Why Magic is Fun: Tempo vs. Card Advantage

A few days ago, Jay Treat asked the following question on twitter:

What would happen if you took all the spells from, say, 8th Edition and made them cantrip?
— Jay Treat (@WizardsFamiliar) April 22, 2015

In the ensuing conversation, I claimed:

@WizardsFamiliar The tension between card advantage and tempo advantage is the very heart of why Magic works as a game.
— HavelockV (@MagicSonnets) April 22, 2015

Jay asked me to elaborate on this point in an article, so here we are!

First, some background. If you haven't already seen them, have a look at Reid Duke’s excellent articles on tempo, card advantage, and how they interact. In the last, he writes:

Part of the problem is that tempo and card advantage frequently compete with one another. You make sacrifices in tempo to gain card advantage, or you make sacrifices in card advantage (or card quality) to gain tempo. These tradeoffs can stem from either the way you build your deck or the way you play the games.

In other words, the twin constraints of mana and cards create natural decision points. You can cast Divination to win the card advantage battle, or Wind Drake to win the tempo battle, but not both. This fundamental tension between accumulating resources and deploying them against your opponent appears in many other popular games.

• In Hearthstone, you can draw a card with your Warlock power, or summon a Knife Juggler.
• In Starcraft II, you build a third Hatchery, or hit your opponent with a Roach all-in.
• In League of Legends, you can farm jungle passively, or gank lanes to get your carries snowballing.

The reason this tension shows up in so many places is that it creates a plethora of desirable effects. I’ll talk about these all in the context of Magic, but it’s worthwhile to consider how they apply in other games as well.

First, it creates meaningful decision points in the game: if you choose to durdle and draw cards while your opponent is smashing your face, you’re gonna lose. If you throw away three creatures on an alpha strike that brings your opponent to ten life, you’re gonna lose.

It offers non-obvious choices. Sure, you’ll always cast Wind Drake instead of Divination on turn three, but what if it’s turn ten? Or, once you’ve hit a board stall, should you Doom Blade that Pillarfield Ox and swing for the fences, or save your removal for better value? The correct play in each case will depend on the board state, life totals, and the cards in each player’s hand and deck. Players who have the skill to evaluate these situations accurately will be rewarded. On the flip side, LSPs will be penalized, but often invisibly so; they’re more likely to think, “She had a Baneslayer Angel, so I lost,” than, “I should have sandbagged that Doom Blade!”

It creates strategic diversity. The entire aggro-midrange-control continuum is based on this dichotomy. If decks weren’t constrained by how many cards they could draw, we’d all be playing burn. If there were no limits on mana, we’d run nothing but giant threats, card draw, and counterspells. Having two axes of gameplay forces each deck to put appropriate weights on the different approaches, or even rely on being able to switch focus mid-game.

It allows players to pick their own play style. A player who enjoys winning via tempo can choose a deck that suits him, and go for the exciting all-in YOLO plays. A different player can go 3-0 after drafting a deck with four Divinations.

It gives built-in weaknesses to powerful cards. A long time ago, R&D was terrified of printing 2/1 creatures for a single mana. (Look at Randy Buehler’s commentary on an old Vapor Ops test!) However, despite being extremely powerful on the tempo axis, such creatures are so crummy in terms of card advantage that they’re quite safe to print. Similarly, expensive planeswalkers like Ugin, the Spirit Dragon are monstrous card advantage machines, but lousy tempo plays, and can easily be punished. Note that most major development mistakes are strong tempo plays that also create card advantage, such as Bloodbraid Elf and Stoneforge Mystic.

It allows designers to shift environments between the two modes. Tempo-focused mechanics such as Landfall and Bloodthirst lead to fast limited environments like Zendikar and M12. On the flip side, there are sets like Invasion where card advantage was much more important. It is absolutely vital for Magic not to feel too much the same from year to year, and the freedom to tweak this balance is an important tool for creating variety.

Perhaps most importantly, it creates a built-in negative feedback system which leads to more satisfying games. Because the mana system requires tension between spell cost and power, the player who is winning on the tempo axis is often not the same player who is winning the card advantage battle. Thus, even a game that is clearly won by one side feels like it was a worthwhile struggle. A player who lost on tempo says, “I killed all her threats and had Frost Titan in hand, but she was able to burn me out.” A player who lost on card advantage says, “I had him down to three life, but then he cast a big blocker.” Both of them feel like they were close to winning, and in a sense, they were.

(Tangentially, this is why I think Hearthstone is much less fun than Magic: there’s too much of a positive feedback loop. The player who is behind in tempo is forced into worse trades, and rapidly falls behind in card advantage as well. Losing in Hearthstone sucks!)

What should we take from this as designers? I’d say the most important lesson is carefully balancing these two priorities, so that both axes come into play in any limited environment you create. Many mechanics naturally push in one direction or another, and awareness of those tendencies will help you decide which mechanics belong in your set. Furthermore, each color also needs some amount of each, although the precise balance point will vary. (Much of my beef about Red came from the fact that constructed-quality red cards used to be all tempo, with little potential for card advantage.)