Charles Talks Inverse Advantage and Stax in Commander
Charles Zhuang
Dice City Games Contributor
Hey Magic players! In my previous article series for Dice City Games, I went over five fundamental concepts of advantage in Magic that are helpful to understand while evaluating cards for deck construction and threat assessment. If you missed those, check out Value Paradigms in Commander I, II, & III. In this next series of articles, we’re going to move the complexity dial upwards a bit and take a deeper dive into just one of the kinds of Inverse Advantage, often called “Stax.” We’ll go over some fundamentals about Stax and get into the nitty-gritty on how to thrive in a state of Inverse Advantage with this strategy. Don’t worry, if some of those terms are a bit unclear to you, I’ll try to catch you up as we go! I’ll be using the background of Competitive EDH (cEDH) to help frame new concepts and facilitate our learning.
The Duelist Goes To War
As we begin today, it will be essential to keep in mind that we’re talking about strategy in a game beyond two players. There’s a lot of media — articles, streaming, VOD — for players to learn strategy in Magic, but much of that content focuses on a 1v1 dynamic. The value paradigms I’ve laid out in previous articles are certainly not confined to those dimensions, but it can still be challenging to apply them in a multiplayer, free-for-all setting. For most Commander players, our deckbuilding, threat assessment, and play-style are still mapped to a 1v1 mindset, even though we’ll end up playing in a group of three, four, or five players. When we do that, we’re unwittingly applying the heuristics of one game setting to another, and some of these end up cultivating bad habits and impressions about our Commander games.
What are Heuristics?
“Heuristics” are the rules of thumb we create for ourselves when we learn a game. When you pick up a game for the first time, every little new concept or situation taxes your critical thinking abilities. Think back, if you can, to the first time you looked at an opening hand of Magic cards. So much information, and each piece demanded your attention! But as you become more experienced, you find patterns within the game that you can shortcut — these specific choices come up often and require you to follow the same path virtually every time. Now, playing an average deck that I am experienced with, I don’t have to use much brain power to decide if I mulligan a hand with 3 lands and 4 spells. I can shortcut a lot of the analysis because I’ve been in this spot countless times. As they learn, players often apply heuristics to answer increasingly complex questions: “You should always counter what was tutored instead of the tutor itself”; “You should always cast an instant at the end of an opponent’s turn, just before your turn”; “You should play a board wipe when your opponent has invested more resources into the table than you, or when you need to reset your opponents’ board state”. Now, with heuristics in hand, a player can save their brain power for the unique situations in the game that need more careful consideration.
How we arrived at those heuristics are based on our understanding of value paradigms like Tempo and Card Advantage. For example, the heuristic about board wipes stems from our understanding that trading one resource for many of your opponent’s resources creates Card Advantage. On top of that, a board wipe can be considered a Tempo play if you’re using it to slow down your opponent’s momentum. Seeing to it that your opponent’s time is wasted, in this case by killing in just one turn an army of creatures that they spent many turns building up, is a basic heuristic that is central to a control player’s thinking.
That’s the Good of heuristics, but what about the Bad and the Ugly? Your opponent has just cast Demonic Tutor with a ton of creatures on the battlefield. You, with a Counterspell in hand, lean on the heuristic mentioned above: “counter the tutored spell, not the spell itself.” Your opponent smiles as it resolves. They search for, and then directly put into play, a Gaea’s Cradle! Oops — can’t Counterspell a land, can we? We applied a shortcut, when we should have taken a moment to consider the cards that your opponent would most benefit from getting in this situation. The paradigms of Card Advantage and Tempo can change in importance depending on the game or format, and the heuristics we derive from our hard-fought battles can be flawed if we forget the contexts from which they were forged. In our example here, we tried to leverage a Tempo advantage by forcing our opponent to waste mana on both a tutor and a spell, but they outwitted us. Step away from the normal or expected, and suddenly we are applying a heuristic to our detriment. Indeed, while heuristics are reliable in the general sense, they’re our pitfalls in the specific sense. Some of these heuristics particularly fall apart when we transition our games from the 1v1 board state to the 4-player free-for-all. So gear up, Planeswalkers! When walking into a game of Commander, we must learn to leave our Duelist garb behind and equip ourselves with the fine, polished heuristics of a General.
