Sweat the Small Things (How to evaluate cards better)

Today's Soundtrack: https://open.spotify.com/track/1PEPcLm2QEo0HCRIhQjPq1?si=ce234ed7fe1f4605

Table of Contents

Intro

Evaluation Starts With Re-Evaluation

Think for Yourself

Bias Cheap

Sweat the Small Things

Wrapping Up

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At some point I'll write up thoughts about MH3, but the format is still in its' early stages and I'm still very much in the exploratory phase with it. So instead today, I want to use MH3 cards to talk about a trend I've been noticing recently in terms of card evaluation.

Most limited players will listen to set reviews to get prepared for a format. This is a great and entertaining way to absorb the background information necessary for getting on the ground running in a new environment. The content creators who put out set previews/reviews are all incredibly talented limited players who mostly are incredibly skilled at card evaluation - Their opinions are a great baseline and are worth listening to!

However, as with a lot of my content, I think it's often useful to take a step back from the regular set cycle and try and come up with methods for improving our thinking over time / taking skills to the next level, beyond what content creators can give us.

So let's get into it!

Evaluation Starts With Re-evaluation

Listening to a set review for a new format is fun. The cards are new and exciting, you haven't been able to play with them yet, and you want to hear about what's going to be good.

You know what's a lot less exciting, but probably equally important? Looking back at your evaluations and seeing what you got right and wrong.

If your goal is to get better over time, you'd better start building some accountability into your process when it comes to card evals. Some limited podcasts already do this, and I think it's a great tool -- The "set re-review", so to speak. If you're not listening to these episodes, you should! But even for shows that don't do this, I think going back to re-listen to the set reviews after the format has played out, remembering your thoughts from the first time you listened, and checking if they hold up is going to provide an opportunity to see gaps in your thinking and adjust.

Think for Yourself

Along these lines, I think one of the biggest things someone can do to improve their card evaluation abilities is to intentionally try and disagree with their favorite content creators sometimes. Now, I don't mean go harass them on twitter -- these can (and probably should) be private disagreements.

When you're consuming content about a new set, you should be actively searching for times when you think the hosts are wrong. Not only does this condition you to be actively evaluating the arguments they are making for each card, it gives you opportunities to test your own thought processes once the format is released. I haven't done this yet, but it might be worth keeping notes on where you disagree strongly with evaluations you hear, and revisiting those notes later on.

I should say that it doesn't really matter how good you are at this! If you're wrong and the content creators are right 90% of the time, that is simply more information and more opportunities to learn and advance your thinking. Don't be scared to be wrong, have bold takes, just make sure you are tracking them and learning from them.

One great way to do this is to play Magic Data Science's P0P1 challenge on twitter!

https://x.com/mtg_ds/status/1796643484352315460

Bias Cheap

This is a point that has been made by others, but I think it's worth reiterating. Magic players have a systematic bias towards larger effects and cards that do "more" over cards that do their job efficiently.

My strategy in the P0P1 challenge is, when in doubt, to pick the cheapest cards that seem strong. It takes a LOT for a 4-6 mana common to become one of the higher GIH WR cards in a set, and you notice this the more you actually pay attention to winrates and results after the set review cycle is over. This bias is so pernicious that even the best set reviewers still fall prey to it a lot of the time, despite being fully aware of it and actively trying to account for it in their thinking!

The best recent example of this I can think of is Incinerator of the Guilty from MKM. This card reads like an A+ bomb - if you connect with it, you instantly win the game almost every time.

However, in modern limited, there are severe structural limitations to how high the winrate of a card can go if it costs 6 mana and doesn't have an immediate and distributed impact on the board. Pyrotechnic Performer had a higher winrate as a rare, because it was a 3/2 for 2 mana sometimes while also having a potentially huge lategame impact, and the flexibility to not fall behind in a game because of a card's efficiency is such a huge advantage that's easy to underestimate when thinking about cards in a vaccum.

Sweat the Small Things

Here's the meat of the point I wanted to make today, and this is where I'm going to deep dive on some examples.

I think players far UNDERestimate the impact of small details when it comes to evaluating cards.

A lot of set review content out there focuses on heuristics for evaluation like the vanilla test, quadrant theory, comparison to older cards, etc. These are all great tools for evaluation, and you should definitely be using them in a vaccum to come to reasonably well informed opinions.

However, I believe these are still blunt instruments that only get you so far. To really get to an advanced stage of card evaluation, you MUST care about the details.

What do I mean by this? There are a variety of ways this can crop up. I think MH3 is a really good set for this, because it is supposed to be an "expert" power level set, where even the commons at least have potential modern applications. This means things will be pushed, but these pushes almost always occur in the "nitpicky" parts of cards.

It's easy to skim over this and think "okay, I know this archetype of card. Grizzly bear with upside - The upside comes with the adapt ability, and the ability works through giving you graveyard hate + providing a one-time attack with a creature you exiled as a payoff".

That's partially right, but it's critically important to recognize a piece of text that's NOT on this card, which almost assuredly would be in a non-modern horizons set...

