Turning raw materials into end products

In the previous article on Resource Management, we discussed the positional value of Lands within a traditional ramp strategy and traced prices for movements between one location and another. So far, we have mostly looked at how players can increase their amounts of available Mana through the course of the game. The main principle being that it is always beneficial to ramp resources upwards, rather than implementing some form of downward spiral of available Mana.

Nevertheless, the act itself of increasing the amount of Mana at a player’s disposal does not really win games. Much like what happens in a manufacturing company, increasing stocks of raw materials is not going to automatically generate an end product. We surely have focused at length on amassing as many resources as we could, but we have not addressed how to then put them into fruition. In Magic terms, we have spent Mana only to unlock more Mana, but we still have not transformed this resource into actual game-winning components.

I’d like to frame once again the next steps around my Borborygmos Enraged Commander deck, although a number of different ramp-focused decks can help paint portions of the same picture. And by “portions” I mean that Borborygmos Enraged will be introducing some interesting twists along the way.

Setting now aside the copious amount of ramp cards included in the deck, all serving the sole purpose of getting us to the desired critical mass of available Mana, we now find ourselves wondering how to convert Mana into actual action. At first glance, we are facing three main alternatives to invest our resources:

1. Mana-to-Board (M2B): this is one of the most traditional ways Mana is invested in a game of Magic; resources are converted into board presence, allowing players to impact the game first-hand; a good example from the deck comes in the form of Avenger of Zendikar, actively converting Mana into power and passively increasing that same power thanks to following Land drops; the conversion rate between Mana and power is traditionally linear, with X/X creatures costing X Mana, although a plethora of external factors and effects can vastly alter this ratio
2. Mana-to-Damage (M2D): this is the most direct option, allowing a straight conversion of Mana into an attack aggainst opponents’ life totals; Banefire is the primary example in the deck, although Magic has a rich history of Lightning Bolt-esque effects; their scalability and costs determine their effectiveness into widely different formats, such as Standard, Legacy and Commander; moreover, the conversion rate of these effects largely varies, from the linear ratio of Mana to damage in Banefire, to true outliers like Flame Slash, which trades off flexibility for raw efficiency
3. Mana-to-Cards (M2C): a fairly underrepresented option in most Green decks, Mana can be directly converted into cards, re-filling players’ hands; while Harmonize is likely the most straightforward example in the deck, the recursion effects of Creeping Renaissance and Praetor’s Counsel serve the same purpose; the conversion rate again varies widely, based on cards’ colour, restrictions and scalability

Each of these transformations comes with the effect – or the by-product – of one or more cards moving between the main game areas. As the card transition in most of the provided examples is a single card, we could be tempted to consider these as a relatively fixed constant, with the obvious exception of M2C-related actions.

On the other hand, mapping each movement alongside its Mana investment can help putting things into perspective, despite being a quite challenging effort. The following graph maps both flows of Mana in solid colours and by-product flows of cards via transparent pointers. As anticipated, it is easy to see how the transparent arrows mimic some of the main movements paths we discussed as part of our previous discussion on Resource Management.

Putting it all together, it’s notable how, in the specific context of a dedicated ramp strategy, Mana eventually becomes both the key resource the deck aims at amassing, as well as the main fuel to guarantee the gameplan can be steadily carried out. Practically, the play pattern takes the form of a self-fueling engine.

Before we move forward, it’s interesting to briefly digress on how Magic as a game lends itself to creating a very rich environment of cross-contaminating effects. More specifically, the three main conversion options from the above map can largely affect each other, chaining together engines, loops and combos. And, quite often, this is where Commander really allows players to go all-in with their more synergistic builds.

Converting products

First things first, not all Magic decks include all possible forms of product conversion and cross-contamination. Many decks tend to primarily focus on just one or two options, aiming for consistency, more than untamed flexibility. I’d like again to go in the details on where Borborygmos Enraged places itself among the main cross-contamination options and how its ramp strategy pays off. But first, let’s see what the main product-to-product conversions are traditionally available as part of Magic’s environment.

To the surprise of nobody, the most obvious conversion of products comes in the form of permanents on the board dealing damage. This is how the majority of gameplay actions in Magic take place and it is likely the most intuitive product-to-product conversion. On the other side of the equation, cards like Precinct Captain and Blaze Commando guarantee the opposite conversion can also be covered, generating board presence when damage is dealt.

