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Alas, now I've gone and started it by rambling on like an idiot. You might say that's not the most auspicious of beginnings, but I prefer to think of it as building a relationship with my audience - at least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I see you reaching for the Back button there; you can't sneak that past me! If you hold on a second longer, there'll be some content I promise, but first I'd like to spend a few lines explaining what this column is for and why I'm writing it.

I have been playing Magic for a long time now, nearly ten years, and for about half of that time I have considered myself a serious player. Anyone who has played as long as I have will have picked up a thing or two, and part of my aim is to share these things with some of the newer players out there. Perhaps some of the better players might benefit from someone else's perspective on things too, you never know. Who knows, maybe I'll manage to improve my own game by trying to help you guys. In any case, this column is going to be primarily a Magic theory column and as such if you're not interested in either competitive play or game theory then it may not be for you. I will try to make it as interesting as I can though!

As a starting point and a preface to future articles I want to start by examining some of the real basics, hopefully in a slightly different way than what you're familiar with. Once this is out of the way I can start on more complicated things. First, let me pose a question: What is Magic a game of, or to put it in a different way, what are the key concepts in Magic?

To someone who hasn't really thought about it before it may not be entirely obvious. There are several things that the game revolves around, such as "life", "mana", "permanents", "cards", "library", "lands", "creatures", and the list goes on. I want to focus only on the two most important of these for now: "cards" and "mana".

Hang on, what about "life"? Well, I don't consider life essential to the game of Magic. Life is just a way of determining who wins the game. In this way it's rather arbitrary, you could equally well play Magic by making the object of the game to amass 10 power worth of creatures in play. Obviously it's not balanced, since all the cards they have printed up until now are based on using life (typically) to determine who wins the game. It's still Magic though.

This is leading to the introduction of two concepts most players would be at least vaguely familiar with: "Card Advantage" and "Tempo". But what do they really mean? Well, in a very simplistic sense card advantage is leaving your opponent with less resources and options than you, and tempo is leaving them with less time than you. Perhaps you can see how they are related to the two key aspects I outlined above, or if you can't quite see it yet I hope I can help you understand more fully in the next few minutes.

The easiest way to gain card advantage is to draw more cards than your opponent. Cards such as Concentrate are pure card advantage: Use one card to draw three, netting you a two-card advantage over your opponent. Other cards, like Solemn Simulacrum, also gain you card advantage by doing something (like giving you a land, lands are cards!) then replacing itself with another card, while possibly trading with a card of your opponent's.

Another common way to gain card advantage is to use one of your cards to "deal with" or "trade with" more than one of your opponent's. Using a Fireball and six mana to kill two Grizzly Bears is card advantage, since after doing that (and assuming that cards were even up until that point) you have one more card in play or in hand than your opponent does. Are these the only way to gain card advantage? Well, no, they're just the easiest to understand. Picture the following situation:

Your opponent has two Myr Enforcers in play to your no creatures, and you would like to kill them (obviously, since if you don't you're likely to lose the game!). You have in hand two Electrostatic Bolts and a Wrath of God, and enough mana to cast them all if you wanted. Should you use the Wrath or the two Bolts?

That's a loaded question. The answer is, "It depends," on what it depends we haven't discussed yet, so assuming you've only read the previous paragraph, we'll go with the obvious card advantage play and choose the Wrath. Now you're a card up, and you have two Bolts to deal with the next two threats he plays. Looking good!

Wait a minute, what's this? A Broodstar? With seven artifacts in play? Your Bolts don't kill that! Look at what this silly card advantage thing has gone and got us into! We're a card up but it doesn't matter a jot, because unless we can draw another Wrath in the next couple of turns these Bolts will still be in our hand when we lose the game. Great - so what went wrong?

Card advantage, that's what went wrong. We had it used against us, or we used it on ourselves. Those Bolts are only worth a card if our opponent plays something that they can trade with. By playing the Broodstar our opponent asked a question that we no longer had an answer to. This is a particular kind of card advantage that is only "locked in" when the game ends. For instance, if we managed to draw another Wrath before the Broodstar had its wicked way with our life total the Bolts may indeed have turned out to be useful. They certainly deal with most of the other creatures that are likely to be in his deck. It was unlucky that he had the Broodstar to foil our plan. Or was it?

Let's look at this situation from our opponent's perspective. He may have had the Broodstar in his hand all game, and put both Enforcers into play in order to try and bait us into using a Wrath on them both, thereby (hopefully) leaving us without an answer to his Broodstar. This may have turned out to be a good play by him, or we could have had two Wraths and no Bolts, in which case his double-Enforcer play would be looking a wee bit silly. Of course he could also could have peeled the Broodstar too, in which case we may well be justified in thinking him lucky, or us unlucky.

