Pattern Recognition #269 - Hidden in the Fog

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

2 February 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.

And welcome back! Today's article comes to us from my local weather and one of the three climates that I live with. The first is windy. The Second is Precipitating. Rain or Snow, it comes down. Third is foggy. I'm serious, where I live, we get a couple weeks of thick fog, non-concurrently over the course of the year. It's eerie, really.

But what this means is that I'm going to talk this week about Fog effects in the game and how they work, as well as how to get around them. Because nothing says interesting like getting Lost in the Woods when you're trying to attack.

Fog, like many things, started life very early in the game, with it's printing in Limited Edition Alpha. This was back when the colour pie was still a colour scribble, and things didn't always make sense to us in the current era. Simply put, Fog would allow for Combat to happen, but for no combat damage to be dealt by anyone. Actually.... that's not completely true. Fog, and most of its successors, prevents combat damage, meaning that combat damage isn't set to "0", but rather becomes a null value, This is important because if combat is Fogged out, then any triggers that happen thanks to combat damage - such as Lifelink, Toxic, or things like Keeper of Fables.

At its core though, Fog has two uses. One proactive, and one reactive. And to be fair to most people, the reactive use of the card is the one that most people can grok right off the bat by reading the card. Simply put, if you are in danger of losing when you are attacked, and you know that, and your opponent knows this as well, and they swing into the red zone for the win, you just tap that one and Fog all the damage away, buying you just a little more time to either win on the crack-back or hopefully draw into something that can pull out a clutch victory for you.

Used in this way, Fog and its associated family of cards are a last-ditch defensive effort, buying time and hopefully resources to win. But that's not the only reactive use for them. Multiplayer changes the dynamics a lot. No longer is Fog being used to reactively to defend ones self, it now becomes a political tool and player preservation weapon. You don't need to use Fog when you're under attack. You can use it when someone else is under threat, and save them from dying, keeping them in the game one turn longer. Oh, and earn a "Save Another Player" Slow Grow point. Because why would I ever bring this up? I'm in this year!

Anyway, that's the most obvious, and also probably the best use. But there is more interesting aspect to shutting down combat that a lot of people that I've met never really get to using. What if you use it preemptively? Unlike with something like Mandate of Peace, which specifies that it has to be cast during combat, why not cast it in someone's first Main Phase? Doing so is a blatant and obvious sign that you are saying that "There will be No Combat!" this turn, what could be the point?

The point is to preemptively shut down combat before it even begins. And the question I can hear you all asking me and yourself is simple - Why?

Well, the first answer is simple. It throws an aggro player off their game. I can tell you from experience that when we get into the swing of things - literally - being told "No, you can't attack" is hard to parse. We get throwing out an attack and expecting a crack back. We do math all the time to see how much we can sacrifice in the pursuit of victory. This is just the sort of thing to mess with us that we can struggle to catch up because we can't attack, are we going to do? We have plans for other contingencies, but this isn't one of them.

Preemptively shutting down combat also means that creatures that would tap to attack are now being held back. They force the player to be on the defensive this round of turns and the point I'm trying to get here is that that player is on the defense. They have creatures to block with, they are not the same target they could have been if they attacked, so why even attack them? Go for someone else. It's a political tool.

So let's move on to the card itself, and some variations over the years. Because there have been quite a few. Mostly in , but occasionally in other colours.

First of all, the classic Fog. It's set the benchmark for the ability, and I think, based on what Wizards has done since then, it's too cheap for what it does. When I'm looking at similar cards today, they tend to be either or . Yes, they tend to come with certain caveats, additional clauses or riders to give them some more or different utility, but they are still cheap. Which is kind of the important thing, as being cheap means you don't have to hold up much mana to react, but Wizards does want you to commit mana to the whole thing, so more expensive it is.

Darkness was one of the first proper colour-shifting cards in the game, from Legends (and later a Time Spiral reprinting). This was Fog, but . That's it. But it never really fit with 's play style, so it went away.

On the other hand, Holy Day is the Fog, and it at least fits with the idea that is the colour of protection. You know, back when that was a thing. Of course, of all the colours, is the one that will get more of these effects as time goes on, though will keep the lead.

Moving on, Hunter's Ambush is a fine example of an asymmetric Fog, something that will come up a few times over the course of the game's history. In this case, by paying an extra you go from a normal Fog to a Fog that only affect non- creatures. Which means that this is an excellent card to go into any sort of mono- or very heavy deck. After all, if it's not really a drawback for you, but for your opponent, that's even more reason to run it. Something similar is even more narrow, but Moonmist makes Werewolves even a little better!

Then there's this guy.

Spore Frog

This guy. In any sort of deck with reliable recursion, such as Meren of Clan Nel Toth, this guy (and to a lesser extent, Kami of False Hope, which is the exact same thing, except and a Spirit, not a Frog) can completely lock down a game as no one can swing at anyone else without some sort of Fog effect in the way.

In fact, this even led into an entire deck archetype - the Turbo-Fog deck, which utilized these sorts of cards, running 6+ of them when possible, and just stalling the game out as long as possible in order to pull out their combo win. They tend to show up in Aggro heavy metas by default, but do tend to contain enough of a generalist control package to help deal with those matchups as well.

But! Fortunately for Aggro and face-beaters of all kinds, there are ways around this. In one of the last holdouts of the ancient Enemy Colours, has a lot of cards that have written on them "Damage can't be prevented". Now, this leans into one of the core conceits of the game, even though I'm pretty sure you won't find it written down as a rule anywhere. That being that the "_General Rule is overridden by the Specific Exception". In this case, the game's rules allow for combat damage, but that is changed by a general change caused by Fog and its brethren to prevent combat damage. But then comes along with something like Insult / Injury, and that damage can't be prevented!

The negation of "Can't" is more important than the more tone neutral of "Damage is prevented" for this interaction, and with this, does indeed have the chance

Questing Beast. Buried deep in this creature's massive box of text is the fact that Combat Damage from creatures you control can't be prevented. No amount of Fog will stop the Beast - and everyone else on your team at the same time.

I've run this in EDH. Once people realize what you're doing, it quickly becomes Archenemy. Except that's usually around the time I just killed someone. And they're on the back foot.

Fog and its associated cards are niche in their use, but if they hit that niche, they are extremely powerful and cannot, must not be underestimated. From buying a player a turn, to being a political tool, to being a poor man's board wipe, the ability to shut down combat damage can completely turn over a turn, and with it a game.

Have you used these cards to their full effect in the past? Been a victim of a surprise shutdown? Comment below!

Join me next week when I definitely don't talk about the Slow Grow tournament. Tomorrow is the first week, and I will do alternate weeks for it as I have in the past. So two weeks for that.

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!