Pattern Recognition #146 - The Top of the Library

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

26 March 2020

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition! This is TappedOut.net's longest running article series. In it, I aim to bring to you each week a new article about some piece of Magic, be it a card, a mechanic, a deck, or something more fundamental or abstract. I am something of an Old Fogey and part-time Smart Ass, so I sometimes talk out my ass. Feel free to dissent or just plain old correct me! I also have a Patreon if you feel like helping out.

The Library. In a fit of pure punage, you actually not only need a card to enter this library, but depending on what you're doing, you need as many as 40, 60 or even 100! Or more!

The "Library" is a thing that has come to us from the flavour of the very first set, from the rules book itself which described the library as just that, the place where we hold all of the spells we use in our Spellbook of a hand when they are not in use. Like the "Graveyard", this is an archaic term that has been kept around because it is something unique to Magic, it helps define the game and how we interact with it, giving it more life than we would otherwise attribute to it.

Mechanically speaking, the Library is a curious thing. It is a resource for a savvy player, both in the potential and in the practical. It is at the same time a known and an unknown (though I could not describe it as a Known Unknown or as an Unknown Known). It exists as a part of a cycle of play that includes the hand, the battlefield and the graveyard, and while for the post part, you take your resources from it, you can also put resources back into it with work.

Constructing a library, a deck, is perhaps the most intense thing you can do in Magic. With this step, you create a deck that you can play with ease, or one that doesn't work the way you want. Mathematicians have poured over the fine details of how the game operates, and the nature of the library and the relative amounts of resources that go into it.

Of course, that's not what I'm talking about today. Today, I want to talk about deck manipulation and all the ways we don't have to depend on our shuffling of the library at the start of the game to determine what cards we get and when.

So that of course leads into the first question we must ask - Why?

Well, I'm sure that some of you already have the right answers in mind, so this is for the people who do not understand the sheer power of what I am going to talk about and how to best do it.

Deck manipulation comes in what I think of as three broad flavours, and what they do and why they are important. And each form of deck manipulation is a way to answer the question of why manipulate your deck.

The first form of manipulation is a form of subtraction. Any card that is removed from the deck is a card that is a resource that you make into a known known, a card that you know what it is and where it is.

Fetching comes in a couple forms and is the first type of deck manipulation that many players see when they start the game, if only because the next type I will talk about is a bit more subtle.

Fetch is not a card, but a class of cards of all types, from Land to Planeswalker, that for a cost, allow you to search your library for a card with a certain quality and either put it into play directly or more often, into your hand.

For example, Fabled Passage is a Land that is part of a grand design in Magic that allows you to sacrifice a land to search your library for a land and put it onto the battlefield. Fetch Lands (and not just cards like Arid Mesa which take the name for themselves) are designed to help smooth out the mana of decks by acting as a sort of either or for the deck, a way for the card to exist in a sort of flux between being what it actually is and what it could be.

But it's not just lands. It's also cards like Mystic Tutor or a Gamble or all the way up to Conflux. These are all fetches (also called Tutors because only now as I write do I remember the cycle of cards this ability it named after - Demonic Tutor), these are all cards that have the same basic utility though the execution and cost can and do vary wildly.

This is the first version of deck manipulation. To manipulate the state of your deck in such a manner that this card you have in your hand both is itself and any other potential card in your deck. There's a term in quantum physics to describe this sort of state, but I'll be damned if I know it right now. I'll probably figure it out after the article gets posted. Isn't that the way of things? To not know what you have until you have it?

The next sort of deck manipulation is Top Deck Manipulation. This is an aspect of the game that doesn't get a lot of focus, but still resides in places new and old. It is based on the simple premise that no matter what colour you are in, you will draw the next card in your deck at some point (glares at certain decks that deny even that) and by knowing what is or is not that card, you gain an advantage.

OK, let me step back here for a moment. Unlike fetches of tutors, topdeck manipulation has the advantage of deliberately changing the order of your deck, rather than through random shuffling. And this deliberation is something I like to divide into two type - Hard and Soft manipulation.

A 'soft' manipulation is a mechanic like Scry (linked article, go read!) where you can look at the top of your deck and determine if you want to keep it or not, then draw a card. You may not know what it is, but you do know what it is not, with the hope that the next card you draw will be better.

On the other hand, hard topdeck manipulation is almost exclusively the domain of . This is the sort of manipulation that comes when you Index your deck, and you rearrange the top of your library without moving anything out of it as you would with Scry.

