Pattern Recognition #358 - Taxes

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

6 March 2025

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

And welcome back everyone! Today's article is brought to you by my filing my taxes this year and it was just such a pain because my employer dumped most of my accumulated vacation pay on me at once. But enough about that, let's talk about Taxes in Magic!

Taxes are not a mechanic, but a definite theme in the game where the costs of cards are something that people count with exact degrees every time. Every point of mana can matter, so finding ways to reduce those costs is a major factor in many decks. This can come from things like Reanimate type effects, which bypass a creature's cost entirely to get them into play, to more conventional cards like Jet Medallion which just acts as a straight mana cost reducer.

Taxes are the opposite of that. They are costs and requirements in addition to what a spell or ability would normally cost and they are designed to slow down the opponent, to make it harder for them to act. These can be conditional, affecting only certain things, or having differing effects for failing to pay the tax in question.

Historically, this effects started in , where you got cards that no one has ever heard about called Mystic Remora and Rhystic StudyGC. Or Propaganda or Arcane Laboratory. You see, the reason for this was that in the old days of Magic, played the Control Game. It still does, but they no longer play the resource denial game through Phantasmal Terrain and its ilk, and they no longer change the fundamental pace of the game. 's control moved away from the passive and strictly into the realm of the active means of control.

Passive in this case means cards that mess with players just by existing. Not directed at anything in particular, but rather changing the fundamental assumptions about the way the turn is played out by the players. Do you may mana to attack? Or carefully consider what cards you play in a turn?

Active control in this case in directly interacting with the actions of your opponent. The classic Counterspell is iconic for this, and yet it isn't what we're here to talk about.

These passive effects were seen as a bit too much for one color to have, so they were slowly shifted into 's friend, . This colour wasn't the color of control directly, but this shift did ensure they would move in lockstep forward. is the color of law and rules, and the card effects that used to be interpreted as hostile action by yourself against your enemy became more synonymous with the rule of law, and of friction. Of changing the rules and the terrain of the game to slow down the opponent.

(And you wonder why I get annoyed every time gets a new card that only lets it play catch up and never gain an advantage? Because it's NOT NEW)

So Propaganda became Ghostly Prison, and Arcane Laboratory became Rule of Law. AEther Barrier doesn't quite track, but does become Spelltithe Enforcer, Rhystic StudyGC got an Unknown Event version in White Rhystic Study (which gives me hope), and Force Spike became Mana Tithe

But wait, didn't I just say that it was the passive stuff that got moved over? Well, yes and no. Mana Tithe was originally a color-shifted print from Time Spiral, but it did help out with establishing a certain degree of cause and effect that the colour could do now, even if it wasn't obvious.

Because this sort of card is a temporary effect, something that can catch a person by surprise, or punish a greedy play that results in a total tap-out. It doesn't stop anything, but it is a tax.

Taxes are a slice of the game that acts to slow the game down. The goal isn't to stop the game. It isn't to win the game either, but rather to act in such a manner that the people who are trying to win find that they can't. Not as quickly, not as easy. Taxes are mana sinks. They are time sinks, causing delays and frustrations that disrupt your opponents plans (or yours, if you're on the receiving end).

Effects like Ghostly Prison or Authority of the Consuls punish rapid aggression across formats, with the latter being a Foundations reprint so it's in Standard for the next five years. Which is a pain as I'm still running RDW as my go-to deck in that format. And it's in every deck with in it because it's a hard counter to the tempo of a Haste deck!

Not that I'm annoyed or anything.

Then you get Damping Sphere, a card designed to put the brakes on Storm decks (which are probably going to make a comeback in the next Tarkir set if Stormscale Scion is anything to go by, as well as general spellslinger designs.

You get Thalia, Heretic Cathar which punishes fast creatures and greedy lands, you get Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, who taxes non-creatures a little, slowing that down.

You get Grand Arbiter Augustin IVGC, who is the best there is at this sort of thing as he bridges the gap between the two control colours. If you see him across from you at a Commander table, you're either running against my Birds List, and I have special double-sleeves for this guy that has one side with the Tax ability crossed out as an option for the other players if they just want me to run with a couple of Medallions in the Command Zone.

The purpose behind Taxes isn't to win the game, as I said earlier. It's to slow down the game enough to get your own win conditions into play. This is the sort of play style that drags the game out and waits patiently for their time to come. You tend to win with Approach of the Second Sun, or other passive effects like that. Laboratory Maniac and his friends are a good choice, as well as other cute effects like the cheeky Test of Endurance that is both literal and metaphorical.

Other colors don't really have Taxes as I am describing them here. The closest is with their Group Slug effects, with cards like Harsh Mentor and Impact Tremors. The idea here is not just to make the ability to take actions more costly in terms of resources and timing, but to outright make it harmful.

Some people can't tell the difference. They have their plans, and anything that can throw that out of whack is something they viscerally reject. Seen it. Caused it. I'm chill enough to grumble and adjust my plans.

But the best part about Taxes is that they tend to just affect just your opponents. One of the things about that I like is that for them, symmetrical effects aren't. That is a truism that while this colour can and will roll out board wipes and massive changers on a whim, because they know that this is an option, and they can control when and where these sorts of effects can hit the board. They know what's coming and can plan for it and around it.

The player who is playing Taxes tends not to get taxed in the first place unless there are two Taxing decks a rolling against each other. Then victory becomes a matter of small degrees and slicing the pie just a little more effectively, and managing your resources better. You have to play better, and not just depend on the text of your cards to see you through.

So just pay the damned .

Thank you all for reading! I'll see you next week when I talk about Weeks Three and Four of Slow Grow! Well, Week 4 is tomorrow, so I have no idea how that will go, but hey, it's the thought that counts, right?

Send me happy thoughts, please. I need them.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! 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!