While this can be an effective back-and-forth loop of Creatures dealing damage, which in turn generates more Creatures, it is not necessarily what ramp decks usually look for. While certainly a concept worth exploring inside dedicated strategies, let’s turn our attention to the other conversion options, which Green-based strategies can easily look at for inspiration.

A value-oriented board presence can generate a significant card advantage, which than can be then re-converted into a continuously increasing board presence. Think of the value engine that is Beast Whisperer, which, in the right Creature-based deck, essentially becomes a self-fuelling machine. And for an example of tournament-winning Card-to-Board converter, look no further than Zombie Infestation.

Finally, back-and-forth conversion of Mana and cards is easily achievable, and sometimes abused as part of game-winning combos. Think Curiosity and its colour shifted counterpart Keen Sense, converting damage into cards. Pair any of these up with Arc Mage, converting cards into damage, and you set yourself for a nice value engine. Of course, you can also just bypass Arc Mage‘s discard option and go straight for the infamous Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind and Curiosity combo, for an immediate Damage-to-Card-to-Damage loop.

The unexpected payoff

Now that we have framed the main product-to-product conversion alternatives existing in Magic, let’s take a step forward and see what can be enabled by a ramp strategy that, up to this point, has mostly proven effective in moving Lands around. As anticipated, instead of focusing on classic M2B ramp payoffs, I’d like to specifically use Borborygmos Enraged to frame our next steps. The card, in the end, is the primary reason why I wanted to dive into this Resource Management analysis.

First things first, Borborygmos Enraged is obviously great at transforming cards from the player’s hand into direct damage, along the Card-to-Damage transformation line from the previous graph. On top of this ability, the already mentioned Keen Sense pairs amazingly with Borborygmos Enraged, generating a Damage-to-Card-to-Damage loop not unlike Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind’s engine, provided the damage is dealt to players and not to Creatures.

However, Borborygmos Enraged incorporates a card type restriction that specifically demands the discarding of a Land card to activate its effect, while Keen Sense only guarantees that a random card is drawn. The problem of this unreliable engine can be tackled from two perspectives:

1. Circumventing Keen Sense’s uncontrolled card draw: this is likely the easiest – and, arguably, most boring – solution, as Abundance is able to bridge the exact gap between Borborygmos Enraged and Keen Sense, effectively generating a three card combo that is likely to end the game on the spot
2. Resuming our Resource Management analysis to understand how, Keen Sense or not, Lands can be moved once again, although this time shifting gears to pursue a different priority, other than pure ramping

The paradigm shift

In the previous article on Resource Management, we focused on analysing the main flows of Lands as part of a ramp strategy and tried to understand the average levels of efficiency that could be targeted for each of the main flows. Once Borborygmos Enraged hits the battlefield, however, the priorities completely shift and the player’s hand suddenly becomes the position of higher value for available Land cards. If up to this point the goal has been to move Lands toward the battlefield, moving them back to the player’s hand becomes now the most crucial action, allowing us to revisit previous paths with a new perspective, as well as to explore new options. In other words, this is when the paradigm of traditional ramp breaks.

If up to this point the goal has been to move Lands toward the battlefield, moving them back to the player’s hand becomes now the most crucial action, allowing us to revisit previous paths with a new perspective, as well as to explore new options. And this is why I wanted to use Borborygmos Enraged as a reference point throughout this analysis. Its ability is pretty unique in the context of a ramp deck, as it completely subverts expectations of a traditional ramp-enabled payoff. And by doing so, it shines a light on a number of additional ways a player can manage resources.

Library-to-Hand (L2H) and Graveyard-to-Hand (G2H) have proven to be among the most densely populated paths in the whole strategy, in terms of card availability in a Green-based colour identity. Aside for direct ramp (L2B), tutoring and regrowing Land cards are already among the easiest actions the deck can perform. These paths have been discussed at length in our previous article and they continue to prove effective in supporting Borborygmos Enraged once it hits the battlefield.

The additional path than can be explored, in complete countertrend to the developing stages of the game, is Battlefield-to-Hand (B2H). This action invalidates a lot of the build-up performed up to this point, essentially destroying the long-terms benefits of ramping in favour of one-shot damage.

Mina and Denn, Wildborn is an excellent B2H engine, but the real star, here, is Storm Cauldron, providing a free way to reclaim any number of Lands from the board to the player’s hand. With a steady supply of Lands returning to the player’s hand, a Storm Cauldron played at the right time can really win the game on the spot.

