Pandora's Deckbox: Resilience and Deck Strength

Pandora's Deckbox

Epochalyptik

18 October 2013

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This is a followup to Characteristics of a Strong Deck. That article outlined the seven characteristics that contribute to a deck's overall strength: flexibility, resilience, sustainability, consistency, cohesiveness, efficiency, and effectiveness. Each of the followup articles will focus in depth on one of these characteristics. In this release, we will examine resilience as a deck trait and how it affects the strength of a deck.

Resilience: the ability of a deck to endure unfavorable conditions and setbacks without losing momentum.

If a deck is resilient, it is able to withstand disruption and come back from disadvantageous board positions. Resilience is closely related to flexibility in that both characteristics improve a deck's survivability. Whereas flexibility applies to the game state before disruption or disadvantage occurs, resilience focuses on recovering after something has gone wrong. Critical to resilience is the preservation and restoration of momentum. When a deck encounters a setback, it loses some momentum and must recover before it is at full strength again. The rate and effectiveness of the recovery are essential elements in gauging a deck's resilience.

Resilience is influenced by a multitude of factors, including alternate win conditions and investment in strategies. As with the other characteristics, it is subjective and can only really be comparatively measured.

Why Is Resilience Important?

Resilience allows a deck to survive setbacks and reestablish itself. Such capabilities are necessary in the tug-of-war pattern of Magic, where players constantly fight to establish dominance in the game. Momentum, the driving force behind a deck's position in any given game, must be restored after a setback to prevent position loss from turning into game loss.

Given ideal conditions, resilience is not, strictly speaking, necessary. However, ideal games are extraordinarily rare; the likelihood of facing disruption or disadvantage is more of a certainty than a probability. Therefore a strong deck must be able to recover from unideal conditions and reestablish itself in the game. As is the case with an inflexible deck, an unresilient deck encounters the "glass cannon" problem: a lack of resilience ultimately leads to an inability to cope with resistance. While an unresilient deck can occasionally deliver with an explosive, all-in strategy, it will crumble if it encounters any problems. Ideal conditions are not true indicators of a deck's potential, so an unresilient deck cannot be a truly strong deck.

Contributing Factors

The number of win conditions available within a deck impact that deck's resilience. In the event that the primary win condition is disrupted, a secondary win condition can be used in the comeback effort. There is a certain balance to the number of win conditions a deck should have, though. In most cases, two is the most a deck can afford without sacrificing too many of its other characteristics.

A deck's resilience also depends on the degree to which it is invested in its strategy. A deck that is completely dependent on all aspects of its strategy working as planned will be naturally less resilient than a deck that can afford some variation in its strategy. Dependence on a certain timetable or hand composition leads to overall weakness because those factors are not guaranteed. Game-to-game variance is part of Magic, and resilience is, in part, indicative of a deck's ability to cope with that variance.

How Does Resilience Interact With Other Characteristics?

Flexibility

Resilience is much like flexibility in that both characteristics measure a deck's ability to deal with threats. However, each characteristics does this differently. Flexibility preemptively responds to threats before they can disrupt the deck. Resilience retroactively counteracts threats after they have disrupted the deck. Although both characteristics are fundamental to the strength of a deck, they do not quite interact in a particular way.

Sustainability

Resilience allows a deck to rebuild momentum as the game state develops. This makes it critical to sustainability, which is the ability of a deck to deliver constant pressure. Loss of momentum will translate to loss of sustainability.

Consistency

Resilience is vital to consistency. Without the ability to survive varied game states, a deck cannot perform consistently across numerous scenarios. Again, momentum factors into this interaction because pressure must be consistently applied to maintain advantage. When advantage is lost, momentum becomes even more critical because it is what will fuel a recovery of position and advantage.

Cohesion

Resilience has a tenuous relationship with cohesion. A cohesive deck tends to be resilient because it acts like a web. Even if you sever one or two strands, the web itself maintains its shape. However, an emphasis on too many different win conditions leads to a decrease in cohesion if those win conditions fight for deck space and do not build upon one another. A deck should have one or two win conditions that fit within the same general strategy. This allows resilience to be improved without great expense to cohesion.

Efficiency

Resilience can be analyzed from an efficiency standpoint. The most efficient means of improving resilience are those that take the least time and fewest resources to implement. The longer a backup plan takes to implement, or the more expensive a backup plan is, the less efficient it is in terms of resource consumption. Examples of resources in this case include the number of cards necessary to implement a backup plan, the costs of those cards or their abilities, and the number of slots in a deck that must be dedicated to this backup plan.

Effectiveness

Resilience is tied closely with effectiveness because the recovery is ultimately meaningless if it cannot restore a deck to a position comparable to the one it held before being disrupted. Effective recoveries must be as complete and fast as possible. This also involves some crossover from the other characteristics (especially efficiency). If a deck takes too long to recover, then it is not highly efficient, and therefore not highly resilient.

As discussed earlier, having multiple win conditions can increase a deck's resilience. Care must be taken in designing and implementing extra win conditions because they could easily detract from the other characteristics and thus reduce the deck's strength. Broadly speaking, a deck can usually afford one or two closely-related win conditions without great cost to its other characteristics. More win conditions, or less closely related win conditions, can detract directly from the cohesiveness of a deck. Additionally, the extra deck space required to support those additional win conditions will cause indirect problems with the deck's other characteristics.

Additionally, a strong deck should not focus on fragile win conditions. They are harder to rebuild because they tend to be more complicated and more constrained by game state. All-in approaches lead to glass cannon decks.

Looser strategies naturally improve a deck's resilience. When a strategy demands that a deck adhere to a rigid timetable or an exact resource expenditure each turn, disruption is especially devastating. Merely softening the demands of the strategy is in itself a method of improving resilience because it reduces the efficacy of disruption and allows easier, faster recoveries.

Recursion effects lend to resilience because they allow a deck to reuse lost resources during recoveries. Efficiency is critical; inefficient recursion is a liability because it increases the time and amount of resources that must be spent during recovery. Costly recursion leaves a deck vulnerable to further setbacks and is not useful in many situations.

Controlled resource use lends to both sustainability and resilience. Overextending makes disruption more devastating. By not overextending, the number of resources in hand and on the battlefield are kept in balance. This makes available more options and allows for a faster recovery if the game state changes. "Topdeck mode" is always a hard position to escape.

Proper sideboarding is vital to boosting game two and game three resilience. Monitor what the opponent is playing and what disruption he or she uses. A properly-designed sideboard should account for the most frequent and dangerous forms of disruption, and should therefore offer solutions or options in difficult matchups.

Resilience is a critical characteristic because it allows a deck to perform even when the game state becomes inhospitable. This characteristic, more than any other, determines whether a deck will stand up to pressure or crumble against resistance. Because Magic is a game of competition, resistance is certain. Preparation allows a deck to survive and rebuild in adverse conditions. As with flexibility, resilience plays an enormous role in determining how a deck handles different matchups.

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