Pattern Recognition #50 - Alpha Boons

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

2 November 2017

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Hello everyone! My name is berryjon, and I am TappedOut.net's resident Old Fogey and part time Smart Ass. I write this series, Pattern Recognition, as a means to entertain, educate and something else that starts with an E. I have been playing since 1997, give or take, and have been a judge, worked in a shop selling Magic and in general have just been around the block many times.

Today, as you may have surmised from the title, is my 50th article! Woo! Go me!

And so for today's subject, I decided to go back and go over my first article again. This isn't like my reuse of my Volver article, that was due to technical difficulties. No, you see, when I started writing this series, I did so with no idea what I was actually doing. And if you read the first ones, you may see how I was still finding my footing.

So, I decided to take all my experience over the past year and come back to my first subject and see what new things I can say.

Or not say, as the case may be.

A little bit of background first though. I was having some trouble figuring out what to call this series, as I knew that a good story needs a good title. And I also knew that my first article was going to be about. So naturally, I decided to use the working title of 'Cyclical Thoughts', because hey, I would be working with Card cycles, right?

Well, as I have advised other people on this very site, picking a theme is a limiting factor to what you want to write, and you have to consider just how much you can wring out of your chosen field. So I needed something a bit more vague as a descriptor, something snappy on the tongue, and most importantly, that I could see myself writing for long periods of time.

And thus, the name Pattern Recognition was born!

Yeah, I'm not impressed either. But it works, so I am going to work with that. And that's enough padding! On with the real meat of the article!

ahem

The Alpha Boons are a curious set of cards that were first printed, as one might conclude from the name, in Limited Edition Alpha. They were a horizontal cycle of cards that all shared the theme of "Pay one mana, get three of something".

Now a quick explanation, a Horizontal cycle is a set of cards that goes across all five colours (and sometimes into artifacts and lands as well) that all do something similar mechanically. For example, the Protection Bears from the Invasion Block - Galina's Knight, Llanowar Knight, Shivan Zombie, Vodalian Zombie, and Yavimaya Barbarian. This is a cycle of five creatures that all share a casting cost of two allied colours of mana, and have Protection from their mutual opposing colour.

On the other side of things is a vertical cycle, which are cards that are in the same colour, and have the same effect, but the cost and power of the effect scale up as you rise through the rarities. Cards like Lone Wolf then Pride of Lions then Thorn Elemental, which all share the same "Super Trample" ability.

Anyway, the Alpha Boons are a Horizontal Cycle that changes rarity for a single card (which is why I explained vertical cycles, so to point out that this is not an example of that). They are all Instants as well....

Actually, scratch that. One of them was an Interrupt. But we don't talk about that anymore. It's an Instant, and that's all you need to know.

And all five cards represented, in their own way, one of the core concepts of their respective colours.

So what are they?

Healing Salve for , Ancestral Recall for , Dark Ritual for , Lightning Bolt for and Giant Growth for .

I will look at this cards in order.

Healing Salve, in case you don't want to or can't hover over the link for a card image, is an Instant that when played, lets you prevent the next three damage to target creature or player (and possibly Planeswalker - the rules haven't changed yet and no errata has come down, so I'm hedging my bets here) or to allow a target player to gain three life.

In the beginning, one of White's things was damage prevention. When dealing with creatures, they didn't have large ones, such as Force of Nature or Shivan Dragon or Sengir Vampire. And two of those colours ( and ) could bypass creature-based damage entirely with cards like Drain Life or ... Lightning Bolt.

So, in the face of being on the small end of creatures, White deployed the capacity to prevent damage to their creatures. I talked about Banding in the past, and how it allows you to distribute damage around to avoid anything dying in combat, but as I just said, combat isn't the only source of damage.

Healing Salve therefore represented White's solution. You could prevent damage to a creature, preventing it from dying in combat, or you could protect yourself from the same.

Which, when you think about it, makes the Life gain option kinda anemic, unless you were operating at a point where you were faced with damage that couldn't be prevented. Which arose later. Much later.

Now, I will be the first to admit, I liked this card back in my youthful days of old, when I played a 90 card mono-white deck for multiplayer matches. But age and wisdom have happened to me since then, and I can tell you know that this card isn't all that great.