Stax Strategies and cEDH
Elephant in the room: I understand many, or perhaps even most, Commander players lack experience with Stax and cEDH. But when I talk to Magic players, particularly those who are interested in trying out more high-powered mono-White decks, these are subjects that naturally fit in our conversations. It’s like talking about the director Alfred Hitchcock; sure, his work may not be in your wheelhouse (some say it’s for The Birds), but examining his work can teach us lessons that extend far beyond his specific oeuvre. The relatively narrow field of Stax and cEDH covers an enormous breadth of strategic concepts in Magic that players would never encounter in a normal 1v1 Magic game, so my gamble is that this is a good starting point for walking through strategies as they exist in multiplayer Commander as a wider format.
Okay, with that out of the way, let’s cover some fundamentals about Stax.
$ The 4K Solution ($.T.4.K.S.)
I think the first thing we should go over is the name. When I sit down at a table with Commander players, and someone says the word “Stax,” someone inevitably asks “what is Stax? Why is it called ‘Stax’?” So where does the name come from?
Most people will attribute the name to the card, “Smokestack”, and while that’s partially true, it’s not the full story. The name “Stax” originated from a vintage decklist that went by the name of “The 4 Thousand Dollar Solution,” which, in creative shorthand was acronym-ed as “$T4KS”. This deck came about during a time when Storm made its debut and Tendrils of Agony was the card that defined the metagame. The rise of a hyper-aggressive combo deck dominated the metagame and the need to combat it paved the way for an attrition-based deck list, equipped with the tools to stop it, featuring one of its iconic pieces: Smokestack.
The deck, as its namesake suggested, cost around $4,000.00 at the time featuring several of the Power Nine pieces and a playset of Mishra’s Workshop ($4,000.00 for a list like that nowadays would be considered a bargain!).
While the heydays of Smokestack and Tendrils of Agony have been overshadowed by newer, more advanced cards and mechanics, their methodologies remain immortal. When a player is comboing off, the phrase “Storming off”, which refers to a player slinging several spells in a single turn, is still used today — even when they aren’t using a card with “Storm” in their combo anymore.
cEDH is often derisively called, “Vintage Lite”, as many of the competitive decks in the format look like they’re 100 card singleton versions of some of Modern, Legacy, and Vintage’s greatest hits minus some of the Power Nine pieces, but with the addition of cards like Mana Crypt and Sol Ring. It is no surprise then, that in such a “Vintage Lite” landscape, the pall of Stax is not seen too far from that horizon.
Breaking Parity
Most people define a deck as “Stax” if it aims to deprive an opponent of resources — and I use that word fairly loosely. Depending on the deck, these restricted “resources” might include mana production, cards in hand (virtual or actual), or access to basic game actions like going to combat unfettered or putting spells on the stack. Most Stax pieces, in general, are symmetrical in nature. In other words, if I play a Winter Orb or a Rule of Law, these effects apply to me as much as they would apply to you. The goal of most Stax decks (such as Urza, High Lord Artificer) is to bend that symmetrical effect into an asymmetrical one, where the opponent suffers more than we do. We’ll call that “Breaking Parity”.
Typically, in Magic design, symmetrical Stax effects cost more efficiently compared to asymmetrical ones. They cost less mana or have less restrictive requirements for a more powerful universal effect. That’s because symmetrical effects, at least on paper, have the drawback of also affecting you. The effect of Static Orb, for example, would be better if it only affected your opponents (like Dovin Baan’s emblem). That’s why Static Orb costs only 3 mana of any color, while Dovin costs 2WB and the time it takes to work up to his Ultimate ability.
To date, there aren’t many Stax pieces that are asymmetrical, and some of the symmetrical ones are rather unique in their kind. So, if for no other reason than the fact that asymmetrical Stax pieces are scarce in Magic, breaking parity is often seen as a crucial principle in the makings of a potent Stax deck. The more easily you’re able to turn a powerful detrimental symmetrical effect into an asymmetrical one, the sooner you’re able to create a large Inverse Advantage in the game.
