Entropy and Inevitability

06/04/2024

I often hear people talk about "inevitability" in Magic. "My opponent has inevitability in this matchup, so I need to be the beatdown." "UW Control has good inevitability, I just need to survive early." "I want another grindy card in my draft deck for lategame inevitability."

Generally, what people are referring to in talk of inevitability is the very very lategame. As Reid Duke puts it in his article from 2014:

This concept can definitely be quite useful - knowing how best to make sure your lategame trumps opponents' lategames is important if you want to build a deck that consistently tries to extend the game. But at the same time, having true inevitability is quite hard, and is only completely relevant to a small number of extreme lategame scenarios.

Thinking about degenerate lategame scenarios is useful and all, but we must also ask: how did we get there?

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Part 1: Entropy

The second law of thermodynamics states:

In layman's terms, this roughly means that everything trends towards chaos and disorder. Some processes leave entropy constant and thus can be reversed, but there are also processes that are irreversible - they increase entropy, and so cannot be fully undone.

I would propose that a game of Magic can be described in a similar way. Every game starts with both players at parity, but as the game goes on, things devolve in favor of one player or the other. Some advantages can be reversed, and the game-state restored to parity; but other processes cannot ever be fully undone.

Different Kinds of Advantage

Of course, there are many ways for one to get an advantage in a game of Magic. You can have an advantage in cards, mana, tempo, board position, or even more nebulous concepts.

And it isn't a simple question of a linear "advantage bar" or anything like that - different players can be favored in different ways. In fact, my claim above that "every game starts at parity" is not quite true! After the die roll, the player on the play naturally has a small amount of mana and tempo advantage; and the player on the draw naturally has a small amount of card advantage.

A key skill in playing Magic is to figure out how best to push forward on the advantages you do have, while mitigating or making irrelevant the disadvantages.

For example, if you're woefully behind on cards and don't have a way to catch up, then you need to make the game about something else, perhaps by leaning on a different advantage you have. Maybe you can leverage a mana advantage to be able to present more threats than your opponent can answer in one turn. Maybe you can leverage an on-board advantage to simply kill your opponent before their cards can matter. Maybe you can leverage a line-up theory advantage: sometimes, even if your opponent has more raw cards, you can engineer a situation such that only very few of those cards actually matter.

Inevitable, Irreversible

Many kinds of advantage can naturally flow back and forth, and be reset or reversed by certain actions.

This happens all the time in Magic, as both players interact and vie for advantages. When I play a creature, I gain some board advantage and tempo - but as you kill it, you can remove my board advantage and regain that tempo. I can gain a lot of board advantage by playing many creatures out, only to lose all of it and a bunch of card advantage to boot from a single wrath.

However, there are often some things that can't be reversed. These might vary from matchup to matchup; but there is usually some gamestate that, when reached, cannot be escaped.

One example is when you develop a resource or threat that can't be interacted with - or at least is so hard to interact with that it might as well be untouchable.

Lotus Field in Pioneer is a good example of this - it is almost impossible to get it off the battlefield once it has been put there, so once the Pioneer Lotus Field deck gets two copies in play (usually using Thespian's Stage), they will likely have them in play for the rest of the game.

Inevitability, as people commonly refer to it, is usually this form of irreversibility - a threat or other win condition that your opponent cannot ever fully deal with. This can range anywhere from deck looping in limited with cards like

Hoverstone Pilgrim; to being able to roughly infinitely rebuild your board with synergies like Shigeki, Jukai Visionary+ Virtue of Strength or Slogurk, the Overslime+ Otawara, Soaring City

Of course, there are other kinds of irreversible game-states. Consider a game of KHM draft where your opponent plays a big blocker like

Ravenous Lindwurm that your Boros aggro deck will struggle to remove. Maybe you have one removal spell for it - a Bound in Gold - but otherwise it will be extremely difficult to get it off of the battlefield. That can represent a real inflection point in the game, one that almost irreversibly changes the dynamics of attacking and blocking on the ground.

