Inspiration

I've decided to experiment with using Inspiration in our current Lost Mines of Phandelver 5th edition D&D campaign. To that end, here is how I'm going to apply it in the actual game.

Using Inspiration gives you Advantage on an attack roll, saving throw, or skill check. (When you have Advantage, you roll two d20s instead of one, and keep the higher number. Likewise, Disadvantage means rolling two d20s and keeping the lower one.)

First of all, everybody will start each game with exactly one Inspiration. You can only have one Inspiration at a time, so it behooves you to use it. But you can only use it during certain times.

Taking an Inspired Action

You can use your Inspiration when you're doing something that ties into your character's personal characteristics (ideals, personality trait, bonds, flaws).

1. You can use it to give yourself Advantage.

As an example, let's suppose you have the Personality Trait, "My greataxe is a family heirloom, and it’s by far my most precious possession," and during a battle it gets knocked away, teetering on the edge of the cliff. If you put yourself in danger to try and save it, you could use Inspiration.

2. You can also use it to give Advantage to SOMEONE ELSE with their own actions.

Suppose that your Personality Trait is "I see people as marks for a con and have difficulty feeling true empathy for them," and you decide to help a fellow conman size up a potential victim. You could use your Inspiration to give them Advantage on their attempt to trick their target.

3. Lastly, you can use it to give Disadvantage to SOMEONE ELSE.

For example, if your ideal is "I must protect my friends," and you decide to help take the brunt of an assault, you could use your Inspiration to help them fend off the attack and give the enemy Disadvantage on their attack roll.

The important part is it has to connect directly to your personal characteristics somehow, and that you're actually in a position to be able to do something. You can't just toss in an Inspiration to help someone if you're not even in the same room, or help defend them from someone if you're not actually able to do so, etc.

Earning Inspiration

Once you've burned up your Inspiration, you can earn a new Inspiration point by volunteering to impose Disadvantage on your roll based on one of your personal characteristics, OR by making a decision that creates a significant setback. Either one has to be related to personal characteristics.

1. Imposing Disadvantage based on a personal characteristic

Suppose you have a Flaw, "I'm easily tempted by shiny objects," and you're asked to roll Perception in a room studded with glittering gems and treasure when you're searching for a trap. You could volunteer to impose Disadvantage on the roll because your character is too distracted by the gems to notice the obvious traps laying about.

2. Making a decision that creates a significant setback

You can also earn Inspiration back when making a decision that creates a setback. Suppose you've taken an oath to never lie, and an enemy asks you an incriminating question. You answer honestly, giving him critical information or a significant advantage.

Character Development

People change and grow over time. As your character experiences challenge and loss, triumph and adversity, they might believe in new ideals or shed previous ones. Sometimes the DM will invite you to wipe out an old characteristic and replace it with a new one that reflects the current character. For instance, if you had an Ideal, "The Church is always right," and your character goes through a harrowing experience that could cause him to lose faith, you might strike out that Ideal and replace it with something new.

This is still a work in progress, but it should give you an idea of how it works.

Understanding the stack

Whenever you play a spell or use an ability in Magic, it doesn't just happen instantly. There's a space between when you cast it, and when it actually happens, a kind of magical limbo called the stack, where your spell goes. Whenever anybody puts something on the stack, everyone has a chance to respond to that and play their own spells or abilities and put them on the stack as well. When nobody has anything to add anymore, the spells start happening, or resolving, in the order of the last spell cast to the first one. In other words, last is first. The original spell is cast, then another is put on top of it, like a building block, signifying the order. When it is time for the spells to resolve, they resolve one at a time, from top to bottom.

SPELLS

Let's suppose you're playing green and have a Llanowar Elves in play.


You have a Giant Growth in your hand.

Your opponent is playing red, and casts a Shock, targeting your Llanowar Elves. What happens now? The Shock doesn't happen instantly, in real time, at least. It goes on the stack.


Now, you have a chance to respond to it. If you do nothing, the Shock will resolve, and your Llanowar Elves will be dealt 2 damage, killing it.

But you want to save your Llanowar Elves. So you cast Giant Growth in response to Shock. What happens now? Your Giant Growth goes on the stack, above Shock.


Your opponent has no response. Since neither of you have decided to play anything else, the stack begins resolving, one at a time. The top item, the one that was played last in real time, resolves first.


Your Giant Growth resolves first, and gives your Llanowar Elves +3/+3 until end of turn. After that, the Shock resolves and deals 2 damage to the Llanowar Elves, but it survives because it is already a 4/4.

Now suppose this Llanowar Elves is attacking your opponent later into the game. You want to deal more than 1 damage, so you cast a Giant Growth targeting your Llanowar Elves before damage is dealt. (Combat damage uses the stack too, by the way.) Your Giant Growth goes on the stack. In response, your opponent casts Shock, targeting your Elf as well. The Shock goes on top of the stack, above your Giant Growth. You have no response. The stack begins to resolve, and since the Shock is on top it resolves first. It deals 2 damage to your Llanowar Elves, and it dies. Next, your Giant Growth resolves, but there is no creature left for it to pump up, so it does nothing and your attack is thwarted. You'll have to find another way to win.

