The Long Answer

Ramping is a generic game strategy by which resources (cards, mana, turns, cash, etc) are leveraged to increase one’s access to additional resources. We use these resources to win. In the game of real life, buying a business would be a ramp strategy. You pay in once, you retain the liquid value of the business, then your steady state income is increased. Eventually (hopefully), your realized earnings exceed the amount you invested minus the liquid value and you profit. If owning a successful business isn’t winning, I don’t know what is.

In the context of Magic the Gathering, ramp is a strategy that can pay off very quickly. Five of the Power Nine cards are Vintage restricted artifacts that ramp our mana production on T1 with zero investment (outside of the card itself). You can see “profits” the same turn you play it and each after with minimal risk, the degeneracy of which I will demonstrate near the end of this dissertation. Wizards of the Coast was quick to identify the nature of such cards on the game, and they haven’t printed anything close to thMOXOPALem in a long time.

We’ll start by taking a look at some information skimmed from a fantastic article by Frank Karsten. He presents a very reasonable methodology for determining how often you’ll be able to play your lands on curve, given a deck running X lands and a palletable mulligan strategy. I’ve chosen to represent decks with 21 and 24 lands for my demonstration purposes, as 24 lands is near the top end of Modern decks and 21 is the number Ponza runs traditionally.

By itself, this information doesn’t mean all that much for us. Ponza is comfortable running fewer lands because of all the ways we ramp, we generally aren’t struggling too much if we miss our 4th or 5th land drop.

Here’s the part where I shame the people who put Birds #2 out of a job. Some people are running 22 lands and 1 less Birds, claiming it gives better resistance to disruption and tracker benefits. Assuming our ramp is entirely disrupted (I would estimate it happens in roughly 30% of games), the chance of getting stuck on 2 lands when we want to cast our 3 drop goes from ~18% to ~15.5%. If we factor in the rate of disruption of our T1 ramp, you’re looking at being in a better spot with mana roughly 1% of your games. I won’t attempt to do the math for Tracker benefits running 21 lands (9 fetches) vs 22 lands (9 fetches), but I honestly doubt its significant in comparison to what I’ve already done here. Play enough, 1% can certainly be noticeable.

The effect of running 10 dorks over 9, however, is much more substantial. We are always looking to keep a hand with dorks, and plugging into a simple hypergeometric calculator (Pop 60, Success 9/10, Sample 7, Cum Probability X ≥ 1) tells us that one extra dork means 4% more of our 7 card hands show us T1 ramp.

So going from 21 lands/10 dorks to 22 lands/9 dorks: benefit with 1% of hands and deficit with 4%. I know it’s simplified, but nitpicks can be argued in both directions so I let them cancel out. If you really want to put the cherry on top of this math cream sundae, you’ll keep reading down to the part where I illustrate the difference in power between T2 and T3 mana denial effects. Until someone shows me better math, I’m stamping this busted.

THE PART WHERE I ILLUSTRATE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN T2 AND T3 MANA DENIAL EFFECTS

To best gauge the effects of ramp and mana denial, I’m taking a holistic and generalizing approach: that the value of all non-mana variables in Magic can be reduced to a mana equivalent and that Cumulative Mana Availability (CMA, both natural and converted) over the course of a game is a fair indication of win potential. I will warn you, this takes a stadium filled with intricacies and reduces it down to a snowglobe we can shake; it can’t be done without a few casualties.

First illustration that leads me to this school of thought is an extrapolation of data from the first section.

How Boring Without Context

It’s a good rule of thumb in Magic that midrange mirror matches favor the player with the slightly higher curve. You will draw a similar number of cards, those cards will work in similar ways, but a small shift in power in the direction of the late game affords you more win potential in the long run than what it losses in the early game. Whether this hypothetical game ends turn 4 or turn 14, you’ve almost always spent more mana than your opponent. If you bump your curve up slightly, run one more land in a flex slot, the incremental advantage demonstrated in the graph above adds up. The games you lose will have been short and evenly matched, but the long games will almost always bend in your favor. This CMA curve, and all others like it, represent the cumulative amount of mana available to spend over the course of a game with land drops following Frank’s average rates. Each mana left unspent is an efficiency loss I cannot accurately account for, except to say that Modern decks err on the side of efficiency and most players will execute strategies that maximize their position, whether or not it results in full expenditure. It might be worth only tapping 2 on T5 if it means Mana Leaking your opponent’s Through the Breach. Don’t whine that I’m not accounting for everything.

So, what if we use our T1 to play a Birds of Paradise and pass? How does that affect our CMA? Let’s also illustrate the effect of playing a Mox, for a worthless comparison.

Now we’re in business

Of course, a Bird that costs (G) and taps for (X) will pay for itself the next turn. At the end of T2, both players will have been afforded 3 mana to spend doing non-ramp things.

ArboElfPass, you idiot, what about decks like Affinity that can kill T3 without tapping more than 3 lands the whole game?

