Axis Theory

Today's Soundtrack: https://open.spotify.com/track/4hpvKryuaU4CMcyqlahOyj?si=6a061e5d5799456a

I've talked a decent amount about being a somewhat new competitive constructed player this year, and I think this gives me a relatively unique perspective. In ways I'm both a newbie and an expert at the same time - It's been relatively easy to ramp up to high level constructed because of my deep history with the game and deep knowledge of theory, but at the same time, a lot of the learning I've been doing has had to be starting from first principles because of my lack of experience.

I love thinking about things from first principles! So I began this week planning to write a "basics of constructed" article that went into the different formats, the fundamental resources in Magic, and how each strategy like aggro, control and midrange attempts to win games on each of those resource axes.

I knew this was a pretty ambitious task going in, and in the back of my mind didn't expect it to be doable in one piece. However, I still ended up surprised by what it turned into! I found the discussion of Magic's fundamental resources a really useful framing for how I think about the game, and turned this into a theory article about the resource axes in Magic. The first part talks about what I view as the three fundamental axes that a game is fought on: Mana, Spells, and Life, as well as some "pseudo-resources" that interact with these 3 or act as "in-betweens". Then I use this framework to talk about particular cards and effects, and which resources axes they're each interacting on.

(For those unfamiliar with how the word "axis" is being used here, think of it like a "type" of resource or a "dimension" of advantage one can have in a game).

If this name hasn't been taken yet and I can be so bold, I'd like to call this "axis theory".

Let's get into it!

Table of Contents

• Intro

• Axes

• Fundamental axes

• Mana (amount)

• Spells

• Life total

• Non-fundamental axes

• Mana (color)

• Board presence

• Effects

• Simple Effects

• Card Draw

• Removal

• Counterspells

• Utility Lands

• Activated Abilities

• ETBs

• Opportunity costs

• The King of Axis Theory

• Wrap-up/Until Next Time

Axes

My belief is that there are only three fundamental axes that are fought over in Magic: Mana, Spells, and Life.

You begin the game at 20 life, and don't get more of it by default. You begin the game with 7 cards in hand, and draw one card per turn. You start the game with zero lands in play, and get to play one per turn.

Most games are won by reducing your opponent from 20 to 0 life, but if you are able to gain a significant mana or card advantage over your opponent, it becomes very easy to reduce their life total to zero in most cases - So in practice, a game ends when one player or the other is first able to win decisively on any one of these three axes.

Almost every Magic deck is built with all three of these resources in mind, but most constructed decks are designed to win games on a particular axis, and might have backup plans for the other ones. Some of the best decks have competitive avenues to win on every axis, but this is hard to achieve - It's better to have one extremely strong axis you can win on than be trying ineptly to win on all three.

Magic is a beautiful enough game that it hides these resource battles in very subtle ways. Resources get traded off for and blended into each other elegantly, so it's not always easy to tell which axis is the primary one being fought over in a matchup or specific board state (sometimes the answer can change multiple times in a single turn, sometimes with each game action being taken). But I think having a clear view of each of these fundamental axes, and what constitutes an "advantage" in each of them is crucial for playing the game at a high level.

Mana (amount)

(Note: For now I'm only going to be talking about amount, not color of mana. I see color as a separate balancing system that we'll talk about later!)

The first axis we're going to talk about is mana, because it's the gateway to the others. Mana is the first problem you need to solve in every game -- You start out with none, and need to generate it before you can do things that effectively push forward (or deny your opponent) the other axes (I'm going to call these effects, and we'll talk more about them later).

The easiest way to win a game of magic is to have a decisive mana advantage early in the game, and the easiest way to lose is, well... the opposite. As such, the designers of the game tend to be very careful about printing cards that allow either player to do this. The main way to make sure you don't lose games to not having enough mana is to make sure you are able to play a land on every early - middle turn of the game. "Missing land drops" is usually a very bad sign for your chances to win a game, even though newer players may not recognize how much it is hurting them when it happens.

Magic designers tend to be very careful about printing cards that let players get significantly ahead on mana early in the game, because of how powerful this can be, but there are almost always ways to accelerate mana that see extensive play. Some decks want to advance their own mana and play expensive spells as soon as possible, and others just want to make sure they play a land every turn and get the most out of the 1-2-3-4-5 linear development of their mana.

