Karn, The Great Creator is Here to Take Names and Eat Food

Throne of Eldraine is coming to Standard this week! The new Standard format will be shaped by how the best cards in the format interact with everything. How much does your deck care if your turn three play gets bounced by Teferi, Time Raveler or turned into a 3/3 by Oko? Does your creature die to Bonecrusher Giant's adventure, Stomp? All of these questions and more will help shape what decks have what it takes to win a tournament.

One of the cards I'm most interested in exploring is Karn, the Great Creator.

I've played with Karn a fair amount in Standard as a card advantage engine in ramp decks that could find powerful answers to what my opponent was doing. 

Mono-Green Ramp is one of my favorite decks I've ever built. The two main things it had to contend with were aggressive decks with a lot of ground creatures, which were largely handled by Wildgrowth Walker and Ripjaw Raptor, and slower midrange decks with zero to one basics that had a difficult time beating Llanowar Elves into Field of Ruin, or the Field-Crucible lock on turn five. 

Wildgrowth Walker and Field of Ruin are gone, so that plan isn't completely replicable, but the use of Karn as a card advantage engine in a ramp deck might be. In War of the Spark Standard, opposing artifacts were mostly limited to the occasional Mox Amber in Jeskai Superfriends.

Going back to how interactions shape a format, there are a lot of artifact-centric cards in Throne of Eldraine, and this time around Karn might play a greater role in shutting down what people are doing.

The base-level interaction here is that Karn can blow up Food tokens. While some of the uses for Food get around Karn because they involve making a Food then immediately sacrificing it to something without activating it, I am interested in doing something like playing Karn the turn after my opponent plays Oko, Thief of Crowns to prevent them from doing whatever they wanted to do with the Food (like turning it into a creature to attack me or protect Oko).

Jonathan Blank has been having a lot of success in testing with this deck centered around Feasting Troll King, also known as FoodGaak or Trash Man.

To get Feasting Troll King into play, you need to make three Food tokens somehow. Karn deals with this in two ways: by shutting off FoodGaak's primary Food engine in Witch's Oven, and by activating on opposing Food tokens to turn them into 0/0s. The way Karn interacts with Witch's Oven when he comes into play is nice, since if the opponent activates Oven and sacrifices a 0/4 in response, Karn can +1 on one of the tokens to decrease the chance that the opponent gets a Troll King.

Karn is also nice against Oko, Thief of Crowns, as he can eat Oko's Food tokens to prevent the opponent from doing anything broken with them, like turning them into 3/3s and attacking Karn. At some point, Karn can just grab Sorcerous Spyglass to shut off Oko and win that battle for good.

Karn's ability to eat Food and shut off artifacts could be what pushes him over the top, but he's still a solid turn-four play against most decks thanks to his ability to grab multiple artifacts from the sideboard to deal with whatever. Hero of Precinct One giving you a hard time? Get Scalding Cauldron and take care of it. Don't want Teferi, Time Raveler to bounce your creatures or Narset, Parter of Veils to draw into a way to kill Karn? Get Sorcerous Spyglass (I like having two Spyglass in my sideboard so I can play Karn, -2, get a Spyglass, -2 again, get the second Spyglass, and name two of their planeswalkers to pull ahead on board). God-Pharaoh's Statue is good against UR Phoenix, which looks like it'll remain a contender with Opt reprint and a replacement for Tormenting Voice. Meteor Golem is another key reprint from M20 that helped Mono-Green Ramp deal with big, problematic permanents.

The question is whether there's a similarly good shell around Karn. Losing Llanowar Elves and Wildgrowth Walker hurts, but in a deck that can maximize Gilded Goose and early blockers, he should be able to hit the board early and well-protected and power through games.

