Moneyball: The Case for Card Quality
In 2002, The Oakland A’s won an American League record 20 wins in a row in Major League Baseball. The strange thing about this was not how good the team was, but rather how cheap the roster’s salary was compared to the rest of the league. The entire salary of the 2002 Oakland A’s was $40M. This sounds like a lot, but it wasn’t even 1/5th of the salary of the highest salary team, the New York Yankees, who’s salary was $125M. The Oakland A’s were playing an unfair game to their disadvantage. The way that Oakland combatted this was to find undervalued players at discounts and build a roster out of those types of players rather than overpaying for the best of the best. At this point you are probably wondering, like with most of my articles, “Levi, what the heck does this have to do with Commander?” Well, I’m glad you asked! The topic this week is about how to allocate funds to your commander deck.
Similar to the Oakland A’s losing all of their best players to the Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees, commander is an unfair game. Other players will have more expendable income or simply wish to spend more of what they have on this game to make their decks as strong as possible. It is hard to compete with that. According to the Command Zone, it has actually been confirmed that decks that have a higher budget also see a higher win percentage than their budget counterparts. This can definitely be frustrating, but there are things that you can do to work smarter, not more expensive.
For this exercise, we are going to say you bought a preconstructed commander deck and you happen to come across $100.00 that you would like to spend to upgrade the deck. $100.00 can definitely do a lot for a deck. You could add a Mana Crypt, or maybe some shock lands! If you’re looking to invest into the cards themselves to hold value, that might be a wise choice, but if you’re looking for the biggest impact to your deck, there is a better way to go about it. Allow me to introduce you to our “Does he get on base” concept - card quality. (Side Note: If you haven’t seen the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, I highly recommend it.)
Card quality at this time is a term primarily used in cEDH circles, but I feel it has casual implications as well. Card quality refers to how effective or ineffective a particular card might be in a deck. The running theory is we don’t want to run any bad cards (shocker right), and eventually get to a point that all the cards in the deck are good, then great. In cEDH, the reference usually talks about having bad cards in a cEDH deck that are combo pieces and to try to run combos that only use high quality cards as much as possible. When we are looking to upgrade a preconstructed deck, we have to look at the current lineups to know what we need to do.
The first thing to look at is the stats. How many ramp spells are in the deck? What about card draw, spot removal, and board wipes? If this is a deck revolving around a particular creature type, how many of that type are in the deck? By getting a feel for the deck and the ratios, we can get a better idea of where to start. Most preconstructed decks will have some type of sub theme. For example, the Azorius Spirit precon deck had a tapping down theme and the Riders of Rohan deck had a Monarch theme in addition to their human typal theme. I would recommend cutting one of the two themes and focusing on the other. By allowing the deck to flow all in the same direction you can increase the synergy between all of your cards so they will perform better than they would together.
So once we have determined what our “bad” are we can determine how many there are. If there are 25 cards in the deck, you have a 25% chance of drawing a bad card. So with the $100.00, instead of grabbing 1 or 2 powerful cards for your deck, it may be better suited to look for 25 cards averaging $4.00 each to replace the bad cards for your deck and therefore improving the overall card quality ratio of the deck. Instead of raising the ceiling potential, we want to raise the floor to ensure when you draw cards, the ones that are going to your hand are in fact good cards that will help your game plan. The next time you come across some money, you can go back to the deck and find the “good” cards and swap them out for “great” cards. By improving your deck’s consistency, you actually have a higher chance of hanging in with an opponent that has a much more expensive deck.
In an unfair game, you have to work smarter, not harder. While cards like Mana Crypt are quite powerful, the impact on an average game is rather minimal. Similar to the Oakland A’s, finding that value in the little things goes a long way to building a strong commander deck.
Similar to the Oakland A’s losing all of their best players to the Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees, commander is an unfair game. Other players will have more expendable income or simply wish to spend more of what they have on this game to make their decks as strong as possible. It is hard to compete with that. According to the Command Zone, it has actually been confirmed that decks that have a higher budget also see a higher win percentage than their budget counterparts. This can definitely be frustrating, but there are things that you can do to work smarter, not more expensive.
For this exercise, we are going to say you bought a preconstructed commander deck and you happen to come across $100.00 that you would like to spend to upgrade the deck. $100.00 can definitely do a lot for a deck. You could add a Mana Crypt, or maybe some shock lands! If you’re looking to invest into the cards themselves to hold value, that might be a wise choice, but if you’re looking for the biggest impact to your deck, there is a better way to go about it. Allow me to introduce you to our “Does he get on base” concept - card quality. (Side Note: If you haven’t seen the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, I highly recommend it.)
Card quality at this time is a term primarily used in cEDH circles, but I feel it has casual implications as well. Card quality refers to how effective or ineffective a particular card might be in a deck. The running theory is we don’t want to run any bad cards (shocker right), and eventually get to a point that all the cards in the deck are good, then great. In cEDH, the reference usually talks about having bad cards in a cEDH deck that are combo pieces and to try to run combos that only use high quality cards as much as possible. When we are looking to upgrade a preconstructed deck, we have to look at the current lineups to know what we need to do.
The first thing to look at is the stats. How many ramp spells are in the deck? What about card draw, spot removal, and board wipes? If this is a deck revolving around a particular creature type, how many of that type are in the deck? By getting a feel for the deck and the ratios, we can get a better idea of where to start. Most preconstructed decks will have some type of sub theme. For example, the Azorius Spirit precon deck had a tapping down theme and the Riders of Rohan deck had a Monarch theme in addition to their human typal theme. I would recommend cutting one of the two themes and focusing on the other. By allowing the deck to flow all in the same direction you can increase the synergy between all of your cards so they will perform better than they would together.
So once we have determined what our “bad” are we can determine how many there are. If there are 25 cards in the deck, you have a 25% chance of drawing a bad card. So with the $100.00, instead of grabbing 1 or 2 powerful cards for your deck, it may be better suited to look for 25 cards averaging $4.00 each to replace the bad cards for your deck and therefore improving the overall card quality ratio of the deck. Instead of raising the ceiling potential, we want to raise the floor to ensure when you draw cards, the ones that are going to your hand are in fact good cards that will help your game plan. The next time you come across some money, you can go back to the deck and find the “good” cards and swap them out for “great” cards. By improving your deck’s consistency, you actually have a higher chance of hanging in with an opponent that has a much more expensive deck.
In an unfair game, you have to work smarter, not harder. While cards like Mana Crypt are quite powerful, the impact on an average game is rather minimal. Similar to the Oakland A’s, finding that value in the little things goes a long way to building a strong commander deck.
Thank you for reading!
If you have a topic or question you would like to see covered in the blog or on the upcoming podcast, send me an email at thoughtvesselshow@gmail.com
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