Pattern Recognition #266 - Prowess

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

12 January 2023

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

So, this week's subject is a bit on the softer side of things. Mostly because it's hard to get to a point where you can definitively define how it works given that there's a lot of abilities out there that have some overlap to them and synergize quite well with it.

Which, now that that is out of the way, let's talk Prowess. Originally conceived of in the Second Great Designer Search by Jonathan Loucks, it would take four years for it to see the light of day in the Khans of Tarkir Block. Mechanically, this is a mechanic that is quite simple on the surface, but as I will discuss, it can be anything but. To whit, Prowess is a Keyword ability for creatures that states "Whenever you cast a non-Creature Spell, this creature gets +1/+1 until the end of the turn." Very simple, on paper. Very complicated when you're on the board. Trust me. I've got this deck in front of me, and it can be extremely difficult to keep track of triggers.

Historically speaking, Prowess exists because at the time, Wizards was trying to invoke a case of what I like to call supersymmetry. No, not the physics thing. Rather, Wizards was trying (again) to encourage more creature based combat to resolve the came, and to that end, tried to give each colour pairing a combat mechanic to help create an underlying means for Wizards to encourage combat across future sets. Now, for some, this was pretty obvious. got Lifelink, would eventually get Menace, and as they went along, they realized that not every colour pairing had something solid behind it. And so goalposts got moved leading to Wizards deciding that needed something that wasn't an Evasion ability, but could also synergize with their allied colours of and .

Prowess fit that bill. It wasn't Flying or Skulk or anything else that did that meant that their creatures couldn't be blocked, and most importantly, it agreed with 's preference for casting non-creature spells. So, Prowess was introduced to the game with Khans of Tarkir! Associated with the Jeskai Clan, Prowess represented how these people channeled their superior knowledge into their martial prowess. Hey, the word choice works too!

As of the time of this writing, Prowess exists on 52 cards in the game, and the three non-creature cards with this mechanic, such as Goblin Wizardry and Jaya, Fiery Negotiator produce tokens with Prowess. The Majority of these are , with about a third being , and 5 creatures. This mechanic is well represented at all rarities, and

Anyway, allow me to introduce you all to perhaps the most effective Prowess card in the game, the one that, while in Standard, helped define an whole archetype, and one that I am proud to be running right this second. Well, I'm actually writing right now, but you know what I mean.

This centerpiece of mono- decks for Khans, as well as its reprint in The Brothers War, the Monastery Swiftspear is a frightening effective application of the mechanic in a colour that benefits the most from it. For those of you just joining us, and aren't aware of all the ins and outs of Magic, there is a deck archetype called "RDW", which is short for "Red Deck Wins". This is a deck based around cards (currently in Standard) like Strangle, Play with Fire and Lightning Strike, all cheap spells that deal direct damage to a target. But with the Swiftspear, these spells also serve the dual purpose of making said creature larger than it was before. Which in turn makes it harder to kill when you attack with it. And because Prowess works on instants, combat tricks now include dealing direct damage to an opposing creature and now the Swiftspear can hit harder and take more hits. Or skip the direct damage, and cast Sure Strike and turn the Swiftspear into a 5/3 with First Strike. What's that? Deathtouch on Sheoldred, the Apocalypse? It doesn't matter any more!

No, I'm not just saying that because I've done that on Arena, just to watch my opponent blue-screen over their inability to understand what just happened.

But to this point, I've been very carefully curating my examples of cards that work with Prowess because while throwing down a creature and making it bigger is the easy part, Prowess isn't easy.

One of the reasons that Prowess was moved from Evergreen to Deciduous in terms of how often it would appear in a Standard was how it occupied a fairly narrow design space in terms of cards in a set. If there are too many creatures in a set, the ones with Prowess won't have enough material to work with. This is something that came up in the development of Ixalan, where Prowess was very briefly considered to be the Merfolk mechanic before being dropped in the face of the Tribal focus on creatures.

The other problem with Prowess is in the Batching. This is a term that Wizards uses to describe the ad-hoc grouping of several card types and subtypes within a larger frame to allow everything to act as a whole. This was something that always sort of existed in the back of the game, but really came to the fore with the Historic mechanic from Dominaria. This grouping of three distinct things - Artifacts, Legendary spells and the new Enchantment subtype of Saga - into something that could be addressed by the wording on the card as a single object. Prowess runs into the problem of the fact that it looks at everything that is cast that is not a creature. So whenever you play an Artifact (that's not also a creature), an Enchantment, and a Planeswalker, these all also trigger Prowess.

So in effect, Prowess works on everything that isn't a creature, but is in of itself a creature, meaning that there is a balance that has to be struck within a set (as outside of Limited, Prowess' relation to its deck is the realm of the opinion of the player) between the creatures with, the creatures without and everything else. It's difficult to strike this balance without a lot of work and planning.

All of this helped push Prowess into the sidelines. And while it has shown up again and again since then, it has never really become 's go-to mechanic for creature combat. No, that's still Flying.

And yet, I just mentioned Batching, and there is something that works with Prowess that is a lot more open in terms of output, while throttling back the input to something that really likes. Let's talk about Pseudo-Prowess, or rather, 's love affair with Instants and Sorceries. Now, this is not a Keyword. This is not batched. Rather, this is a rather large running subtheme in this colour pair that I actually brought up ages ago when I talked about how and interact. They are the colours who really don't care about the material, for various reasons, so both of them like to throw around instants and sorceries. To that end, they have a wide and on occasion, terrifyingly deep ability to take even the simplest spell and explode it into something else entirely.

Let's start with the semi-casual deck I am going to link at the end of the article. In it, I merely put in Goblin Electromancer, Storm Skreelix, Primal Amulet  ^Flip, Jace's Sanctum, Ruby Medallion and Sapphire Medallion for cost reduction. Just one, or even two can very quickly pay for itself when you're throwing down cards as fast as possible. From there, listing the number of cards in these colours that like to get or recover Instants and Sorceries. From Arcane Infusion to Bloodwater Entity, to Expressive Iteration.

Then you get all the cards that these colours have that don't have Prowess, but care about Instants and Sorceries. Starting with the classics of Young Pyromancer and Guttersnipe. The options are endless! Literally! There are also plenty of cards now out there that also just give themselves a small bonus when you cast a non-permanent spell, so no matter which way you go, you're getting somewhere.

Pattern of Prowess

Commander / EDH berryjon

SCORE: 1 | 35 VIEWS | IN 2 FOLDERS

But the whole point of the deck is simple. Cast spells, make my creatures HUGE and swing for the win. When I ran this last week, I was able to one-shot a Selesnya Lifegain deck with Commander Damage thanks to going from 10 power on Balmor to 11 Power and Doublestrike, at instant speed. You should have blocked with Sigarda! The ability to swing with a board, and all the mana open where people have no idea what I'm about to do is just beautiful, and should be treasured.

This sort if synergy in these two colours (and due to a technicality), you get a wonderful, fast paced and very interactive deck that likes to do things and make plays. You don't worry about intricate interactions, you just have to count the number of triggers you have going on and add everything up when you swing. Then throw down one more because you can. There are many ways to take this style of spellslinger deck, many ways to get your wins out there, and they all have Prowess, or the idea of it at its core.

And for that, I love this mechanic, and will love to see more of it in the future.

Join me next week when I do more Slow Grow prep work and talk about my three options for the final Commander of the deck. Two are built into it, the third...? That's going to be a surprise to many of you, I would think.

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!