Risk Reward: A Magic Diatribe · 3:49pm Oct 15th, 2018
I know. I'm gone for months and I come back to write the thing basically none of my followers are here for. I have broken the social contract.
Don't even care, this is going to bother me for months and until I get around to building a new platform and audience that does eat up this content, you are going to have to deal with it. And until I write this, I am going to be haunted by the specter of this. Freaking. Card.
Risk Factor. Oh, Risk Factor. How I hate you. How I love you. How I wish I could escape the discourse surrounding you. As per usual, these blogs are more engaging if you play Magic but on the off chance you don't h
Anyway here's why I hate the new hotness. Or love it. Or.... look I have very complicated feelings because of this card.
So if you don't play Magic or you play it casually, my weird obsession with this one Guilds of Ravnica card is probably a bit strange. Why spend time and words and deep feelings on this? Risk Factor is not usually a card to inspire deep feelings. It's just a red spell that does damage or sometimes draws you cards. That's it. There's nothing to really obsess about. No deep lore significance, not really at the top of the week one Standard meta, nothing. This card just kinda is. Nothing to obsess about.
Except for the fact that it's complete and utter garbage, and yet somehow the greatest card in the history of Magic.
Okay let me try to explain this.
Risk Factor is what's known as a "punisher" card in Magic parlance, meaning the card has two different modes. Unlike modal spells (think Cryptic Command) which challenge the player to make the best possible use of their flexible abilities, punisher cards are supposed to give your opponent the choice between two bad options. Punisher cards have a long, sordid history in Magic, going back all the way to the beginning of the game. And most of them are in red for some reason.
So here's the thing: Punisher cards are something players, especially new players, really like. It's easy to imagine how cool casting a punisher spell will be and watching the expression on your opponent's face as they agonize over a horrible decision. Some people play Magic to get a visceral sense that they're outplaying their competition, and punisher cards play to that desire. Playing a punisher card makes you feel like you're next-leveling the opponent, playing three-dimensional chess while they're over here on snakes and ladders.
Anyway punisher cards are bad and good players don't typically use them in competitive decks.
Let's look at Sword-Point Diplomacy for an example of why punishers tend to underperform. On its face, Sword-Point Diplomacy seems good. There are four possible outcomes when you cast this card: draw three cards, draw two and your opponent takes three damage, draw one and your opponent takes six damage, or your opponent takes nine damage. Every single one of those outcomes would be a good card on its own. In fact, paying three mana to deal nine damage to the opponent would be up there with the strongest burn spells in the game.
So if every possible outcome of playing this card would be good on its own, how can the card in aggregate be bad? The answer is that your opponent has complete control over the outcome. Because your opponent can not only choose how many cards you draw but which of those cards actually go into your hand, in practice playing a Sword-Point Diplomacy usually ends up resulting in you getting two to three useless cards added to your hand while your opponent takes minimal damage.
This is the hurdle most punisher cards have trouble jumping over. While each individual part of the card might be okay, or even great, your opponent is always going to have the freedom to choose the option that hurts them the least. The more options a punisher card has and the wider the gap in power in those options, the more likely it is that your opponent will find a way to take your mana investment and make you feel like you've wasted it. The ceiling on a punisher card may be sky-high, but by their nature you're usually going to have to deal with a rough floor.
What I'm describing here is old hat to Magic veterans. Despite that, punisher cards tend to get a lot of love from the community. Pick any given card and there's a strong chance that it has a cult-like fanbase who insist that it's worth playing. They'll have stories upon stories of the times they've won tournaments with it, or how other people are simply playing the card wrong and you have to maximize its value in deckbuilding to take true advantage of its powers. Strangely the decks these people describe never seem to break through into high-level competitive events, which I'm certain is because those rotten netdeckers outnumber them and for no other reason.
The thing is that in the case of Risk Factor, the cult is not only really big but there's a chance that they're right, which is incredibly frustrating.
The obvious comparison for Risk Factor is Browbeat, one of the earliest punisher cards ever printed. In many ways they're almost the same card. Same rate, same second effect, pretty similar damage. The major difference between them is that Browbeat can only be cast during your turn while Risk Factor can be cast in response to anything your opponent does, and that Risk Factor has Jump-Start, meaning you can discard a card to cast it again from your graveyard. While those are pretty major differences, the cards cost the exact same amount of mana.
Given that, you'd expect the performance to be pretty similar, and if they are then you'd expect Risk Factor to be pretty bad. Browbeat clearly wants to be in a red deck that plays lots and lots of direct damage, but at three mana it's on the high end of burn spells. Sure you can pay three mana to deal five damage to the opponent once early in the game. You could also play Goblin Guide and two Lightning Bolts in that same turn and deal way more damage. Lightning Bolt can even kill an opposing creature or planeswalker.
