A deck like American Geist is far less bothered by a card like Abrupt Decay, which can’t deal with Celestial Colonnade or Geist of Saint Traft or Restoration Angel. A card like Batterskull, on the other hand, tends not to phase them until they’re at just four life, because the life gain their opponents gain is irrelevant in the face of infinite damage. Twin is very concerned about beating cards like Path to Exile and Abrupt Decay while it is attempting to put a Splinter Twin on a Pestermite. Twin only cares about cards which impede their combo or directly result in it losing the game due to life loss. If those first two points sound like an aggressive deck’s winning mechanisms, ding, a prize for you! It’s the third which creates the unique deck that is Tempo.Ĭontrolling the things that matter is a tricky business. You’re taking advantage of speed, or time, to start winning the game, presumably over an opponent who is not enacting their winning game plan as quickly. If you play a creature, and your opponent plays a land, and you each do that for four turns, you’ve probably won the game. You’re creating a time-advantage when you do something and your opponent isn’t. Time-advantage is crucially tied to mana-advantage, and some theorists say it’s the same thing. If you use your mana in an efficient manner each turn, by not letting any of it go to waste, you are generating a mana-advantage over an opponent who does not, because each turn they don’t tap an available land for mana and utilize it, that turn’s mana disappears forever. Tempo is part controlling the things that matter. Both of these game plans are characterized by the term Tempo. Geist wants to play a Geist and defend it until it wins the game. Twin wants to disrupt mana and field development until it can randomly win the game. Twin was constantly attacking Geist’s manabase, and quickly gained a more pro-active position in the matchup, which is exactly what both of these decks ideally wanted to accomplish. Game 2 (I didn’t see Game 1, though the written coverage shows that it was fairly irrelevant to the point) was won and lost on mana and resource denial. Keep this in mind as I go on a long-ass tangent. That was when I started to think about other kinds of 2-for-1s, and in this case, the big problem is that Kachapow, in order to kill the Angel, would have to Mana 2-for-1 himself in addition to possibly 2-for-1ing himself in the traditional sense of card advantage, in order to overcome the Angel. My friend objected immediately to that idea, stating that an Electrolyze combined with any other 2-3 damage card keeps the card advantage neutral, because Electrolyze draws you a card. What I ended up thinking about, however, was that no matter how Kachapow sliced it, he probably had to 2-for-1 himself to kill the Restoration Angel. The game state was complicated, and if you can find the video coverage, check it out. If he deprives Kachapow of his red mana sources, he blanks the known Lightning Bolt and can guarantee (except for if a red mana source is drawn) that the Angel can’t attack into the Clique without extreme risk. The play is defensible, if extremely risky, though Kachapow had complete knowledge of Horvat’s hand from his Clique. If the Geist player presents a removal spell off a new-found red mana source, your Clique (and thus your hopes of blocking and killing Restoration Angel with the help of a Bolt, a Grim Lavamancer, or an Electrolyze) evaporate. Horvat proceeds to Lightning Bolt Kachapow’s Clique, and the game ends a couple turns later as Restoration Angel’s ¾ body crashes in again and again, before the game is finally ended in the favor of the Geist player.Ī friend and I were talking about the Tectonic Edge play, and how when you’re behind on board, (Clique isn’t going to trade 1-for-1 with Restoration Angel), blowing up your own lands is an extremely risky play. Kachapow opts to attack Horvat’s mana base, cracking both Edges with the first’s ability on the stack to rob Horvat of two of his lands. Both players are stuck on 4 lands, but two of Kachapow’s are Tectonic Edges. In game 3 of their set, the Twin player, Kachapow, has a Vendilion Clique in play, staring down Horvat’s Restoration Angel. The vods for the finals are nowhere to be found, but the coverage is here: I was watching the finals of GP Prague yesterday, in a match between American Geist and UR Tempo-Twin. I want to get back into the habit of writing for y'all, so this article is going to be a little shorter than most, despite being about a topic which I think it extremely deep and relevant.
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