Well, with Scry, you can still do that, but you also have the option of putting things to the bottom of your library and just get new cards.

But with hard topdeck manipulation, you tend to look deeper into your deck and from there you can arrange to your liking the order in which you draw your next few cards. You can arrange for optimal draws, making sure you hit your lands when you hit them, or to push back a card you know you won't need until later in favor of cards you can play now.

Of course, the best hard top deck manipulator is a card I have singled out in the past, Sensei's Divining Top, a card so valuable in any deck for its ability to sort out your draws, and in a pinch, draw you a card at the expense of being the top card of your library for your next draw is something that cannot be understated.

The difference, I suppose, between the two types is that Hard manipulation doesn't leave room for doubt about what you are going to draw next, whereas Soft does. It's that last little bit of uncertainty, the difference between Serum Visions and Preordain. It's small, but it's there and it's absolutely massive when the difference hits and you win or lose.

As an aside, there is an additional part to this, something that I think would be seen as point 2.5, an addendum to the ability to topdeck manipulate like that. And that is the ability to manipulate the bottom of your library.

For some of you, this may not seem like a big thing, and indeed it is something of a fringe case. A fringe case that every so often gets a nod from Wizards. Consider for example, the case of Grenzo, Dungeon Warden. This card from Conspiracy is a creature that cares about the bottom of your library and if it's a creature that meets a certain condition, then that creature goes onto the battlefield instead. It's certainly an interesting Commander from what I've seen, and when combined with cards that allow you to scry cards to the bottom of your library like Crystal Ball, or with more archaic cards like Soldevi Digger that put a card from your graveyard to the bottom of your library.

Yes, that's a card that exists. I've confused people when I play it and I insist that in this format? Yes, Graveyard order matters because I make it matter.

But more interesting is Tunnel Vision, a card that I have put into my Teferi, Temporal Archmage cEDH deck as a "Plan C" in terms of winning. Because when I know what's at the bottom of my library, I can blow it up with this card for a win with Thassa's Seer, or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries. Knowing what is at the bottom of your library means that you can stop there when it comes to using your library as a resource, rather than making a gamble on how far down the card actually is.

The last form of deck manipulation is rude, harsh and with about three exceptions, really a byproduct of other methods of manipulation. Yet it sometimes the only thing you can do is force a player to Shuffle their Library. To whit - Soldier of Fortune. This creature and its effect that appears on very few other cards do two things. The first and most obvious is to be a 'reset' on someone else's manipulations. They stack the deck in their favour - literally as I should have impressed on you by now - and you throw all that out the window, resetting all their effort.

The other side of this is defensive, or rather I should say that it a case where you have looked at the top of your deck and you don't want the card or cards that are coming. You need options now, so you need to hit the emergency reset button on your deck. You Shuffle It.

By re-randomizing your deck, you reset back to chaos the order of cards. This is measure by which you can try your luck at your deck again without any sort of preconceived notions about what you have coming up. Is it any wonder that this only showed up in with their love of random chance?

Library manipulation comes in many forms, from intentional to accidental. While it is mostly a reward, it is not without worry as there are cards that can force all your work to be undone or even to punish you for it. Ob Nixilis, Unshackled for example punishes tutoring and by extension library shuffling.

But on the whole, manipulating the top of your deck is seen as a good thing by Wizards as it improves and smooths out gameplay, something that can be important in all formats and in all levels of play. Manipulating the whole of the deck is still right out though.

Of course, this is all contingent on how many cards are in your deck. Casting Index when your deck is 53 cards - 60 in a deck minus an opening hand of 7 - is different than doing it when your deck is 93 cards when you cast it on your first turn in Commander. Scale matters when you go looking at your deck, and that needs to be accounted for when you act.

Just remember that too much manipulation of your deck runs into the concept of durdling, or spinning wheels, that is, acting for the sake of acting and not actually doing anything. This is one of the major complaints levied against Sensei's Diving Top, and I can see why in having used it myself.

But as a means by which to improve play of the game, as a means by which players can dig themselves out of a hole of bad luck or in being able to create spectacular plays through sheer persistence and effort? That's what makes this a worthwhile thing to do in the eyes of Wizards.

So the next time you look at the top of your deck and you wonder what it is, know that there are always options that will allow you to Peek into the future and decide whether or not you want to Opt in or out of it.

Join me next week when I talk about something. Don't know yet, but I'll figure it out! Maybe I'll finally get my Friendly Local Spike to help with an article or three. Maybe not. We'll see.

So, until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!