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An Offer Your Opponent Can’t Refuse

By: Erin Jade Hess (She/Her)

This is an opinion piece.

What does it take for your opponent to scoop up the game by merely revealing private information? How does one end a game by giving away their intricate strategy? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

Like a Bond villain, Counterbalance players in Magic: The Gathering win the game by telling their opponent their evil plot before firing their death ray. A combination of Sensei’s Diving Top and Counterbalance, the deck’s pilot rearranges the first dew of their deck, reveals the top card, and can use it to counter any spell thrown against them, providing the mana costs match.

Today I’d like to discuss a similar tactic within Argent Saga and one of the players that took game psychology to the next level.

Meet Gillian, The Witch Queen, Water champion extraordinaire. While she doesn’t offer the same hard-counter that Counter/Top features, she does offer extremely powerful card draw, especially in a Water or Water/Light spell heavy deck. The strategy is to win the game by having more answers than your opponents questions.

What does this mean? Your opponent plays the Ergon combo, you have a bounce in response. Your opponent is swinging in at your Towers, you have a debuff or destruction in hand. You get the idea.

Much like Chess, TCGs are games of questions and answers. This is where control players (like me) find their niche, answering so many of their opponents questions effectively that they start to ask their own (putting threats on the board and winning). Games with us are long, painful, and often times only fun for one player, but it works.

Gillian thrives in this setup because your deck is already full of spells she can use as fuel, often times allowing you two draws per turn if chance is on your side. Not only will you control your opponent through your cards, you’ll also control the game through psychology.

Nobody will play their best unit knowing what horrors lurk in your hand, why waste their Twilight Knight to a bounce or removal and lose a turn of tempo? Revealing your cards with Gillian not only draws you another spell, it serves as a threat to your opponent; an offer they can’t refuse. “Hey, you don’t play that unit and I won’t send it to oblivion, capeesh?”

This is the essence of a control player, pulling the strings of every aspect of the game, the cards on the board, and your opponent can be yours to use to your advantage in the match.

Any aspiring competitive player deserves to read Johnny Magic and the Card Shark Kids, the tale of John Finkel, one of Magic’s greatest players and original superstar. It’s a fantastic book and can be found for next to nothing on Amazon (I promise this isn’t sponsored, I just really love the book. No affiliate link here.)

There is a chapter where David Kushner describes the strategy Jon took to an official, prominent 90′s tournament. Jon would simply stare past your eyes, into your soul, and straight through you, not even at the board most of the time. Unblinking, unrelenting, unapologetic. Between this mind game and his skill at the game, he took home a handsome amount of prize money.

Curious, I tried this out during my competitive Magic days of yore. I went to a game store a little outside the draw range of my LGS, shuffled up, barely said anything past “this table?”, “good luck”, and “offer cut”. Without hesitation, I played a deck heavy with revealing information on my deck (UR Delver, sideboarded with the Splinter Twin core to keep things interesting) and fired my eye beams. A clean, perfect win. It was only after the broke down the game I would drop the act and actually introduce myself, explaining the strategy, sharing a laugh about the awkward moment we shared.

Here’s how it went down: I would constantly reveal my top card using the effect of Delver of Secrets, letting my opponent know exactly what I was holding onto. Between the threat of multiple counterspells in hand and the Finkel strategy, it closed out games handily.

Now, just as a disclaimer; DON’T DO THIS. It’s incredibly creepy and I did this for science and to write this silly article. Seriously. Please don’t. To prove my hypothesis, I played a few more games without presenting myself as an unholy cryptid, not having too much trouble (except for the Death and Taxes matchup).

Back to Gillian. Information reveal every turn, extra draw power, a deck full of answers; she’s everything I could have ever hoped for in a champion! I fully plan on building around her and having some fun test games, see how she works.

Sometimes doing something unconventional is the right way to win a game. No one expects you to effectively play with your hand revealed, and that holds the potential for a tilt. Or shall I say... counter the balance?

Stay caffeinated,

Erin Jade Hess (She/Her)

Further Reading:

1) https://www.amazon.com/Jonny-Magic-Card-Shark-Kids/dp/0812974387 2) https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/countertop-2009-03-16 3) https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Answer

Art Credit: “Sensei’s Divining Top”, Michael Sutfin. “Counterbalance”, John Zeleznik. “GIllian, The Witch Queen”, G.R.

Forever is a Long Time

By: Erin Jade Hess (She/Her)

This is an opinion piece.

