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Tempo

This article first explained the concept of tempo. Although it was called "time" by Taylor, this finally was the correct analysis that explained why giving up cards to gain mana advantage early on made sense. Before that time, we had speed decks and "slow" control decks, and Robert Hahn's Schools of Magic tried to explain things with suboptimal categorizations like offensive and defensive speed.

I've posted several times about the concept of time on usenet and I'm
going to write another rather pedantic one about this concept. The
reason this time that I want to do it is that I have seen several
Mirage, Visions, and Weatherlight cards misused... And the main reason
I think these cards (specifically Memory Lapse, Power Sink, Man o' War
and Ancestral Knowledge) are being misused is because of a lack of
understanding of the concept of time in Magic.

If you look at the game mechanics of Magic, there are only two basic limitations:

1) Draw one card per turn 
2) Play one land per turn 

The two limitations are related to each other in subtle ways. 

The first limitation has been discussed at length by the Godfather of
Magic theory, Brian Weissman, and it seems that tournament Magic
players understand how and why card advantage is good. Even indirect
card advantage is fairly easy to spot and understand.

For instance, when you Wrath of God and you kill three creatures with
one Wrath of God you are gaining the same amount of card advantage as
the card Ancestral Recall does. You can just add it up: Three cards
for one.

The second limitation is more difficult to figure out because of the
more complicated interactions of mana, time, and casting cost of
individual spells in a deck.

Time is for the most part interchangeable with mana. 

If you have just a little mana on the board and a slew of creatures in
hand, you can take a single turn to play each creature (ignoring for
now the effect of drawing a card each turn). This requires time. If,
on the other hand, you had a large enough mana base to play out your
entire hand, you could do this in one turn - so you can use either a
lot of time to play out your creatures, or you can use a large base of
mana.

If you play extremely efficient creatures like the Savannah Lion or
the Kird Ape, you are building a deck that is mana efficient - and
thus one that is trying to win by obtaining a time advantage.

While it is always good to have as much card advantage as possible and
as much time advantage as possible, for the most part, decks tend to
tilt one way or the other, attempting to establish a time advantage
(such as a Stasis deck or a creature swarm deck) or a card advantage
(such as CounterPost). A few decks attempt to establish both (such as
classic Necro during the "black summer").

Nearly all control decks with many counterspells have to win via card
advantage. With the control deck, you allow your opponent to build up
a horde of creatures. You let him play the Lions and Kird Apes and you
take your medicine when he attacks. Finally, when you Wrath of God,
you obtain a huge card advantage, and you win by having more cards. On
the other hand, if the fast creature deck is able to deprive you of
enough time with his Strip Mines, he will defeat you via his time
advantage. Winning with card advantage and counterspells takes a long
time, and you often don't care if you can play all your spells at
once. In a control deck, there are often larger and less mana
efficient spells that violate the principles of a time advantage
deck. It is difficult to make a deck that wins both via card and time
advantage.

Mirage-Vision-Weatherlight is a special environment in that for the
most part decks are extremely dependent on a good draw - not too much
land, not too little. Because of this and because a good burn deck can
win so quickly, most decks have been trying to win via time advantage
and not the slower and more controlling method of card advantage.

If you look at the two spells - Memory Lapse and Power Sink - it
becomes obvious that Memory Lapse is a card which is useful mainly to
preserve a time advantage, while Power Sink is more useful for a deck
trying to win via card advantage. The Power Sink requires a lot of
mana to use effectively, which equates into not having the time to
play out creatures and swarm your opponent. With Memory Lapse, when
your opponent plays out a large spell and you force him to try to cast
it again, you are gaining a huge time advantage.

In a deck designed for the long games, Power Sink is better. If you
use Memory Lapse, your opponent will be drawing that spell again,
while you draw something else - which about one-third of the time will
be a land instead of a useful spell. So, Memory Lapse slightly
increases the effective card quality of your opponent's library in a
long game. In the short term, on the other hand, Memory Lapse gives
you an incredible advantage in time.