COUNTERSPELLS


Counterspells work in a similar way. What a counterspell does is go on top of a spell on the stack, and resolve first. The effect of the counterspell resolving is to kill the spell it's targeting; it takes it off the stack and throws it into the graveyard. That spell never has a chance to even hit the table. What is key to understand is that they counter spells, which means they can only do their work when that spell still exists as a spell, on the stack, not as a card in your hand, or an object in play. Once that moment is gone the counter does nothing.

ABILITIES

Abilities use the stack as well. When you activate an ability, that ability goes on the stack and waits to resolve, along with other spells that may have been played before or after.

Suppose you control a Master Healer.



I'm tired of you constantly saving your creatures and hurl a Lightning Blast at your Master Healer.



My Lightning Blast goes on the stack. In response, you tap Master Healer and activate her ability, choosing your Master Healer. Her ability goes on the stack, above my spell. It resolves first; the next 4 damage that would be dealt to Master Healer this turn will be prevented. Next, my Lightning Blast resolves and deals 4 damage to Master Healer, but it is prevented. Nothing happens to her.

If we did it in the reverse order, something else would happen. If you tapped Master Healer to prevent 4 damage to herself, for whatever reason, and I cast Lightning Blast in response, my spell would go above hers on the stack and resolve first, killing her. Her ability would resolve next, but she wouldn't be there anymore to have any damage prevented to her, and it does nothing.

What I have described is called an activated ability. It is an ability that is used when you activate it by paying a certain cost. The format is, "[COST] : [EFFECT]". As long as you can pay the cost, you can play the ability. It doesn't matter when, unless it specifies it.

But there are other kinds of abilities that use the stack. There are triggered abilities, which only happen when something it is set to detect triggers it. These usually are written as, "Whenever something happens, do something."


At the beginning of your upkeep, Phyrexian Arena's ability triggers and goes on the stack. After it resolves, you lose 1 life (and draw an extra card — the POWER!). It can be responded to, as well, just like any other item on the stack. For instance, if you are at 1 and have this out, you could play a spell in response to Phyrexian Arena activating to gain some life before it resolves and makes you lose.

There are also mana abilities, which are simply abilities that produce mana. These do not use the stack and cannot be responded to. The last kind of ability are static abilities, and these do not use the stack either; they are simply characteristics of the card, like "flying," or "first strike." They are always on.

The stack is one of the confusing aspects of Magic for newer players, but as you can see, it is not as complicated as it seems. Once you grasp the fundamentals, it becomes second nature. There is another level to it with combat, but I'll save that for another day.

Metagaming Etiquette

As everybody knows, nobody likes a metagamer. Metagaming is considered cheap by most players. Getting called a "metagamer" is not a compliment. Note that I'm talking about casual play between friends, not tournament play. In a tournament, anything goes and nobody's going to care if you do one strategy or another; everybody is trying to win. But otherwise, creating one deck for the sole purpose of beating a specific other deck and nothing else is what's frowned upon. First of all, it's not going to be able to beat anything else. It's made solely to spoil somebody else's fun.

That, however, is its own punishment, because it does not improve your skill. Anybody can throw together a random pile of cards that's designed to beat one deck and nothing else. What improves one's abilities is forging a strategy that is able to handle the aforementioned opponent but still stand up to the rest as well. Having to make the compromises between the focus on thwarting a particular enemy strategy and maintaining general effectiveness is what creates good judgement and deckbuilding skills.

There's also no point to playing such a deck that's metagamed completely against one deck. Why? Well, if your deck is designed solely to beat mine, and it doesn't have to worry about anything else, and all the cards are picked specifically for the purpose of thwarting other cards in my deck, then of course it's going to win. But then why bother even playing? What would it prove? It doesn't prove that one player is more skilled than another, or that they have designed a better deck. It just shows that, obviously, a deck designed with cards designed to beat a certain strategy is going to beat it. If somebody was doing that with me, then I wouldn't play with them, or just use another deck. At which point their scheming will have been for nothing, or they'll switch to another deck that's metagamed for that deck, and I'll have no reason to use that one either, and so on, ad infinitum. You shouldn't be worried about losing to an unfavorable matchup. It presents a learning opportunity that will let you tune your deck better to its weaknesses.

MAINBOARDING
It doesn't matter what kind of deck you stack if you're stacking it.

Then there's the matter of maindeck design. The maindeck is designed for the general match, and the sideboard is for bringing in something specific to a certain strategy you've anticipated in the second and third game. Once again, it rewards skill, since a good player will have prepared a good sideboard and be better prepared going into the next match. If they phoned it in then their sideboard will be useless. Some players prefer not to bother with a sideboard, and just modify their maindeck before each game to suit the deck they're playing against. This makes me want to drive that player's head through the wall. Not only does that remove a critical element from the game, but it is also cheap because it basically foregoes the match of the two original decks competing against each other and replaces it with the metagamed deck designed to beat my original deck.

