Holy Crap! Phyrexia is Evil! (Part 2)

Tomorrow is the New Phyrexia prerelease, so I'll be heading out to inflict terror on the pathetically incompleat. But before I do, I wanted to write a follow up to Part 1, in which I explain why I have a few reservations with the new set regarding how its designs affect the way the game works. To do that, I first want to explain the different types of actions available in a typical match.




Proactive Plays are the first type, and include any action in the game that a player can take to directly and positively improve their own standing within the game, generally one that advances a plan for winning. Every game has proactive elements, since these are what provide a means to finish the game and provide some sort of final rankings. In MtG, things like playing a Glistener Elf, targeting my opponent with a Scrapyard Salvo, or milling my opponent with Mind Crank are all examples of proactive plays.

The second type, Reactive Plays, influence the gamestate by negatively impacting our opponent's plans for winning the game. Not all games have reactive elements (for example, in a game like Go, there's really no difference between proactive and reactive plays, since your board state is inversely related to your opponent's board state). In a typical 1 vs. 1 game of Magic, the positions in the game aren't directly related — reactive plays that negatively affects my opponent's board or game state help me by improving my relative standing in the game. Spot removal is the best example of a reactive play. For example, say my opponent controls two creatures, and I only have one. My opponent taps mana to equip one of his creatures, and in response, I destroy it with a Doom Blade. I haven't directly improved my own standing, I still have the same win condition (my one creature), but my relative position in the game has improved. The trick with reactive plays is that even though sometimes they hurt me, they're still good for the game overall, since they increase the number of ways I can interact with the game and other players.

And lastly, we have Preemptive Actions. In Magic, these are usually board neutral: they neither directly impact my opponent's board position, nor do they directly advance my own plan for winning. Instead, preemptive actions prevent or otherwise inhibit my opponent's abilities to make proactive plays of their own. These are the most "griefy," since by preventing my opponent from taking actions, they limit the ways we can interact, which in turn limits how much fun we have playing the game. Enchanting an opponent's land with Evil Presence, targeting him with Despise, playing Torpor Orb, taking a nearly free peek at my opponent's hand with Gitaxian Probe, or targeting something like Stoneforge Mystic with Surgical Extraction are all examples of preemptive plays.  In the last few years, Magic R&D has clamped down on "don't let your opponents play" style-effects (especially after 9th edition rotated five years ago, taking with it a lot of nasty cards like Stone Rain and Persecute), so New Phyrexia (which is chock full of preemptive cards) is obviously a significant departure from recent design standards.

This is not to say that I don't like the individual cards named above, as something like Surgical Extraction is a neat card on its own, and I'd like to own a set. Same with Mental Misstep, Despise, and so on. The problem is that if there are too many different preemptive plays available, they start to choke off the available proactive plays that we can use to win the game. And this is a major hazard, especially in competitive environments where we need the ability to finish three games in 50 minutes or less.

This is also the reason I'm unconvinced that New Phyrexia will do much to shake loose the current top decks in an environment like the current Standard. The strength of the various Caw-Blade decks isn't just that they can dig for reactive solutions, it's that they can generate multiple, robust, proactive plans to win the game by playing a mid-range aggro strategy with small creatures and equipments, or a controlling long-game using manlands and 5-6cc creatures as finishers, or by using Jace 2's library destruction, or by winning via Inkmoth infections. And this will likely continue to be the trend for constructed decks in the near future: players will need multiple paths to victory, because it will be easy to choke out narrow win-cons.

So this is a puzzle for me, and I wish I could get someone from Wizards to answer the question: "Why do a griefer set now?" Because it'll be fun for the majority of our players? Because the Spike population is dissatisfied with the current metagame? Is this a one-time deal just to mix things up? Or is it part of an experiment to test how much grief the current game can handle?

Edit note: I'm also not sure how well I've articulated what I want to say, so for this post, I'd extra appreciate any feedback!