Alienfinger gives a good rundown on card advantage in our first article after the extended break.
Introduction to CA:
Magic: the Gathering is a complex game. The theory we use as guidelines when building decks and when playing the game is based on hard logic, but it still serves only as a set of guidelines. When need arises, however, time has shown that we are capable of utilizing aforementioned logic to the extreme, and arrive at conclusions when determining the net gain of either of two options which on the surface seem impossible to compare. In this article, I’ll attempt to tackle at least some of the practical applications of the incredible wide and vague term ‘card advantage’, also abbreviated CA.
Card advantage is – in its most basic form – rather easy to grasp as a concept, and none of what is written in the next paragraph should come as a surprise for the initiated. I’m more or less including it for those just starting on Magic theory.
The basic theory goes like this: If you currently have more cards available to you than your opponent does to him, you have more options than he does. Assuming that your cards are of the same power level as his, this gives you an obvious short term advantage. More important, however, is it that in a game of Magic, you often have to trade cards with your opponent – and often on a one to one basis. Examples are when creatures trade with each other or when a creature is met with a removal spell. This means that the one with the most cards available to him at any given point in the game has a decent chance of ending up the one who can cast game-winning spells when the other party is out of cards. Thus, it is generally accepted that the number of cards you have available for use is a more important resource than any other in the game – including mana, cards in library and even life points.
When people talk about CA, they’ll often use terms such as +1 CA (you gain one card relative to your opponent and 2-for-1’s (your opponent loses access to two cards while you only lose access to one– or you get access to two cards while spending one) and others. Examples of cards which achieve just that are Into the Core and Divination.
Many people, however, tend to forget about a couple of things when talking about CA. This article aims to rectify that.
Virtual Card Advantage:
There’s a lot to say about virtual card advantage, but it mainly ties in with the concept known as the game state. Basic theory first:
Having access to more cards – and therefore options – than your opponent is important, as explained above. But a number of factors mitigate that. Virtual card advantage is generated when your opponent is incapable of utilizing the cards that he has access to – you do not gain CA, because your opponent does not have less cards than they had before, they are just not useful in practice. For an example imagine sitting with a hand full of removal spells against an opponent playing zero creatures in his deck. Despite the fact that you might have access to more cards than your opponent, a large amount of those are useless in practice, and thus he has a very real advantage – despite the name ‘virtual CA’.
Virtual card advantage is the concept that most people have difficulty grasping because it goes so much further than the simple scenarios such as the one above. Quite the number of decks lives and breathes virtual CA, and entire archetypes would be nonexistent if it wasn’t for this.
An excellent example of this is aggro decks. They are perfectly happy giving up CA of the regular kind because they in return get tons and tons of virtual CA. Your opponent may have more cards available to him, but in the early game he can often only cast one card per turn. As such, the aggro deck is attacking with more efficient cards in the one part of the game where the opponent’s card advantage is mitigated. Thus they gain an advantage which can either lead them to win the game on the spot – or alternately put them so far ahead that the opponent cannot win back what is lost and loses the game a number of turns down the line.
The reason virtual card advantage means everything in situations such as the one above is that it is so interwoven with the game state. A Goblin Guide might give your opponent card advantage, but it gains you tons and tons of virtual CA simply by putting so much pressure on your opponent to defend him- or herself that they have no use of half their full grip of cards.
This is also why so many people undervalue the objective power level of cards such as Koth of the Hammer and Searing Blaze. Everybody knows that the cards are very, very good – otherwise they would not have seen as much play in high-placing tournament lists as they have – but I still see people undervaluing them at every turn. Why Searing Blaze generates so much pressure should be obvious from the previous paragraph but why a card such as Koth does is a tad more complex.
In reality, though, it ties in beautifully with the overall concept of virtual card advantage. When you play a Koth of the Hammer, the game state changes drastically. Even if your opponent doesn’t have to fear a Volt Charge for some reason, he or she has to somehow handle the constant threat that the planeswalker poses – both by simply animating mountains and by threatening with its ‘ultimate’. If your opponent has no current access to an Oblivion Ring or a Vampire Hexmage then the solution is typically to attack it. Thus the game is determined by creature combat – an area where your deck will typically be superior – and this leaves those of your opponent’s cards useless which do not aid him in this pursuit.
There is still plenty left to describe pertaining to virtual CA, but I want to touch a couple of things – first the cards generally known as card filterers or effects which offer card selection or card quality. Halimar Depths, Ponder, Preordain and so on all have in common that they provide a very useful effect without actually giving you CA. They do, however, very often net you virtual CA, because you are able to trade cards you don’t need for cards that you do. Another kind of card offering virtual CA is the spells or effects with multiple modes – if you can always use your cards for something then you’ll often find that you have more relevant cards in hand than otherwise. Examples of this are Cryptic Command, Esper Charm and so on.
Notes on More Traditional CA Generators:
The above paragraphs may have given the impression that virtual CA is generally better than literal card advantage. This is not necessarily true, although if a deck – through pressure – is generating a lot of virtual CA, then spending your turn playing a Divination or a Tezzeret’s Gambit might not be the best plan. On the whole, though, cards such as Divination are very powerful. They generate card advantage, and card advantage wins games.
But many players underestimate how little immediate pressure these cards relieve you of or put on an opponent – even when a Gambit is used in a burn deck and theoretically draws you game-ending burn spells. It still doesn’t change the current game state, and it gives your opponent a breathing space in which he or she can win back some of that which was lost in the early game – or denies yourself that breathing space which could have been used to alter the game state.
Again, this is due to the fact that when an opponent is putting pressure on you, he is gaining virtual CA because you cannot fully utilize the cards available to you. Gaining more cards that you still cannot utilize is a waste of a turn – unless you literally have no cards which interact with your opponent’s plan and you need to dig for an answer.
Once more I would like to emphasize that this does not mean that cards such as Divination are not powerful. The aim of the previous paragraphs was merely to show that they are a very specific subset of cards with a very specific function. When your opponent puts little or no immediate pressure on you – instead opting to secure an amount of CA (examples would be some Birthing Pod lists and a number of popular control lists) then a straight up card draw spell can often tip the scales because of the card advantage it implies.
Conclusion:
It is hard for me to write a simple wrap-up for this article. It has encompassed a lot of different ideas and thoughts and oversimplifying it would be doing it a disservice. But if one paragraph is to emphasize the overall purpose of this article, then let it be the following one:
Think carefully about the purpose of each of your cards. Card advantage is so much more than card drawing spells and Day of Judgment. A simple Doom Blade can net a player incredible amounts of virtual card advantage, if it allows him to live long enough to utilize his grip of cards. So don’t be the guy who reasons that ‘CA is good, so I need to run CA generators in my deck. Enter Tezzeret’s Gambit’. Be the guy (or girl) who knows how your deck is going to win games and be the guy who plays the cards that get there.