"activate this ability only as a sorcery"

This is such a common feature of modern design that it's easy to assume it's there when it's not. The difference between an Act of Treason and an Act of Aggression is a canyon of value. The ability to activate this ability as an instant (or, in fact, trigger it outside of the adapt- another small, but more noticeable detail is the triggering whenever any +1/+1 counters are added!) makes for essentially an entirely different card.

Here's one going in the opposite direction. This card first reads like a weird Eldrazi Skyclave Apparition, of course with the Thought Knot Seer ability instead of the X/X token (debatable which is better, but roughly equivalent in terms of value.

Sure, it's effectively a 2-color card, but it has a better body! This effect, getting rid of a troublesome permanent for good and only giving your opponent marginal value back if they answer your answer, is super powerful.

But look again. The word isn't "nontoken"... it's...

Noncreature.

That is a huge restriction. This is no Skyclave Apparition, any more than Bramblecrush  is a green reprint of Vindicate. That one word takes this from a universally powerful, efficient answer/threat hybrid, to a situationally powerful Reclamation Sage-style effect.

I gotta be honest, this one baffles me. There is literally a THEME in the set around drawing your third card in a turn! It would be so easy to skim over this one and think it's templated the same way... but no, this card belongs alongside Improbable Alliance, not Sneaky Snacker. That is a HUGE power level gap, and it's critical to notice it if you're going to recognize how good this card is (though, the vanilla test is already quite strong of course).

This card is a great example of a pattern that is worthwhile to start recognizing -- Often, Magic cards will be templated with abilities that neatly fit together into a prescribed play pattern. Mark Rosewater talks about this a lot in his Drive to Work podcast (highly recommended if you want to get familiar with deep magic theory!), but the general idea is that players like it when cards fit into a neat little package and all the abilities make sense together.

It's an easy human tendency to assume that things meant to go together will always go together, but it's equally important to resist this when it comes to evaluating cards. The obvious play pattern here is "adapt, attack, grow to a 5/5". But imagine if this card just didn't have the adapt ability... in a vaccum, it would still be a Centaur Courser, but in a set with a modified theme, it still reads more like a build-around uncommon than an average common! The attack trigger can grow your own creatures without having to spend any mana, and this ability already comes on a reasonable body. This card is much closer in "virtual size" to a Loxodon Smiter than a 3-mana 3/3, even when we forget about the adapt ability.

This is a weird card. MythicSpoiler's "thesaurus" for it comes up empty. The obvious comparison is an Act on Impulse that compensates you if you can't use all 3 cards... but what if a better comparison were Basalt Monolith? How about a cheaper Captain's Call?

This is a classic card where "Plan B" is actually "Plan A". 3 Eldrazi spawn is a really powerful rate for 3 mana - They can chump block, be used as mana, be pumped up for attacks, sacrificed to other effects... the list goes on. I think it's important to evaluate this card with a baseline of "3 mana, get 3 bodies" as opposed to "Impulsive draw with a compensation rate". You can only do that if you're paying close attention to details and rates, instead of approximating based on previous cards you've seen.

This last card I want to highlight is a masterclass in subtle, but powerful design. There are already a few reasons this card is strong that traditional limited theory will highlight. Fixing lands are always picked less highly than they should be, and same goes for modal cards... this is both!

However, there are a couple more reasons to like this card that I think may go under-appreciated. I'll start with the more obvious one, which is hybrid mana. It's easy to read this as a RW card, but it's actually much closer to a colorless card. You can VERY easily play this in any deck that can produce red OR white mana, which is... most decks. The ability to play it as a land just compounds the flexibility.

But the thing I really want to point out here is the effect. We're used to these effects on modal and flexible cards being relatively "nerfed", to account for the card's additional power.

This card reads like that. Doubling effects are strong, but Rush of Blood is not a very good magic card, since it doesn't usually let a creature that was going to lose a combat straight up win a combat straight up.

Effects that grant first strike without a stats boost are similarly pretty weak. There's a reason we almost always see this effect alongside at least +1/+0 a-la Kindled Fury, and these aren't even usually very strong limited cards!

But the details are important here. When you combine these effects, you get something that's even stronger than granting double strike, one of the most powerful abilities in Magic. The SPELL side of this card is quite literally a lot better than Double Cleave, despite not "reading" that way at all to people who are used to these effects and scanning quickly.

All of these micro upsides make for a card that I'm incredibly excited about. This is a card that's going to be very helpful to have in almost every game of limited magic you play. To illustrate how much I like this card from a pure evaluation standpoint; I wouldn't be devastated if I were forced to run 2 in a straight UBG deck. Any deck that can produce red or white mana, and I'm quite excited!

Wrapping Up

If you want to take your limited card evaluation to the next level, these are the things I would do:

• Start revisiting your evaluations on a regular basis

• Make sure you're at least sometimes finding points of disagreement with content creators you listen to

• Start paying close attention to the minor templating details on cards and thinking about how these impact the card's power, independently of similar cards you've seen before.

This is by no means the be-all-end-all of one of the most important skills in Magic, but I do think it's a good set of rules to follow if you want to get better over time.

Until next time!