samantha in Samantha’s Perfect Saturday* if you take the reference. The instrumentation combined with Del Rey’s strained, almost monotone, vocals descend together into a kind of quiet 1950s madness. I don’t know about you, but to me church bells = “horror movie”.

Del Rey is certainly successful in creating a particular tone in this. I have a set of songs I listen to when I need to tap into my reservoir of madness. I can see this one fitting in there.

II. Dark Paradise

This was by far my favorite song of Thea’s picks.

I like pretty much everything: instrumental variation, singing, beat, switcheroo near the end.

Well, maybe not the grammar. Lana, you wish you “were” dead, not was.

III. Off to the Races

Two angles on this one:

  1. As a song “Off to the Races” is pretty listen-to-able. As in, I liked it musically, more or less. I think that Del Rey could probably use an editor on this one (to polish the best bits, but rub out the excesses), but that is kind of a flaccid criticism. Happy to listen to this again, especially the thirteen-year-old me that I hope I never lose. The speaker in this one is baaaaahd. She is a Bad. Girl. She kisses with an open mouth and talks about her bikini and stuff.
  2. I am both attracted to and repulsed Del Rey-slash-the character-she-is-trying-to-depict here. She is both a bad girl and bad news. I don’t know how many of you have spent your one scarce resource** chasing after girls (or whoever) that were just going to drive you nutso. I have. Cried. Wrote innumerable teenage (nineteen is still a teenager) journal entries about this kind of stuff. I mean none of those chicks has ever gotten me a knife in the gut, though. Attracted. Repulsed. More attracted than repulsed. Knife in the gut 🙁

IV. Ride

The Top 10 Assorted Things That Occurred to Me Watching the Official Music Video for “Ride”

  1. I am in the bubble.
  2. Shut up, you are not in the bubble. “The bubble” is for beautiful women who think that a handsome older man will appear to buy them a steak dinner if they somehow run out of Jimmy Choo money.
  3. On second thought… Definitely in the bubble on this one. Some kind of bubble for sheltered [honorary] White males, even those not as good looking as Jon Hamm.
  4. I think I know what Lana is going for at this point. Is she actively trying to drive me miserable? I HAVE VERY GOOD EMOTIONAL CONTROL YOU KNOW.
  5. Nope. Miserable. Full-on life tilt by her high note “fucking crazy” at 7:04.
  6. Pretty good high note, that one. Would listen again.
  7. Since I started watching Sons of Anarchy I have stopped being afraid of / actively avoiding bikers. For instance last year I was in a club in Cali and started chatting up this huge, silent biker bouncer. Is it super fun working here?
  8. (it’s pretty fun, apparently)
  9. On the subject of bikers, Clark has this Amelie-esque project to take home the class stuffed animal, and take pictures of him doing interesting stuff.
  10. This is by far the coolest one we took today:


Even though I am not-scared-of-bikers enough to chat one up in a strip club, I still was really nervous on this and made Katherine hustle up with the pic already. I also told Clark that if we got caught, the Harley owner would probably beat him up and steal his girlfriend. Well I would have if Katherine hadn’t stopped me.

V. Body Electric

One of my favorite ideas in all of literature is from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, where a skilled wizard learns to distill madness into a tincture that he can take a dropper of, every now and again, to connect to his crazy-style on demand. I admire that because, as a writer, there are certainly times when being able to turn the crazy on might be advantageous.

My crazy is different than Lana Del Rey’s crazy though. My crazy is like a million exploding shades of orange. It’s kinetic and moves at the speed of a car crash. Sometimes it’s fun. Things might break, but — maybe because of that handy bubble — there is little sense that they can’t be fixed. Here is one of my favorite bits of writing, from an old Planar Chaos set review:

My two-year-old daughter has a crazy hat. It is a knit cap woven out of multicolored orange, red, and yellow yarn. She gets this glint in her eye and will pull it on and suddenly go berserk. She will run in a five-foot circle until she falls down, or failing that, up and down the hallway, arms in the air. She screams and tumbles and does I don’t know what else. I’d try to describe it further but she is still bound by the physical laws that affect two-year-old girls and I wouldn’t be able to convey the manic energy that comes over her, Bruce Banner-like, when she puts on the hat, anyway. Just this morning I surprised her and pulled it down over her ears when she came up to me in the kitchen, just to see what would happen. I wish I had my video camera. My wife says she’s like a pinball, but you know, less metallic and shiny… which is ironic, because pulling on the crazy hat is like Bella’s Autobot Matrix of Leadership, transforming her into something pumped full of energon and impossible to injure.

Mire Boa is my crazy hat. When I look at it I just want to punch the screen to pieces and then drown my enemies in the blood running down my slashed knuckles. I want to hurl my arms into the air and cry to the moon… but I remember that I’m not physically very imposing and that I wouldn’t be scaring anyone. This card is just so exciting to me and you know why. It’s a bare half-degree off of my favorite two-drop ever. I played its predecessor over Wild Mongrel in U/G in Extended and won $250. Sol Malka used to play the River-style slitherer in The Rock, or The Rock’s great grandfather, whatever. I can’t wait to drop a Mire Boa on turn 2. I love a crazy hat. I hate Crovax even more than I want to play him.

Staring at YouTube videos and listening to Lana Del Rey nonstop over the past three or so hours, over and over again to try to understand what makes Thea like this music so much, I come away, more than anything else, with a sense of deep respect for this artist. On the one hand she has this veneer of “a painted porn star is singing this song to you” which I think is fairly intentional. My recession, thoughts of bubble-in-ness, even revulsion at the idea of a beautiful woman assaulting me with that aesthetic come down to essentially a sense of discomfort. One of my colleagues in my other life likes to remind me that all good advertising makes you uncomfortable.

I didn’t actually do any research into Lana Del Rey’s background before I listened to any of these, or started writing this up. Maybe some of you who are devotees of her oeuvre will see this as a critical weakness, but I come from a school that tries to analyze the content, experience, and tone of a work itself, rather than its relationship to its creator. But my experience of these songs leads me to feel that the work is more the snowball-character that the songs, linked to one another by their singer and collections, as much as the music, lyrics, and individual performances.

And my conclusion is this: Lana Del Rey has a tincture of madness in her pocket.

Not only does she have a tincture of madness, she has a special madness that she can wield like a can of mace. Del Rey can force her crazy hat onto listeners and pull it over their ears and eyes, even without the help of willow wands, sacred circles, or rings of power. Lana’s particular madness is a very different madness than a pinball Bella at age two. Her madness is the madness of isolation, neglect, abandon, despair, disuse… perhaps excess. It is a last gasp, exhaled four minutes at a time.

And for other people — probably other young women especially — who feel put through life’s wringer by lost love, substance abuse, or living on the wrong side of the law; I get it, she can create a connection, and a crystal route to a specific emotional response.

But did I like the songs?

Some. I liked “Dark Paradise” and “Off to the Races” the most; “Body Electric” the least among these five. But even that one I listened to twenty times or so trying to figure out what I felt about it. At this point, I don’t see Lana Del Rey as go-to playlist stuff for me (I became a Taylor Swift convert in essentially one sitting about two months ago on the other hand), but I can certainly see revisiting this position with future listens.

LOVE
MIKE

* “Samantha’s Perfect Saturday” is a bonus track on The Official Miser’s Guide, my 30-day audio course at Star City Games. It is an example of how to target a specific audience; as stated above, the character in “Samantha’s Perfect Saturday” resembles a less depressing version of some of Lana’s songs’ speakers.

** Time.