Pattern Recognition #393 - For Better and For Worse

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

8 January 2026

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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! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday! I didn't, as I would up sharing a dinner with sick nieces and got hit up with the flu as well for about a week (including when I'm writing this) so please forgive my intnded brevity.

The concepts of Strictly Better and Strictly Worse returned to my head while I was sorting through my overstock cards over the holidays. Something to keep my mind and hands moving, I suppose. Now, for those of you who are not quite familiar with the terms, these describe two cards that when placed side by side, you can tell that one is simply better than the other one.

Perhaps the most classic example for me is the difference between Shock and Lightning Bolt. If you lay these two cards beside each other, you can see clearly that the Bolt is the better option because it deals 3 damage to the target instead of two. Now, there are some fringe cases where you may not want to deal three damage to something - cards like Screaming Nemesis where the amount of damage can be thrown back at you, but for the most part the existence of these sorts of fringe cases are not counted when it comes to determining what is better or worse. The two cards being compared are done so by themselves and with no relevant board state to create external complications.

There are too many examples of this sort of card comparison in the game for me to even begin to itemize or list, and while the MTG Wiki has a set of examples on their definitions page, and the Scryfall Tagger has the "better than" and "worse than" Card relations for individual cards, there is no real way to sort through things except one card at a time. Yes, it's exactly as tedious as you might think it is.

So instead of doing that, I'm going to take a closer look at why and when these sorts of things happen and what it means for the development of the game as a whole.

To start with, Wizards as both a company and as individuals are not ignorant when they make cards that are better or worse. They have an internal document for all the cards ever made that includes development notations for them to show the history of the card as it was iterated on before printing. So when a person makes a card that can be seen as being a strict upgrade or downgrade to something previous, they can check the larger development history to find out if the cards being designed or up/downgraded have a history about why they were the way that they ended up and thus if the same logic still applies to them or if they're reinventing the wheel and maybe they should just reprint the original card instead. Or a functional reprint with a different name or maybe creature type.

Actually, that's one more thing to remind people of. Creature Types do not matter for the purposes of this discussion. A Badger and a Goblin that are functionally the same card are equivalent to each other as they are only measured against each other and not with other cards in play. In the larger context of things, yes, a Goblin may be better due to the mutual support it gets with other cards, but in of itself, it is neither better nor worse than a Badger in this discussion and comparisons.

On the same hand, other types and subtypes can make a difference. Having the Arcane subtype or the Snow Supertype can affect the performance of the card, but while some people may say they are usually an upside and thus a positive, they are again completely dependent on other factors to make them better. To that end, these sorts of cards can be called Conditionally better, not Strictly better.

OK, where was I? Oh yeah, cards that are Strictly Worse.

Now, it may seem obvious to you and I where and when cards may be printed that are worse that they are done because they aren't meant to be played seriously for whatever reason. The biggest sources of this opinion that I have seen tended to be from the cards that were unique to the various Starter Decks. And for me, the card that sticks out the most here is Precision Bolt, a card that is not only utterly blown out of the water by Lightning Bolt, but more relevantly, it is strictly worse than Lightning Strike, the more balanced and fair version of that initial Alpha Boon. First, it costs more, and in addition, it's Sorcery speed, not an Instant.

But this was a deliberate design choice as this card wasn't intended for the full set itself, but rather for the preconstructed intro-deck associated with that set. It was designed to be strictly worse in order to allow the new players to have an easy path to upgrade their decks as they got more cards. They were not meant to be Standard playable, or Legacy or whatever formats you were thinking of. They were designed to work with the deck of cards they were in and nothing else.

The other reason to make cards that are Strictly Worse - either a new design or rolling back to a previous card that had been printed and then superseded by the Strictly Better card - is because of dynamic and rotating balance.

You know, that thing that happens?