Effects that reduce your opponent's mana by targeting their lands aren't printed at a competitive enough rate to see play anymore, because the designers of the game generally (and correctly, in my view) see this as unfun gameplay. However, decks that use effects to accelerate their mana take on the risk of those effects getting removed or disrupted, and doing this effectively constitutes denying your opponent mana, which can be extremely powerful.

However, there are more ways to get ahead on mana than simply denying it to your opponent or generating it on your own.

The most common form of mana advantage in most games of Magic comes from using less mana than your opponent does to produce the same quality or quantity of effects that they do, or directly negating their effects while spending less mana than they did to produce them.

We'll talk more about this later in the 'board presence' section.

In other words, it's often more about what you and your opponent get out of your mana than how much of it either of you produce. Don't forget though that you need to produce a minimum amount to be able to play the game at all. Decks and strategies that can't do this consistently will fail far more often than they succeed.

Mana = the axis that allows you to play the game.

Spells

So how do you use mana? I like to think of "spells" as opportunities to spend your mana for an effect on the game. Usually these are literal cards in your hand, but "spells" can also be permanents on the board or cards in other zones like the graveyard. The Arena UI recognizes this - cards with abilities like flashback in your graveyard are displayed as "virtual" cards in your hand. You could think of something like a token on the battlefield that lets you pay mana and sacrifice it for an effect as a spell, even though it isn't displayed that way.

This resource is very closely tied to the concept of "cards", and up until this point I've been using "spells" and "cards" interchangeably. I actually began by using the word "cards" for this resource, and had to go back and change all references when I figured out a better word to use. I hope it will become clear why I don't want to use the word "cards" to refer to this resource as you keep reading. There is some clash here with the traditional concept of "card advantage" that I want to be very careful to avoid.

Since lands (typically) only generate mana and don't give you an opportunity to spend it, there is an inherent tension between being able to hit your land drops/produce mana and having enough spells (opportunities to spend your mana).

We'll talk about different ways that decks attempt to solve this problem later, but for now the most direct way is to have cards that are modal (or even better, doubly capable), letting you both generate mana and spend mana. These can be lands with abilities that spend mana instead of generating it, or spells that can turn into lands or otherwise generate mana in addition to doing other things. Magic designers actually love to print these effects, because they allow players to build more consistency into their decks, making sure that they have both mana and ways to use it (spells) more of the time. The tradeoff for these effects making your deck more consistent is that they typically are not very mana-efficient, so a deck full of them will be too slow (too behind on the mana axis) to win games.

The amount of spells you have is sort of only useful to the extent that you have mana to spend on them, though it is worth noting that there is a real optionality advantage to having multiple things to do with your mana - you get to choose the most efficient thing to do. An ideal balance of these resources typically involves having multiple options for which "spell" to spend your mana on at most stages of the game - but it is possible to have so many options that you're no longer gaining a meaningful advantage from the optionality, which can be a sign that you've got too many spells and not enough mana.

Where are we so far?

Mana = The axis that allows you to play the game

Spells = The axis that allows you to spend mana for effects

The goal is to have an ability to consistently generate ever-increasing amounts of mana every game, and at the same time to have spells that allow you to use that mana to affect the game, ideally with some meaningful amount of optionality most of the time.

Life total

Now we come to the third axis - arguably the most basic. Most of the time, one of the first sentences you'll say when teaching someone the game is "the goal is to reduce your opponent's life total from twenty to zero". This is true! However, in order to do this, first you need mana, and then you need spells to spend that mana on. Only then can you start reducing the opponent's life total to zero. Life total is actually the final axis in the game, not the first one.

This doesn't mean that life total is any less important than the other two fundamental axes, but it does mean that it is 'gated' by them. There is not a single deck in magic that begins by manipulating its own or the opponent's life total, but (nearly) every deck ends the game doing exactly that.

There is generally a divide between strategies that attempt to manipulate life total directly and strategies that end up manipulating it almost as an afterthought after winning on the other resources. I think this is the best way to define "speed" in magic - decks that want to immediately use their mana and spell resources to produce effects that reduce the opponent's life total are "fast" decks, and decks that have no interest in this at all are "slow" decks. Most decks fall somewhere in the middle, but it's good to recognize where a strategy falls along this axis.

Quick recap!

