Time is measured in units of turns remaining. How much does a player start out with? Given a 60 card deck and that player draws 7 cards, they begin with 54 turns before they die to decking. Now, as soon as their opponent plays a Grizzly Bears, their time resource falls to 10 turns remaining. If they play a second Bears, then your turns remaining falls to 5. How much is a Shock worth in this case? About five turns. All the ways you can win a game of Magic are ways you can attack your opponents resource of turns remaining. Once that resource dips to zero, you’ve won the game.

This measure is mainly a way of comparing different win conditions, but it can also be expanded to talk about different card valuations.

How much is a goblin token worth? What hes worth is directly correlated to his ability to win the game. This would involve some calculation versus a scale from game-winning to useless. Figuring out that scale would be an excellent article. That would be fun to write, as well.

1) Their ability to explain phenomenon
2) Their ability to predict phenomenon

From the podcast and summary alone, I think that the GUToM’s shows incredible potential to explain a ton of things in magic that thus far have required multiple and irreconcilable theories. For instance, you can explain why red burn decks win using the ‘Philosophy of Fire’ (cards equal life) but can’t use that theory to explain why they sometimes lose to control decks. You can explain why those control decks win using ‘card advantage theory’, but not why they lose to red decks. With GUToM you can explain both: the deck that gets the most value for their mana taps wins (incidentally, this explains why the feeling of losing to red burn is similar to the feeling of losing to land destruction - both strategies essentially try to limit your access to mana and your ability to cast spells). Card evaluation also seems much better and more refined under GUToM (well covered in the podcast), etc…

Whether the theory has predictive power remains to be seen - that will be up to designers who take the theory and run with it. I’m eager to see the results

BTW I find some of the comments regarding the value of Magic theory juvenile and laughable. Does anyone dispute the value of chess theory, bridge theory, or poker theory to those respective games? Understanding theory can ‘only’ make you a better player (though admittedly misunderstanding it can make you a much worse one).

They are attacking. You are at 1. You have no other possible play. Obviously you Blade it, but why? The value of that goblin NOT hitting is the potential sum total of your deck’s mana expenditure. If it connects, you are unable to continue using mana since you’re god damned dead.

You have a 7/1 (with no trample because its terrible and you’re terrible), and they have a 1/1 goblin token and nothing else. It might be correct to ace the token there, because you’re denying them the option to make a trade AND getting 7 damage to their head.

The point is, while any good player will see those situations and say ‘duh’, we have the framework to QUANTIFY the “duh”. The point is not to evaluate a card’s value in a vaccuum. It helps to have an idea of what “good” cards in certain roles “should” cost, but its more important to derive values situationally.

What’s the value of a bolt when the other guy is at 3?

What’s the value of a White Knight against a Mono Black deck?

What’s the value of Doom Blade against a Mono Black deck?

What’s the value of Earthquake when you’re at 4 life and staring down an army of Hill Giants?

What’s the value of a pinger when your opponent has dies-when-targeted stuff?

Those examples should show why the vacuum value of a card is totally irrelevant. It’s the current and potential effect on the game that truly matters. Measuring in FRACTIONAL (or decimal) mana expenditure is the most effective and accurate way to quantify the strength of a given play.

Remember, this is not about some sort of strategic theory on HOW to play the game. The main point here is that, instead of quantifying games in terms of Tempo, Card Advantage, etc, we have ONE metric by which to evaluate game play. There are many games where players lose and have to ask “why did I lose that one?” This is the closest thing we have to a single answer. Otherwise we have to use multiple definitions to answer the question. Parting example:

Jund mirror match. He mulls to 6 on the play and gets off the first Blightning. I still win easily because of my 2 card advantage. It’s easy to chalk that win up to card advantage, but its harder to say WHy i won because of CA. Basically, my having extra cards increased the odds that I would be able to use my mana efficiently. Because of the increase in odds, I had the Blightning when he was on two cards, removing a Siege Gang and a Malakir Bloodwitch - two cards that would have won him the game.

On the other hand, when he blightning’ed me, having the two extra cards increase the odds that I would be able to retain the most important card, the one that allowed me the BEST mana conversion in that matchup. Siege-Gang Commander. Indeed, after the dust cleared, he had no hand and I had nothing but the commander and my 5th land drop. That siege-gang ended the game, but it was actually his mulligan to 6 on the play that -won- it for me. Quantifying the win was easy: his blightning would have been more effective on the draw, since I would have had fewer options, and thus my chance to retain the best way to convert mana would have decreased.

Fishysua: How is this tool good?

Mike/other magic physicists: I find all of these attempts (not just here, but several others that have been doing the same thing on other sites) to pin down some grand unified theory of magic (i) silly, (ii) self indulgent, and (iii) mostly useless. These give me faint echoes of Jordie Tait’s implied card advantage debacle, where basically you take a situation or a play and apply this giant complex mathy theory to it, and then you look and see if it makes sense to make the play without the theory, given the game state, and if so, do that. So don’t do A, do complicated B. THEN do A. If A and B agree, great, but if not, take action A. Since A wins whatever B is, why not just do A in the first place? No GUToM required. Shrug.

Think for a moment of the 5 color cascade deck with Roil and Spreading Seas as two drops…that deck wins every game if it gets safely to turn 4, what if the opponent could not do anything before turn 4?

If your work does hold up to such scrutiny you will have done us all a great service and you will have answered your critics in the most eloquent way possible - and if there are holes, then the exploration and dialogue can continue.

I believe that much of the hyperbole and self-gratification that at times grated on your detractors is driven by the excitement of feeling that you are on the cusp of discovering a paradigm shifting model for a game that you’ve already invested much time and energy into - that’s laudable and understandable but in the absence of clarity and audience-focused delivery (given the nature of the podcasting platform as a broadcast medium) it can be misread. I’d like to thank you for your efforts and look forward to where you go from here with this line of work.

You’re not quite getting it. Doom Blade is worth 1B, always. If the Baneslayer didn’t get the chance to do anything, their 3WW actually netted them 0. If you’re using the rest of your mana effectively, that doom blade put you 3 mana ahead of your opponent. And yes, killing a goblin token with it is a loss of 1. It’s easy to see that doom blading a goblin token is a situation that should really never arise.

Thus far, as near as I can tell, you’re not actually making statements, just tautologies. Your “theory” is purely retrospective–”They won because they got the most value out of their mana. I know they got the most value because they brought their opponent’s life total to 0 first.”

Here are good places to start:
- State your theory, with definitions as appropriate.
- Is your theory positive? That is, does it make predictions?
- Is your theory falsifiable? That is, what could we observe that would render the theory demonstrably false?
- Under what circumstances does your theory fail? That is, what are the exceptions to the rules?

- Is a doom blade worth more when it kills a Baneslayer Angel than when it kills a goblin token? Based on your disagreements over the coffee table, I can’t even tell. I thought a grizzly bears was worth “W” or whatever, but if they have an elvish warrior does that mean it’s worth less?

Bring this out of the haze of bong smoke Either put it in words–reasonably coherently, reasonably thoroughly, on (digital) paper–or quit talking about how revolutionary you’re being.