Interviewer: “Why do Germans play one more land than everyone else in the same decks?”

Kai Budde: “I think we just like to cast our spells more than everyone else does.” Tom LaPille – Lands Are Awesome

The problem is that Vintage players habitually underestimate the importance of mana on their decisions. It comes from a lifetime of accelerating out their plays with moxen. When Vintage players look at cards, they see the casting cost reduced by one or two mana because they have so many easily available memories of multiple moxen in their opening hand, or playing second turn Mind Sculptors off of a first turn Sol Ring. It’s a very real cognitive bias that presents itself whenever Vintage players try to evaluate cards. They are overly optimistic. They often imagine best case scenarios where they have four mana on turn two. “Ok, so let’s say you play this card turn two off a mox or something.” Vintage players have a strong tendency for underestimating how much equity they gain from having artifact accelerants in their opening hands. They transfer the equity belonging to moxen onto the spells they are casting with them. Accordingly, the emotional investment becomes attached to the spell rather than the mana used to cast it. In reality, the spell is much more replaceable than the mox. Rather than be emotionally attached to Divinations, they should be emotionally attached to their thousand dollar moxen.

This behavior is not limited to Vintage players, but moxen exaggerate it and make it different than the cognitive bias present in other formats. Professional competitive formats have become disciplined about land counts because the stakes are high enough that people actually play the right amount of mana in their decks. Conversely, the most common mistake of amateur deckbuiders is not playing enough lands and color sources to support the spells they want to cast.

The emotional attachment to expensive blue draw spells is basically an error in card evaluation. Many Vintage players think Thirst for Knowledge and Gifts Ungiven are fantastic cards, only slightly behind Gush. The reality is they are barely played in Modern or Legacy, and Gush is banned from the latter. Thirst for Knowledge and Gifts Ungiven are only ok draw spells. They are only marginally better than Read the Bones and Divination. It’s the moxen that are powerful. The only times Gifts or Thirst have been format-warping, Gush has been restricted.

Vintage requires a truly broken draw spell to allow blue decks to be fair. Thirst for Knowledge and Gifts decks are always combo decks because the tempo loss from playing expensive Divinations is so severe that you need a game-winning combo to overcome the unfavorable position you’ve put yourself in. Gush allows Force of Will decks to be fair, combat-based, and adhere to the principles of normal Magic. Gush is a strongly positive force in Vintage because it rewards an understanding of mana and punishes this cognitive bias. It is a skill-intensive card that simultaneously makes the format more accessible and rewards good deckbuilding from both its pilots and its opponents. Gush decks are fair and good Magic decks. Comparing the good Gush decks of today with the dominant combo decks of past Gush eras is disingenuous at best. Gush today is neither oppressively controlling nor oppressively aggressive. It results in a bunch of midrange decks. And incidentally that’s probably exactly why Vintage veterans aren’t in love with it.

All we really want are decisions. More options, more choices. Whenever people want to restrict a card, it’s because they think restricting it will create more deckbuilding decisions. That’s a universal commonality to restriction and banning arguments across formats. When people ban something for being too good, they ban it for restricting too many decisions available in a format. When people get annoyed at format-warping cards, it’s because they feel those cards restrict their deckbuilding options. But this is exactly what good cards do. They restrict our opponent’s decisions. That’s how we win a game of Magic. Chapin said it, remove the opponent’s option to continue to play the game. Good cards create options or they destroy our opponent’s.

Sometimes we complain about things because we don’t understand where our decision was.

I’ve been playing and testing two versions of Delver. Both have 4 Delver of Secrets and 4 Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy. One deck, we’ll call it the Pure deck, has 4 Young Pyromancer. The other deck, the Split deck, has 2 Young Pyromancer and 2 Monastery Mentor. I’m not married to either the Split or the Pure versions, and I go back and forth between them based on metagame considerations. The Split version makes better use of Black Lotus and has a better midrange game against other Young Pyromancer decks. The Pure version has a better Plan A and is a better aggressive deck. The decks were otherwise identical. They had identical mana bases. Three moxen, fifteen lands, and Lotus.

I felt like the Pure version was clunkier than the Split version. I would constantly be put in situations where I had to choose between Young Pyromancer and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy. It felt like I was stumbling on mana. I tended to choose Young Pyromancer because the value of free countermagic is a lot higher when a token maker is on the table, and because Jace is a great card to pitch to Force of Will when you have four of them in your deck. And sometimes I won and sometimes I didn’t, but it felt awkward and clunky.

The Split version ran more smoothly. Often I would curve out turn two Jace into turn three Mentor. I would get to flip Jace on turn 3 and pull ahead. It felt like my mana was much better, and it felt like I was winning more games.

Something struck me though. It is impossible that the Split version had better mana than the Pure version. The Split version had the same mana base and a higher curve, with the two Mentors costing three mana as opposed to Pyromancer’s two. How could the more expensive deck run smoother?

In reality, the Split version rarely presented me with the decision between casting Jace or casting Mentor. When I had two mana I had to cast Jace. Then later I would have three mana, and I would cast Mentor. The Pure version forced me to make a decision between my two mana creatures. The Split version often made the decision for me. It’s not that the Pure deck was clunky, it was just that it gave me more decisions about how to spend my mana. But the very presence of a decision made the deck feel like it wasn’t running right. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the Pure version was better. Mentor might be worth it anyway. But I learned to be wary of making a decision based on which deck felt like it was running smoother.

It’s easy to misidentify phenomena in Magic. Where are your decisions really located? Are you trading options in deckbuilding for options in the game? If you give yourself free range in card choices and just play whatever underpowered cards you feel like, you are going to end up with fewer decisions in the actual games. Conversely, if you hold yourself to highest standard of card quality, you will end up with the best cards in the game and the mana to cast them. The best cards are the ones that create decisions for us or destroy those belonging to our opponent.

And just as Vintage players often misappropriate their evaluation of card quality, stripping it from moxen and bestowing it upon expensive draw spells, they translate higher variance in the actual game to more decisions in deckbuilding. When you play cards with liberal casting costs, you might have more deckbuilding options, but your in-game decisions are going to be more dependent on the variance of drawing your restricted cards.

Decisions are great, but if we aren’t winning, we often retroactively dismiss many of the choices we had. When we win, it was because we made great decisions and we are happy. When we lose, it was because we got unlucky, we flooded or choked on mana, and the few decisions we did make didn’t really matter because we drew the wrong number of lands. The ability to dismiss losses as luck and victories as skill is what makes Magic more addictive than either games of pure skill (Chess) or pure luck (flipping a coin). The game succeeds at it’s very root because of this cognitive bias.

Vintage is so fascinating because it combines the highest variance cards in the game’s existence with the most powerful tools to hurdle the uncertainty those cards create. In low variance Limited formats, it’s much easier to lose to mana screw or flood than it is in Vintage. We have Preordain. It’s also much harder to lose to Black Lotus in Limited than it is in Vintage, but Vintage has Force of Will. The health of Vintage depends on the balance between the tools available to overcome variance and the restricted cards responsible for it.

Gush is so positive for the format because it is among the best possible tools for balancing out the luck of who draws their restricted cards. The Thirst of Knowledge and Gifts Ungiven versions of Vintage depend to far greater degrees on drawing your restricted artifact mana. Gush separates your ability to gain card advantage from the good fortune of drawing a mox, and that is incredibly empowering to you as a pilot. While you might lose deckbuilding decisions because Gush is better than all those other expensive draw spells, you gain so many more decisions in the course of every game that would otherwise be lost to the wild variance of the restricted list.