Prolog
It’s a gaming post, people! Continue reading
only if you’re interested in what I’ve been doing with gaming – in particular
with Magic: the Gathering. (MtG, or just “Magic,” one of my very favorite games.)
Introduction
In MtG, players use collectible playing cards to build customized decks and then take turns playing cards from those decks against other players, who are playing cards from their decks. Generally speaking, for most formats of play, decks are built to contain 60 cards. 60 is the minimum for almost every play format, so almost everyone who plays builds to exactly 60, but more than 60 is allowed.
For most MtG game formats, there is a limit of four copies of any individual card in a player's deck. [Other than basic lands, which are the base resources in a deck. I wouldn't even mention them except it will matter later.]
Highlander
But there is a format of deck building called "Highlander" - and in this format, "there can be only one" of any card (again, other than basic lands.) Constructing with this rule typically results in a less predictable deck, but it's an interesting challenge. (The “Highlander” name is from the movie. If you don’t know why, you should probably see the movie someday. The quoted rule comes from the movie.)
It's almost like having a puzzle. Under normal deck building rules, it’s often the case that I build with a particular card as my inspiration. Let’s call it Card X. To make it more likely I'll see Card X during a game, I would like to have four copies of Card X in the deck. But Highlander means I can only have one. So, what should I do? Are there cards similar to Card X I can add, so when I see the new Card X', I use it in a similar way? Are there cards I can add which will make it more likely I'll see Card X?
Similar Cards for Highlander Decks
I’ll give you an example. In Magic, the creature cards in your deck fight for you. Each creature has two base attributes of Power and Toughness, denoted by P/T on the card. Take this creature – Llanowar Elves:
On the bottom right corner, you can see 1/1, meaning this creature has Power 1 and Toughness 1 – almost as small as you can be.
Well, as I said, your creatures can fight for you. (That’s not what this creature usually does – but I’ll get to that in a bit.) If you send this Elves card in to fight for you, it’s likely to lose its battle. If you want to give it a better chance of surviving, and dealing more damage to your opponent, you might want to give it some Power and Toughness it does not normally have. This, in the jargon, is called “pumping” it. Well, of course, in your hand you might have a spell to accomplish this like Giant Growth:
This card gives a temporary +3/+3 to the Llanowar Elves, making it 4/4 for a little while. In the deck I decided to design, I wanted to be able to pump my creatures, and Giant Growth is one of the best, most efficient pump cards. But I can have only one! Since the cards I can actually play – my “hand” -- are only the cards I’ve drawn from my deck of 60 cards, and since that hand typically contains no more than 7 cards, it’s not likely I’ll have Giant Growth. In a normal game, I’d have four random chances to have Giant Growth in hand, so I’d like to find three more pumping cards to make my chances of having a pump card when I want it. (In fact, I might want more than that!)
With so many sets, but the same basic playing rules, Magic has lots of options. Here’s one:
“Ultra”?
A few weeks back, I had an idea to make the Highlander puzzle even more challenging. I was looking at the HUGE number of cards I have, and thought "what if I also limited myself to only allowing one card from any SET in the deck?" Others may have come up with this idea, but for me, it was new, and so I decided I'd give myself this challenge -- and I called this new format "Ultra-Highlander." No more than one card per set in the play deck.
For those of you who are not MtG players (are you really still reading this?), Magic cards are released in "sets" -- collectible groups that come out at a rate of about four per year. I've been buying MtG cards since 1993 -- 27 years. While I haven't bought cards in every single set, I have bought large quantities from the vast majority of them (I counted 83 sets from which I purchased at least a box.) And over the years, I've also acquired a few cards from most of the sets I didn't buy in large quantities. So, when I decided to attempt "Ultra-Highlander" I knew I had thousands (tens of thousands) of cards from which I could select.
This, of course, gives me many options, so that might sound like it would be easy. And, of course, if you just wanted to throw a deck together, it would just be a matter of grabbing cards. But I wanted to create a deck that would be have a fair chance of competing well enough that it would be fun to play multiple times. And making a competitive deck with the restrictions I’ve laid out leads to some challenges.
