Pattern Recognition #102 - Strictly Better

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

28 February 2019

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.net's longest running article series about the bric and brac of Magic: The Gathering, card design, game history and theory as well as being my own personal soap box for when I want to go on and on about things that interest me. Who am I? Well, I am berryjon, self professed Old Fogey and yes, I've been playing this game for longer than some of you have been alive. I've earned that title.

Today's article is something that will not be, directly speaking, involve the title itself. Because I know full well that I can't make any article better than another or deliberately worse than another. So let's instead, talk about cards that are better or worse than another.

A definition first. Strictly Better and Strictly Worse are two phrases used in the magic community to denote a situation where a card is measurably better - or worse - than another card, even in some small degree. Today, I will be looking at some examples, how they relate to each other, and then delve a little bit into the why of such things. After all, we know that Wizards doesn't shy away from functional reprints, cards that are the same save for a cosmetic change or two.

But how to define Better or Worse? well, let's take a look at two examples. One of which is a classic one as it's always on the minds of players. Shock versus Lightning Bolt. In this quite simple case, we can see that both cards are Instants, that they both cost , and can deal their damage to any target, be it Player, Planeswalker or Creature. However, Shock is worse than Lightning Bolt because it only deals two damage instead of three. Thus, one could say that Lightning Bolt is strictly better than Shock, much as it is, well, pretty much every other burn spell in the game.

Another example is the case of Ashcoat Bear when compared to the creature-baseline of Grizzly Bears. By simply adding a mechanic while keeping the cost the same, you can improve the card and make it better. Or, say, Enfeeblement when compared to Dead Weight, where one costs against the cost of for the other.

Same effect, lesser cost. That's another way something can be Strictly Better than another card.

With this out of the way, and man, I thought that would take up more space, let's start to look into the why of it all. From my thoughts as I prepared this, I find that there are, most likely, two major reasons for this. The first is internal set requirements and balance.

That is, when cards are designed, they are first designed to work within the set they appear in first and foremost. This is not to say that cards stay that way, or that Wizards ignores other formats, but the best way to test a set is actually through Draft/Sealed/Limited Constructed.

To elaborate, cards are first designed and tested and balanced against cards intended to go into the same set during the earlier stages of development. This includes selections of reprints and the like. At this point, the idea of better or worse is not a design goal, or something to be aware of.

Why is this? Well, it's simple. Draft and Sealed are, because of the way Wizards interacts with the secondary market - officially it doesn't, but unofficially keeps an eye on it to look at trends in the game's community - these two formats are the ones that earn Wizards the most money. They require that packs be bought and cracked, packs which Wizards sells. So making sure that these two formats are fun for players to play is of paramount concern to Wizards.

And because in these formats, the set is a self-contained whole, designed to interact only with each other, the idea of being better or worse doesn't really enter into it for the most part.

Not to say that there aren't exceptions. Wizards does think that Rarity can be a balance factor, so you can have cases like in Magic 2010, where Baneslayer Angel and Serra Angel appeared and one was better than the other, yet one was more common than the other.

I also erroneously mentioned that those two cards were part of a vertical cycle in that set two weeks ago. I was incorrect in that regard, and for that, I apologize. Hey, I can't be right all the time now, can I?

Anyway, even rarity changes aren't enough to stop cards from being better or worse in the same set. It was pointed out to me that in Rise of the Eldrazi, Glory Seeker and Knight of Cliffhaven were both printed at common in white, yet one is markedly better than the other when taken in isolation. Heck, the only way that Glory Seeker could be considered "better" would be if you also had Muraganda Petroglyphs in play, but that is so out-of-color and from a completely different set that you can't use it to make any meaningful comparison.

Thankfully, this doesn't happen often, but I know that it gets noticed when it does. Wizards isn't perfect, and sometimes something slips through the cracks.

But after that, it's only when a card gets out of the Limited environment and into the wild that it starts to face down its predecessors, and that's where people start looking for the small, incremental dots of power creep that bring the game up just that extra notch to try and get some minor advantage over their opponents.

Here is where the idea of Strictly Better comes into play, where if you are given the option of using one or the other, why would you use the lesser one?

There is no easy answer to this, though there are some factors I think comes into play. The first is that players want new cards. They don't like reprints for the most part (awesome cards not withstanding), so that also helps explain why Core Sets are so "meh" in the execution. So that means that new cards should be new! And Exciting! And totally not a functional reprint of something that came out 10+ years ago!

But Standard still exists. This format is a rotating one, which means that when a card comes out that is powerful, time itself can fix it by removing it from the format during one of the regular rotations. And while having a standout card is not only acceptable, but expected, if something gets too out of hand, too much "better", then there is always the drastic measure of banning a card until it rotates out.

The same cannot be said for the Eternal formats - Modern, Commander, Legacy and the like. These, once a card is in, it is in save for banning, which is something that Wizards doesn't like to use at all, but will if the card becomes too prevalent and too meta-warping. The latest of which is the slamming of Krark-Clan Ironworks for its part in certain combo decks.

It is here, and only here that the metric of being Better or Worse finds its home. Here, with nearly 20,000 unique cards in the game, it is only a given that a card will come out that can be better than what has come before in some manner.

Wizards knows this, so the plan is to actually do this in small incremental points.

You read that right. I am alleging that Wizards is deliberately creating cards that are Strictly better, and that it's part of a long term plan for the game.

This is something that is in response to the sad fact that in Magic, over the course of the whole game, creatures suck. I'm serious. Summoning Sickness alone is a huge blow to creatures that can't be removed. It's too far baked into the game.

So Wizards has been slowly cranking up the power of creatures over the course of years, testing out the waters as they do so. Each change in making creatures better than previously allowed is an attempt to move toward a more stable equilibrium where creatures can and will stand on their own far better than they do now.

I've actually explained this before, when I was working at my FLGS to a curious customer during conversation. I described the powerlevel of the game as being in two lines on a graph, starting from Alpha and moving to the then-current set. The bottom line was Creatures, and the top line was an average of everything else. I pointed out that over time, the power of creatures is intended to rise sharply, while at the same time, the average of everything else drops, but far more slowly. This isn't to say that exceptions exist. The Power Nine, for example, break the scale.

The end goal is a state where creatures and everything else are on a roughly equal power level. There can, and will be some variance as the nature of cyclical balance means that at certain points, some aspect of cards in the game will be better than others. Some mechanic, or combination that makes a color or two top dog for a season before the next set comes along. Where things change, but internal balance and consistency is maintained across all factors in the game. No power creep because power is carefully maintained inside a range of power metrics.

If you ever look at the cards from a new set, you can see this incremental improvement in action. Creatures tend to get better, while everything else gets slightly less effective, or worse in the long run. Terrain Elemental instead of Grizzly Bears. Lightning Strike or Shock instead of Lightning Bolt. Time Warp instead of Time Walk.

Its a long process, and Wizards isn't done yet. But for now, I think the occasional instance of a card being Strictly Better or Strictly Worse is a good thing for the game, and while some cards have reached the point where Wizards is content with where they are, there is still a lot of work to do.

And the whole of the game will be Strictly Better for it.

Join me next week when I go back to Slow Grow! I'm almost done, I promise.

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!