Mana = The axis that allows you to play the game

Spells = The axis that allows you to spend mana once you have it

Life total = The axis that ends the game, which players translate mana and spell advantages into, either quickly/directly or slowly/incidentally.

Before we're done talking about resources, I want to address some "pseudo-axes" that are extensions of these 3 fundamental ones. These sit "in between" the axes, acting as a sort of bottleneck or filter between them, and are quite important!

Mana (Color)

I mentioned before that I wasn't yet going to talk about colors of mana, just amounts, but now is the time to talk about color!

We all know there are 5 colors in Magic, and each color has strengths and weaknesses in terms of the effects it's good at producing efficiently. Colors of mana are a way to gate this efficiency, so that not every deck can play every kind of effect. If you want your deck to do certain things, you're going to have to have it be able to generate the colors that are good at doing those things.

However, the more colors you add to your deck, the harder it is to have access to each color when you need it. The more colors you're trying to be able to produce, the harder it is to have the right ones at the right time, and you may be prevented from being able to use your mana at all.

The reason color is not a fundamental axis is that it is trivial to solve for any deck. Simply play all basic lands and only cards of one color! You won't have any color issues ever again. The only downside is that you're limited in terms of spell optionality -- you won't be able to play all the most mana-efficient effects. Mana quantity doesn't work like this - It is a problem that every deck must solve, no matter what.

However, color absolutely matters, because most decks end up wanting to produce effects from more than one color. The easiest way to do this is to play lands that produce multiple colors, and these typically come with a resource cost - either mana, by coming into play tapped, or life. You can also pay for this cost in the "spells" axis by playing more lands than you would normally need to solve the mana axis (remember, this means mana amount!), so that you are more likely to draw a variety of lands to hit your color requirements.

Typically, players prefer to pay either the life or the mana cost rather than the spell cost, because mana color is fundamentally a limiter of the spells axis already. If you're sacrificing cards to make sure you have enough colors, you're inherently less likely to need those colors, since you'll have fewer spells and fewer color requirements!

I should also note that instead of paying a cost in the other axes, you can simply pay the cost of consistency to "solve" the color problem - what you're really doing is not solving it in order to gain the benefits of having access to a variety of powerful effects (an example of this would be splashing a bomb in limited with zero fixing, just because the added inconsistency is worth the power). Unfortunately, this is just a sneaky way to pay the cost in the spells axis! Less consistency inherently means you will have access to fewer spells, especially in the early stages of the game.

In general, decks with a lot of colors almost always end up making this tradeoff to some extent - sometimes you'd rather be slightly less consistent so that you don't have to give up an untenable amount of advantage on the other axes to consistently have all the colors you need.

Board Presence

Board presence is another extremely important resource in Magic that I still don't view as one of the fundamental axes, and I'll explain why.

Most people think of their on-board permanents as being worth "cards", and this is in a sense true - Getting permanents onto the battlefield requires cards -- but I think what a lot of folks don't fully internalize until they reach the highest levels of the game is that these permanents represent mana investments in an equally meaningful way.

Board presence is "spent" mana + spells. It's the output of these two resources.

Let's get more specific. What, precisely is that output?

Most of the time, it's changes in your opponent's life total, and the protection of your own.

"Board presence" in Magic is a card + mana investment that lets you change the opponent's life total (or prevent them from changing yours), without spending any more mana + spells

It should come as no surprise that board presence is an extremely efficient category of effect to produce. If you can produce an advantage in this pseudo-axis, it gives you large advantages in the other ones (generally life total, but not always), for free, every turn. Board presence is the most popular way to win games of Magic for a reason - it is the most efficient way to gain advantages in the fundamental axes.

Obviously, board presence is most easily used to gain life advantages, but what about spell or mana advantages?

Spell advantage through board presence is usually easy to spot, and this is what players often mean when they talk about card advantage. If a permanent draws cards (or creates the token equivalent of cards) when it attacks or taps, it's gaining you spell advantage. If you use a single spell to remove two of your opponent's permanents, you just gained spell advantage.

You also likely gained mana advantage (assuming the total mana spent on the two cards was greater than your one), which is why this kind of effect is so powerful. Mana advantages through board presence are harder to spot, but equally important. If you remove an opponent's 3-mana creature from the board for 2 mana, you didn't gain spell advantage, but you did gain mana advantage. Similarly, if your opponent can't attack with their 2-mana creature because they don't want you to block it with their 1-mana creature, you've gained mana advantage (or arguably life advantage, depending on how permanent this situation is).