But at the same time, that doesn't mean you can never attack anymore. You probably can have tools to still progress the game - going wide enough to go around the blocker, flying over it, 2-for-1ing yourself with a trick, or just finding your one-of removal spell. The game has shifted, but it hasn't ended. A 6/6 isn't inevitability, even if it might irreversibly shift the course of the game.

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Part 2: A Constructed Case Study in Entropy

So why is it important to think about irreversible game-states and inevitability? Well, often it's actually quite important for how a matchup plays out! For example, let's take the Slogurk vs Analyst matchup in Standard:

There are some games where one player or the other runs away with their own synergies; this more often happens with Slogurk running away with the game than the opposite, but we can put those games aside for now.

In close games, generally Analyst has some amount of "inevitability" in that it is hard for Slogurk to lock out Analyst's ramp forever. Usually there will come a point where Slogurk either runs out of interaction, the interaction becomes less relevant (Otawara can stop Nissa from killing quickly but do not stop things forever), or Slogurk doesn't have enough mana to both develop and interact.

So, the Analyst player will often be able to push out some form of ramp. And once that ramp has happened, it's irreversible - the Analyst player will just continue to have their basics on the board forever. After that point, things get harder but still not impossible for Slogurk - you can still delay the actual kill with Ertai, but given infinite time Analyst will eventually be able to set it up.

However, this doesn't mean that Analyst wins long games, becuase Slogurk also has "inevitability" in the matchup; in that while its combo usually takes longer to assemble, Analyst has very few ways of interacting.

Therefore, usually the cadence of close games between Slogurk and Analyst is that Slogurk will develop and try to interact with Analyst in ways that slow down the ramp but don't permanently stop it; while Analyst can deploy spot removal and

Ill-Timed Explosion to slow down Slogurk and eat into Slogurk's ability to interact. And eventually the game reaches a state where either Slogurk combos and Analyst has nothing to say about it; or where Slogurk runs out of interaction and ways to slow Analyst down and therefore dies.

Navigating the matchup often involves both sides figuring out what matters most both in terms of pushing towards your own inevitability and slowing down your opponent's inevitability. It's a constant push and pull of managing when you need to avoid letting your opponent do something irreversible, and when you can let them run wild because you can simply race them to the finish line.

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Conclusion: Playing to Win

Under the framework of entropy, games are always moving in a direction: you can get back to something roughly resembling parity, but there will always be something different. Even if both players have the same number of lands in play and cards in hand, there is probably some advantage one player has. Maybe one player gets the first draw at a topdeck from parity; maybe one player's deck benefits more from having 8 lands in play than the other's.

This can even include something as simple as a key card being spent - in one of the rounds I was on coverage in RC Dallas, my UW Control opponent spent their last Sunfall resetting the board to parity, and from there they irreversibly had the disadvantage of not having any more sweepers anymore.

So, you should constantly be looking for ways to leverage this instability. Figure out what resources you're ahead in, and see if you can leverage that advantage to push towards winning the game. Trying to win through an avenue you're already behind in is harder and less likely to work. Instead, see if you can figure out ways to leverage where you're strong.

A common consequence of this is that it's more common to be assertive when you're on the play, and more common to be reactive when you're on the draw. The extra tempo of going first naturally augments your assertive gameplans, where the extra card from being on the draw helps you have more of the right answers to your opponent's threats.

That said, this doesn't mean you should just completely give up in areas you're behind - sometimes, even if you're not planning on trying to contest one area of advantage, it can be very important to make sure you don't fall so far behind in that area that it starts to affect other areas. There's a big difference between having a few mana's worth of mana disadvantage, and letting your opponent have an

Omniscience in play.

In the end, it's all about evaluating what matters and what doesn't, what you can affect more effectively and what you can't profitably make progress on. Taking game actions at random can certainly win you games - but knowing and playing to your strengths will often lead to better results.