Even late into the game when you want to refill your hand, which would you rather draw as a red mage - a Browbeat that might make you tap out for a turn to get to your card draw and win on your next turn, or a Boros Charm to just. Y'know. Win?
By that logic, if Browbeat and Risk Factor are pretty much the same card, then Risk Factor is an adorable trash baby and while fun, probably not tournament playable. Of course, they aren't the same card. And that's the problem.
While there are very few "good" punisher cards, there are a subset that are strong enough to build decks around, and those are the cards where the "floor" or playing the card is high enough that even in the worst case scenario, the card was worth it to play. Vexing Devil has never quite made it, but it's come very close more than once because one mana to deal for damage and a one mana 4/3 are both very strong outcomes for their rate and thus both not great options for your opponent to choose from. Combustible Gearhulk is actually kind of a house, since the worst case scenario for it is being a giant robot that can deal anywhere from 6-12 damage to your opponent and set up your graveyard for reanimation spells.
The difference between these cards and Risk Factor is that being attached to a creature generally makes any effect slightly better than it would be otherwise. Even terrible creatures can block damage or turn sideways to eventually win the game. But Risk Factor does have one advantage not even these cards have: You can play it twice with the same copy.
One of the big issues with Browbeat is that if you do play it early on to deal three damage, you've lost the opportunity to pay three mana to draw three cards. And given that Red can deal five damage in ways that are way more mana efficient than tapping out to cast Browbeat, that means the card is basically always going to be performing at a low level. Risk Factor shaves off a point of damage, but what it has over Browbeat is the potential to solve that problem.
Cards with Jump-Start can be cast a second time from your graveyard by discarding a card from your hand, even if the card you discard is a useless land. If you play Risk Factor early and your opponent takes the damage, you can use the Jump-Start abiity of that same Risk Factor to play it again later, when your opponent's down to 4-8 life. At that point they either have to take the damage and pray to dodge every spell in your deck or let you draw three cards and pray that those three cards don't just let you deal four damage anyway.
This, the pro-Risk Factor faction argues, is what pushes it over the edge. Burn decks rarely get efficient ways to draw cards, and Risk Factor far outclasses any we've seen so far. In addition, red has a pretty robust burn deck available in standard. Yes we've lost some of the bogeymen of the old top-tier red decks that let them play a long game, but we still have a pretty good selection of aggressive creatures to choose from. The argument is that Risk Factor is valuable in these decks because it gives them late game reach. Argue with that or trash-talk the card and this fanbase will devour you.
In fact, if you so much as play Risk Factor on camera in a way that doesn't satisfy the peanut gallery, they're likely to turn on you. Here's streamer SaffronOlive (better known as "Seth, prrrrrrrrrrroooooooooobably better known as SaffronOlive") playing a deck he dubs "Risky Wizards" for his weekly show "Much Abrew About Nothing". It's worth noting that while the deck Seth is using here isn't particularly well-tuned, the amount of comment hate he gets for some of his decisions is pretty disproportionate. It's worth noting that Seth isn't actually the original builder of the decks on "Much Abrew". They are instead chosen from a list of decks he makes short videos on during the previous week, with him tending to default to the decks that get the most fandom response.
In other words the people who are trashing his play and deck constructing abilities on this video are the same people, in part, who asked him to play the deck in the first place. They demanded tribute to their dark god, and were not satisfied.
Burn for the burn gods.
And that's where I feel... well, a little burnt. Or needlessly contrarian. The amount of vitriol fighting over Risk Factor creates is exhausting if you play a lot of Magic. While the card is one of the best punishers we've seen in recent years, that is not a high bar to leap and doesn't necessarily mean that Risk Factor is a good tournament card. Sure it's kind of unique in its function of being a red draw spell in a burn deck, but Experimental Frenzy is in the same set and potentially lets a good burn deck draw three to five cards in a turn without needing to be cast twice. Red is such a good deck right now that even if Risk Factor is okay, I'm not sure it's better than every other option you could be playing in Red.
I mean, personally, I don't think the card deserves the level of community fixation it's receiving. It makes following people who play magic a lot exhausting. One might say it...
...burns you out.
(Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!)
It's articles like this that make me realize that for all that I love Magic, I'm not really part of the game's community. And this article in particular has me wondering whether that's a good thing.
All I can say is that during the Prerelease, my Dimir control deck taught an Izzet player that jump-start doesn't do you much good if you can't keep cards in your hand.
Well, that and it's good to hear from you.