Recap time!

Mana color - a restriction on mana that adds a cost to producing different effects that can be paid in different ways (either with the two other axes, or with consistency, secretly a spell axis cost, and often a mix of all of these)

Board presence- a way to spend mana and cards to generate free axis advantages over time, usually life total, but not always.

That's really it! Together, these 5 resources/axes (really just 3) I believe constitute the backbone of Magic. Decks that are good at winning on each of these axes (either one definitively or multiple flexibly) tend to be the decks that succeed.

I plan to use this axis framework going forward to talk about lots of other things, but for today, I think the most helpful thing is going to be to talk about different kinds of cards, and how they interact with each of the axes. I've been talking about "effects" a lot, and the "efficiency" of those effects. These are meant to be quite general terms, as I've been talking about these axes at a very abstract level, but let me now back up these theories with some actual card evaluations.

For folks who don't do well with theory on its own and need specific examples to solidify their understandings of things (this is most of us, I believe), this next part's for you. Let's get into it!

Effects

Let's start off as simple as possible, with effects that directly produce advantages on only one axis.

Grow from the Ashes is an effect that grows your mana axis - it puts basic lands into play, which, absent other effects, do nothing but produce mana. Casting this card allows you to increase your mana ahead of where it should be by only hitting your land drops every turn, so it's not only helping your baseline mana development, but trying to give you a distinct advantage in that axis.

Under more traditional theories of Magic, you might say that you're gaining "card advantage" when you kick this spell because this gets two cards into play for the cost of one, but I think it is more useful to think of this as an effect that only grows your mana axis, because it doesn't give you the ability to spend mana on anything. Yes, in theory when you use this card to grab two lands instead of using multiple copies of Rampant Growth, you're spending fewer cards to do so and are more likely to have other spells that allow you to spend mana on different effects, but this is more of an indirect result of the tradeoffs between two different effects that solely produce mana, rather than an inherent "spell" or "card" advantage attribute of either effect.

Boltwave is an effect that allows you to spend 1 spell (and 1 mana! don't forget!) to directly gain an advantage in the life total axis.

Most of the time effects attempt to do this do so through board presence rather than directly, but I wanted to choose the simplest example I could find. Hired Claw would be a good example of a card that does this through board presence, and hopefully it's easy to see why that route tends to be more efficient in most typical games of Magic -- although it is more easily stopped too.

Inspiration from Beyond is a bit more complex of a card than our first two, but I wanted to choose an effect that directly seeks to gain an advantage in the "spells" axis as I've defined it here, and only that axis, which straightforward card draw doesn't actually do (we'll discuss this in just a second).

Inspiration from Beyond (assuming you have or mill at least one instant or sorcery) gains you an advantage in the spells axis for the cost of just one spell (and 3 mana! don't forget!).

Hopefully it's obvious, but even though you're technically only gaining one "card" in your hand when you cast this spell, you're also gaining the flashback spell in your graveyard. You're going up in "spells" when you cast this, even if you're not going up cards in hand.

Okay, so what about Divination?

Divination is the stereotypical "card advantage" card - it draws 2 cards for the cost of one. However, this is not purely spell advantage, because not all cards are spells - some are lands!

One of the biggest level-ups in my limited game over the past few years, and I believe one of the smartest theory developments that has been catching on recently, is the idea of card draw and card selection in limited as fixing. This idea hits on a deep property of Magic: If you see more cards in a game, you'll be more likely to draw both enough lands and enough spells to hit your land drops and have spells to cast as well.

In other words, Divination (and card draw effects more generally) are not purely spell advantage cards, even though most new players think of them in this way (because they are conceptually conflating card advantage and spell advantage, as well as not seeing how cards like divination help with hitting land drops and finding color sources in a subtle way).

Card draw, as an effect, is about Spell advantage AND mana advantage (Under this framework, card selection actually operates very similarly, just through optionality rather than quantity!)