So let’s get back to selecting a card similar to Giant Growth. You see Predator’s Strike is from a set called Mirrodin, and that set has a load of fun cards! If I select Predator’s Strike from Mirrodin, my deck cannot contain:
Sword of Kaldra, another card that can pump creatures. How do I decide?
Pure Color - Green
Mtg has the notion of “card color.” There are five colors of magic – green, white, blue, black and red. Cards can have one or more of these colors, or they can be colorless. So, basically, six possibilities. Each color has advantages and disadvantages, but more importantly, individual players have a color or color combination that they prefer. I am Green. I build decks with all colors and all color combinations, but when I think about what I am most drawn to, when I analyze which cards make me want to build decks most often, I have to be honest with myself and admit that Green is my favorite.
So, when I decided to create an Ultra-Highlander deck for the first time, I made one important decision: the deck would be all Green, and only Green. While this almost certainly limited the deck’s potential effectiveness, it means I only had to consider pure Green cards. Another challenge for the puzzle.
And it means I won't use Sword of Kaldra – a colorless card.
Reprints: Cards in Multiple Sets
Another factor to be considered is “reprints.” Some cards have been used in more than one set. Giant Growth, being one of the original cards created in the very first set of MtG, and being very useful, has been printed in 17 sets!
In my definition of "Ultra-Highlander = maximum of one card per set" I decided that Reprints gave me options, rather than limiting me. That is, if I use Giant Growth from the Revised set, I couldn't use any other Revised card, but I could use cards from any of the other 16 sets it had been in.
Reprinted cards, then, gave me more options! As I built the deck, I noted which sets contained each card I considered. Then, as I chose other non-reprinted cards from sets, I eliminated the reprint possibilities. Ultimately, for example, while I didn't eliminate every other set for Giant Growth, I used the Fifth Edition (5E) version, because I didn't have another 5E card I wanted to use more, and this let me choose any other card from the other sets.
Synergy? Not So Much
Three of the four annual MtG sets introduce new abilities, and those abilities are often most valuable when played with other related cards -- either building decks from one set only, or from sets which are related. These cards are designed to work well together – they have “synergy.” Many of the cards which are most often used when building typical competitive 4-copies-allowed decks are most useful because there are other cards which have the same abilities or they have attributes that make those abilities particularly valuable. Those cards are most often in a single set, or a few related sets (called "blocks") and so have “set synergy or block synergy.” This results in some cards becoming less useful in a Highlander format, and particularly less valuable if you can't use another card from the set. So one of the first challenges is identifying when a good card in the set is good in this environment, or if its level of set synergy disqualifies it from consideration.
Let me use an example: Timberwatch Elf
Here's another card that can pump. The amount it pumps is based on the number of Elf cards in play, which can be amazing if your deck has lots of elves. That's synergy. And Legions, the set in which this card was released, had lots of Elves! Now, I've built many Elf decks through the years, and I can tell you, I include this card in pretty much every Elf deck I've ever done.
But, when selecting cards for a generic Green deck, I thought I would not have Elves be a high enough percentage of my creatures to make this card as valuable as some other Green card from Legions. I kept it in mind, but sure enough, by the time I was done selecting other creatures, I only had seven other Elves out of the 22 creatures in my deck. This card, which is so good in some Green decks, does not make the cut in my Ultra-Highlander Green because it's synergy ability is too low.
[Now, it did make me consider whether I could build a good Ultra-Highlander Elf deck, but I managed to resist following that squirrel, so I haven't tried yet. I am convinced this card would be my Legions pick if I ever did build one, though!]
Reality (Limited Time & Energy) Sets In
As I mentioned before, I have a lot of cards. Look at my Magic: the Gathering closet.
Every white box you see in that closet is full of Magic cards. As are the white boxes you can't see. As are some boxes in the basement - with cards I will never, ever use. It's a lot of cards. A lot. While my supply is not infinite, it is effectively uncountable.
I have them sorted, so I can find most things when I look for them, but if Green-only cards are 10% of those cards, that still makes the number of cards to consider quite large.