Generally a player who does that does it under the impression that it's helping them, but it actually isn't. Who it actually helps is the player with the bigger card collection. Instead of just limiting the help we're going to bring into the three round match to fifteen cards, we now have access to every card we own. You might swap in a few cards here or there that you've brought along to suit the person you're going to face, but now I can just as easily go through my entire collection and find just the right cards that completely annihilate your deck. And since there's no limit on what we're changing, there isn't any component of skill in it, so each player can just grab handfuls of whatever card we want and throw it in, instead of the selection being limited by the our selection of fifteen cards which require the choices to be narrowed by the our judgement.

If you're the worse player, then it only hurts you. If you're the better player, you don't need that assistance anyway because you should be skilled enough to design your deck. In either case it's unnecessary.

Also, if you know beforehand, when you're designing your maindeck, that you won't be using a sideboard but can bring in anything you want, it does not force you to make choices in how you design your deck. It doesn't really matter what you put in there because you can just change it whenever you want. You don't have to worry about having made it too set on stopping aggro decks to have game against control, because as soon as you run up against that control deck you can just swap everything out and make it into an entirely different deck. The decks themselves become meaningless. Knowing that you only have so few cards to bring in later forces you to decide beforehand what your deck is going to emphasize because it can't go after everything at once, and that it only has so much reinforcement coming in from the side later on.

Will these players ever get better by taking the easy route? No. Their skills will stagnate and they'll get left behind instead of developing themselves and their decks in adjustment to what they face off against through their play experiences, giving them a wealth of knowledge and wisdom to call upon when they need it.

Metagaming

What is metagaming? A "meta"-something is that item turned in to apply to itself. For instance, metaphilosophy is the philosophy of philosophy. Metahistory would be the history of the chronicling of history. "Metagaming," in the general context, would be using information outside the game to influence elements within the game. If you know a certain player loves to play a certain way, and you play to exploit that, then you are conducting a basic form of metagaming.

In the case of Magic, metagaming takes place within the "metagame." The metagame is the current roster of decks being played in the gaming environment. It's the field you'll be competing in. Since we all play with different groups of people, our metagames are all different. Within my group of friends, for instance, almost everybody loves to play aggressive creature based decks and so the metagame is aggro heavy. Within another group, the metagame may favor control. On the tournament scene, the metagame is a national phenomenon that is composed of the entire competitive Magic community.

Decks are defined within their metagames. There is no such thing as the "perfect" deck, that is objectively the best and that can defeat every other deck. If that was the case, everybody would play the same deck and the game would die. A deck is only good insofar as how it relates to the other decks in its field. A slower, controlling deck, for instance, could be great in an environment of other control decks but would get eaten alive in a metagame filled with super aggressive decks that have made playing such a deck unthinkable. There are objectively better decks, but the environment can make it so that such a deck still is unplayable because all of its matchups against other decks in the metagame are poor.

"Metagaming," therefore, in the Magic context would be using this information of what decks are dominant and what decks are getting destroyed to influence what you play. It is a continuum that is constantly in flux, like an ecosystem. For instance, you may notice that within your metagame a certain kind of deck is constantly played and crushes the other decks. People will eventually start playing decks that take such obstacles into account and are better suited to defeat them. Eventually, the original deck will be deposed and a new deck will reign. But then decks that the previous King of the Hill kept in check will no longer have their natural predator pushing them down, and flourish again, which will throw the metagame up in the air again.

The challenge is using this information to create a deck that is ready to handle what lays in its game environment but that isn't so focused on defeating a particular strategy that it fails against everything else, and is therefore a failure. You have to assume a general metagame where any of them could come up as opponents, and therefore your deck has to be equipped to deal with the metagame at large, rather than a specific deck. Since games are generally played in sets of three, and you have a sideboard of fifteen cards, you can include preparations for what you expect to face up against in the sideboard to swap in based on what you're facing, instead of crippling your deck to face a strategy as its main focus and have it keel over and die as soon as something that doesn't consist of that strategy shows up.

It requires knowledge of the possible cards and decks in play, and their interactions and performances relative to each other, as well as the experience and foresight to see what is coming ahead. If you read the metagame correctly, and show up at a tournament with a rogue deck tuned to play the best decks off against each other, you may very well win. That is how a great many tournaments are won; taking the rest of the opponents by surprise on their weak spots while they're focused on others. On the other hand, if you read it wrong then you'll just fall apart and have a deck thats poorly suited to the field its competing in. Metagaming is a skill, and like any other skill, there are proper ways to do it and ways that will only invite defeat.

Introducing the Phyrexian Arena

Welcome, fellow Magic players, to "The Phyrexian Arena," a new blog dedicated to offering strategy and analysis on all things Magic. Having spent years playing, I thought that I could present the insights I have gleaned for the benefit of others, in addition to discussing Magic for my own enjoyment.