The Symmetrical Fallacy
Believe it or not, though, the drive to break parity is actually a rule of thumb — a heuristic. Most players have a fixed assumption about when and how a Stax piece, or a parity-breaking piece, should be played. This heuristic tells you that a Static Orb, for example, doesn’t get played until you’re able to break parity with something like an effect like Seedborn Muse or Gaea’s Cradle, cards that break the spirit of the law that Static Orb wants you to abide by. This makes Stax games rather exploitable.
If a Stax player relies too heavily on a parity-breaker to give themselves an edge in a game, and cannot play a game with their own symmetrical effect without another key enabler, then their playstyle is frail. A removal spell can undermine the Inverse Advantage a Stax piece may be trying to create. What we’re covering here is how we can think about Stax beyond the zombie-like heuristic of breaking parity at all costs, and engage in some Real Talk about how to utilize Stax skillfully in a free-for-all game. By the end of this, we should have more knowledge about utilizing Stax pieces as individual game pieces rather than as part of an elaborate synergy or combo. Through understanding this, we can really sink our teeth into some of the more fundamental strategies in EDH, often overlooked by even the most veteran player.
The Perfect Lock Is A Lie
One of the biggest misconceptions about Stax decks is that they’re supposed to “lock” players out of the game. While some Stax decks do behave in that manner, these strategies are more akin to combos than to Stax. The objective of Stax first and foremost is to control the game and eek out large incremental value, or win from an advantageous board state with either an eventual self-contained combo or through pure raw damage. Stax is the attrition/control player’s archetype in a 4-player setting. The idea of Stax, at the end of the day, is to out-resource your opponents. The means by which you do that — either through a “hard lock”, a non-interactive combo on a Stax’d board, or a super-grindy game of combat — varies from Stax deck to deck.
Curving the Silver Bullet
As Stax players, we need to think past heuristics. Rather than applying blanket answers to problems, or using Stax pieces as silver bullets, we need to learn how to curve the answers we have to hit the enemies in front of us, even if the cards your opponents play aren’t quite what you expected or they don’t “line up” with the cards you have in the way you hoped they would.
One of the biggest drawbacks players complain about Stax is that some of the Stax pieces are dead cards if drawn in a game where the style of card they’re “meant to Stax” isn’t on the battlefield. But as always, let’s check our assumptions! The notion of “meant to Stax” already falls prey to the heuristic that any given Stax piece is supposed to only do one specific thing. It’s important to get creative; improvise until you find a way to line things up in a profitable way, even if it isn’t the most intended or obvious solution. If an opponent, say, drops a Smothering Tithe, a Stax player will quickly scan their hand for the “right” answer — a Stony Silence or Null Rod, for example. Otherwise, the treasure tokens made by the Smothering Tithe might get out of hand, undoing your hard earned resource denial. But without those silver bullets — you know, the cards you practically sharpied the words “Smothering Tithe” on when you added them to your deck — there are other creative ways to slow down the advantage gained from Smothering Tithe. A Blind Obedience plus a Static Orb can slow down the momentum from Smothering Tithe without completely turning it off. You may not be able to stop all the treasure tokens from being used, but you can certainly limit access to them. And that might just do the trick.
So, we know that heuristics can be a double-edged sword; a key weapon as we fight against dragons and demons, but one that sometimes nicks our leg if we miss putting it gently into its scabbard when we don’t need it. Whether or not we make that mistake depends on us exercising a new kind of discipline — recognizing when rules apply… and when they don’t. This folds neatly into our discussion of Stax, which is a playstyle that can uniquely benefit from out-of-the-box thinking from time to time. Yes, trying to figure out how to break parity, and realizing when it might not even be crucial to do so, can subvert our commonly held heuristics and leave us adrift at sea without a compass. But once you realize that every Stax piece doesn’t need to be the exact silver bullet you envisioned, and that “locking” the game can be overreaching, the world opens up to you. Next time, we’ll talk a bit more about bending heuristics to do our bidding (cue evil, maniacal laughter). Then, once we’ve made sure our brains are working for us, we may even try to get into the mind of our opponents to see what makes them tick. Thanks so much for joining me — until next time!
Join the conversation:
Twitter: @Ilvaldi and @dicecitygamesdc
IG: @dicecitygamesdc
