Overvaluing Synergy at the Cost of Tempo

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plushpenguin
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Post by plushpenguin » 2 years ago

Whoever said that tempo doesn't matter as much in EDH is a dunce. It matters just as much as in the 1v1 formats, it simply may not always have the desired impact in any particular game.

So, why am I bringing this up? Well, I've noticed that there are a lot of new players playing this game now, and many of them go to me to ask for advice. I notice when I look in their decks a lot of "level 1" basic synergies. Well, what do I mean by that.. I mean stuff that on a basic level makes sense with the commander because it is better here than it would be standing alone in another deck. However, these synergies are calculated in a vacuum and do not take into consideration any other factors including gameplan and sequencing.

However, there is a very big key mistake I see a lot of players make. They will add cards that synergize with their deck even if it is technically worse than a comparable option that does not strictly synergize with the deck. In this way, they are costing their deck potential tempo for a card that works with their theme. I'm not saying that synergy isn't important, but it should not be overvalued.

So, to best illustrate this point, I'm going with a real-life example I had. I was tasked with helping fix a Willowdusk, Essence Seer deck that was severely underperforming. Out of the box, it is essentially an unconventional B/G lifegain deck. I don't have the entire gatherer database memorized, so naturally I go to EDHREC to see what people put in their decks. Here, I see most of the lifegain cards and payoffs. Problem is, they all kind of suck. Like, none of them are worth the effort and tempo. Alhammarret's Archive is essentially winmore, a lot of the regular lifegain cards are simply not worth the card that they cost and even the payoffs suck. The only good good one is Blossoming Bogbeast because if you untap with that, all it takes is one Gray Merchant of Asphodel and suddenly you are swinging for +17 on all your guys.

Here's an example of a payoff that looks good but isn't: Essence Pulse. This is the boardwipe for lifegain decks. 4 mana is generally a solid rate for something that can be a hard wipe. However, the factor that isn't considered is the time and resources spent on playing a lifegain enabler in order to ensure that the card is even online and that takes tempo and resources that you may not be able to afford. People simply play it because they look at it and see a payoff. Yes, theoretically you can make this very controllable. However, you could also just play Damnation, Toxic Deluge, Pernicious Deed, or even just Crux of Fate will be better because crux doesn't require you to have a board to enable it and so 5 mana unconditional is better than 4 mana conditional.

And so for the lifegain deck, there was one thing that stuck out to me. Paying life on demand is a LOT easier than trying to gain a lot of life. So my focus shifted to something that can be carried out more easily, which is paying a ton of life to put a massive number of counters on a Gyre Sage or a Devoted Druid or a Marwyn, the Nurturer to effectively turn your cards into a Channel. And being able to play Channel (even if it requires a bit of setup) is a busted strategy. It is a lot easier to curve Gyre Sage into Willowdusk into Unspeakable Symbol than it is to try to gain life to enable Willowdusk. This then essentially allows you to "out-tempo" your opponents simply by having way more mana (and eventually cards if you build right) than your opponent. This doesn't even require a lot of money to set up, most of these mana=power payoffs cards are cheap in cmc and money. So instead of being the lifegain deck, you only use your lifegain to offset your lifeloss so you don't die too early to your opponents.

This is where I used the concept of valuing tempo to change the strategy to be more effective. I establish a gameplan and tell myself what am I going to do every turn of the game. In this way, only the synergies that I think are good enough where I DON'T need to sacrifice tempo and where a conventional card of that caliber would not be better than the synergy I established.

If you want another example, I'll pull out my Xenagos, God of Revels deck as this one is a little more subtle (and I have a trove of XP on the deck). So, anyone who has built a Xenagos deck seriously will find that the synergy and win condition more or less builds itself and that tempo is what really needs to be focused on. However, in this specific example, I took the above concept to an extreme. Most people wouldn't consider the Aggravated Assault + Savage Ventmaw combo to be a bad duo in a deck, especially in a deck where neither card is bad by itself. However, I consistently found that I never wanted to cast Aggravated Assault on curve. I asked myself, is this better than _____, where ___ could be the card I ran instead. So yes, this combo can win the game with any number of opponents remaining assuming it lives. I ended up replacing it with another "combo", which is Godo, Bandit Warlord + Embercleave. Godo + Embercleave is a one-card combo (godo tutors the other half and is easily tutorable himself) where you can do 48 trample damage to an opponent with haste for just six mana. The comparison here is a 2-card 8 mana combo that kills all opponents vs a 1-card 6 mana combo that kills one opponent. The latter is significantly more consistent and faster than the former even though the former is more powerful if pulled off. I found that if I untapped with godocleave, I usually have the other two players dead because my followup extra combat or draw effect can generally seal the deal easily. I just found that at the power level I wanted to play it, despite being a heavily synergistic card, Aggravated Assault wasn't worth the tempo loss of playing it on T2-3 and having it sit there, and it it is definitely worse as an 8 drop than any other extra combat.

