Some time ago I wrote about Mishra’s Factory in the 93/94 format. Reading some of the comments on reddit I thought of doing a MF case, part 2, but I have other concerns in the format, and treating cards’ cases independently only go so far, when it’s not downright stupid. The land conundrum is mostly a triumvirate of problem cards : Library of Alexandria, Mishra’s Factory and Strip Mine. There are other lands that are to be considered in the discussion as all mana-producing lands are, you know, kind of important, but the three problematic lands in the format as of today are those.

I’ve already explained the Mishra’s Factory case. The Strip Mine case is manifold, but well-known, so I won’t develop it into an article : 1) some thinks it makes games too boring because almost everybody plays four if unrestricted and 2) that it makes the game very random as often if a player has multiple SMs in his opening hand/early turns the opponent won’t be able to develop his game, additionally 3) some think it would makes life too hard for budget players as richer ones playing full sets of “jewelry” would be less affected, 4) it would affect reasonable land based strategies, like for instance reanimator decks benefiting from Bazaar of Baghdad.

And those are just the arguments against an unrestriction. Before talking about arguments in favor, we need to talk briefly about Library of Alexandria. The overpowerdness of the card is so self-evident that when someone tells me that it isn’t more oppressive than Mind Twist I assume I’m getting trolled (and I still do, so I won’t justify myself). Last year I send an email to Magnus de Laval (host of the 93/94 blog) talking about LoA, which didn’t argued much more that all it took to know that the cards needs to be banned is to play the format (I don’t want it to be banned). Another trolling argument you have to go through when you talk about this card is the following : “everybody plays it and it’s only relevant when in the opening hand , so it’s fair”. No it’s not ! Fuck it, I give up; let’s have a troll-feeding session.

Even if everybody played one.. If I play aggro and I have it in my opening hand, I’ll have to shoot my game-plan in the leg and wait a turn before starting the onslaught because LoA is that good. If I play control I won’t nearly shoot my plan in the leg by that much, if at all. That’s one thing. Another is : LoA is most of the time worthless later in the game for aggressive decks, and to a lesser extent for midrange decks. But for The Deck or other control strategies, it’s still too often and too fast the golden, game-breaking card that it is. The last one is : spells that can take care of LoA will be countered much more often by controlled decks, as a real aggro deck won’t play those and just maybe has room for a few anti-artifact measure to neutralize an activated Chaos Orb.

As for actual arguments about controlling LoA without unrestricting Strip Mine, they’ve been given for years now, and years have shown those arguments to fall flat : no, putting Stone Rains or Ice Storm in your deck won’t help as those cards are weak, put you in too much trouble against many decks, and in fact against the others they’ll still be too weak in many situations. In addition, their casting cost means they’ll probably be countered if playing against (aggro/)control (another imbalance with less controlling strategies regarding the card). Blood Moon and Armageddon are interesting cards, though the first is more appropriate to the format, but while Blood Moon neutralizes your opponent’s LoA it will also neutralize yours, were you to draw it. Only Sinkhole gets a pass with its cheap casting cost. But only a limited number of decks and strategies can accommodate that card considering its nature and casting cost. The old school ’94 card pool ain’t that bad and Garfield knew to provide a good solution-card. That card has a name and its name is Strip Mine.

So let’s see the upsides to an unrestriction : 1) if you won’t do a rule update (or errata) making Mishra Factories not being able to defend as a 3/3 and deal damage, then more Strip Mines means MFs are less of a problem, 2) and of course any abusive use of any land is pretty much solved beforehand, so no need to think about banning LoA or just suffering through it, problem solved 3) multi-color “good stuff”, fully-powered deck, and more importantly the dominant deck called “The Deck”play risky manabases, and would suffer more from such an unrestriction than more humble (and often more budget-friendly) mono or bi-colored decks. Point 3 in favor directly contradicts point 3 against. Let’s examine.

While LoA and MFs are a problem, we also have a “The Deck” problem. I don’t think any set of reasonable alterations to the format would unseat that deck from a tier 1 if not domineering position, and that’s not my goal. In fact I’m a control player at heart. I’ve just lost the appetite to play The Deck in this format, I need more of a challenge, and playing that deck offers too little right now. The card pool is geared towards control being on top, with control cards being generally at an all-time high, and aggressive cards definitely not (for comparison only Lightning Bolt and Kird Ape have seen some play in the modern format -and for the latter, very moderately so; while cards like Swords to Plowshares, Counterspell, Mana Drain, The Abyss and Moat are too powerful to be even considered for a standard-legal reprint). But some adjustments to the formats can be done to successfully achieve some damage control, while respecting the historicity of the format. Anyways.. who benefits the most from a Strip Mine restriction ? (Well, apart from land destruction decks, of the O’Brien school of Nether Voiding people into hell.) One argument is that the rich players will have Moxes, while the others won’t and therefore will suffer more as the jewelry is unaffected. That seems like displacing an argument that shows that Winter Orb and Armageddon are friendlier to the richer kids than the poorest, which is a valid one (and the reason why those cards aren’t very competitive in this format, while they were beasts in old school type II). Like I wrote there, The Deck as it is established right now has a shaky manabase, it typically plays around 10 mana sources of white, while the deck doesn’t play spells requiring two whites, and around 13 blue, while playing dual-blue spells. Those numbers are very small (see there for a stastically serious study of mana sources requirement), the deck is very short on colored mana already, and hopes to thrive by using opponent’s color through their Fellwar Stones, or just survive with the help of artifacts when the colors aren’t there. A cheap monocolored weenie decks doesn’t suffer as much from such restrictions, it would still need to adapt its number of mana-sources, but its chances of being cut from the colored mana it needs to cast its spell is obviously reduced. Moxes aren’t that big of a refuge, like they are in the case of massive land oppression cards like Winter Orb, Armageddon and Manabarbs. In fact by being monocolored they’re at the worse an impediment in that case, or anyways they’re not you favorite target as it’s more efficient to destroy a dual land or a City of Brass. That’s why I think that argument against Strip Mine’s unrestriction is not only spurious, but that it’s the opposite that would happen : expansive decks, especially the most dominant ones would suffer the most, which is good for the balance of the format.