To break it down, let's look at what happens when you gain three life. Well, not much honestly. As I've told people when I worked in my former LGS, gaining life doesn't make you win the game. It just sets back your loss. And if your opponent isn't aiming for a damage win, what does it matter? Now, I know that cards like Felidar Sovereign exist, but those represent an exception to the rules, not a means to win directly. So, gaining life does nothing intrinsically. It requires more to work.

And even if you aren't not-winning, you can always use that three life to draw three more cards through Necropotence, so there's that.

On the other side of the card's modal choice, damage prevention really isn't that much better. Now, I'm not saying it's bad, but rather it's in how the card works. Damage prevention is a reactive choice, and one that by its very nature means that someone else is in control of the situation and you are trying to mitigate the damage (in more ways that one). The second problem only compounds this. It's a single use. It's note like Samite Healer, which can be used again and again as long as you can tap it. No, Healing Hands is a single use at damage prevention and by the time it becomes relevant, it it probably too late.

After this, White's cards tended to go in either direction. While Alabaster Potion was an attempt to make the card more relevant by making the effect cost , essentially turning the card into Stream of Life with a prevention option, it was more likely to be the repetitive damage prevention on things like Master Healer, Flowering Field or Pearl Shard (which I count because of the cheaper activation cost).

As for the life gain? Well, it never seriously caught on, outside of the caveat of adding some cards drawn, like through Healing Hands or by making the life gained a pretty large amount like on Rest for the Weary's Landfall trigger. Of course, when you deal with cards like Kiss of the Amesha and Energy Bolt, you can see how the the addition of a life gain option can create cards that are a bit more viable.

Oh who am I kidding? The only time I can remember using Energy Bolt was when I was filling out a Commander deck, and wanted more direct damage spells.

You know what? Let's talk about happier things.

Ancestral Recall!

Wait, I said happier. Not whatever I feel about this card.

So ... Draw three cards at instant speed for . Let me put this out there for those who haven't gone back to read my first article, or who may not know some of the old shames of Magic. This card is broken. It is so colossally, stupidly and ridiculously overpowered that this card has been enshrined as one of the Power Nine. Nine cards from Alpha (3 Blue, 6 Artifacts) that are so completely over the top and unbeatable that Wizards has never given thought to reprinting them, even before the existence of the Reserved List. Sure, they may make pale imitators, such as Ancestral Vision, but there is no compare.

Magic is a game about resources, and being able to draw cards from your deck is an example of a throttle on your resources. Ancestral Recall makes a mockery of that.

I did a whole two part article on the hows and whys of Card Draw, so I won't repeat everything I said there, here. Rather, I want so focus on this card in particular. For starters, and most damming, this card is massively, horrendously under costed. When I talked about how much an additional card draw costs in terms of mana, I used Concentrate, Divination, and Jace's Ingenuity. Why these ones? Well through these and a few others, I was able to determine that the 'cost' to draw a card at sorcery speed was either or . Add Instant speed to that, and you usually paid more.

So, at first glance, Ancestral Recall is too cheap for what it does. And this isn't just a representation of flat mana. No, it's also an Opportunity cost. One of the things Blue likes to do, what with their generally reactive play style (not all the time mind you, but enough to make it noticeable) is that they will leave as much mana open for their opponents turn, then spend it at the last possible moment in order to maximize and leverage the threat involved.

And there is a massive difference between needing to spend and spending at the end of the previous player's turn to draw three cards. That's four extra mana that could be used for other things, like couterspells. Or worse. What could be worse than Counterspell? I'll leave that to your imagination.

So yeah, Ancestral Recall. The rare card in this cycle, and still not enough to keep it approaching balanced. And it's bad enough that even Wizards only made one real attempt to fix it, and that was in a set dedicated to throwbacks and references to old cards.

Moving on, we come to Black, and their contribution to the Alpha Boons. Dark Ritual. Yeah. So. I'm going to have to explain this one to all you new people out there. You know, everyone who has started playing in the last ... checks watch .... Oh, after 04 October 1999. Which is the last time this card was printed in a regular set, and not as a special printing or in a fixed deck.

Black used to be second best when it came to mana acceleration. But this wasn't like Green's exponential growth style of Forest - Llanowar Elves, Forest - Llanowar Elves, Rampant Growth and having 6 mana available on turn 3. Rather, Black accelerated through Sacrifice. You gave up things to gain something else. Perhaps the most (in)famous aspect of this is their equivalent exchange rate of 1 life for 1 extra card drawn. Here's looking at you, Lich and Necropotence.

