Overvaluing Synergy at the Cost of Tempo
Posted: Sat Aug 07, 2021 6:38 am
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?
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?