Pattern Recognition #251 - Linear Decks

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

18 August 2022

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

Last week, I praised patterns in the game, in the cards and in the players who play everything, but I also warned that there was something of an anti-patter, or to put it more properly, a pattern of play that isn't variable, isn't interesting to see (more than once), and worse yet, isn't really fun. Unless you're at that sort of table where everyone goes into knowing that Fun isn't at that table, but why would you ever want to do that?

So, today, let's talk about Linear Decks.

A Linear Deck is a deck in any format that pursues a single goal with relentless efficiency. They exclude all options and anything that does not help the deck reach its goal in order to put more cards in that aim for the goal of the deck. These are in the vast majority, Combo decks. This is because Control is too reactive and that mana and cards are better spent on reaching the combo, while Aggro decks, while linear in their own way, aren't a monomaniacaly focused on a single end-state.

Linear Decks move from A to B to C to winning with as few steps as possible, and with little opportunity for interaction with the opponent as they can manage. Yes, defending their combo pieces is vital, but every card and point of mana spent on that needs to be done with the utmost efficiency. Every turn spent not advancing towards their goal is a turn that is wasted.

Decks like this like redundancy, and not just redundancy in the frame of "here is one card that does a thing, so if I have two cards that so something effectively the same, I can have 8 copies in my deck".

If you're thinking that this is starting to sound like those sorts of degenerate Modern or competitive EDH and Legacy decks that try to win on turn 2 through 4, you're right. And that's not a problem from the standpoint of the whole game. You see, sure Linear Decks are extremely well tuned decks that hit their pace and slam through to victory, but they are not without their weaknesses. Huge, glaring weaknesses.

So let me back up a moment along a different path and talk about the Meta.

Now, this is a subject I've touched on before, but never really taken a proper deep inspection of, so I will just do a quick and dirty summary here. To whit, the Meta of a format is how the various decks that are recognized archetypes in that format interact with each other and which is perceived to be stronger or weaker in any given match up.

What Linear decks do, is that they play the game at the Meta level, rather than the decks their opponents are playing directly. Because of their dedicated focus on a single thing, their best bet for winning doesn't actually come from out playing their opponent, but in actuality, to try and avoid bad decks entirely. Because of how they are constructed, and their relative lack of interaction or alternatives to winning, Linear decks work amazingly well until they hit something they aren't optimized to handle.

For example - and this is not a perfect example - consider how a mono- Lifegain deck could interact with a Burn deck. In an ideal world, the two would balance each other out with sometimes the Burn deck overcoming the life gain, while in other cases, the lifegain would exceed the burn.

But take that same Burn deck and throw it against a different kind of deck, one that doesn't have defenses or relevant interaction, like for example, a Graveyard deck that finds all its resources meaningless in the face of cards being thrown at their face too fast to react to. What Linear decks want is the later and not the former. The ability to go off without being stopped before their time.

So let me talk to you about my favorite Linear Deck, Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice.

This EDH deck, with my semi-serious version right here: Just Your Average Light-Paws Deck is extremely linear. Cast the Commander, hopefully with protection in hand, then start casting Auras to search my library for protective Auras to keep my Commander alive, then swing at the biggest threat. With a half-decent effort, I can start deleting opponents on turn 4, or five at the latest.

Except the deck plays the exact same way, every time. It's very linear once I start casting spells, as the ones I search for are the same ones in the same order, with little variance. Mask of Law and Grace, and Shield of Duty and Reason are first-grabs, then Hyena Umbra, All That Glitters, Battle Mastery and then something like Sage's Reverie to refill the hand and double-down on Glitter's bonus.

At that point, I'm swinging for lethal damage and there is very little that can be done about it. The rest of the deck is there to fill out space, or to act as emergency backups should I fail to prioritize properly with my Commander, or they get lucky. Oh, and it's ridiculously budget, coming in at less than $100 US at the time of this writing.

Of course, it does have its own weaknesses. Another deck can deal with Light-Paws through classics like Swords to Plowshares, decks with serious colourless components like Eldrazi decks, or as was the case last week at FNM, my Sydri, Galvanic Genius deck that ran Vehicles, could stall out long enough for me to combo out a win.

But one of the things that makes Linear decks work isn't in their focus on the end-state. It's how they get there. And of the most common ways to do that is with Tutors.

Now, earlier, I mentioned how having two full playsets of two slightly different cards can more than double your chances of getting either or when you need it? Well, not in so many words, but with Tutors, those sets of tutors become not just copies 5-8 of a specific card, but rather 5-8 of any potential card. So you could have a combo piece in your hand, and a tutor, meaning that you can use the tutor to get the other combo piece. Tutors are cards that reduce variation in your deck, my making the tutor itself something of a Schrodinger's Card, in that it could be this card or that card. You won't know what you need until you have it, and once you have it, it's a good option because it can be anything.

This is why I think that Linear decks aren't a problem. Yes, they can be powerful when executed correctly, but the same can be said of any combo deck. They roll the same dice that everyone else does, but are looking for more respectable odds of winning.

But because of that, they can be blindsided, they can suffer se3tbacks and when they do, they tend to lack the ability to bounce back or rebuild that other, less hyper-focused decks can do. They have excellent synergies, but at the cost of redundancies.

And if you would like to know more, I would suggest reading up this article from 2014 by Reid Duke of Wizards, as it talks about the same things I do here, but with examples that are 8 years out of date.

Jon me next week, when my calendar suggests I should be working on my next Custom Set update, but with Dominaria United being spoiled starting today, we'll see how that goes. Anyway, make your comments below, and I'll see you next week!

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!