I'm going to pull one last example with the Xenagod deck that goes in a slightly different direction. They aren't directly comparable as they do different things, but this is a good example of "something that doesn't seem like it would be good but it is" vs the exact opposite. So, the synergistic card is Traverse the Outlands and the generic card is Escape to the Wilds. People used to run Traverse in Xenagod decks. However, I never did because the thing is that playing the draw effects that scale on power require you to untap with a fatty. This doesn't tend to happen often as people don't like getting 1-2 shot by haste creatures. So any time I untap with a big creature and have one of these effects is considered "significant" setup. So, what would I rather have... 7 mana and 14 cards, or 21 mana to untap with and an empty hand? Yeah, there's a reason why people have been cutting traverse the outlands from their xenagos decks.
However, I want to focus on Escape to the Wilds. In theory, impulse draw should be awkward right because Xenagod decks play high cmc fatties and you can't realistically play multiple if you hit multiple of them with this card, making its 5 + a land play for 5 rate (which is excellent) not quite realistic. However, in MY specific list, there are 20 one-drops, and so all it takes is hitting 2 lands + a 1-drop for me to realistically play at least 4 out of the 5 cards I hit with escape. This has made it quite excellent for me in practice. In fact, EDHREC did an analysis video on Xenagod decks recently and this card was one of its recommendations. I knew that this person looked at my list because almost NO ONE other than me ran this card before he had this video. Now, like 4% of eligible decks run the card. Without understanding the context, some of those decks are probably making the incorrect move, but this is a good example of how card evaluation can get quite complicated when you start factoring in your mana curve and everything. Again though, this is understanding how your deck's sequencing can really help more than just focusing on synergy.


Any thoughts on this giant wall of text I just laid down?

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Mookie
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Post by Mookie » 2 years ago

Hmmmmm.... I have two distinct reactions to your thesis, that people are prone to overvaluing synergy and undervaluing tempo.

Firstly, I'll definitely agree that lower-variance cards are going to often perform better than high-variance cards. It's very easy to look at your deck's themes and assume that any conditions will be trivially met... but in practice, your opponents are going to be throwing disruption your way. It's not easy to guarantee that you can gain a bunch of life, or stick a massive creature, or whatever. It's also definitely easy to be greedy and throw in a bunch of expensive spells in your deck that look sweet, only for you to die with them in hand because you die before you can cast them.

....however, I also think that if you're approaching your deckbuilding from the perspective of trying to win as many games as possible, then you have missed something pretty important about the format (unless you're playing cEDH, in which case go ahead). I think games of EDH are more fun when people embrace variance and try to do something sweet. I think it's important for people to be able to play their pet cards, even if they aren't very good. High-variance, synergistic cards are, to me, what make games memorable - I'm not going to remember using Thran Dynamo or Fact or Fiction for the twentieth time to make a little extra mana or draw a few extra cards... but I definitely remember the times I get 30+ mana off Black Market, or draw a dozen cards off One with the Machine.

I'll also note that it's important to keep the ceiling and floor of cards in mind when evaluating them - just because a card is synergistic doesn't mean it actually has a ceiling significantly higher than the baseline. In your example, the ceiling on Essence Pulse is... an easier-to-cast Damnation, which isn't very exciting. In that case, yeah, you should definitely go with something more consistent. On the other hand, if you're considering something like Black Sun's Zenith in a Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons deck, the ceiling is making a massive army of deathtouching snakes - that seems like a payoff worth striving for, even if it may be a less consistent board wipe.

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JWK
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Post by JWK » 2 years ago