I actually like the idea of playing Karn in FoodGaak. Merfolk Secretkeeper and Wall of Lost Thoughts are high-toughness creatures that give Karn some of the same protection he had in Mono-Green Ramp with Wildgrowth Walker, ensuring that he gets to activate multiple times and that the opponent can't just ignore Karn and kill you. Curving Gilded Goose into Karn helps mitigate the damage Karn will take from losing Llanowar Elves. Meteor Golem and God-Pharaoh's Statue are a bit harder to cast without Llanowar Elves and a smooth manabase, but giving Gilded Goose a steady supply of Food helps that problem, as does having Oko as another way to deal with big fliers.

Replacing Tamiyo and Golden Egg with Karn and Paradise Druid is a relatively painless change to make. Golden Egg is pretty mediocre. Tamiyo helps get Feasting Troll King in play, but not before turn four, so I like using that slot to interact with my opponent. I played with some numbers on Karn, Paradise Druid, Golden Egg, Merfolk Secretkeeper, and Emry, and decided that I want to start with 4 Paradise Druid/3 Karn (incidentally the same numbers as the slots they replaced). The one change I made to support this was replacing the fourth Emry with the fourth Merfolk Secretkeeper. Karn needs to be protected more than Tamiyo did and planning to leverage Karn in the midgame means there's less of a need to draw a ton of cards with Emry and Golden Egg.

Here's the list I'm starting with:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/2286857#paper

Why I keep hands that might do nothing

A few months ago, my friend KanyeBest was streaming a deck I worked on on Twitch. It was a mono-green ramp deck with Wildgrowth Walker, twelve planeswalkers, and Field of Ruin to punish greedy manabases.

In game one of a match on the play, Kanye drew an opening six with one land and a relatively powerful curve, including at least one explore creature to find more lands (this was during the Vancouver mulligan). Since there was a reasonably high chance he would brick on a second land and just not get to play Magic, he was leaning toward taking a mulligan. I told him to keep. He kept, found a second land by turn two, and suddenly had a good hand on six cards.

Here's the thing about keeping hands like that: Under the Vancouver mulligan, the odds of drawing a land with one scry and one draw were not actually that low. With 23 lands in 53 cards, the odds of missing are (30/53)*(29/52), or 31.57%, which means the odds of hitting a land are 68.43%. The odds of winning the game in that case are lower, of course, and the odds of winning if it bricks on a second land are extremely low - I don't estimate more than three to five percentage points to be added to my overall odds of winning, almost all of which come from drawing a land on turn three. This equation doesn't even account for factors that can skew the math like fetchlands, which I know is going to come up here because my turn-one play is fetchland, end step fetch Overgrown Tomb (unless I suspect my opponent might be on a Blood Moon deck, in which case I still fetch before my next draw but I get a Forest instead). With that said, the equation [1 - (misses in deck/cards in deck)*(misses-1/cards-1)] does a reasonable enough job of estimating likelihood, even if it isn't exactly right here.

In this case, the hand was good enough that I felt it would win more than half of the scenarios where it hit a land, which would be a 34.2% winrate overall - let's say 40% of the games with this hand are ones where it hits a land on turn two and wins. Adding 4% from the games where it doesn't draw a land on turn two, that's an overall winrate of 44%.

While 44% is obviously not an ideal winrate, I feel better about this than about a mulligan to five on the play, even a large part of the fail rate being that I don't get to cast a single spell before I die means the mull to five will probably be more fun.

I had a lot of success with Mono-Green Ramp on Magic Online - the most wins I've ever had over four leagues was 18 with that deck (4-1 5-0 5-0 4-1). In addition to better than usual technical play and making mostly reasonable decisions with Karn and sideboarding, I was doing two things to gain percentage points: aggressively activating Field of Ruin in the early turns against opponents who might have one or even zero basics, and keeping hands that had a very real risk of not playing Magic.

