Evaluating Cards Quadrant Theory

So I’ve been thinking about how to better evaluate both magic cards and deck construction and re-read Marshall’s Sutcliffs post on Quadrant Theory from Brian Wong. Here is the link: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/li/quadrant-theory-2014-08-20

The quick summary is as below, you 4 major states in the game, Developing, Stall, Ahead and Behind. A card is good when you consider these 4 positions and find cards that are good in most of these board positions.

For those who do not know, it’s pretty simple to understand. In general the board state is what matters in games of limited. Therefore at any point you are usually one of these states on the board. You are:

Just starting the game (develop) Lost board presence (losing) Winning board presence (winning) Even on board (Stall)

Cards that are good usually hit multiple stages and thus they are usually the strongest in limited.

Building a better deck

This is all fine and dandy but what does this mean for the actual deck construction. I think a major level up moment for magic players is coming up with an actual plan to win the game. Therefore on-top of this basic quadrant theory there are also directions that the game will flow into, this is what it might look like.

In general green arrows means you “Win” in that phase of the game, red means you “Lose” that state and yellow means you are at a “Draw”. Though this chart is probably really obvious key things to make note of is how hard it is to actual win a game if you don’t develop early.

Win Develop -> Win Ahead -> WIN THE GAME

When you lose the development fight, you have to go all the way around the chart to finally eke out the win.

Lose Develop -> Win Behind -> Win Stall -> Win Ahead -> WIN THE GAME

It’s also why having a deck that is well balanced in all the aspects is often a bad deck compared to a focused deck. A deck that develops well, and then does well ahead clearly has a game plan. In fact with this aggro style deck, even very good behind cards probably don’t help you much at all. On the flip side, a deck that has great behind potential, and strong stall game will usually find themselves ahead during the late game.

We can take a look at a game I played recently:

Not bad right? You can see the draft video Here

If I was to rate this deck I would put it this level:

Develop Ahead Behind Stall Vampires Deck 4 5 3 4

This deck went 2-1. Can you guess how I lost? I lost because I faced up against a very strong R/W deck that beat me in the develop phase. My deck doesn’t have great options if I’m behind on board, it’s much stronger attacking. If I lose the develop then I still have a shot at getting back to a stall, but my opponent played more cards to get them ahead and ended it quickly.

If I was to re-tweak the deck then it would simply to include more 2 drops even at the sake of some premium Vanquish The Weaks. Deathless Ancient was a complete dud in the deck as my deck really only performed well in the develop stage, and should played anything else in its spot instead.

Conclusion

Hopefully this helped you better understand a little bit about how a deck is constructed. The main takeaway should be that you don’t need all the quadrants for a good deck, you need usually 2. Develop and Ahead, or Behind and Stall. Yes there could be other decks that might work, but they will usually do worse than those 2 main archetypes.

Tune in next week where I use this concept to analyze the competitive landscape of a set too!

-Dev