At the most fundamental core of Magic Spellslingers, victory is most often achieved by the player who reduces the opponents life total to zero. This incentivises players to include threatening cards that if left unanswered, are capable of pushing for victory. It should go without saying that the best and most reliable cards to push you towards winning a game are creatures. For this reason, interactive cards are inherently disadvantaged against proactive cards in this game.

Tusker v Tusker

Let’s imagine a game where both players play with a deck of only Kalonian Tuskers. If both players are playing reasonably, there should be no clear way to find an advantage to win the game. Now imagine the same game, only the second player replaces half of their deck with Grudge Match. Suddenly there is a guaranteed victory for the first player. Player one is now operating the more consistent deck, playing the same curve every game, whereas player two has introduced variance. They now fall behind on board by drawing too many Grudge Matches, which does not trade profitably with the Kalonian Tusker. This is an extremely simplified example, but it demonstrates the core issue with including reactive cards in a deck.

The Risks of Reactive Cards

Whenever you draw and play a reactive card, such as Flagrant Foul, you are investing resources (your free card draw per turn and your four mana to cast it) into a card that does not threaten to win the game. In fact, no matter how many Flagrant Fouls you draw, you can never use this card to defeat your opponent. Additionally, interactive cards are further disadvantaged in Magic Spellslingers by the fact that their effectiveness is based on how they measure up to the card they are interacting with. Grudge Match is a wonderful tempo play against many decks, but if you are playing against a deck which features many high power creatures, it can be difficult to find a window to make the spell effective, thus introducing instability into your gameplan. The decision to include a piece of interaction into a proactive Magic Spellslingers deck should be a purposeful decision. Here are some quick rules to think about if you want to make sure you aren’t including too much interaction in your decks.

Consider the Metagame

This should be rule one for every card inclusion, but it especially holds true for interactive cards. Interactive cards are typically more narrow in scope than threats. The cards that your opponent will be trying to win with may only be answerable by a small subset of cards. Maybe your deck has problems keeping up with an unchecked Joraga Druid. Takedown is a very mana efficient way of answering the card, but it is fairly narrow in application, only being useful against 3 power creatures. With limited deckslots to work with, you need to be sure that your deck really wants a card that is limited to dealing with early-game creatures.

Think about the Stages of the Game

Does your Angrath Rush Down deck want Flagrant Foul or Shock? Interactive cards in aggresive decks are high-risk, high-reward. A well timed removal spell can be backbreaking tempo plays in the right circumstances. On the other hand, drawn at the wrong time, they can ruin your curve and give your opponent free turns to smother you out of the game. Cards like negate are generally only useful in aggresive decks after you have developed your board presence, but can lead to unwinnable gamestates for opponents relying on expensive spells to stave off your threats. Generally the more expensive a reactive spell is, the more important it is to consider when your deck needs this interaction to come online to optimize your strategy.

Only play interaction when you are sure that it will be useful.

If you can’t guarantee that the card will be useful, it needs to be very strong in situations where you can use it. Most likely this is a sign that the card should be cut, or trimmed from your list. If you’ve determined the card seems narrow in scope, try replacing it with more versatile options. For example, you could include a removal spell like Path to Exile in your Ajani deck as a way to get past annoying blockers, but maybe what your deck really wants is a card like Stoneforge Mystic, which can often provide useful buffs for your creatures so that you can overpower or ignore these blockers, leading to the same result with a more consistent card choice. Even control decks in Magic Spellslingers fair much better when they draw creatures to stabilize the early turns rather than relying on interaction to turn the corner into the late game.

Understand the risks and evaluate the rewards

Although interaction is a risk to include in a deck, the payoffs to well timed interaction is huge. All cards aren’t created equal in this game, that goes for creatures and interaction as well. Control decks completely rely on the idea that they can conserve resources by using a few interactive spells to deal with the opponents most powerful cards, all the while gumming up the ground with efficient blockers to hold back their weaker ones. Some powerful combos in Magic Spellslingers can also only be stopped by interaction - things like Labratory Maniac, or Strahd-Haste combo. This may encourage you to seek to include spells that can deal with these combos when building your decks, but usually the more reliable strategy is to check the decks that play these combos by pressuring their life total in order to take advantage of the fact that they have to use more situational cards than normal.

I hope these tips helped you refine your own Magic Spellslingers deckbuilds. Let me know in the comments what reactive cards you’ve been wrestling with including in your builds! Come visit us again for more Magic Spellslingers tournament coverage, winning decklists and strategies!