Moving back to the play areas map, Borborygmos Enraged helps us tracing the yet unexplored Hand-to-Graveyard (H2G) path. Interestingly, this is the least value-adding path in the entire deck, as it comes with the complete exhaustion of a resource in the name of direct damage. From a Resource Management perspective, this is particularly critical, because the discarded Land is both a card escaping the player’s hand and a Land not hitting the battlefield, where its value up to this point would have been the greatest possible.

In other words, after an entire battleplan crafted around ramping as much as possible, the decks completely course corrects the approach, taking back all resources deployed up to that point and shifting gear into a completely different behaviour.

This is where direct contingency cards like Life from the Loam and Groundskeeper become even more valuable, as they cheat on this resource exhaustion, buying back Lands after their use, opening back the G2H pathway we already discussed in our previous article. Life from the Loam especially gives its best when paired up with one or more cycling Lands like Tranquil Thicket, when its dredging capabilities and the Land’s cycling effect turn the two cards into a three-Mana six-damage engine.

A slightly more indirect way, again, passes through the battlefield, with G2B movements enabled by Crucible of Worlds and Ramunap Excavator.

Putting it all together

Merging all the perspectives we have analysed so far, it’s interesting to see how much all the main play patterns of the deck revolve around movement and transformations of resources. While fairly intuitive for a Magic player, the level of complexity involved is actually quite significant, with a number of moving parts and transformative resources that get manipulated, exhausted and recovered.

Even if we just ignore all the possible movements that exist in Magic and focus solely on what the deck primarily tries to do, we end up with a selection of different components that, from a strategic perspective, can be grouped into two main game moments and related play pattern:

1. Setup and development: the initial turns of the game are fully dedicated to ramping and amassing as many Land as possible on the board; this is achieved either via direct Library-to-Battlefield (L2B) ramping and Library-to-Hand (L2H) tutoring, coupled up with the opening of additional Land drops (H2B)
2. Operating speed: the later turns of the game, especially once Borborygmos Enraged is out on the board, are focused on setting up a continuous Hand-to-Graveyard-to-Hand loop with most of the available Lands, eventually passing through the board, recovering resources from the battlefield or, at worst, tutoring additional Lands from the library

As it’s to be expected, the merging point of all paths, transformations and paradigms discussed so far is quite dense.

Interestingly, traditional ramp strategies in Commander tend to primarily focus on the setup and development part of the equation, amassing large amounts of Mana to then assemble their payoffs with game-breaking permanents hitting the board. As far as I am aware, Borborygmos is one of the only Legendary Creatures that so drastically lends themselves to a complete paradigm shift, actively working against its setup strategy to benefit from a self-destructive payoff.

The parallel to Resource Management within companies is also very peculiar: while resources are largely manipulated and transformed as part of a company’s production process, the primary goal is always sustainability. Companies, in the end, harness the power of innovation when they manage to transform their breakthroughs into sustainable practices.

Sustainability, however, is not necessarily the primary goal of this deck. Although a traditional ramp strategy is always pursuable, via Avenger of Zendikar-esque cards, the main target is to actually consume a critical mass of resources developed up to that point, converting them into direct damage, which itself possesses no board presence value.

Closing thoughts

Of all the Commander decks I have had a chance to play, Borborygmos Enraged is probably among my favourites. Not because the deck is extremely powerful – truth been told, it’s a good deck, but it’s nowhere near competitive Commander good. The main appeal of the deck is its extreme focus on managing resources through a fairly complex lifecycle, most notably playing towards a goal in its setup stage and then completely shifting into a different play pattern. Understanding when to shift from one phase to the other is truly what makes games interesting.

What fascinated me in this analysis of Resource Management and transformation is that Magic has clearly finetuned an implicit set of costs for each of these effects. And although the level of efficiency that can be achieved is largely set, a lot of in-game variety comes from how effectively each of these transformations is organized within a larger strategy. When each of this movement is executed is truly what makes the difference between winning and losing a game.

I must confess I have lost multiple games because I was a bit too trigger-happy with Storm Cauldron, dropping it too early and failing at maintaining a consistent board presence. The rule of thumb I have adopted over time is to shift into operative speed only when a reliable recurring engine has been setup. And even then, it’s always a roll of the dice, considering how much your opponents can interact with any predetermined battleplan.

In the end, as most Commander players know, each game is different and assessing threats and opportunity is always the real challenge. On the other hand, framing play patterns and in-game decisions with a deep awareness of the principles behind them can really make you feel accomplished as a Resource Manager.