What the fuck I love this card now
That's a lot of devotion to your topic, there. I'm guessing that came right out of you without much effort, heh.
Also, it's blood. *Blood* for the Blood God. Let's not go provoking Khorne now.
frinkiac.com/video/S05E19/0G4kAb9dwnS1VVdNi9oza7VcnDc=.gif
Stuff like this is why while I love playing Magic, I interact with people who play Magic as little as possible.
The fact it's an instant seems like a really big factor, too, as you say. The ability to just pass the turn, burn something on theirs if you need to, and if not then play this does some real work in offsetting the high mana cost. Also: makes it plausible in blue-red depending on the rest of the format.
It's interesting that you decided to bring this up just now, because I've been thinking a bit about Pox the last couple days, and that sort of effect (see also Balance or Liliana of the Veil's last ability) has similar "your opponent needs to make choices about how this hurts them" features to true punishers like this--but are more likely to be good, probably because all the effects happen, they just get to choose exactly how. And of course you get to do more optimization on your end to break the symmetry than with something like Risk Factor or Browbeat.
But as is so often the case, the real lesson is that if you take a theme and put it on a blue instant, it's better than if you put it somewhere else:
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It is worth noting that because of Pelt Collector, Vexing Devil is seeing a huge resurgence in Modern Zoo decks. Punisher cards everywhere are getting boosted by GRN.
I'm with 4953525.
I played a lot of Magic with friends as a kid/teenager, but the first time I took my patchwork white deck to the local Wizard's store to play in a real tournament, I learned about errata and banned lists and Standard and Extended play and all that other stuff that really sucks the fun out of the game if you don't have the money to stay on top of the releases; which, at 16, I didn't.
That sounds pithy maybe, but I really do like reading about the new hotness and weirdness going on in the game sometimes, so blog posts like this are right up my alley. God, I remember hearing about Plainswalkers for the first time and was like, "wait you mean the players are cards now, or...?" That was cool.
My first instinct when I read the card text was "target myself and get three cards with no hassle," but I guess that's not a very red thing.
4954462
Well, the fact that it reads "target opponent" puts a bit of a kibosh on that plan, yeah. Red actually doesn't get to just draw cards under normal circumstances, which is part of why Risk Factor being playable or not is a big deal. It has access to rummaging (discard some number of cards -> draw that same number of cards) to filter out dead cards and it gets the occasional "do a small effect + draw a card" cantrips, but Red isn't supposed to get easy access to adding cards to its hand. It ties into the whole "impulsive nature" thing.
4954788
If an artist is always his own worst critic, then a Magic player is always their own worst opponent.
(God, now I want someone to make that work.)
It can make you draw more cards, that'd be a lot for me to obsess over. If I was on the receiving end of that card I might just take the damage instead of giving my opponent more options to beat me. At least, this coming from my TGC experiences.
(I noticed this post just today, and despite the fact that I'm several weeks late to the party I'M GONNA POST HERE ANYWAY COS WHY NOT)
I think the deciding factor (hehe) for Risk Factor isn't so much its power level as it is the fact that it's an enormous non-bo with Experimental Frenzy, as demonstrated in this clip from Jeff Hoogland's stream:
Risk Factor has proven itself to be a pretty powerful card – to the extent that there were even decks in Modern like the new Runaway Red archetype and even this Jund deck that won an SCG event a month or so ago that are trying it out – but in terms of Standard it had the misfortune of being in the same expansion as a card that, at least in the current wide-open Standard metagame, is both seemingly stronger than it as well as being anti-synergistic with it.
Though, I'll be honest, Mono-Red in Standard has been in a weird place at the moment. Currently, it's not as strong or as relevant in the metagame as sites like MTGoldfish would have you believe it is. Standard Mono-Red has become divided between traditional burn-heavy low-drop-centric builds that would make great use of a card like Risk Factor (and Experimental Frenzy, although for some reason people seem to be playing both of them in the same deck still which doesn't make any sense to me but whatever) and 'Big Red' style decks that utilise more powerful mid-to-late game creatures like Rekindling Phoenix and Siege Gang Commander, as well as incremental value cards like Treasure Map, in lieu of a card like Experimental Frenzy which would rather be in a deck with lots of cheap spells so it can go off more consistently.
Mono-Red just isn't really capable of abusing Risk Factor as much as it wants to since the premiere deck in the format, Golgari Midrange, has access to Wildgoyf Walker and enough removal and inexpensive sweepers to absolutely dominate Mono-Red in its current form.
Also, let's be honest, Experimental Frenzy is way cooler.
EDIT: also can i just say that Standard is like. the fucking best right now?? I wanna write an article about it super bad cos i've been having so much fun with it.