Often times, you can learn more from a bad draft than you can from a good one. Skorish explores how emphasizing flexibility allows you to be a better drafter - and take that flexibility into a positive position even when the draft is full of bad cards.

Talion covers a reversible heuristic for politicking in cEDH. Whether you like it or not, the most winning players in cEDH abuse the politic system. Get with the times, or stay in the x-6 bracket.

Let’s get into it.

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Being powerful, when there is no power to be found.

By Dylan Skorish

Picture this. It’s Thanksgiving evening. You’ve polished off the last of your plate. The turkey was a little dry, but the gravy made up for it. Your uncle had a few too many and is snoring on the couch while Joe Milton is throwing pure meatball subs to the Cowboys defense on the TV. You head off to the comfort of your childhood bedroom and fire up your aging PC.

Waiting for you on your desktop is trusty old MTGO, patiently biding its time until your triumphant return. You know what you’re here to do. It’s time to Vintage Cube.

What better way to cap off an evening with family than by opening something sweet? What treasures could be waiting for you? A Mox? Too humble. Dream bigger. Black Lotus? Ancestral Recall? Drake Sasser’s signature Time Walk?

The queue fills, and you lay your eyes on your coveted pack-one, pick-one. This is what stares back into your soul…

Well, it looks like it’s not shaping up to be an easy night. But you’re not going to let those precious tickets go to waste. As much as this pack lacks the kind of pop you’d hope to open, hope isn’t completely lost. Let’s break down a few helpful rules to adjust our approach in this situation and make decisions that maximize our chances of winning.

Extremely rude real initial reaction upon viewing this pack

Now, why exactly is this collection of cards so notably poor? Individual card power is very low. Sure, cards like Bristly Bill, Dragon’s Rage Channeler, Flickerwisp, and even Thundertrap Trainer can be fine role-players when put into the right deck, but they’re very likely to be among the worst cards in an otherwise decent deck.

Our biggest problem is that nothing here points us in a particular direction to work toward, nor is anything generically powerful enough to warrant a pick. No More Lies is solid but hard to cast. Infernal Grasp is the worst of black’s kill spells. Witch Enchanter will make your deck in white but isn’t amazing. Time Spiral costs way too much mana to play outside of a big-mana combo deck these days.

Where do we go from here? I refuse to go back to watching the Eagles game.

The answer to our prayers. A light in the darkness. One of the most boring cards ever created: Multiversal Passage.

This brings us to our first rule for handling bad packs: Emphasize flexibility.

Multiversal Passage will make your deck close to 100% of the time. As mediocre as it is, it will improve your mana without pushing you in any particular direction. That's the beautiful thing about this pick: you can put zero weight on it.

Now, we're going to pull back the curtain a bit. This pick isn't from some point in the future during Thanksgiving. It's actually a screenshot sent to me by a friend of mine. For the sake of his anonymity, we'll call him Bob.

It was me the whole time

Bob has been struggling lately with a losing streak, and I've received plenty of screenshots of his opponents ripping multiple pieces of power in a single game. Simply put, he's been on tilt. I asked Bob what he ended up taking, and his response surprised me.

Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes.

Here's the thing: I'm not sure this is the worst card in the Cube, but it does ask you to do a pretty substantial amount of work just to draw one card and maybe, if you're lucky, put some counters on a creature. Bob told me he wanted to try the card since it's new and he often ends up in the lands deck. So, why not, right?

Here's where Bob went wrong. This card is always wheeling. Sure, this pack sucks, but I would bet everything that nobody else is taking Avatar before it comes back around the table.

What Bob was doing was leaving equity on the table. This is the part that becomes difficult: having the intuition to figure out what is likely to wheel and gauging how much you're willing to risk losing by passing a card if it doesn't.

When you take Multiversal Passage, you're effectively saying that you're willing to let the rest of the table fight over whatever scraps are left. If Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes wheels, good for you! You've picked up a card that you're legally allowed to put in your deck without sacrificing anything. If it doesn't, well, you're probably going to be okay.

