Synergies are usually about assembling pieces of an engine on board or in hand. So naturally, seeing more cards or having more mana let's you get the right combinations more easily.
In this example, he is talking about ramp decks, but I think that the same is true of synergy decks, except that instead of casting expensive spells, they are amassing and deploying engine pieces.
Expensive cards or synergies take over a game in case of a stall.
Evasion and Overrun effects are key to ending games.
Expensive cards or mana sinks win games.
Most fun games I had was when the answers were available, but there were less answers than threats. However, having way to few answers leads to non games.
Right, you want your players to have agency in the ability to respond. The point was that if you overload on removal you make those synergies so much harder to reach.
I guess I also should've posted my own followup thoughts! I, too, posted in my cube blog about this.
@LadyMapi is on point here. Incremental advantages (including having slightly better creature, or slightly more Scry decisions, or whatever) tend to matter more when neither player has enough resources (mana, cards, etc) to buy into the big leagues of card advantage (via a fully enabled Crusader of Odric, or a Rishkar's Expertise, or whatever).
Totally agree. I talk about this a bit in my post, linked above. I posit that small games were more hostile to synergy than large games, which is not always true, but generally holds in terms of setting some design goalposts for whatever your objectives are. Your post does a nice job of hitting the highlights way more concisely than my post, haha.
Agreed that these different kinds of big games all come with different flavors. But generally I think it's true that in big games, regardless of which game resource one has an abundance of, synergy and other scaling effects matter more while non-scaling incremental advantages matter less. And I guess, maybe the scaling effect is sometimes just a really big X spell in that case where you have a "few high-impact decisions" to make, but the point is that the cards most favored in that big game are still scaling bigger than the threshold-style cards that work best in small games.
Yes and no. I think 'The Deck'.dec votes for small games - it used things like Moat, Disrupting Scepter, Swords, Counterspell, etc - 1-for-1 or 1-for-n trades. So did Countertop control, in particular Miracles - Terminus takes a lot of resources off the board for a single
. But there have been very Big control decks - Lorwyn-era 5CC immediately comes to mind. So too Cruel Control. But in your environment, I think it might be better to look to stuff like 'Next Level Blue', a The Deck that used Goyf as its Serra Angel and played tons of counters, removal, and Cliques, as well as Sword of Feast and Famine to make big mana. NL U did a lot of the same things as The Deck - just like Moat invalidated Villain's creatures back in the day, in 2011, so did a Tarmogoyf. Clique attacks the hand, and the battlefield and stack are basically yours to police due to the big mana from SoFaF, and could never run out of interaction due to Riptide Laboratory + Venser (a trick Legacy Miracles briefly tried with Venser+Karakas).[/c]
I think most control decks are trying to obviate the opponent's resources by spending their own cards (a small-game thing), until eventually the game reaches a resource-starved-but-many-lands-in-play state where the control mage can take over through some or all of 1) big topdecks like Cruel Ultimatum, 2) incremental value like an unanswered planeswalker, 3) or pure card draw to keep the 1-for-1s going. But these are all relatively small-game strategies -- contrast Lorwyn's 5C Control to Lorwyn-era Kithkin, and it's obvious that the control deck votes for a smaller game until they're ready to turn the corner.
I guess you mean cards like:
Yes, but ... when I say "partly obviate...", I don't mean Wrath of God, since that completely destroys any creature-based synergies and would pull against what it seems Chris is trying to accomplish with their synergy-driven format. I really am talking about efficient Pacifism effects, mass Pacifisms like No Mercy, or even Wrath played against a noncreature-based synergy. Just anything that allows Villain to get partial value from their game objects.
Hmmmm this is super interesting. I don't really get what "beater midrange" is, though, and I don't think of all synergy as slow (Affinity or Phoenix, for example).
Well, agro should be able to overcome one wrath effect. Typically, the control player taps out to play the wrath and the aggro one has a turn…
Yeah don't look into the names too hard I just tossed them onto the pic for some context. And this is cube focused, so "affinity" and the like typically need not apply to my definition of "synergy"; think more loam strats or Sidisi decks. I consider stuff like aristocrats and affinity more aggro-combo anyways. Again, can't think into the naming too much. Its more about what a particular deck is trying to accomplish and how, and less about what label the broader community gave a particular deck.
