Pattern Recognition # 286 - Rituals

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

22 June 2023

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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.

And with my boilerplate introduction out of the way, let me properly welcome you all back. Took a week off, worked my arse off, skipped Commander Night, that sort of thing. But I'm back and ready to rumble, so let's get to it!

I've talked about the notion of the Ritual in the past as how it relates to the larger subject of Mana acceleration and Ramp, but I don't think I've actually addressed this in more detail. To be honest, I was inspired to do this by by Tor Wauki the Younger Commander deck I rolled out, and the use of the Rituals in there when cast from the graveyard thanks to Underworld Breach helped fuel several victories. Seriously, repeated castings of Grapeshot with a damage modifier really add up quickly.

Anyways, Rituals. Here, let me show you the card that started it all:

Dark Ritual was one of the Alpha Boons, a subject which I covered in my first article nearly 7 years ago, if not longer. My, how time flies. These were a horizontal cycle of cards (mostly) which granted a player 3 of something for the cost of a single mana and at instant speed. For , this was . And look, I'm not going to talk about that card type. It was a thing.

But the DarkRit, as we called it back then, us cool kids who played before sleeves in the back corners of the school, was certainly a card we would use because, hey, why not? With it, we could power out our Lord of the Pit two turns early, or do other mean and nasty things, like cast Megrim before the player could get their counterspell mana up and running.

You see, Dark Ritual occupied an interesting place in the game at the time. It wasn't what is now called Fast Mana, which is to say mana rocks that produced more than they cost to cast, which included things like Sol Ring or Mana Crypt. Sure, you also had - later on - coloured options like Fire Diamond, or less effective cards like Thran Dynamo, but in the early days, those sorts of rocks were more the norm than the exception. And nor was DarkRit similar to 's means of getting more mana out and about, with things like Llanowar Elves, Birds of Paradise, or Wild Growth.

These types of mana acceleration were permanent based. That is, you cast a spell, and that spell stayed on the table for further use later on. As long as the permanent was there, you could use it.

What made the Ritual different was that it was a spell. You only had one use of it, then it was in your graveyard. This made for a differing play pattern. Instead of mana acceleration that was greater than 1:1 per turn, you got yourself a sharp boost for one turn, then were back to normal on the next turn, without any long term advantage.

This played well with 's methodology. They didn't care what they sacrificed, as long as it got them closer to victory. And in this case, with Dark Ritual, there were several things you were giving up. The first, and perhaps the most important as the game advanced, was the card itself. Because the Ritual was a .... Instant, and no other card type, ever. For other means of acceleration, that card in hand becomes a permanent on the board, and you can save it for a later turn, when the mana you spent you bring that card into play has been refreshed.

And gives that up with Dark Ritual.

But this is not say that DarkRit is a bad card. It honestly isn't. Rather, it's a card that has its uses, and you have to understand those uses when you play it. Much like many other cards. However, because this is an Instant and no other card type, there are things that this card does and does not within its colour. For starters, it is difficult for to recur this card type, as they tend to focus on other cards to pull from the graveyard, such as you Exhume a Creature. The colors that really interact well with this, and therefore get the most value out of it are actually , with their plethora of abilities to and card to get this card back from the graveyard for extra value, or even to copy it wholesale to try and get more value out of it.

But I digress. With the publishing of DarkRit, one of the things that Wizards did in those early years of the late 90's was to take what was, and twist it around to experiment with them and see what worked and what didn't. In fact, this began with the very same set!

Now, while DarkRit was just pure mana, and thus is a more proper representation of being what we now call a Ritual, Sacrifice works out very well, especially with its successor, Burnt Offering. In fact, got into the swing of things by looking at the former card and being given Metamorphosis. Now, if you look at that card, you may be thinking that you've seen this card before, but as an enchantment. And you're right!

It's called Food Chain.

But again, back from my digression. kept this sort of card in its back pocket for quite some time, with DarkRit itself being the third most commonly printed of the Alpha Boons, with 49 distinct prints. Lightning Bolt for 53, and Giant Growth for 56. Healing Salve is 4th with 26, and Ancestral Recall with 14 distinct printings. Yet, even with that, change was coming. Onslaught brought us Brightstone Ritual, a card that was part of a longer series of cards that and had that added mana based on some external criteria. And in this case, it leaned into the Tribal aspect of that block, which meant that it was a reward for playing Goblins, giving you plenty of mana to spend on more Goblins or something else entirely!