So then, how does Black accelerate? They lose out on the card, and the priming charge of a single . Remember, barring casting tricks, Dark Ritual is only a net gain of ! It's not as good as you might think it is, but it's still better than nothing.

But OK, you tell me, casting a card isn't really a cost, is it? And today? No. It's not. But when Alpha was printed, decks were only 40 cards, and the secondary market didn't exist as we know it. People traded cards rather than buying or selling them! And you certainly never bought boxes of cards.

(glances at his still unopened box of Ixalan)

So who knew how many Dark Rituals you actually had? Or saw? Putting one in your already thin deck was not putting in something else that might actually be useful. Like Lord of the Pit. Or Scathe Zombies.

Dark Ritual existed in that weird time where Black wanted to accelerate, to try and take the lead or catch up, and was willing to do whatever it took to do it. And giving up 2.5% of your deck just for the chance at it was a risk people were more than willing to take.

But such was not to last. Black's association with mana acceleration was very quickly excised, I can count the number of such cards on one hand. I think part of the reason for this was that Black and Green were seen as enemy colours. They should oppose each other, not compliment. And Green was more entrenched with the ability to get more mana quickly, so Green got to keep it and Black was left out in the cold.

There's not really a lot more I can say about this. Unlike the next card, Dark Ritual is a classic in the same vein that people like me like the Time Spiral block. It was different and it pushed the colour out in various ways. And that unsettles people who have only grown up with the modern colour pie. You lucky, lucky people.

Nowadays, It's that gets temporary acceleration. Braid of Fire, Chandra, Torch of Defiance, Infernal Plunge (also known as a colourshifted Culling the Weak) ....

Speaking of , let's talk Lightning Bolt.

If there is any card on this list that any random person who plays Magic would recognize, it would be Lightning Bolt. For a simple cost of , you can deal three damage to any creature or player or Planeswalker.

Let me say this first; Lightning Bolt has rightfully earned its place in any Modern Red deck. 3 damage doesn't seem like a lot, but at the time of this writing, there are 9228 creatures in Magic. And of those, 6796 of them have three or less toughness.

That's right, about 73.65% of creatures in the game die to this one spell.

Magic has always had a tricky time balancing the ability of creatures (and to a lesser extent, players) to take and receive damage. While players have their starting total of 20 life (for the most part), and it cannot be replenished (coughHealing Salvecough), creatures have far less capacity to absorb damage, but at the same time, anything that doesn't kill them goes away at the end of the turn. And Planeswalkers act like players, except that they start smaller, and can rebuilt their effective life total if left alone.

Lightning Bolt is on the aggressive side of this equation. Three damage to a single target isn't flashy (though natural lightning bolts would beg to differ), but it is a solid and reliable chuck of damage, even to a player.

Now, at this point, you would be expecting me to compare Lightning Bolt to it's near equals, right?

Wrong.

A quick check indicates at least 146 Instants or Sorceries that can deal damage to a creature and/or a player that are mono-red in nature. Now, if anything, I should use Lightning Strike and Shock as the two nearest examples. The former deals the same damage as Lightning Bolt, but costs more, while the latter costs the same, but only deals 2 damage instead.

Let's just ignore Open Fire as being bad, especially when the very next set reprinted a card that is strictly better. It's called Lightning Strike.

Dealing direct damage is not just a measure of just how much damage one can do. Fall of the Titans for example is a great way to dish out the hurt like nothing else. But what this entire article should be pounding on is that efficient usage of mana is important to a card. And there is (almost) nothing that is efficient at dealing damage as this card.

And any Modern Format Red deck that is working with Burn would have this card front and centre as an show-in to be four-of.

Finally, we come to Green. Green's gimmick back in Alpha was creatures. Big creatures. Really big. And so what would they do when it comes to creating a card that needs to give three of something?

Giant Growth gives +3/+3 to a target creature.

Seems simple. And it is. Green makes creatures bigger. Small creatures become moderate, and large creatures get huge! Sure, it may seem like a one-note trick, but that's not the point.

I've talked about how combat shapes creatures and vice-versa. In this case, Giant Growth represents the capacity to change combat. Normally, it's a case of simple comparison. Power equal to or higher than the toughness? The creature dies. And it can go both ways. The attacker and defender can create a mutual kill, like if Grizzly Bears blocked a Blade of the Sixth Pride.