OK, let me dial back the bitterness a bit and lay this out for you. What used to be one of Magic's core strengths was its dynamic balance. That being, there was a robust and well supported format where every card in it has a limited time frame in which they are valid - usually two years give or take a month. With this restricted card pool to work with, Wizards can design cards that can work well with the cards before and after and not have to worry overmuch about being swamped with potential interactions. A card could be made better or worse than a card that will soon be rotating out in order the better fit the new dynamic of the next year or two. Or if a card is under performing, and it is felt that a replacement with a slight improvement is needed for a healthy format. Say, for example, if Shock wasn't pulling its weight, then perhaps a quick inclusion of Play with Fire would help?

No, I'm not picking on Burn spells here. They're just the easiest examples I can use as Mana -> Damage is a conversion that is quick to understand and scale.

So to quickly summarize, Strictly Worse comes about when a card is deliberately underpowered in order to cause the archetype it is supporting in the the small rotating format it is in.

That, at least, is the intention.

Which leads us to the real problem. Strictly Better. These are card where the only reason you would run something else would be if you didn't have this card in the first place. Well, maybe not always. So, there are several reasons why someone would print something Strictly Better, and the first one is actually just a mirror of the justification I gave above. That there is an archetype or something that is under-performing - or perhaps they are being propped up to deal with something that could be overperforming - and it is part of the great cyclical balance that helps keep the game healthy and alive.

The other option is something that Wizards has poked fun at themselves with in the Mystery Booster Playtest cards. Namely Bear with Set's Mechanic. These are cards that are very bland and normal - like Shock, but are given a small boost to go with the set's themes or mechanics. Such as with Fiery Impulse, which took the Shock turned it into a conditional Lightning Bolt. But only as long as you touched a creature with it. Or turned into Play with Fire for added Scry 1 effect, or Wild Slash with the added Ferocious effect if you have a high enough power or Burst Lightning where you can take your Shock and Kicker it into a Lightning Axe!

The game doesn't mind this sort of thing at all, and in fact one of the use-cases for Core sets was to establish slightly-under powered baselines for all sorts of things just so that the regular sets in the rotation have that bare basics to work with and up from! And this was perfectly acceptable and reasonable. Give players an easier-to-understand onboarding set, then ramp up the difficulty for them a little as they experience and grow into the game.

This is a great use for a card being Strictly Better because it's adjacent to other cards that are all Strictly Better than the baseline card in different ways, allowing for players to pick the best or most fun option for themselves without worry or fear that they are doing it wrong.

And lastly, we have the worst reason for Strictly Better.

When the wheels come off

What happens when there's no reason to dial back on a card, to create something worse? When you are not regularly removing cards from your premiere format because that format no longer has an effective cull-date, you lose the ability to pare down the power and effectiveness of your cards because the problematic cards are around and still legal for longer. So how do you address balance issues when you can't time them out and don't want to outright ban things?

Well, you start to adjust other cards, other play styles and other archetypes up. Just a little. Just a tad. A touch, here or there. A small improvement to help keep things apace and now those other things need a little glowup and glamup to keep pace and those cards that were problematic? Well they're not so powerful anymore! Nobody plays them so they aren't a problem! It's the new cards everyone is talking about!

This is the problem that Modern had (and still has) before it collapsed under its weight, and is the problem that Commander has been driving headlong over a cliff to embrace as well.

Because when your only solution to a problem card is either to ban it, pray or make something strictly better? When the floor of complexity and powerlevel rises to the point where the whole house of cards collapses under its own weight because there is no inherent safety valve where we can make something worse and have it stick around for long enough to reset expectations. Now that Standard has gone the way of Extended, I only foresee these problems getting worse as Limited is the next to get gone. Which has already been tried thanks to the Aftermath/Beyond/Spider-Man Boosters.

Cards being Strictly Better and Strictly Worse are important to the vital life of the game, because they can come about when the game needs to cool off or step back from going overboard on committing to something. Or when it needs to heat up and get things moving again. It's the misuse and misunderstanding of these aspects to gameplay and card design that can and has killed games in the past. The ever-increasing, ever-better design goals eventually crush a game under its own weight.

I'd rather this didn't happen to Magic, please and thank you.

Thank you all for reading and I hope to see you all next week! I may have something to work with regarding Lorwyn, I may not.

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!