But the color pie was changing. was transitioning away from seeing cards as the means and ends in of themselves, and was aiming fore towards paying costs that were less ephemeral. After all, a sacrifice means nothing if you're not giving something up in the process. Instead, started to experiment with getting proper Rituals and it started with Seething Song in Mirrordin. This Ritual was scaled up from DarkRit, costing more, but at the same time, adding an additional . In terms of math, this is a worse card, as spend 1 to get 3 is more efficient than spending 3 to get 5. But there are still cases were the jump is what is wanted. It also had the unintended (though I say that with as many caveats as I can get away with) side effect of actually filtering your mana. That being turning your off colour or colourless mana into a specific color for fixing purposes.

Seething Song was followed up by my favourite multiplayer accelerator - Mana Geyser in Fifth Dawn. This one was also highly dependent on your opponents cooperating, but when you're in a larger pod of players, that initial buy-in of can pay huge dividends. Interestingly enough, Seething Song is banned in Modern - a direct result of the same experience that I had that led to today's article. It was too good in Storm and Spellslinger decks, and after taking out Ponder and Preordain, Seething Song was next on the list to try and cut down on Storm's mana production.

And Mana Geyser was banned in Oathbreaker, probably much for the same reason as it was fast acceleration, but the Oathbreaker rules website is a mess and I can't find out why, as the general description of "Fast Mana is Bad!" doesn't explain why Battle Hymn, Seething Song and Pyretic Ritual are still legal.

So yeah, that's something to keep in mind. Artifact based mana acceleration is good! Temporary acceleration is bad when it leads into Storm.

Something interesting came to me as I was looking through the Scryfall Tagger and looking over these Rituals. There was a pair of common cards back in Mirrordin that caught my eye that I realized was an alternate take on how Rituals worked, so I felt it was important to talk about them here. Deconstruct and Turn to Dust were cards that did a thing, and then refunded their cost. I went looking further, and found several cards in that did something similar, though not as... redundantly as those two. Apex of Power and Explosive Welcome are a couple examples of cards that are more recent that are Rituals, but not. These cards are interesting because you can find their effects, or something similar at a cheaper (I actually wrote cheater here, but that's for a different day) cost.

But what these Rituals do is they refund you some of your mana. By forcing a higher initial cost to the spell, something like Explosive Welcome can ensure that the effect doesn't come out too early, but at the same time, still allows you to do something afterwards. For that card, yes, you have to have 8 mana to fire it off, dealing 8 damage between two targets, but you also get a refund of , meaning that you've actually paid a total MV of . And while certainly expensive, that is well costed for the effect at that rarity. Apex of Power does the same, as it has the basic mana floor required to cast it to give you the effect of the card, but by the same token, the effect certainly doesn't need to be that expensive, meaning that the refund allows you to do something with that mana and the cards you've enabled.

Rituals are nothing new to the game, but Wizards, for reasons such as copying and recursion, haven't been willing to make them as much a part of the game as more permanent-based acceleration with Rocks and Dorks. They are cards that make a rare showing for the reasons I've hopefully made clear in the discussion above.

Breaking away from MTG for a moment, all this talk on my end has reminded me of my favorite Table Top game, Star Fleet Battles. In that game, one of the factions has the ability to improve their power output of their ship for a turn, but at the cost of damaging the ship's power in future turns. However, using this ability puts you on a definite clock in terms of usability as most ships with this ability only have about 5-7 turns of using all this extra power before they need to use the ability just to break even with where they were at the beginning of the game. This is called the Cocaine Effect, colloquially, as you just need one more hit of power, while at the same time ignoring your impending doom. In a way, Rituals are the same thing. A temporary shot in the arm that can't be interacted without outside of instant speed reactions, and you get your ahead-of-curve effect, but you've set yourself back in cards and while you have what you want, can you do anything with it? Or will you have to go reaching for your next shot in the arm, hoping you can combo or storm off before you have to pay the piper?

Thanks for reading! I'll see you all next week with a subject I haven't quite decided upon yet. So until then, comment in the section below about your experience with Rituals and the like, what you think about them and their use.

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!