didn’t AJ Sacher already discuss this on tcgplayer a few months ago? does mike know about that kid?

So with your Knight, sometimes it will be worth more mana than you paid for it (it killed a Grizzly Bears and did some damage) and sometimes it will be worth less mana than you paid for it (oppo played better creatures and you ended up chumping with it). You weigh up all the pros and cons and end up with an average. Your theory is that if you can maximise the ratio of this average to the actual mana cost, you will do well.

Have I got that right? It seems that you’re no longer really talking about ‘mana’ at all but ‘card goodness’. You may have quantified it by equating it to mana but what you’re really saying is that “good cards are good”. On top of this, cards evaluate differently in different decks and in different metagames. So what you’re really really saying is that “a good deck for this event is a good deck for this event”.

I’m not trying to debunk your theory and think it’s very interesting that you’re putting real numbers behind what people generally do by instinct or experience. But I’m not sure this is as profound as you make out. It’s just what people have always been doing, seen from a different angle.

@james
Blame @sloppystack

I wonder how valuable it would be to publish a non-extensive list of baseline effects and what their cost is. For example:

Destroy all creatures: 2WW
1/1 flier: U or W or…
3/3 trample: GG
Draw 3: 2UU

et cetera.

I know I would appreciate a discussion about how much these and other common effects should cost so I could better implement this theory into my deckbuilding and playing. Maybe it would be worth talking about on fivewithflores.com?

@ michaelj

Here are the links to the two articles in question that AJ wrote for tcgplayer. Thanks for the podcast and your work on the unifying theory! =)

http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=8394
http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=8547

I am very glad that this was posted before the pro tour.
i believe this is most likely the most important theory on how to play and consider magic that i have ever read.

Mike it only took you 17 years to solve magic.

thank you

I like the idea and it’s a great method for evaluating decks for a format and/or meta games. There might be areas where a bit more thought might be needed but it sounds promising to me.

[...] earlier this week Mike Flores did a podcast explaining his theory about pretty much the same subject but he also goes into what the theory [...]

@Ben: That doesn’t account for the Fog deck though.

I appreciate the dialogue on the subject, I always love magic discussion, but this cast is hard to listen to, mike needs to bring the reigns in a bit, perhaps stay away from the coffee.

way to just copy a pro and claim it as your own

i don’t believe that this was mentioned, and it may seem somewhat obvious, but i think that one way the theory can be expanded and improved (imho) is the following:
card values should be based on cards within the format that is being considered.
for example, in standard, countering any spell costs uu1, whereas in legacy, countering a spell costs uu. comparisons to cards that are not in the format can be useful for comparing and analyzing formats, but when you are using total mana as a metric, cards should be valued based on the tournament-caliber cards that provide a similar or identical effect within the format you are considering.

newest article from AJ on Stock Mana http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=8738

AJ Sacher’s theory is not the same as Flores’. Sacher talks about using your mana each turn and denying your opponent mana through playing around counters. They even talk about using all your mana each turn as being the mindset in this podcast. I think the differences can be highlighted best using Sacher’s final statement. He decribes pitching a card to FOW to play it ‘for free’ as getting a free counterspell worth UU (-1 card, +2 mana).

Even though this is wrong (you lose the FOW and the pitched card so it’s -2 cards) Flores’ theory, as far I as understand it, would approach the situation like this: you’re getting a free counterspell (+UU) to counter, for example, their goyf (1G, worth +2GG, total +2UUGG) and to hell with the number of cards it takes.

Correct me if i’m wrong

The biggest problem I see with Mike’s theory is the idea that cards whose sole purpose is interaction — PTE, WoG, Relic of Progenitus, etc — have a fixed value. PTE isn’t worth BR, it’s worth whatever the value of the creature it destroys is. In an actual game, WoG is worth the real mana value of your opponent’s creatures minus the real value of your creatures. And in a real game, Relic is worth whatever value you get out of it in that game (i.e. 20-some mana against dredge). The value of any card in the abstract, then, is it’s average value over the course of a tournament.

Still, that’s not enough. If the only thing that matters for winning a game is how much real mana you have, then the only thing that matters is that you have more real mana than your opponent as often as possible. Suppose I have a deck that regularly beats Jund by about 30 mana (ridiculous, but bear with me) but loses by 15 mana to everything else. Since jund takes up 1/3 of the field, my deck should be exactly average. However, my win record has me losing 66% of my games. In contrast, a deck that matches every deck in the format mana-for-mana will only lose 50% of it’s games. In other words, consistently good cards are better than situationally amazing cards (but we already knew that).

Cards like Relic of Progenitus are maindeck-able because they don’t put you that far behind in the matchups where they do nothing special, and can win you the game by themselves when they do matter.

This felt like pretty groundbreaking stuff while listening too it. I think its important to remember that we have all been thinking about “card advantage” in the wrong terms. Within mike and Aj’s theory all card advantage does is give you more oppurtunity than your opponenent to spend mana, but that is the importance of it, more options to spend mana on.

Also I think mike’s analogy to basketball is a good one. The team that scores the most points always wins but, also that there is a very high correlation between the team which has more rebounds usually ends up winning the game (i think the figure mike used was 80% of the time). I would like to see us keep track of Magic in the same way with more statistical data. For example lets say we are watching a pro tour top 8 match that is getting streamed. It would be great to see a running total of how much mana each player has used over the course of the game, and also how much mana “potential” mana they had avaialble to them each turn. At the end of a match we could see total mana usage as well as potential mana as a ratio, for instance: 100 mana/150 mana spent, I wonder in any game of magic what percentage of mana that is available to us over the course of the game we are using? I think a turn should be counted as your turn and your opponents turn to take into account the possiblity of spending mana on your oppnonents turn…..

I imagine as more statistical data becomes available that there would be a similar trend to that of the team which rebounds more in a basketball game, the player who spends more mana would usually win. If not the case in a single match, given a larger sample size say, a Pro Tour, or a Career, it seems likely that this could be highly likely

[...] found the deck for us to play that weekend. When I saw Mike’s Grixis list, it was right after listening to Kelly, Will and Mike discuss the Grand Unified Theory, and I felt like the veil had been lifted. My main problem with the Double Negative/Sphinx version [...]

Great listen, but Flores kept getting interrupted, which was pretty annoying.