Know Your Unknowns

What’s good, Spirit Squad!

Today we’re gonna go over a key skill in improving at card games: sequencing!

For anyone who hasn’t heard this word in the context of card games before, sequencing is:

Paying attention to the order in which you play cards, so you get the most value out of each card you play.

Just playing your cards in the right order sounds simple, but is almost always anything but!

The art of sequencing your cards well applies to every card game, not just to Magic: the Gathering. Games like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! allow players to search their decks for specific cards very regularly, online-only games like Hearthstone introduce random effects that can’t be replicated in paper play, and the goal of the player in each of these games is to get to exactly their desired result as much of the time as possible.

To do this, games typically allow their players to access cards in their deck in three ways:

• Search for the card they want, using another card.
• Search for the card they want some percentage of the time.
• Draw random cards from their deck and hope for the best.

Or, as said in The Boondocks:

There are known knowns and there are known unknowns. But there are also unknown unknowns, things you don’t know that you don’t know.

(What?)

Known knowns are cards or effects that allow you to always know what you’re going to get out of them. The most iconic example of this is Demonic Tutor from Magic: the Gathering, which just plain allows players to search for any card they want and put it into their hand without having to show the opponent what it is. This effect is so all-encompassing that players of games other than Magic call search effects “Tutoring”.

Known Unknowns are cards that allow you to get your intended result, but come with limitations. The card Dawn in Pokémon, for example, can get you up to three Pokémon cards from your deck but can never get you Energy cards.

Unknown Unknowns are cards that get you more cards, but you have no control over what cards you get. Pot of Greed, for example, allows a player to draw two cards from the top of their deck (wink).

What’s this got to do with playing the cards in the right order, though?

Knowing what cards you do and don’t want, and when, gives you the best chance as a player to secure the outcomes you want most out of your cards that you have less control over than you’d like.

As a rule, you generally want to play your Known Knowns and your Known Unknowns before trying to interact with your Unknown Unknown cards, so that your random cards are as close to not-random as you can get.

To illustrate this, I’ll use an example from one of Magic: the Gathering’s most notorious decks: Caw-Blade.

The Caw-Blade deck used the card Squadron Hawk to look for additional copies of itself, effects like Brainstorm or the effect of Jace, the Mind Sculptor to draw cards from the deck, and special lands called “fetch lands” (Flooded Strand is one example) that let players look for specific lands in their decks and shuffle afterwards.

So what you can do is use your fetch land to get another land out of your deck, play one Squadron Hawk, look for the other three copies of itself right out of your deck, and then use a Brainstorm effect to draw three more cards and put two of those Squadron Hawks on top of your deck. Next turn, you draw a Squadron Hawk and you’re good to go right?

Wrong!

Instead, what we’re gonna do is use that Squadron Hawk to get the others as planned, but we’re gonna do that first. Then we can Brainstorm, seeing three more cards and putting back two Squadron Hawks. Still as planned here. But now, let’s use that fetch land after playing the Hawks instead of before. This way, next turn you’re potentially drawing something that isn’t a Squadron Hawk you already have the ability to search for.

This sounds minor, but remember that every card you see is a whole 1.6% of your deck (2.5 in Yu-Gi-Oh!). Repeat a small optimization like this four or five times and you’re giving yourself 7, 8, maybe even 12% better chances to see cards you need when you need them, rather than wasting opportunities! What if you need a key removal spell or a key counter spell, but instead locked yourself into drawing a Squadron Hawk? That’s actively losing a game you could have given yourself a chance to win.

(Special shout-out to my boy Allen, who decided to use Ciphermaniac’s Codebreaking to put cards on top of his deck, and then used other effects to shuffle his deck. Multiple times. Maybe don’t do that, everyone!)

The concept of sequencing your cards well applies to pretty much any card game you can play, so the goal here is to use your Known effects to reduce your Unknown effects as much as possible during your games. May the top of your decks always be cooperative, and I’ll see y’all on the next one!