Aight, we back yet again. Somehow in my long years of being an L1 Judge and Modern and EDH player, I had never realized that learning tempo in Magic The Gathering is a rather visceral experience, in that you learn experientially. For the layman, that means that you have to learn that deep sense of dread and hopelessness in your gut as an Azorius or Jeskai Control Deck beats you to death with Celestial Colonnades across a half dozen turns. It’s a coming of age of sorts.
The Problem: Speed, Baby!
Magic The Gathering is truly an excellent game for children, much to the chagrin of people who take the most complicated game in existence far too seriously. My various hats over the years can tell you that as a kid with a learning disability via dyscalculia growing up, Yu Gi Oh and later Magic The Gathering were excellent math teachers. The game is complex enough that it measures all sorts of delightful things such as memory and pattern recognition. The complex play patterns are simply boiled down math in another context, with visual and gameplay stats. Not bad for a game developed by a Math Major, eh? Cheers to Garfield!
Now, the veneer has been pulled back! As the classic Incredibles meme goes: “Math is Math!” Which means you can boil MTG down to a series of quantitative data points. These are the classic concepts behind the mana curve and how Mono Red can go Brrrr. They’re extremely nuanced and diverse data points, yes. But unlike the qualitative lens where one can insert subjectivity to make larger points, quantitative data points are just the analysis of numbers at the end of the day. Remember – “Math is Math!”
Tempo, as many other Magic articles over the years have purported – comes from Music, to designate speed or timing. And Magic is truly a dance of speed, in a sense. You are trying to ensure a smooth mana curve so that you can pay for your spells and creatures that will win you the game. Truest witchcraft! Because the oldest adage is true: You must pay for your spells in order to put them on the stack.
For those of you that have no clue what the fuck I’m talking about… Magic: The Gathering uses costs printed on most cards to determine how much mana you pay for them. You drop lands and tap them for mana to pay those costs to put things on the stack. You’d be surprised at how often even in the CEDH scene people fuck up this sequence of events and resources. Myself included, especially when I’ve been vaping.
So tempo is how fast you can slap down lands, generate extra mana, and jam sick cards that help you win the game as speedily as possible in most formats. In most Magic formats, you play best of three 1 vs. 1 matches. This means you have to be faster than your single opponent, as close to 2:1 as possible. (If you don’t understand ratios, google it.) It’s pretty easy to get the feel for certain strategies or colors after enough games of Magic. Green ramps mana really well, Blue and Black play more control strategies, etc. Via pattern recognition, most players can often pick up the increasing speed of the game the more competitive the meta they play in. Which kind of makes average player competence a hit and miss based on meta, which is another article on quantitative MTG altogether.
Now, this good old 1 vs. 1 scenario gets even more complicated once you get into EDH slash Commander. Not only is the card pool incredibly vast, the banlist small, and the social aspect notwithstanding… You suddenly have three opponents instead of one. That means your force leverage suddenly needs to be 3:1 or better. Granted – some cards thrive in feeding off your opponents. That’s why Dockside is busted in Commander but not too badly in most 1 vs. 1 formats. Granted, you can have four copies of a good card to smooth out your tempo in 60 card formats, which isn’t the case in 100-card singleton. Your first hand is 8/100 cards.
So what the hell are you to do?!? How does one learn tempo quick enough to jam some CEDH or EDH?! How do you find your need for speed?
The Solution: Tuning Your Speed.
You don’t have to learn the entire meta to properly deploy a knowledge of tempo into your games of Magic. Sometimes the zeitgeist of MTG just tells you what’s good before you can really get much of a chance to brew. Cards that leverage themselves well against multiple players will reign supreme and grant enormous tempo in EDH, whereas in a format like Modern, you’ll have to leverage cards on a one to one basis as best you can, pushing for as many 2 for 1s as you can get.
Hilariously, this quirk makes EDH more streamlined in terms of cards that become auto-includes. Rhystic Study and Mystic Remora do fabulously in the format, and cards I repped early on like Archivist of Oghma become all-stars after drawing stupid amounts of cards for low amounts of mana. Dating this article, queue the recent panic about Orcish Bowmasters in the CEDH scene for instant recognition of how the card gets incredible value when there are three enemy players at the table. If you want to speed up the tempo of your deck, run more of these cards. If your deck is too strong and needs tuning down to match your friend circle meta, rip ‘em out. Your choice. If you want to speed up your wins, ensure deck consistency by running tutors, (although in many casual Commander tables these will earn you groans due to their sheer power, being replacement cards for the best cards in your deck and ensuring better consistency and thus faster tempo.) Are you noticing a trend even in this article – free spells are powerful, and card advantage is king?
In a sense, tuning your decks is kind of like the tuning of an engine. Do you want pulling power? Or pure speed? The right tools will accelerate certain gameplay much better than their peers. In 60 card one versus one formats, decks running synergies that require some setup time often run countermagic or board interaction of some sort to buy themselves time. Related, one of my favorite magic colors to play is all of them. Because with the full Rainbow you can leverage all of the best cards and increase your speed via sheer card quality. Not to mention that there are plenty of cards that have been printed over the years that are free to cast, costing you card advantage or later mana payments in lieu of up-front mana.