One thing worth noting, and Mookie kind of noted this... for a lot of possible commanders, if you aren't building the deck around synergy, i.e., to do what that commander does, those commanders aren't really worth playing at all. The pool of potential commanders is a lot larger than the pool of commanders that are objectively good, especially if you are concerned with trying to win ahead of trying to do fun/cool/weird things. Witherbloom is a perfect example. Willowdusk is actually a pretty bad commander, based around pumping creatures up but being unable on his own to pump himself then hit with commander damage. If you decide to stick with him, you are not going to have a very strong deck just because your commander is so weak. Even if you take the obvious (and highly recommended) path of replacing Willlowdusk with Dina and diving full-on into the lifegain stuff, your deck can be only so good. LIfegain is a fairly limited strategy with a few obvious payoffs, and a since many of the support cards to make lifegain decks really work are W or WB, you won't be able to play them in the Witherbloom deck, so by choosing to play this deck at all, you are making a less-than-optimal choice. Thing is, that's okay. The way most people approach this format is not about peak optimization, and I for one am glad of that. I love my Dina deck, which is a heavily-revised Witherbloom precon. It is never going to be competitive, and even if I fully optimize it, the available card pool just isn't as deep as if I was trying to make an optimized deck with a lot of other commanders, but I still have fun with it and I win my share of games against other decks that aren't trying to combo off quickly or just ovewhelm the table quickly with sheer value. It will never win at a table with Thrasios/Tymna or Yisan, but I'm fine with that.

You are definitely correct that some people put too much emphasis on synergy at cost of tempo, though. This is very easy to have happen when your build is essentially "look on EDHrec and toss in all the cards that synergize well with this commander/this deck's core strategy." A lot of people's decks are clunky because they haven't put even a modest amount of effort into streamlining their mana curves, resulting in hands that are full of way too many things they can't cast until later in the game, and often being stuck casting only one thing even in the later midgame because they are running too many cards with mana value 4 or 5.
I have 68 active EDH decks, with more in progress. I don't consider this a problem. Do you?
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Post by Jemolk » 2 years ago

In addition to what everyone else is saying here, I think a big part of the problem is that most people who do this aren't particularly practiced deckbuilders. That's a skill on its own, one that you can learn with practice, but it's not something that people often seem to come into EDH with an understanding of, and you need it here to make decks that you'll enjoy playing and everyone else will enjoy playing against. However, between EDHREC and the way that the competitive formats people come from get completely solved so fast now, deckbuilding as a skill is something that is often undervalued at first blush. Synergistic stuff is fun -- generally, at least in my book, a lot more fun than whatever generic boring goodstuff you'd otherwise put in. But the synergy needs to be worth it, or at least easy enough to get the baseline effect from. With lifegain payoffs specifically, Righteous Valkyrie, Archangel of Thune, and Resplendent Angel are good synergistic pieces. Essence Pulse is not. Not just because its ceiling is a Damnation that also kills indestructible things, but also because it's far too hard to reach that ceiling when you need to. As was pointed out, the payoff just isn't there -- and neither is the consistency. Meanwhile, I actually play Silumgar's Scorn over Counterspell in my 5c dragon deck, because while yes, it's strictly worse as its ceiling is exactly Counterspell and its floor is much lower, in practice you almost automatically hit that ceiling at all times in that deck, and I find it enjoyable to play weird cards that could only possibly work there. It also takes a bit of outside-the-box thinking to realize that Toxic Deluge is in its own right a synergy piece for lifegain, and making those sorts of associations is another thing that can be hard if you're not used to doing it, and you may not even know where to look at first.
39 Commander decks and counting. I'm sure this is fine, and not at all a problem.

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Post by kraus911 » 2 years ago

There's an element of fun in the "machine" of your deck working and an element of fun in being able to interact well and keep up with the table, if not win the game. I think in deciding whether to value synergy or tempo more in your deck you have to decide where on that spectrum you are.

What I really dig about @plushpenguin 's post is how they pointed out to the Willowdusk player that when deciding how to build for a commander there are more options than one might think. I like how you pointed out that gaining life to use as a resource rather than looking for lifegain payoffs is a cool way to approach the commander.

It definitely all comes down to what kind of deck you want, what kind of play experience you want, and whether you like your chosen commander because it's got a cool picture or you're in love with its mechanics or what. I've know people playing Zedruu who go full tilt on the donation theme, it seems to be what the deck wants to do. The point of mine is to get some card draw and also some incidental life gain to keep me alive while I execute my jeskai plan. I mostly donate tokens rather than evil enchantments.

Takeaway here I think is that it's helpful for more experienced players to talk to new players, especially ones frustrated with how their decks are doing, about other options for deckbuilding they may not have considered. And remind them that edhrec is just a list of the most commonly played cards, not necessarily the best ones for their particular plan.

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Post by DirkGently » 2 years ago

I don't think you're really using the word "tempo" accurately. When you're talking about essence pulse, for example, I wouldn't say it has worse tempo than damnation, more that it's less reliable than damnation. Although it can spare your own large creatures, which is something you don't mention. Especially in willowdusk that could be pretty valuable. And it can trigger whatever lifegain-matters things you have. I do think people tend to favor synergistic cards over generically-strong cards, but I agree with what has been said that it's part of the fun of the format. Sometimes I often ask myself is "if I wouldn't use this card here, where WOULD I use it?" Sometimes it's fun to play a card even when there are better options, just because it would be even worse in every other deck.

