Good Riddance Damage on the Stack by Sam Stoddard
bdm | 04:51PM on Thu Jun 11 2009Editor’s note: Sam Stoddard is a PTQ and PT veteran who has done some terrific writing about Magic, most notably Creating a Fearless Magical Inventory. He has been one of the few advocates from the Pro side of the Magic community to embrace the rules changes in M10 and has posted as such on Twitter and his own blog. He has graciously granted us permission to include the following from his own blog for the Top8Magic readership to chew on.)
Posted this a few places, so might as well post this here:
I’ll admit it, I freaked out when I first saw the rules announcements. 1-4 and 6-7 seemed fine, but #5 seemed like the point where Magic stopped being Magic and became something else - WoW or Pokemon. After talking to people and thinking about it more, I’m excited about the change, and I’m ready to see stacking combat damage go.
We’ve been far too complacent for too long in abusing damage on the stack tricks to win our games for us. In talking with people, many people believe that removing this ability will dumb the game down. How much are we relying on these tricks to succeed in magic? Damage on, sac, bounce, champion, pump, whatever, it’s an easy way to gain an advantage against opponents who don’t know the tricks.
If you show up at an FNM or a PTQ and know all your damage on the stack tricks, you have a huge advantage over an opponent who doesn’t understand that just by using these tricks. There isn’t as much incentive to mulligan properly, work on mana bases or otherwise playing better when knowing one trick can get you by. This doesn’t mean that there will be no way for a more skilled player to win, it just means that It’s going to require new and different strategies. I truly believe that you learn more in a draft where your deck trainwrecks and you have to fight every second of every game to pull anything out than one where you end up with a constructed deck. The constructed matchups where you go in as a dog and mulligan to 5 and are forced to make every play perfectly teach you more than a series of great matchups with god hands. Winning does not make you better at magic. Working for your wins, and even your loses, makes you a better magic player.
Under 5e rules succeeding at tournament magic was largely about being one of the 3 people in the room (judges included) who actually understood how the batch and damage prevention stops worked and knowing how all the mish-mash of awkwardly templated cards in your deck actually read. When they released 6th edition rules, there were hundreds of complaints by players who couldn’t fathom wining in a world where you couldn’t cast balance, know it wouldn’t get countered, then sac all your lands to Zuran Orb. Or why people weren’t being punished for not understanding how to use damage prevention step correctly or how to pump your pestilence so that 4 damage happened all at the same. Magic playskill was as much about knowing the rules perfectly as it was about making good decisions.
Ten years later, with the crutch of rules-lawyering somewhat behind us, tournament players have gotten much better. They were forced to learn every other aspect of the game twice as well to get half as much return, but when they did, those gains compounded. While no single aspect of the game was as powerful as tricking your opponent into giving you permission you to cast a lightning bolt (which you didn’t want to, but thanks for passing the turn), exploring other avenues to gain advantages has led to a massive improvement in the quality of professional and non-professional play.
Damage on the stack is gone, and we are going to have to evolve or die. A lot of cards we love are no longer good. That’s a good thing. Things are going to be really rough at first. Everyone’s card valuations are going to be way off for a while. Combat tricks are going to be riskier. Bounce spells will need to be used offensively rather than just to gain card advantage in blocking. People who want to compete at any level are going to have to find new ways to gain advantages in games. The people who do will succeed, and those who don’t will blame the dumbing down of the game. New strategies will emerge and everyone is going to work harder on previously ignored aspects of their game in order to improve.This is going to be a hard and painful process, especially for those of us who are so set in our ways, but we will be better players for it.
More so than taking away from being able to beat bad players, this will create a divide between the mediocre players and the good players. Both those groups used to have damage on tricks an the like to take advantage of, and the players who are better will have access to more tricks in the coming months, and make better decisions in combat. This is the group that will struggle to adapt or die. They clearly have an idea of what’s going on in the game, but they may not have the depth to compete when their one tried-and-true trick is gone.
You attack with a 5/5. Opponent blocks with a 3/3 and two 1/1s. How do you order the blockers?
3/3, 1/1, 1/1 gets destroyed by a Giant Growth.
1/1, 1/1, 3/3 gets in trouble with a damage prevention spell of 1 or more
1/1, 3/3, 1/1 doesn’t get as blown out by giant growth, but a +2/+2 is now the same as a +3/+3 in terms of saving the 3/3. This is probably ideal in a format like Shards.
But lets say you do have nothing and you know your opponent has a pump spell. He has chosen to block like that probably in an attempt to trade in the event you have a giant growth. You might order them 3/3, 1/1, 1/1 baiting it. Your opponent thinks. Why did he order them like that? He clearly wants me to use the pump spell here. He must have a burn or bounce spell. If I try and pump, I’m getting 3 for 1′d. Let damage resolve.
Bam, you just got 3 for 1 because you tricked your opponent into thinking he was smarter than he really was by broadcasting a card you didn’t have. This is a new type of decision that did not exist before the rules change.