So what’s the long and short of better tempo? What’s the ultimate tempo cheat guide for dummies? Well friends, there are a couple of guidelines that echo across most formats and metas of Magic: The Gathering… The first is that you should always be on the lookout for free spells. One of the great things about Magic: The Gathering is that mana and resource management makes pure card advantage less of a powerhouse than it is in other similar games. Cards like Force of Will, Phyrexian Mana, hell, even Energy and other such busted mechanics that downcost or allow the free casting of cards in your hand will always increase the tempo of the game and overall meta. Look at the history of the banlist for mana formats, and you’ll find cards that break what many call “parity” in MTG. This reverse psychology version of tempo where you need to break parity on your own cards is called Stax, and is a famous playstyle that slows your opponents down while ensuring your speed remains the same or better.
Sometimes, “free” spells don’t immediately appear to be free, but are instead insane force multipliers. Let’s take Planeswalkers as a card type as an example. I despise planeswalkers, because mathematically, or from an “action economy” game designer standpoint, the card advantage of dropping a single card and then having an infinite accruement of value every turn until attacked to death is enormous. Cards like the Blue Teferi that can activate every turn make multiplayer formats somewhat of a joke depending on the quality of their abilities. A banned example in EDH is Paradox Engine, as it allows for infinite value provided you have card advantage to fuel the engine.
If you ever want to know the through-vein of faster tempo – look for cards that either break that 1:1 or 3:1 advantage in terms of average mana generation or card advantage. I’m sure somebody somewhere has already created a value list for every resource in Magic The Gathering. Just like filtering your deck via fetchlands or tutors gives 0.0069% of a card improvement in drawing later, I’d put Card Advantage at the very top, followed closely by card selection or mana generation. Some of the classics at improving tempo are subsequently planeswalkers as noted earlier, going back as far as our good old friend Jace, The Mind Sculptor.
So, free spells, tutors, card advantage, and faster mana generation will always improve tempo. Some card archetypes like Planeswalkers also just contribute to your overall tempo by improving your overall action economy, or the number of things you can do each turn. You should also look for alternate economies, because often they aren’t balanced well and end up busted, such as a few key synergies in Energy counters, or the ever-busted Phyrexian mana. In EDH and Commander, oftentimes the best cards are going to be either asymmetrical stax effects like Drannith Magistrate that slow your opponents down whilst not touching you in the slightest, or cards that specify “all” or “for each player” as cards that would normally net you less value in 60 card formats will become 3-4 target spells or benefit you exponentially.
There are some famous examples of cards that were SO GOOD at improving tempo, they allowed you to play entire turns on other people’s turns! In 60 card formats, there were the famed Mindslaver or Emrakul locks, in which you would take your opponents next turn and basically torpedo any game actions you could. Effectively, you would play the entire game as a game of solitaire and your opponent would be forced to scoop or give up. In EDH or Commander, the most egregious card, one I played against as a format staple for months here in the Vancouver EDH scene, was Prophet of Kruphix. Prophet gives you the ability to untap permanents and play at flash speed on opponents turns. I’m sure you can see why getting four turns for every one opponent’s turn would improve your tempo towards a banworthy amount.
Some of these strategies are still possible in certain formats. They still break tempo by gifting you multiple “turns.” The card combinations exist to recreate Prophet of Kruphix even in modern-day EDH. But assembling a Leyline of Anticipation alongside a Seedborn Muse is a tad more complicated than dumping out a single card and immediately profiting from it. Because remember, the name of the game for tempo is speed. You either want to be matching every play from your opponents card for card, or in formats where a multiplayer table makes that impossible, accruing value ahead of your opponents wherever possible.
That’s the core concept of tempo for dummies – you gotta go fast. If you find yourself struggling to keep up with opponents, a great place to practice your tempo is in mono-red 60 card formats where you are literally racing to lock down or kill an opponent before they can mount an effective defense. Some people like to flip this on its head with cards like Thought Seize, that literally prune away the best cards in your opponent’s hands on a one card for one card basis. (A much tougher feat to do efficiently in 4 player formats outside of cards like Siphon Mind!)
So, if it helps, think of Magic as a race. Especially in four player formats, you have to be constantly juggling the value of your own cards against your opponents. If you want to quickly know who has the best tempo, count cards in hand or mana generation on board. Usually cards in hand is the best indicator or immediate strength, mana notwithstanding. When in doubt, go back to the age-old adage: “Math is Math!”
I’m strange, in that I don’t value winning in Magic as much as most. I value my time. So in a sense, good tempo ensures that I’m going to have good games of magic, with all players making strong, speedy decisions that help them advance their own game state towards a win. I’d much rather spend my time playing good games of magic over one-sided bad ones. So in the hopes of balancing tables everywhere, I wish you all the speediest of tempo, and an easy time in mastering it.
Now, let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