I started the process of selection by going though a few sets, looking over the Green cards, and pulling one, two, three, maybe four candidates from those sets. Then I decided to use Gatherer online to look for possible cards from sets, figuring I'd probably know if I owned a card I might want, and if I owned it, I'd be able to find it. And that worked pretty well, too, for a while.
I used Gatherer, for example, to find as many Green creatures with the Flying ability as I might own. (Flying creatures are harder to protect against. Flying is a weakness for Green, which doesn't have many and most are quite weak, compared to Flying creatures in other colors.)
Gatherer reminded me of the card
I knew I had this card, even though I had not pulled it out for consideration when I was just grabbing cards.
By this point in the process, I had used Excel to create a spreadsheet where I could record all potential cards. I added Bayo Dragonfly to the file. I figured I could find it if it made my list of top possible cards from its set (Tempest.)
Pilfering (and Tearing Down)
This Gatherer process gave me a bunch of options, but it also caused me to look at a bunch of cards I never owned (yes, there are cards I never owned!) so I decided to go back to looking at real, physical cards again.
This time I decided to take a different approach. Rather than going to my unused cards, sorted into sets (mostly), I went after cards which were already in other decks. My reasoning was, if a card was good, I probably already had it in a deck.
So I started pilfering existing decks.
The photo is post-pilfering. That's my box of Green-only decks. (Not all of them. Some of my Green-only decks are also in my "recently built" box, and others are in my "favorite decks" box.)
I grabbed a few likely candidate decks, looked through the cards, and if there was a new card option for my Ultra-Highlander deck, I searched my loose cards for another copy. If I found it, great. If not, I pulled the card out of the existing deck. And, if there was no natural replacement to put in the deck, I tore it down. Some of these decks had been built over 10 years ago, and not played since. It was time. It made me a little sad, but then again, it gave me a deck's worth of cards to consider using elsewhere, and that made me happy.
So, I raided the Green decks and a few Green-and-some-other-color decks, grabbing potential cards as I went, adding them to the Excel file, and tearing down decks that needed to be sacrificed to this Great Endeavor.
Ultimately, I started getting tired. I had been working at this project in my limited spare time for a few weeks. I had a Big Pile of Cards, and a spreadsheet with 136 possible cards to use in the deck.
Trimming to 37 (or so)
OK, remember a couple of numbers I have mentioned so far. First, just above I mentioned that I had 136 potential cards for my deck. Then, remember there are supposed to be 60 cards in a final deck.
But I don't get to use 60 of the 136!
A deck needs to have land in it, as well. Land provides the basic resources to cast the spells represented by the cards. Because the cards will be randomized, you need to have a number of land cards in your deck which will make it likely you'll have the resources to cast what you need. In general, I've found that I need to have 23 land in a 60 card deck to make it most likely to play well. [There are always exceptions, but let's not get into them now, OK?]
The point is, I needed to trim the deck to 37 cards, each from its own unique set.
The trimming process is an iterative one. As an experienced deck builder, I first created the categories of cards I knew I'd need, and examined my candidates to see which cards were best at the categories. I needed Removal cards -- cards which could remove threats my opponents might play. Removal is limited in Green, but there are options. In particular, since one of the weaknesses of Green is Flying, there are cards to remove fliers. And, because enchantments and artifacts can royally mess up a Green strategy, removal of those is good to consider. I also needed to have Finishers. Cards which, later in the game, could be used to do the last bit of damage to my opponent. And so on. I grouped cards into their categories.
But often, I'd find I had put a card into one category, and another card from the same set into another category.
Example: Taunting Elf and Silvos, Rogue Elemental
The Taunting Elf can be used to force your opponent's creatures to ignore all the other creatures you have, so an attack which includes this elf can be very damaging, often finishing your opponent, if you have some other Big Creatures to send into the attack.
Silvos, however, is a really fun Big Creature to send into an attack! Even without Taunting Elf in the Attack, this guy can do some damage, and survive!
I can't have both in the deck at the same time! What do I do? Which do I select?
And that, of course, is when the puzzle starts to take shape. Do I have other Big Creatures which can fill the role Silvos would fill? In Green, the answer is YES. (Which is one reason I love Green.) So Taunting Elf stays.