What Giant Growth does is to make this sort of math a larger variable. Creatures that would die suddenly don't, and creatures that wouldn't've now do. Wizards has love-hate relationship with these sorts of cards, which are often lumped under the very broad category of 'Combat tricks'. They love it because it makes the game more interesting. Not a dull, dry mathematical comparison of risk and reward. They also hate it because it makes the game more complicated for new players.

It's the reason why the Ranged Strike mechanic (found on cards like Crimson Manticore and Crossbow Infantry) got the axe. Too much complication for too little gain.

So that's what Giant Growth does. It represents a one-time expenditure of resources to achieve a limited, but not insignificant goal. And like Lightning Bolt, there is no real immediate comparison with other cards. I mean, Blossoming Defense is the most recent card that is part of the lineage descended from Giant Growth by way of Might of Old Krosa, Groundswell and Mutagenic Growth.

I apologize for the mention of New Phyrexia, but it is a part of this series of examples, and I will hold my nose at it.

Of course, Giant Growth is a bit more than that. It, and all the cards like it, synergize extremely well with the Trample and Super-Trample mechanics. Enough so that there are plenty of cards that do both at the same time! Ruthless Instincts, Overcome and Wildsize to name a couple.

The thing I really like about Giant Growth is that it seems to be one of those cards that Wizards wants to reprint if the number of variants I see is any indication. But they don't just simply reprint the card or a proper functional reprint. They keep making small changes, mostly I think to keep things fresh. Sometimes you get Trample, sometimes Hexproof, sometimes there's a condition that needs to be met to increase the benefit of the card.

And unlike Lightning Bolt, Giant Growth isn't a staple of the colour. Unlike Red and direct damage, Green can do without Giant Growth and its imitators. Sure, Green can be seen as all about the big creatures, but guess what? Green does big creatures naturally. It doesn't need to have cards like Giant Growth to make it what it is. It already is!

There are a couple of other cards I want to talk about here. These are not the Boons directly, but rather cards that I feel are immediately relevant.

The first is Lightning Helix. Of all the Boons, Red and White's were, oddly enough, the most synergistic. Dealing and healing damage in the same action is something that they can do together than Black can do by itself, but in this card, you can actually see it. Unlike Energy Bolt, which is a modal spell that draws from either option - Blaze or a toned down Alabaster Potion (or a colourshifted Stream of Life), Lightning Helix is two distinct cards merged into one, a whole that I can say without deceit s greater than the sum of its parts.

The second is a fine return to my drinking game! Ancestral Vision, Healing Leaves, Rift Bolt and Brute Force. Time Spiral and Planar Chaos created new versions of these old cards either to incorporate new mechanics - Suspend - or to put them into colours that they could also be found in. Red gets a shifted Giant Growth as it too cares about creatures, and it worked so well, that it has been reprinted twice in Modern Masters sets. And Green gets their own version of Healing Salve to show an alternate way that could care about their creatures.

That Red gets the best of this is something that I can only smile at. They need everything they can. And there was no saving Dark Ritual. When I talked about Tarmogoyf and gave an example of how it could explode right out the gate, recall that I mentioned that a Green Dark Ritual would have only made it faster and more powerful.

The Alpha Boons run the gamut from next to useless through practical to powerful to too powerful to a poor implementation of something that didn't really belong to it. And that's quite normal. Magic isn't perfect. No one can argue that point. The Boons are a microcosm of it. Interesting, exemplary and flawed. Held too tightly to a pattern to make them be their own things yet at the same time, they are their own thing, going in their own ways rather than simply being pale imitations of each other like the Protection Bears cycle I mentioned much earlier in the article.

Forgive me, oh Invasion block, for the insult I have delivered upon you!

We will not see their like again, and the game is no greater or lesser for it. They are what they are, and as long as the lessons they taught about card design and balance are learned, then they have become more than so many other cards since. Forgotten.

I am starting a new full time job this week, so I'm not certain how my schedule will interact with my time to work on Pattern Recognition. But rest assured, I've done 50 of these things already - there's plenty of room in me for 50 more, and more still. I haven't a subject in mind yet, but if anyone has an idea, let me know in the comments below.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream, and you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!