Idk what something like traverse vs escape would have to do with tempo. They're wildly different effects - at least long-term, I'd argue traverse gives you a lot more tempo since it accelerates you for the subsequent turns, whereas escape offers more value (provided you can't capitalize immediately on the extra mana from traverse with a draw spell or w/e). I generally think of tempo along the lines of - how quickly and how heavily can I develop my board and put pressure on my opponents, or as a control player to answer enemy boards/pressure. Neither of those cards really build boards or put any pressure on directly, nor remove enemy pressure, so it's a weird comparison to talk about tempo imo.

As far as actual tempo - tempo is something that could matter a lot or matter fairly little, depending on meta and build. Aggro decks are going to care a lot more than control decks, cEDH decks are going to care a lot more than casual decks. I see people firing off removal at irrelevant targets because they don't want to "waste the mana" so plenty of people are overvaluing tempo as well. In normal commander games, most games aren't won by having 1 drop, 2 drop, 3 drop - they're won by having powerful, explosive plays that flip the board around. Godo is a good example of a play that can radically shift the board to give you the win. Whether "tempo matters in EDH" kinda depends what you mean. If your goal is to win, I don't think you should focus on having enough 1-drops and 2-drops just to fulfill a standard curve. But obviously neither should you put 20 8-drops in your deck (usually). Obviously tempo does matter, but it's hard to imagine any context where it matters "as much as standard". Standard you have only 1 opponent with only 20 life, so every turn counts. In commander, you can totally win after not playing a spell until turn 5.

Where I do agree is that I think it's crucial to have a gameplan. One of my best examples is my Kaervek deck, because I pick the ramp - which constitutes most of the deck's spells - to hit 7 mana as early and reliably as possible. That means I don't play any 3-mana rocks which tap for 1 mana, no matter how good they are, because my plan (barring lucky draws like fast mana) is turn 2 play a 1-mana rock, turn 3 play a 2-mana rock, turn 4 play kaervek. So all my mana rocks fit into that curve, with an emphasis on 1-mana rocks since a 2-mana rock can be replaced by 2 1-mana rocks. Just throwing synergy pieces into a deck can be fun, but a truly effective deck will generally know what it's trying to do before sitting down, and that plan will usually involve a fairly discrete number of plays, not "try to gain some life and play some cards that care about life and hope it all works out". I like to build from a plan, but it can also come from playing and refining a decklist as you discover what it does best.
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Post by pokken » 2 years ago

This thread is more about individual card power and efficiency and consistency than tempo.

It seems to mostly devolve to the age-old goodstuff vs synergy debate and I agree that most new players do not make informed decisions on this front. But I'd rather start most decks with maximal synergy and bring it down later personally:)

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Post by Cyberium » 2 years ago

In regards to tempo vs synergy, I tend to look at Jolt539's decks on YouTube. No matter which commander he uses he always focuses on adding the basic ramp/draw/removal before putting synergy cards into his decks. Some would argue that's just a "good stuff" deck, but I think a deck without basic survival and speed would not have the chance to express its synergy properly.

Though a player can always adjust his deck's tempo and synergy according to his meta.

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Post by DirkGently » 2 years ago

Cyberium wrote:
2 years ago
In regards to tempo vs synergy, I tend to look at Jolt539's decks on YouTube. No matter which commander he uses he always focuses on adding the basic ramp/draw/removal before putting synergy cards into his decks. Some would argue that's just a "good stuff" deck, but I think a deck without basic survival and speed would not have the chance to express its synergy properly.

Though a player can always adjust his deck's tempo and synergy according to his meta.
Does he have videos on how he builds them? I just see him playing them.

I always think about synergy first, not last, because synergy is the thing that's going to vary most between decks. Maybe I'll end up finding a lot of synergies that draw me cards, and thus render additional draw unnecessary. I also need to identify what my curve looks like to decide what my ramp should look like - if I want ramp at all. Tutoring is another crucial element of many decks which requires seeing the synergy pieces first in order to make decisions about which cards are worth tutoring for, and which different functions are going to be important for the deck. Removal is less likely to vary, however some decks don't care about their own board and can favor wipes, while others will want pinpoint removal. MV desires will also matter - some decks are planning to frequently tap out and will want Snuff Out for maximum uptime, whereas other decks don't mind holding up mana to get a more flexible removal spell.