One question that seems to be in the forefront of every TCG player’s mind is “what are my cards worth?” The question in the forefront of every TCG collector’s mind is “what will my cards be worth?”

I’d like to open this little blog with a simple question. With Argent Saga being less than a month old, what does the future hold for constructed play? Will we see a system much like Yu-Gi-Oh!, where cards stay legal forever until they are hit by a ban, or a rotating block standard featured in games like Magic: The Gathering and Force of Will?

Before we begin, I’d like to give full disclosure that I am a longtime Magic and YGO player, so if it seems like I am biased towards those systems and reference those games a lot, that is why. Furthermore, we will be specifically discussing ‘constructed’ play and not ‘draft’. For those new to card games, that means that each player brings their own deck to the table instead of opening and passing boosters with others to create a fresh random deck.

In 1995, Wizards of the Coast announced the Type I and Type II formats for Magic: The Gathering; a list of the sets your were allowed to use as your potential card pool when deckbuilding. Type I events allowed players to construct decks with any (unbanned and unrestricted) card in the game, whereas Type II feature much more limited possibilities.

Many where not pleased with the initial announcement, but it was soon discovered that limitation bred ingenuity (read, the Black Summer of 1996). Type II decks could be constructed from the current Core Set (a standard list of ‘core’ reprints released every year with some tweaks to keep up with the game) plus the latest two expansion sets (and sometimes the other reprint sets, but we don’t speak of the dark times…).

With only the basic list of core cards and the current block’s theme to work with, Type II players with given a small toolkit with infinite possibility, whereas Type I players were always being given new toys to add to their collection.

Type I eventually came to be known as ‘Vintage’, AKA the format where you can play with the ‘Power 9’ (Black Lotus, the five Moxen, Time Twister, Time Walk, and Ancestral Recall) and other powerful cards. Type II came to be known as ‘Standard’ with time and has proven that a rotating format can be good to keep a game fresh. In 1997, Wizards created Type 1.5, which would become known as ‘Legacy’, the format where cards don’t rotate, but you can’t play broken cards from Vintage.

One problem emerged, however… The power level between the eternal formats and the rotating format were drastically different. A Standard deck from the Tempest block (1997) could be utterly crushed by a Vintage deck chock full of some of the most ridiculous cards ever printed. A similar effect could be seen in a Vintage vs Legacy game. This problem would only grow as the game advanced. With new cards always entering the card pool and never leaving, Legacy, Vintage, and eventually Modern format decks would always creep in power with the release of every new set.

Standard solves this issue by removing older sets from the cardpool, limiting choice and reducing the chance for broken combos to end the game on turn two (most of the time, except for Skullclamp…). This seems great and all, but this is where I want to start this discussion, proper.

Eternal formats in established games will only ever enjoy a couple new cards (if they are lucky) per set that could even potentially compete in their respective formats given their average power level. With so few options entering the pool of relevant cards per year, it allows the formats to grow and evolve while building upon classic strategies. This means that when cards rotate out of standard, most of them lose close to ALL of their value on the secondary market, with the only ones spared being the odd one-or-two that become must-haves for every deck (see ‘Fetch lands’).

It’s almost a right of passage for a new Magic player to drop a good shiny little penny on a decently competitive Standard deck, only to have it rotate out of legality a year or two later. This proverbial player (I.E. me) takes their old cards to their friendly local LGS, only to be told that the deck they spent good money on was effectively worthless and wouldn’t cover the cost of building a new standard deck (RIP my four $30 Boros Reckoners in 2014…).

Now is when I get to end my history lesson and bring Argent Saga back into the picture. The cardpool is EXTREMELY small at this point in the game. We have Betrayal, the intro decks, and some neat promos at our disposal with an expansion pack on the way. There is just nothing to rotate out now, but as the game grows and continues, eventually there will be.

I hate standard formats and refuse to play anything but eternal formats, but that is my own personal opinion on card games and how I choose to approach them. I have TONS of friends that are totally jazzed on standard, and good for them! You’re enjoying the same game in a different way; more power to you! However, when I purchase cards and complete a deck, I wanted it to stay legal forever. It’ll lose a bit of competitive edge if it isn’t updated and retested regularly, but the core will always be there, ready to shuffle up.

We need to ask ourselves now in the game’s history, do we want to see one eternal format game, like YGO, or would a standard + eternal game like MTG make more sense in the long run? The is certainly merit to both systems and having choice is good, but this is a discourse worth having while Argent Saga is young.

Stay caffeinated,

Erin Jade Hess (She/Her)

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