To settle that of course you’d need to test extensively. Usually I don’t do much theory-crafting like I just did above about the Strip Mines/Moxes point. I prefer to test before speaking. So why not this time ? Well, it’s a conundrum, one so much bigger than this lone point of debate that it seems very unproductive to do that work as of today. I played competitively during ’96 when every decks played 4 of those. It didn’t stop us from having fun, nor to be happy to see it restricted at the end of the year. Multiple Strip Mines is a major annoyance, as is unchecked LoA. There doesn’t seem to be any way out of it.

Or is there ? Well, maybe there are, but they aren’t conventional ones.

My first, though not favorite idea is to alternate. One year with 4 Strip Mines was survivable, one year with only one should be too. It just gets really, really old after a while. One year restricted then one year not (or a faster regime if you like) : I wouldn’t call it a fix but it makes thing fresher with some yearly changes and by alternating the nuisances, those would be easier to swallow.

My preferred idea is to restrict Strip Mines to three. The difference with Strip Mines unrestricted isn’t just “one”, it’s more “like” 25%. On average in one case you’d draw a Strip Mine every 20 cards, in the other every 15. In a seven-card opening hand of a 60-cards deck, you have about 28% chances to get exactly one Strip Mine in one case, 33.6% in the other : that’s less than a 25% difference, but read on. In your 9 first cards drawn your chances to have at least 2 Strip Mines are respectively 5.6% and 10.3% : in that case that’s much more than a 25% difference, which is great since the infamous “he had two Strip Mines, I lost” is what we want to limit. The chances to be able to deal with an opening LoA fast enough, that is to have at least one Strip Mine among your first eight cards are respectively 35.4% and 44.4% : decent numbers in both cases, which is good as we still want reasonable chances to get rid of an LoA with a Strip Mine, and still gives plenty of chances for an early LoA to shine, as is appropriate for this format. To sum it up, the numbers (you can find a hypergeometric calculator there) seem to back three Strip Mines as a good middle ground to the conundrum, at least regarding Library of Alexandria. For reference, your chances to draw your lone Strip Mine in you first eight cards are 13.3% and your chance to draw a LoA (or any restricted or singleton card) in your opening seven is 11.7%. [EDIT] This doesn’t mean that your chances of having a LoA in your opening hand is 11.7, since mulligans will happen, and those could grant a LoA. We’ll do as if two mulligans would render the LoA too hard to abuse. Still in many cases after a mulligan the card can be exploited. Using the great tools build by MIKE VANDYKE assuming we would mulligan both hands with only one land, and those with 5 spells, we obtain about 20% chance of mulliganing, and about 10% chances to get a LoA in that 6 card hand. That brings the tally to around 13.7% chances to have a “live” LoA” in your opening hand.[/EDIT] This does NOT mean that LoA is a problem in only about a game out of ten. It’s more like in a game out of 5 (EDIT: considering the above edit, one game in four actually!) since there are two players to a game, and to simplify we’ll assume people do play LoA since this is regarding competitive play, and -again- later LoAs aren’t dead to everybody and they’re certainly not irrelevant to competitive play as control is on top, so the impact of LoA on the format is hard to encapsulate in a percentage, but experience shows that on the competitive level it is quite high. Add three turns and it’s like the opponent has cast an Ancestral Recall for free if he had an opening LoA, and by then your chances to have drawn your restricted Strip Mine shoot to the roof to.. 18.3%. So even in this already terrible scenario, you still have more than 80% chances not to have found a Strip Mine : with counterspells aplenty for spells that could deal with it, it’s no surprise the card is warping the format.

Of course I don’t expect major oldschool organisations to adopt something like that. I imagine they wouldn’t even consider it more than a few seconds. The number of allowed cards are either 0, 1, 4 and “basic land”, that’s the law. Why ? As we’ve seen there can be great benefits to use other numbers, and as the format is unsanctioned it would seem like an easy fix.

But it isn’t. The Swedish “mothership” wouldn’t do it as they consider their format rules to be just an accessible baseline. Many other groups mostly follow the mothership with little alterations. But on the local level ? It’s not necessarily that much easier. Maybe in some places, but in my local group you can barely utter the words “with more Strip Mines authorized” without being interrupted by a definitive “against”. I don’t know how much of resistance to change, fear of land destruction, and misconceptions enter into that mindset, but with all that, you can see why it doesn’t seem very worth the effort to test point 3 right now, especially considering that there are many other factors to consider : it barely seems possible to even discuss the topic. Anyways, while I probably didn’t make much friends by calling out trolls and such, this is the place where I can do that. Dont acte.