Affinity has super cheap, consistent ramp in the form of Springleaf Drum and Mox Opal, and plenty of 0 drop creatures that contribute to the effectivity of 1 and 2 cost enablers. Remember when I said all variables can be converted to mana? The intrinsic value of a card can be converted to mana at a rate I think starts around 1 and goes up from there. In a midrange mirror, we don’t need strongly consider this factor because a similar number and rate of cards will be played each game. When we look at Affinity, and how they can readily have 6+ cards on board easily by T2, sometimes on T1, you have to account for that spike in value. If I drop Blinkmoth, Opal, Drum, Memnite, Ornithopter, Overseer, I’ve spent 3 mana T1 on a bargain, 4 creatures that scale and 2 ramp elements. I’m probably going to win by the value of card number over card quality and mana expended. Imagine going T1 Mountain, Simian Spirit Guide, 3 Pyretic Rituals, Stormbreath Dragon. Same number of cards, similar effectivity, similar frontloading of mana expenditure, Affinity is just much more consistent by its redundant elements.

Back to our coverage.

Makes you wonder why everyone doesn’t run ramp, until you quickly remember the deck building constraints, color constraints, fragility of non-land permanents, especially creatures with 1 toughness… but the advantage is clear. Ponza is strong because if you don’t (or can’t) stop us T1, you’re gonna hate us T2. How does a Stone Rain sound?

I conservatively assume BoP and Stone Rain both contribute nothing to the game beyond their ability to ramp and kill a land, respectively.

Frank Karsten’s lesson about lands makes one thing very clear: nothing guarantees more CMA that the first land you play. If, on the play, we devote T1 to ramp and T2 to destroying their only land, a 24 land deck will (assuming their hand has a low enough curve) average a little under 4 mana spent to affect the game by the end of T3, and we’ll probably match that expenditure with our T3 play alone. 24 lands average a CMA of 8.6 for T4, our Stone Rain turns that down to 5.6. Ouch.

From there our curves diverge quickly, and that’s to say nothing about denying them a color or leaving cards stranded in their hand. That’s to say even less nothing about Blood Moon, and it’s ability to entirely shut an opponent out (while we durdle because we kept a 5 land hand). They didn’t design their deck to run off what will feel like 4-5 fewer lands over the course of the game. This is part of the reason that threat selection in Ponza deckbuilding can be difficult to test: if things go our way T2, playing nearly any creature on curve after disrupting can put us far ahead of our opponents.

But wait!

What if they bolt the Bird? What if we keep a hand without ramp? What does that look like, a T3 Stone Rain and ramp/threats only coming later? Ugly.

If Monster Ponza keeps a hand that doesn’t have a T1 play, it better have a game winning Blood Moon because we flat out aren’t meant to work without a dork. We cannot extract value from T2 without play a dork or turning one sideways, as we run no 2 drops. Every turn you wait to Stone Rain your opponent, the less valuable it becomes. Blood Moon turns that power back on if they have basics out, but that’s the only saving grace. If you play Ponza, don’t keep no ramp hands in a blind matchup until you mull to 5. If you play against Ponza, kill dorks on sight.

WHY WE PLAY PONZA

Let’s not forget that Birds of Paradise is our worst dork. Sometimes, we trade 4 cards and GG, and we get RRGG floating for T2 and RRGGG for each one beyond. I’m talking about Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl, the latter of which is incredible in it’s ability to take a Lightning Bolt like a champ (which is to say, not at all). I argue that Utopia Sprawl is the strongest card in the deck after Blood Moon, for it’s raw power, Arbor Elf synergy and average lifespan. For giggles, lets put the dream on a graph: T1 Arbor Elf -> T2 Utopia Sprawl into Acid-Moss.

My favorite firebreathing 6/6 costs roughly 5.6 mana…

If you resolve T2 Moss and can even come close to curving for the next turn or two, you’re playing a very different game than your opponent. If you follow up with more dream like T3 Chandra, uptick for RR, Huntmaster, you’ve got 8 mana of board alongside your disgusting elf engine and have given your opponent the chance to tap for 1 on their first turn and 1 on their second. For comparison, you drop a T1 Mox, hit your land drops every turn, and use all available mana each turn, you’ve spent 9 mana on T3. Ponza is capable of incredible things, DON’T MESS IT UP BY SKIMPING ON DORKS.

I can’t wait to entertain dissenting opinions that come without mathematical evidence.

BONUS ADVICE FOR TWEAKERS

If you want to try running different threats in Ponza, you must identify permanents that extract some value quickly (Modern loves removal), but much more value longly (Modern hates Blood Moon and don’t tell me longly isn’t a word).

Every single stock card on the list, from CMC 4 through 6, follows these rules. Consider them rules. What about Chameleon Colossus and Stormbreath Dragon? Protection from X has a hidden mode. It says, “Wreck target player across the table.” and it ETB triggers if they rely on X for removal, blocking, or attacking.

Tracker gets 1–2 Clues immediately, grows and draws more for value. Huntmaster triggers ETB, flips like a gymnast for value. Pia and Kiran throw Thopters up ETB, and grinds with Tracker going long. Chandra is a Swiss Army Knife on ETB, and just does so much if they let her live it’s not even fair. Arc Lightning is a 3 cost card by itself, but that’s what you get on ETB with Inferno Titan, and on every swing.

Kruphix was a recent addition, and wouldn’t you know, she follows the damn rules. On ETB, you can effectively draw and play a land if that’s what’s on top. Worst case scenario, drop her and follow with a fetch for an easy 2 life. Over the long game, you sculpt a nasty engine with Tracker and Chandra.

The best Rules Text for look for on a Ponza creature/threat is “whenever” (the trigger should be something we already do every single game), followed closely by “when”, then a bit further down is “at the beginning” and “:”. With this secret comes great responsibility.