There are two Mirage-Vision-Weatherlight decks which illustrate this
principle beautifully - first, Tom Guevin's Chicago-PTQ deck:

Creatures (20): 
4 Man o' War
3 Knights of Mist
2 Serrated Biskelion
4 Cloud Elemental
4 Waterspout Djinn
3 Floodgate 

Spells (17): 
4 Memory Lapse
4 Dissipate
3 Foreshadow
4 Impulse
2 Boomerang 

Land (23): 
19 Island
4 Quicksand 

Sideboard (15): 
1 Floodgate
1 Knight of Mist
2 Serrated Biskelion
3 Rainbow Efreet
2 Suq'ata Firewalker
4 Undo
2 Dream Tides 

...and Hammer's Chicago-PTQ deck (I'm sorry, this is from memory so
it's not exact)

Creatures (12): 
2 Rainbow Efreet
4 Man O' War
2 Ophidian
2 Floodgate
2 Hazerider Drakes 

Blue Spells (12): 
2 Impulse
4 Dissipate
2 Desertion
4 Power Sink 

White Spells (10): 
2 Gerrard's Wisdom
2 Gossamer Chains
2 Sacred Mesa
4 Abeyance 

Mana And Land (26): 
4 Flood Plain
7 Plains
10 Islands
3 Mind Stone
2 Quicksand 

Now first of all, notice the character of these decks. If you look
superficially at them both, you might think they are both simply
counterspell control decks - but they are extremely different decks,
with different goals and play styles.

Look at all of Tom's creatures: He has an immense army of rather
fearsome attackers. The Cloud Elemental is not there to block; he's
there to attack. Hammer's deck, on the other hand, relies on a much
slower attack with creatures that are more difficult to kill.

We can tell that Tom's deck is a fast attacking deck and Tom plans to
win based on time: He will hit his opponent so hard and so fast that
his opponent will not have the time (or the mana - which, as I've been
saying, is practically the same thing) to stop him. The counterspells
are designed to reinforce this goal of doing damage, not for defense.

Hammer, on the other hand, cannot attack his opponent with such
quickness. Hammer must protect himself against threats and stay alive
long into the middle or end game, where he can finally achieve victory
via one of his card advantage engines, such as his Sacred Mesa. The
Gerrard's Wisdom, by the way can also be used as a card advantage
engine (mainly against burn by trading several burn spells for one
Gerrard's).

Because of this, the counterspells employed by the two decks must be
different. Tom has to use the Memory Lapse: He is going to be in
situations where he will count his mana, count his opponent's life,
and think, "If I can just hit him two more turns, he will be dead."
With such intensity focused on generating a time advantage, Memory
Lapse is a far better spell. Hammer's deck, on the other hand, is
willing to give up time for card advantage. Because of this it, would
be suicide to run Memory Lapse in Hammer's deck. So what if you force
your opponent to recast his Necrosavant and waste five mana with
Hammer's deck by using a Memory Lapse? Because of the slowness of the
deck and the need to win via card advantaging your opponent, the Power
Sink has to be used in this case.

Notice also how time can be traded for card advantage, which is
especially easy to see in Tom's deck. If you Memory Lapse a card, you
often have the option of then Foreshadowing it, gaining card
advantage. However, this whole combo takes up four total mana, and if
you can simply kill your opponent by casting another Puff Daddy, then
you sometimes want to (but rarely, since the combo Foreshadow plus
Memory Lapse is so good for card advantage) give up the card advantage
for time advantage.

The two decks also use the Man o' War differently. For Guevin's deck,
as soon as you draw a Man o'War, you generally just play it out, and
go whack your opponent senseless with whatever creature you already
have in play. On the other hand, with Hammer's deck, you often have to
wait with the Man o' War for quite a while. Sometimes, you want to
wait to get up to eight mana so you can apply the Man o' War/Desertion
combo. Other times you want to wait until you have enough blue so that
when you Man o' War your Floodgate, you can be sure that all of your
opponent's creatures die. You are trading off valuable time to
generate card advantage.

[Snip discussion about Ancestral Knowledge]

- Eric 

P.S.: If you like this article, of course you are welcome to redistribute it,

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