Notably, card draw does NOT attempt to interact with the life total resource under most circumstances. This makes it distinct from card advantage gained through board presence, which is a distinction a lot of newer players have trouble grasping (A blocker holding off two creatures is typically more valuable than a divination, even if those creatures cost the same total mana amount as the blocker)

Now we're getting a bit more complicated. Even basic effects like removal can be tricky to interpret through an axis framework, but I think that doing so helps a lot with card evaluation.

Is Doom Blade a mana advantage card, a spell advantage card, or a life total advantage card? Like most removal, the answer depends on what kind of exchanges you're making with it. I picked this art for a reason -- Doom Blade is kind of like a negative space that absorbs the resources of whatever it was exchanged for, at a cost of 1B and a card.

Doom Blade a Grizzly Bears? You've basically treaded water. Did the bears get an attack in first? You're down 2 life on that exchange. Were they enchanted with Lifelink? Congrats! You're up a mana and a spell.

I think this kind of framing can be very useful for understanding why removal is so contextually valuable in constructed. If the environment is chock full of Baneslayer Angels, Doom Blade is probably quite valuable for gaining axis advantages. If it's full of Spyglass Sirens, it's probably not. When we get to things like Sentinel of the Nameless City, the question becomes murkier, and depends on which axes we're fighting over (life, mana = good, spells=bad)

Counterspells are similar to removal, but with different upsides and downsides. Generally, countering a spell is better than removing it because you don't give it any opportunity to accumulate axis advantages, but the downside is you have a very limited window to make this exchange. Counterspells are difficult to use, which is fundamentally a tax on the spells axis.

Mana Leak, specifically, takes this limitation further, by basically saying that if your opponent ever gets far enough ahead with their mana axis that they don't have enough spells to spend 3 mana on, you lose access to this spell entirely. Decks that play this kind of effect are typically either not very worried about losing access to a single spell (they expect to be far enough ahead in the spells axis that it won't matter), or they intend to end the game quickly (since as the game goes on, mana typically grows and spells shrink)

New players tend to underrate lands that can produce effects, because these effects are typically costed quite inefficiently. 4 mana for a 3/3 or 5 mana for a 3/3 haste would be a pretty terrible card, and there are significant consistency costs to playing a colorless land in most decks. And yet, this is an extremely powerful card. Why? Because it gives you an advantage in two axes at the same time!

Imagine a colorless untapped land that said "when this land enters, draw a card."

That land would be busted and see tons of play - but that's essentially what this card is saying, it's just that the specific card you draw has to be inefficient enough for the overall effect to be fair, so it ends up being kind of a Hill Giant (that can sometimes have haste for an extra mana, which is pretty nice!)

Cards that produce advantages in multiple axes at once are incredibly powerful. There's only three axes!

Using the framework above, we can also see why activated abilities tend to be quite powerful, and often come with expensive mana costs or costs in addition to mana.

Most of the time, we don't want a spell that says "pay 1 mana: sacrifice a creature and get a +1/+1 counter". But that's because spells usually cost... 1 spell. What if we had... infinity of that spell? Now we can scan the game for times where it's useful, and only use them there. It's not giving us "infinite" spell advantage, but it is giving us exactly as much spell advantage as there are times where that spell is one we'd want to use. There are a lot of times that priority is passed in a game of Magic the Gathering. If even 1% of those times you'd want to use this spell, you're likely getting multiple axis advantages throughout a game just by having access to it.

Normally, the cost of sacrificing a creature isn't worth paying, but there are pretty common spots where it can be actually be in our best interests, and there is a reason they don't tend to print this ability without a mana restriction anymore. Infinite free spells (free both a mana sense and a spell sense), even if they say "do this thing that is usually negative", are no bueno, because having access to this ability essentially says "you can gain all the value from whenever paying this cost would be a positive, at no cost". If you can set up a situation where this usually-negative action is positive in a particular axis and repeatable, you literally do gain infinite value. Gating this "infinite spells" benefit behind a cost in a different axis puts a safety cap of sorts on the utility that can be gained.

This is a pretty under-rate body. 3 mana for a 2/3 usually doesn't cut it in limited anymore -- and yet, this was one of the best commons in its limited format. Why?

The answer comes back to our understanding of board presence - board presence is generally about life total advantage, and this card gives us a 4-point-swing in that axis right away. Even if the body is so bad it trades for a 2-drop, we're down 1 mana but up 4 life, and that's still not a bad rate (when you're not down a spell at the same time, that is!)