Yesterday, I was goldfishing with Jund and sent the following hand to a friend:

"This is a pretty good keep, right?" "Ehh. I'm off it," he replied. I liked the hand, but was willing to defer to him. He didn't like throwing away a card with the second Scavenging Ooze, which is unlikely to do anything. He also didn't like the risk of drawing badly and being unable to leverage play skill at all, especially when there are certain cards and even entire decks like Tron that this hand is awful against. I liked how strong the curve of double Tarmogoyf into Scavenging Ooze is, assuming I draw at least one relevant piece of interaction that can help me win the game within the first two turns (this is not an exact calculation, and I calculated the chance of drawing interaction within the first two at up to 74%. As with the Mono-Green Ramp hand, that number might be lower due to a few specific pieces of interaction being dead against most decks.

The two people I asked about the hand, and the two people they asked, were split 2/2 on whether they would keep or mulligan on the play. Both people who said they would mulligan thought it was close.

What interested me when I posted the hand on Twitter was that so many people thought this hand was an easy mulligan. Yes, there is a very decent chance it does nothing or gets run over. The games it loses won't be close. But the chance of drawing relevant interaction is high, and taking a mulligan is not free.

Even if it's justifiable to keep, it's probably close enough that a mulligan is also justifiable by personal preference, but I am certain that the difference between this hand and the winrate of an unknown six-card hand is not high.

David Inglis, also known as tangrams, made light of the post by asking if I'd keep this hand:

Tangrams is good at Magic. If I could only get his opinion on whether to keep or mull this hand and I didn't trust my own opinion, I'd snap off a mulligan. I thought the meme was funny, and it hits on the main reason to mulligan this hand (a pile of two-mana creatures and nothing else is awful against most Modern decks).

Aside from the lands being on the right instead of on the left, my problem with the meme is that it misses two key points in the counterargument for keeping the hand. The first is that we are playing Jund, a deck with a lot of interaction. If I keep the Grizzly Bears hand and my draws are disruption for my opponent's combo, I feel less bad about it. The second is that Tarmogoyf-Tarmogoyf-Scavenging Ooze goldfishes a turn faster than the quadruple Grizzly Bears hand and can more effectively deal with interaction or decks that rely on the graveyard.

This is a fundamental point I think a lot of people miss: They consider what a hand is capable of doing on its own, but undervalue how the likelihood of winning is affected by drawing certain cards (like lands or interaction) with a lot of copies in the deck.

When is it wrong to keep hands that might do nothing?

Tron hands that can only find two of the three Tron lands are often mulligans. Tron's odds of winning on a mulligan are high compared to other Modern decks, and the odds of drawing the third Tron piece are probably a bit lower than the odds of finding relevant interaction with the Jund hand. Since the Jund hand was probably at most a few percentage points better than a mulligan, tilting the odds of winning by, say, 8% in the direction of a mulligan with a Tron hand makes it a fairly clear decision to mulligan.

If a hand is missing more than card it needs to win the game and doesn't have many ways to speed up its draws, I almost always mulligan. This often comes up with one-land hands in decks that need to hit their first three land drops - whereas the odds of hitting one land in your first two draws in a 25-land deck are 1 - (29/53)*(28/52), or 70.54%, the odds of hitting two lands in your first two draws are (24/53)*(23/52), or 20.03%. The actual difference in winrate between these two hands is much smaller, but this is mostly because the 20% hand has so few percentage points to start with that it can't lose many by the opponent's hand doing better things.

Being on the play or on the draw can also make a difference, like with the Jund hand. Stealing wins on the draw often involves being proactive to minimize the tempo advantage the opponent gains from starting on the play. The Tarmogoyf plan is much less effective if it's a turn slower.

Thinking about odds in more concrete terms than guesstimated percentages (like 8% for Tron vs Jund) is optimal for informing decisions in competitive Magic, because it eliminates the chance of making a mathematically incorrect plays based on rough estimates when non-mathematical factors like bluffing or the opponent's play pattern don't matter much. Even so, for someone who doesn't know the exact percentages or how to use them, thinking about the math in rough estimates generally leads to better decisions than not thinking about it at all.