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There’s no need to spend so much money. The power level of a deck is not decided by the price tag. This article is my take on budget Standard and I’m hoping to make this a weekly or fortnightly thing. I want to get ideas from the Magic Community and create an article that will help new players get started without having to invest massive amounts of money in decks.

The first heading might seem like a rambling tangent, but stick it out; it’s definitely there to make a point about magic.

Habitus and movies

The way that the majority of limited games play out is that from turns 2-3 onwards, both players are generally making one play each turn that advances their position in some way. If this carries on indefinitely the game is almost certainly going to be a very close one. However, in the real world this does not tend to happen. At some point a player will pass a turn without making a play in the same turn cycle that their opponent did play a relevant spell. Another possibility is that a player did play a card that impacts the board in their favour, but their opponent played two! One more is that a player played a relevant spell and while their opponent did also play a spell, it had little to no influence on the current board state.

These moments are the tipping points in the game that I like to call ‘Tempo Swings’. A tempo swing essentially happens when one player makes a larger number of meaningful plays in a turn cycle than their opponent. I have found that a good yardstick is that if you have achieved a favourable tempo swing two times more in a game than your opponent and held that advantage over more than one turn, you are very likely to win.

If we take this theory to heart our goal is to both try and get cards into our deck that allow us to create positive tempo swings and also play in such a way that we open ourselves up to causing these situations for ourselves, whilst attempting to prevent our opponent from doing so. I must stress that you cannot simply just cast any spell or activate any ability and call it a meaningful play. You can only count actions that have a reasonable positive impact on your game plan.

I can’t possibly cover all the decks out there, but I’ll cover a range of strategies so that even if you don’t play against these exact decks, the strategy should be similar enough that you can apply what I say here to your situation.

Whew. Nearly there. Hopefully, based on publishing schedules, you’re reading this before attending one of the multitude of Dragon’s Maze pre-releases being held all over the world. Even more hopefully, something you’ve read in these articles will help you win a game or two. We can but hope.

My apologies to those who enjoy reading bits and pieces before the card reviews. I’m working a 60-hour week this week, which is very unpleasant, and consequently, I have very little free time in the evening that isn’t devoted to looking at pictures of Magical cards. If I skip intros, there’s a chance that on Friday, I can do something vaguely human with my girlfriend, like a cinema trip or restaurant visit, and there’s like a 99% certainty that I like her better than you, so I’m going to have to jump straight into cards.