Now, what Bob told me was that he felt his previous decks had been middling and that he was drafting too safely, so he wanted to take some high rolls. There's some truth to that line of thinking. If this pack had a piece of a good A+B combo in it, I would be pretty likely to take that over the Passage. Think something like Zuran Orb/Titania, Underworld Breach/Brain Freeze, or Painter's Servant/Grindstone. These cards aren't usually great on their own, but speculating on them can lead to massively improving a low-power deck when you assemble the combos.

Even a card like Goblin Bombardment is very prescriptive and won’t make your deck a large portion of the time but offers very high leverage in the right spots. So why compromise in a spot where you have a flat power level? Bob was right that sometimes you should be looking for high rolls, but this, as with everything, is highly contextual.

Sometimes you're in a spot where you open a Psychic Frog, followed by a Thoughtseize, followed by a Snuff Out. If your next pick is between an on-color land and an Underworld Breach, you don't have much incentive to speculate over good fixing since your deck is already shaping up in a relatively strong direction.

Now, imagine we're in this pack and start with Multiversal Passage, followed by a cantrip, then a land. If you're subsequently presented with an on-color land and an Underworld Breach, you might just want to take the Breach to give yourself a chance at a much higher ceiling if it comes together.

That's our second rule: A Low Floor Is Okay If the Ceiling Is High Enough.

What's almost never the right choice is taking the filler playable when you have the option between flexibility and a higher ceiling. Let the draft dictate your direction instead of forcing one if your goal is to win.

What Bob was doing was getting caught in a negative feedback loop and overcorrecting based on bad heuristics. "I'm taking lands too highly, so next draft I'll take fewer lands," and so on, rather than evaluating each draft and game in its own unique context.

It's a pretty normal trap to fall into, but I think you'll have more fun overall and win a lot more if you're intentional about evaluating the cards in front of you rather than evaluating them through the lens of your previous drafts and games. As Magic players, we put a lot of emphasis on heuristics. But if you're consistently performing worse than you'd like, it's worth evaluating whether the heuristics you believe in are actually working for you or whether they're just supposed to work.

Ultimately, it's also worth interrogating why you're Cubing in the first place. That’s our third rule: Remember What You’re Playing For. 

If you're invested in winning, then a lot of the time you might need to bias toward the "boring" pick. If you want to draft the bad landfall payoffs because they make you happy, draft the bad landfall payoffs. There are plenty of times when I hop into a Cube draft and just force Storm simply to feel something. Those drafts are particularly fun because when they work out, they're great decks, and when they don't, you're trying to win with the least functional deck ever created.

The challenge isn't just figuring out how to build the most powerful deck when everything is going right. It's figuring out how to give yourself the best chance to win when things aren't going your way. Sometimes that means taking the boring land. Sometimes it means speculating on a combo that might never come together. And sometimes it means forcing Storm because you want to remember both what it’s like to feel beautiful blossoming love and what it’s like to feel utter defeat. 

The important thing is knowing why you're making the decisions you're making. Don't let a bad pack dictate your draft, don't let your last five drafts dictate your next one, and don't confuse following a heuristic with making a good decision.

So this Thanksgiving, be thankful for your family, be thankful for your friends, and be thankful for Multiversal Passage. Because sometimes the best thing you can open is the opportunity to make a good decision.

And if all else fails, there's always the next draft. Maybe this time you'll open a Black Lotus.

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Not everyone can be Lincoln, but you can sure avoid being Tweed.

By Talion

I have been internally waffling a lot on how to write an article about politics in cEDH. It’s an area of the game that everyone approaches so uniquely - my approach might not work for you, and I have certainly encountered many people whose approaches don’t work for me.

It’s also very difficult to develop a hard-and-fast rule for how one should politic across different situations - it varies wildly between games, opponents, and situations, and a probing question or cunning deal that served you well in your last pod might be completely non-functional in this one.

Nevertheless, in this article I will attempt to give you a heuristic for how I believe you should politic in cEDH, specifically around using your own interaction - well, technically two heuristics, but it’s really just one that applies backwards.

“In a time of safety, show strength even when you are weak.”

And conversely,

“In a time of danger, show weakness even when you are strong.”

A “time of safety” refers to a time when none of your (other) opponents are pressuring you - someone has an engine but not many cards yet, someone else is setting up but it’s going to take them a couple of turns to build into a win, the other turbo deck is recovering from a mull to 3.