Isn't that sad? Isn't it disappointing to leave Silvos out of the deck. Yes, it is. Sort of.
Plus 15
When played competitively, Magic is played as a "best 2 of 3 games" match.
For such matches, in addition to your deck of 60 cards, you can bring a "sideboard" of 15 cards. This allows you to modify your deck between games, based on what you saw of the opponent's deck.
So I decided to create a sideboard for my Ultra-Highlander deck. But now I had to decide what kind of rule to make for the sideboard.
The simplest would be to keep the "only one per set" rule. And maybe that's what I should have done.
But I didn't.
Instead, I put in 15 cards, only one of each set. But, it was allowable to duplicate sets between the main deck and the sideboard. This means that, in play, if you sideboard IN a card, you are forced to sideboard OUT the card from the same set. So, in my example above, if Silvos comes IN in between games, then Taunting Elf has to come OUT. I like the puzzle-within-a-puzzle this created, as I balanced the kinds of cards which would have to alternate.
Truth in advertising: I rarely PLAY "best 2 of 3." That's for tournaments, and I typically play casually with family and friends. In casual play, I don't usually play a deck more than once per gaming session, because I have so many decks! And even if I play a deck multiple times, my opponents rarely play their decks again. So if I want to actually try the sideboard, I am going to need "a little help from my friends" to see how it works. I'm sure Paul will indulge me a couple of times, if and when we can ever play MtG again!
Basic Land
One more thing. As I mentioned before, a deck needs land to play. Basic lands are the primary way to get mana (the base resource of the game) and the Basic land for Green is the Forest. I did not even try to figure out how I might get 23 different lands which could produce Green mana. I knew that everything other than a Forest would be less efficient, and if I tried to play with one Forest and 22 other lands, I'd never be able to play a competitive game.
Instead, I went into my trove of basic land and found 24 Forests from 24 sets. They became my mana base. While not all of the 83 sets I mentioned above had their own Forests, enough do that 24 was not hard to get.
Wait! 24? What?
Yeah, you caught me. You noticed that I said that 23 lands in a 60 card deck is the optimal number (IMHO) but I put 24 lands in the deck. What's that about?
Well, shoot. Here's the thing.
If I were actually going to try to win a constructed deck tournament, I'd try as hard as I possibly could to make my deck exactly 60-cards in size. In order to have the same percentage chance of drawing any given card as my opponent, I'd want that. And, for that reason, even for my casual decks, I build to 60.
But I don't really play in tournaments. It's been years. And if I did ever, I wouldn't bring this deck, unless I was willing to just expect to lose.
So, with that in mind, when I tried trimming my deck to only 37 functional cards, but I just couldn't drop the last two, I added one land to balance out the ratios and I called it good. I have 63 cards. I'm leaving it as a future task to find two spells to remove, once I've had a chance to play the deck a few times and decide which cards I was never happy to see.
Epilog
So, there we go. I've defined what an "Ultra-Highlander" deck is, and I've described the process I used to create my first one.
I enjoyed the process, and what's more, I learned from it. I think I could create my next Ultra-Highlander deck much more quickly, at least if I do it before I forget how I approached it (or if I read this post again, to remind me -- which is one of the purposes of the post!)
Now, the only thing left is to provide the deck list. And I will. Really I will.
But I know there is a standard format for those things, and I need to go research what it is, then find a way to build it from the data I have in my Excel file. It might just be copy/paste, but it's more work than I want to do at the moment.
Besides, I don't want my list to get out before I actually get a chance to play the silly thing!
One More Thing
If you have read this entire post, I will be amazed and grateful. Most people I know do not play Magic: the Gathering, and I can't imagine anyone who doesn't play the game will make it this far. And, of my MtG-playing friends, I'm not sure I know any of them who would have the patience to read the entire thing. It's long! So, if you did get all the way to the end, thank you! I'd like you to let me know you managed this feat of perseverance. Maybe I can find a way to reward you with something Magic-related. In addition to my gratitude.
And now, let me leave you with a wish for every game of Magic you play from now into eternity:
May you never be mana-screwed!
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