In the Deck Box #6: May Means Macro!

Hey guys! Sorry I haven't posted anything in a while, I've been extremely busy with final exams and then immediately left to visit friends in Gainesville, Fl because a good number of them were graduating this semester, including our own Stephen Poindexter and Matt Kiep. Congratulations guys! I also did well on my exams, so I'm feeling pretty good about everything. The only daunting task left is writing all these articles about all these awesome Avacyn Restored cards. Even with my busy schedule I was able to get quite a bit of Magic in when I went to visit and threw down some EDH games with a ton of people.

After speaking with some local Gainesville Magic players about Commander, I always get a very common question: 'the deck runs well, what improvements can I make?' It's a really difficult question to answer, because you already opened up with the premise that 'the deck runs well.' What can I possibly tell you to make it run better? So, instead of looking at everything case by case, I'll focus in on the simple technique of development and macromanagement.

What is macromanagement? Well, I'm guilty of getting into Starcraft 2 recently and have been learning a lot about resource management. Conveniently, the idea of resource management applies to Magic as well. Macro is the idea of managing your spending on different things and maximizing your spending on specific things throughout the game to help you win. In Magic, macro applies to managing your spending of mana on spells to maximize your board position in a game. The specificity of what you'll spend your mana on throughout the game is dependent on what spells you're holding in your hand. Unlike Starcraft where you have access to everything your race is capable of doing, in Magic, you're only able to cast cards that you put in your deck. The type of macro you'll be employing is completely dependent on the foundation of your deck building.

What does all of this mean? Your deck is a vacuum with very small variance (relative to the total number of cards in the game). What you put in your deck is what you'll have access to for all of your matches. This leads to a very common strategy called toolboxing. In Commander, the decks are huge, with 99 problems and 1 general. Since the format is highlander, having only one copy of each card significantly decreases consistency of drawing the cards you want or need. Players can overcome this problem by playing many cards that tutor other cards up like Demonic Tutor, Chord of Calling, Mystical Tutor, etc to gain more consistency and engage the board with whatever cards they choose. Another way players overcome this problem is through toolboxing, which is playing different cards that have similar abilities, but are not quite identical. One strong example of toolboxing is Qasali Pridemage and Harmonic Sliver. Although both cards are strong answers to enchantments and artifacts, one is better than the other in certain situations. Harmonic Sliver answers that problematic artifact/enchantment here and now, while Qasali threatens their destruction and the future destruction of any artifacts/enchantments your opponents might play later causing a strong psychological effect that might interrupt someone's strategy. Both are useful in different scenarios.

Toolboxing.. tutoring. Makes sense! Both seem to increase my consistency, but which one is better? Toolboxing plays the higher variance game by strictly using more proactive cards. Most of your spells will do something to affect the board state or establish presence. You don't quite have the ability to get exactly what you want to handle specific situations, but probability serves that you'll come across a card that helps you out. Tutoring is a more fine-tuned way of handling situations. Tutoring allows you to find the exact card you want to play to handle the current board state. Tutoring is also the weapon of choice for decks relying on combo pieces in order to win the game. Why increase the variance of your deck when you only need a handful of cards to win? Combo is clearly an exception to the idea of increasing variance, but more on that in another article. The downsides to a heavy tutoring strategy is the lag time in terms of tempo. Casting tutors costs mana, so you're often trading mana and potentially a turn in order to find a specific card. In some cases, this may be extremely profitable to find an Oblivion Stone to take down an oppressive board. However, in most cases you're sacrificing card advantage and tempo for the opportunity to play a high-impact spell. My advice to most players is to find a healthy medium between toolboxing your cards and tutoring. Your deck should have a healthy number of cards that can answer all different types of permanents (planeswalkers, lands, artifacts, enchantments, creatures), while having the ability to find them during those opportune moments is also extremely important.

Where does development fit in all of this? None of this would be possible without lands. Those poor neglected cards in Magic that don't get enough credit for what they do. Ever been holding that 5 mana spell that you really want to cast and you're stuck on 4 lands? Jav knows what that feels like. =]

The ability to develop your board and create a reliable source of mana income is very important. Having lands, mana rock artifacts, and card draw are vital to running most engines and synergies that you hope will carry you to victory over the course of a long multiplayer game. When you have more lands/mana than your opponents, you have more resources to spend each turn to cast spells that generally have a higher mana cost and consequentially, a higher impact. When you're ahead in the development game, you can focus on combat and some of the micromanagement (something I'll talk about later) to keep your overall advantage on board while your opponents struggle to keep up. Creating strong development and a strong foundation of resources is vital to creating favorable board positions and macromanaging your deck to maximum efficiency.

I understand macromanagement and development, how can I think outside of the box with this idea? Variance, consistency, and development are all very important to establishing strong macromanagement of your Magic games. The Wish cycle along with cards like Mind Control, Threaten, and Rise from the Grave also increase the amount of variance your deck is able to produce, since you have the ability to interact with your sideboard and your opponents' cards. This also comes at the cost of being a turn behind, since you're gradually reacting to what your opponent is doing. It's a trade off between tempo (what you're doing on your turn) and variance (the accessibility to different types cards not found in your deck).

Overall, I feel that macro-ing or macromanagement is easy to accomplish and isn't a difficult style to play. The priority of cards for a deck like this looks like 'Development > Bombs > Removal.' The increased variance in the strategy helps the deck style avoid playing large amounts of removal and instead, tries to out defeat opponents through tempo and resource advantage.

I hope this article was helpful for everyone who's learning the basics to complex deck building and I hope it helps grease the gears on your creations. Macromanagement is just scratching the surface of great deck building and if you stick around, maybe we'll discover other key ideas behind Magic: the Gathering. If you've followed the Bramble On series, a couple examples of macro-heavy strategies are C.J.'s Rith, the Awakener deck and my own Intet, the Dreamer deck. Check out Intet HERE!

I just wanted to give a few shout outs to Drew, Sara, Jason, Sean, Tomas, Andrew, Carlos, Nick, Stephen, Jav, Geo, and everyone else who I had a chance to meet up with. You guys are the best. Until next time, Magic players!

Interested in more Commander-themed content? Check out the In the Deck Box series on the MTG Casual Network Archive!

-David J.

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