In times of safety, I am looking to develop, not waste time and clock talking to opponents. I might only have one piece of interaction, I might even have none. If an opponent puts a win on the stack, I would ask them politely and nonchalantly to pass the turn instead, and bluff interaction. Crucially, I would almost never show my opponent a piece of interaction in a time of safety - if they run into it, that’s bad for them and good for me, so I let them.

Obviously an even better outcome (for me, not them - the fun of politics is the ability to convince your opponents that they should settle for the least bad outcome rather than the best one) is that they don’t push and I don’t have to use my interaction, but I’d settle for putting one of my opponents in the ground so I can have some space to develop. To facilitate this, I try not to put my opponent in a position where they feel they have no option but to push - I wouldn’t wait until the Underworld Breach is on the stack to mention I have something, because then they have no real incentive not to just let me burn it. I would say something in response to the Demonic Tutor, or simply during upkeep - maybe in their draw step if I’m feeling magnanimous. I always try to let them have the option of not throwing themselves into a brick wall, but make it clear that I’m extending them a courtesy by doing so - I could just let them, and it wouldn’t be much more than a mild inconvenience.

I am unlikely to talk specifics in this type of situation - the more I narrow down what I have, the more likely it is that my opponent can pivot to play around it, especially if they have access to tutors or flash enablers.

The one time I would deign to show someone my interaction in this type of situation is if I think it’s really premium in the pod - for example, I would really prefer not to use my Force of Will on a Necropotence in a pod with a Dack Fayden - but I will if you make me! Sometimes you don’t even need to show it here, but I definitely would not suggest outright lying about having an individual specific spell in hand - that’s a short path to the Liar Spreadsheet (something I am assured exists but am yet to see).

In times of danger, we flip this script completely. When everyone is set up to win, it’s vitally important to conserve as much interaction as possible. I do everything I can to avoid showing someone more than one piece of interaction at a time, because opponents thinking I’m strong leads to them trying to bully me into playing table police, which at best leads to a draw - it’s a very difficult position to win the game from. Information is the most valuable commodity at a cEDH table, and you need to hoard it like a miser to win games.

Selling the strength or weakness to your opponents takes practice and knowledge.

When you’re trying to show strength, the most important thing is to have a good idea of what your opponent is doing - if you can call out to them the sequence of actions they are about to take, they are far more likely to believe that you know how and where to interact to stop them. This takes a lot of game time to perfect, but it’s worth it. A lot of players, especially those playing unorthodox decks, come to lean on the fact that nobody really knows what they’re doing to give them an edge - they will often completely lose confidence if you demonstrate that you not only know their plan but also how to disrupt it.

Selling weakness is often more of a performance. I tend to offer my opponent (the friendly one with a worried expression on their face, not the one who’s pushing) a piece of interaction that is better used as backup (red blasts, Misdirection, Swan Song, Flusterstorm are common ones), and entreat them to make the first move. I find players are more willing to believe you don’t have much if I am proactive and vocal about wanting to use my interaction to solve the problem, and just bummed that my interaction isn’t good here. Whatever happens here, I will not under any circumstances reveal my hand, no matter what it looks like or how good it is.

If my hand is genuinely weak, my opponent will know they can safely fight over the current win attempt, and I won’t be able to follow up with a win of my own, leaving them to push unopposed on their turn. If my hand is actually strong, they will likely share that information with the table and use it to offer a draw or bully me into using my interaction, either of which locks me out of winning the game, which is the outcome I want.

If someone asks me to reveal my hand, I only consider it if I think a draw is the best outcome I can get from this game, and I make it clear that that’s what I want before agreeing to reveal information. Sometimes they will settle for me showing them another piece of interaction; in which case I try to make sure it’s as narrow and specific as possible.

Hopefully this is a concise and not-too-confusing insight into how I approach politics and interacting in cEDH. As I mentioned, your mileage may vary from using my techniques and heuristics, and you may not agree with some of the things I say here. That’s fine! If something is working for you in your playgroup and in tournaments, keep doing it. I am mostly writing this article for those who feel lost in the world of cEDH politics, although no doubt my regular playgroup will read it and immediately start using it against me, as they should.

Guys, if you’re reading this, I’m not the threat.

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