More generally, this is why "enters" abilities are powerful - they basically act like a spell you get for free along with your creature. That's a guaranteed advantage in the "spells" axis (or, more specifically, whichever resource was gained from the entering effect) as well as implied future investment in the life total axis through board presence. Two axis advantages for the cost of only one spell (and some mana) - Something we already know is powerful (even if these aren't traditional "card advantage" effects).

Before we get too confident saying that effects where we gain two axis advantages are always good, let me include an example where that's not the case.

In a sense, this seems like an ETB. If you just imagine the goblins have an entering ability that does the damage, it looks like we're casting a creature that gets double value.

However, effects are only as good as our opportunities to use them (AKA, the spells axis). In this case, we have to evaluate how often the following scenario comes up:

• We have N mana

• The opponent has a creature with [N-3] or less toughness

• The opponent doesn't have a different creature that we expect to gain resources that are more valuable than having [N - 2 - toughness] 1/1 goblins.

In all other scenarios, we either can't cast this spell, or the best play available is to use it to kill a creature for no goblins or fewer goblins than possible, which is usually pretty inefficient because it sets us behind on the mana axis (most creatures that this spell can kill cost less than N mana).

So it comes down to how often we expect this scenario to come up. Generally, the first two bullets already put it into a decently rare category. Some decks don't even have any 1-toughness creatures, so we're already talking about scenarios where we've got 5+ mana. Usually when you have 5+ mana, there are some decently valuable creatures on both sides of the board... which makes 1/1 goblins not super valuable, and makes it more likely we will need to kill something bigger than a 2/2, which ups the mana requirements for getting "value" even higher.

This is a card that promises a significant future life total axis advantage through board presence, but is extremely narrow in the scenarios where it can provide that advantage. Even though it is situationally very strong, and structurally flexible, we have to consider the heavy mana axis cost and situational board state requirements (taxing our spells axis, which is the opportunity to use mana effectively).

This is a card that might be quite good in a format with strong mana development and lots of low-toughness creatures, but that's not most limited formats. Normally, the opportunity cost is just too high.

Finally, I want to talk about one of the most axis-theory-coded cards there is. This is a card that is great at generating small axis advantages with extreme consistency!

The obvious thing is that it directly references one of the axes, life total. If you're behind on this axis it provides you with board presence designed to protect it, and if you're ahead, it allows you (well, forces you to be exact, but who's counting, this is a black card, greatness always has a price!) to trade some of it for a card (which, remember, can be either spell advantage or mana advantage).

Now of course, we need to attack to be able to gain these advantages, but luckily the deathtouch ability means that Preacher is extremely unlikely to be leaving the board without taking something else with it (no spell disadvantage). The 4 toughness also helps with this - Not many 2-mana creatures have 4+ power, so it's also going to be rare that we're behind on mana when this gets into combat (no mana disadvantage). Combined with being a solid blocker and having a built-in ability that protects us against life total disadvantage, that's all our bases covered, in a way designed for the card to almost always be providing positive value through resource exchange or generation.

Additionally, this card costs 3 mana, which is an amount of mana reached in almost every game, so we don't have to worry too much about having opportunities to cast it.

Preacher rates out excellently by axis theory. It's almost always providing axis advantages in one way or another.

Wrap-up / Until next time

Axis Theory: Put Preacher of the Schism into every deck!!!

... well, not quite.

Once decks become more streamlined and games are less about who is able to produce more total resources, we start to care not just about efficiency, but specialization. And in some games, when you fall too far behind on a specific axis, incremental advantage isn't going to cut it.

Preacher is not a very specialized card. It's not great at generating large advantages in any one particular axis, it's good at generating small ones in a variety of them, with very few fail cases.

Today I was looking at cards mostly through a lens of how much total axis advantage they are generating and how consistently they are generating it, because it's a good introduction to (and way to explain) axis theory. It's yet another framework for baseline card evaluation, which can help a lot for formats like limited.

However, while this was the best introduction, I don't really think this is the most useful place for axis theory. I already have two more in mind: understanding constructed archetypes and matchups, and providing more useful language for talking about gameplay.

That feels like at least one, maybe two entirely new articles to write, so I'm going to save it for another time.

Until then - Keep a lookout for (& tell me about) places where axis theory starts popping up for you as a useful framework for thinking about Magic!