I see him playing Thran Dynamo in a deck with only 1 card that costs more than 5 and I'm underwhelmed - it looks to me like he's trying to apply an overly-simplistic, paint-by-numbers approach to deckbuilding that I see a lot of newer players use. Effective deckbuilding must be approached holistically. ;)
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Post by plushpenguin » 2 years ago

I honestly wouldn't think of synergy as a last priority, but I wouldn't be beholden to it especially if I know my deck has a special property that can allow me to take advantage of a particular card without needing to build entirely around it to be effective.

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Post by hyalopterouslemur » 2 years ago

Look at Corpsehatch and Spread the Sickness. You're paying five mana for sorcery-speed removal, even if you get two Eldrazi Spawn with Corpsehatch. Both are useful, but I wouldn't consider them filling a removal slot per se in the way Tezzeret's Gambit fills a one-shot card draw slot.

And Death Mutation is just awful.

Now if you can find synergy on a card that fills a role usually antagonistic to your deck archetype like March of Souls in tokens, then by all means...
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Post by ISBPathfinder » 2 years ago

I think the issue is more of the board complexity that they are trying to assemble. If you need your commander + two specific types of cards to make a meaningful boardstate its not being impactful enough and taking too much setup to assemble. +/+ counter strategies are in my opinion notorious for being overly complicated often involving something like a commander + doubling season + some specific creatures to put counters on or generate them. I guess my point is that its worth trying to trim the combination back some to have less cards involved.

Alhammarret's Archive for example is a perfectly fine card for example. I use it in my Anje Falkenrath deck for instance and its pure insanity but I guess my point here is that the lifegain portion of the card is very weak and the card draw can be situationally powerful. The person you are trying to help here is using it in unfortunately a location I would not suggest running it in. Essence Pulse is probably a worse sweeper than most generic black sweepers most of the time even if they can gain life. Gaining life is a very restrictive situation for a one time effect and it may require you to play another card before casting it. Its going to be worse then a real wrath in most cases. I won't say its unplayable but I can't come up with a commander offhand that I would rather have Essence Pulse than Damnation for offhand. In an ideal situation it would be a commander with high toughness that also has a built in lifegain mechanic other than lifelink (or they have less power than toughness) where you can kill everything but them. Thats kind of a very niche situation I just outlined.

I guess my point is that MOST (not all) +/+ counters concepts tend to be a bit slow and involve too many cards in play to function. They tend to be slow to get going and often weak to sweepers. I am not saying that this player needs to play something else but it is my thoughts that most +/+ counter concepts tend to be sort of slow to assemble and vulnerable to sweepers.



In general if someone is new to commander I probably wouldn't get into tempo plays as any sort of suggestion. I often try to get them to run more lands, more draw, less six+ mana plays, and take more mulligans. Tempo is strong but I likely wouldn't bring it up as its a challenging concept to master. I would instead probably direct them more towards a KISS concept and focus on boardstates where your commander + any specific draw can make a semi reasonable boardstate. I get that that isn't true for every card as Swords to Plowshares plus your commander probably isn't a boardstate but avoiding situations where it takes 3-5+ cards assembled to make a board tends to probably be a better place to start than bringing tempo into into the mix.
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PrimevalCommander
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Post by PrimevalCommander » 2 years ago

Tempo has been something I have been working to increase in all of my primary decks. Though I have noticed that, slowly but surely, our small meta is following the greater trend of faster decks, higher power level, and more explosive plays. This is something we are trying to recognize and create other decks that are of varying power so that speed doesn't become the deciding factor in all our games. That way slow durdly synergies can take the forefront in some of our games, and efficiency and tempo can dominate others. Hopefully this will give us more variety in our games and help diversify our playgroup.

I think it comes down to the power level scale and how fast or strong you want your deck to be. Typically High powered 75% decks have a good bit of synergy, since that is what creates an engine of resources to win the game. cEDH decks are low synergy, focused on hyper efficiency, compact win-cons, and heavy interaction or high consistency. These decks prioritize tempo and speed and ignore synergy for the most part. They are perfectly happy to Mental Misstep the Mystic Remora furn one for a big tempo swing, while turn 1 Mystic Remora in a 75% game typically has people slow playing turn 2 or 3 and letting the controller slow themselves down or let it die.

The in between of 75% and 100% is where the synergy and tempo bars start to slide back and forth depending one the individual. These two things are not mutually exclusive, but typically the stronger you want your deck to be, the synergy takes a back seat. My favorite decks right now are those that can function at 75-85% optimization while maintaining a high level of synergy that also increases tempo simultaneously. Though my next build will be a mid-power deck with heavy focus on synergies and less on speed, since I took apart all the decks that fit that area.

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