deck’s with a lot of under-costed cards is probably going to win

he then goes on to compare cards across formats? Like how do you honestly value what the price of drawing one card is, even if it is exclusively in blue?

U/3 -Ancestral Recall

2UU/3 -Concentrate

1UU -Mind Spring/Braingeyser

U -Obsessive Research

2U/2 -Compulsive Research/Thist for Knowledge

The far easier approach would be to just ask wizard’s r&d if they can provide him with thier pricing rubric since they obviously already have this ‘amazing theory’ already written up for when they determine what to price a card at.

In particular, i was thinking the Tarmogoyf example didn’t hold up. You say the card is worth 2GG, but since the card itself costs 1G, that puts you ahead. While that is true, is it not also true that in the same metagame, your opponent will also be playing the best cards, and therefore, there is no gained ‘advantage’? The cards which, according to this theory, generate best value for their cost, are also generally the cards which are most played in tourney environs anyways. I don’t see how this theory differs in any significant way from traditional theories of strong mana curve, stock mana, playing the most bang for your mana, works.

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

Playing Force of Will is minus 1 card for 2 mana. I know you’re spending two cards, but they are spending one, so you’re only down one card. And no, it’s not 2UUGG, it’s just the value of the card countered because that is what counterspells are worth, so it would be 2GG, but really what you are doing costs UU until you know what you are countering.

He hasn’t gone in depth enough to discuss the value of a counterspell, and neither have I yet (I have a fourth part coming out that talks about relative costs, negating value, and hate cards’ value). Obviously he hasn’t, otherwise you wouldn’t come up with a number as outrageous as 2UUGG.

Both sides say “to hell with the number of cards it takes”. In my example, I was merely stating how many cards it was for reference so people like you wouldn’t think it was -2 cards and thus not the same as Seething Song, which was the whole point of the line.

The theories are exactly the same. It is only your understanding of them that is different.

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.

hey even talk about using all your mana each turn as being the wrong mindset in this podcast