Either way, we've just discovered a third major source of card advantage: dead cards. A card is "dead" when the game has progressed to a point where that card is not useful. There are many situations in which this might occur. The example above is just one. Often cards are not completely dead, but become devalued. An example of this would be if we replaced the Broodstar above with a Qumulox. Now our two Bolts can deal with it, but they're only worth half a card each if we use them like that, and we end up giving back the extra card we gained from the Wrath. Later in the game lands are often dead or nearly so. In constructed particularly (but also limited to some extent) you may have cards in your deck that are completely useless against another particular deck whenever you draw them, such as your maindeck Oxidizes against Goblins/Bidding in current type 2, or Unforge against a deck with no equipment in Mirrodin block limited.

Building decks so that dead cards are minimised is an important aspect of both limited and constructed deck design, and I will be covering it in detail in future articles. There are also other (less important) forms of card advantage which I don't have room to talk about here. For now, just remember that to win through card advantage you not only need to get "up cards", but you need to get those extra cards into play. It's not much good casting a Concentrate on your 4th turn if your opponent kills you with a Goblin Piledriver/Goblin Warchief/Siege-Gang Commander on his turn.

This is where the other main concept comes in: Tempo. Tempo is a word that I find to be both misused and misunderstood. The easiest way to describe it is as the efficient use of mana resources over the course of the game. It applies especially to the early stages of the game when mana is severely limited. Most aggressive decks try to win through tempo, while traditionally control decks tend to go for card advantage. This does not mean that aggro decks can forget about card advantage, and it certainly doesn't mean that control decks can ignore tempo.

Aggro decks usually try to deploy cheap "threats" early in the game. By threats I mean cards that will eventually cause their opponent to lose if left unchecked, and by cheap I mean low mana-costed. Threats are often creatures like Goblin Piledriver, Myr Enforcer, Jackal Pup and Troll Ascetic, but can also be other things like Cursed Scroll or Sulfuric Vortex. These are sometimes referred to as "pro-active" cards. They have no requirements on when they can be used, and are basically "questions" your opponent needs to "answer" somehow or lose.

The main distinction between aggro and control decks are the type of cheap spells found in each. Aggro decks contain cheap threats, whereas the cheap spells (if any!) in control decks are usually "answers" or "helpers". Answers are things like Wrath of God, Electrostatic Bolt, Oxidize, Mana Leak, basically anything which requires the opponent to do something before it can be used. These all fall in to the class of cards often called "reactive", since they react to actions by the opponent. They are of no use if your opponent does not play any cards they are capable of answering. Helpers are anything else, and many things fall into this category simply because they aren't either questions or answers. Many cards cross categories. I count mana fixers like Wayfarer's Bauble or Solemn Simulacrum as helpers (although the latter can be both a question and an answer under the right circumstances). Pulse of the Field, Renewed Faith and their ilk also fall into this category, although again Pulse often acts as a (temporary) answer. Cards that do nothing but draw cards such as Concentrate and Thirst for Knowledge are also helpers. Cards like Viridian Shaman act as both threats and answers. In any case, control decks rarely have cheap threats, only cheap answers and helpers.

The reason for this is that the control deck's plan is to run the aggressive deck out of cards by answering all its early threats and gaining card advantage either by drawing extra cards (as many older control decks did with cards such as Whispers of the Muse or Accumulated Knowledge) or by using answers that inherently gain card advantage (such as Wrath of God and Akroma's Vengeance, the way some modern control decks work). Once a control deck is in that situation the way they choose to win the game is usually irrelevant, although it's nice if it's something that is difficult to answer (such as a recurring threat like Eternal Dragon, or old-school unkillable creatures like Blinking Spirit or Rainbow Efreet or even non-creatures like Millstone). Many aggro decks will help the control deck along by playing cards that are inherently card-disadvantageous (like Blistering Firecat). Such cards are a trade-off between card economy and speed, and aggro decks often opt for the speed to try and kill their opponent before they can use all their cards. If they succeed, in a way they ended up with card advantage, since any cards in a player's hand when the game ends were essentially dead cards.

Well, that about does it for a (not-so-) quick overview of what I consider to be the most basic concepts in Magic. There are obviously many things I couldn't cover, like where combo decks fit in (where exactly is that?) which I'll attempt to address in future articles. Next article: Equipment - A Case Study on Tempo. Until then, feel free to post any questions/comments on the forums, I'll do my best to answer them.

May all your topdecks be planned for,
Anatoli Lightfoot
(Darkfoot on the forums)

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