Confident Confidant

I think some people need to understand a little bit more about odds. I’ve been reading the forums at StarCity and TMD recently, specifically those that deal with Fish and most importantly those that deal with UB Fish, and I’ve seen a few disturbing things. Most of those things have to do with odds.

Fish is a deck that puts a bunch of reliable cards together with the hope of stopping the less-reliable-though-more-powerful cards that other Vintage decks run. The deck runs on consistency and card advantage. With four copies of all of your major disruptive and offensive cards in the deck, you can be sure of drawing them if the game goes long enough or if you get enough draw power on the board.

As a Fish player, if you stop drawing more cards than your opponent for a long period of time, you’re probably going to lose. This is why most Fish decks run at least one playset of Standstill or Brainstorm plus some creature-based draw engine like Ninja of the Deep Hours (which is awesome because it’s a ninja) or Curiosity or, as in my deck, Dark Confidant.

Then, armed with drawing two or more cards per turn with four copies of your disruption (whether it’s Daze, Duress, Meddling Mage, Mox Monkey, Fire and Ice, Pithing Needle, Stifle, Annul, whatever) you can be certain to draw them when you need them against an opponent. While they’re struggling to put an offence together, your horde of weenies will attack 4 or 5 turns and kill them.

Of course, you can’t run a Fish deck without Force of Will. Force is the card that keeps Vintage from disintegrating into combo insanity and a fiery pit of prison decks. It’s the only thing that keeps Fish a viable deck because your opponent always has to consider it before they try anything (and with a functioning draw-engine, there’s a good chance they’ll be right about you having it). Fish just gets weak and silly if you don’t start your decklist with “4x Force of Will” and 10 or 12 more spaces for blue cards (preferably at least 12).

What I’m seeing on the boards, though, is that UB Fish with Dark Confidant should not run Force of Will because the drawback of the chance of taking a Goblin Grenade to the face during your upkeep doesn’t counteract the benefit of having a nearly free counterspell.

Seriously. What?

Your odds of flipping Force of Will with Confidant during your upkeep just aren’t that good.

Your odds of flipping more than one Force during your upkeep are even worse, and an automatic Burning Fields is negligible in a format where damage comes in groups of 6, 11, more than 20, or “arbitrarily large.”

Let’s say you cheated and started the game with Confidant in play. You have four Force of Will in your deck, but none of them made an appearance in your opening hand, so you have a 4 in 52 chance of flipping a Force of Will with your Confidant, that’s 1 in 13 or 7.6%. Over the course of a tournament, you might find a Force of Will twice.

And every time you find a Force of Will, your chances of seeing another one in the same game get reduced significantly.

If you start with a Force in your hand and get Confidant into play first turn on the play like a straight-up baller, your odds are reduced to 3 in 53 or 5.6%. With an opening like that in every game, you might take five to the dome once all day.

Maybe you don’t like those odds, but think about your second draw every turn. Say you don’t flip the Force of Will like a chump in the first example; you increase your chances of drawing it for turn! Granted it’s not a huge increase, but it happens repeatedly. Every turn you don’t find a free Shrapnel Blast with Dark Confidant, you have an almost equal but slightly better chance to draw the Force of Will for free and effectively reduce your odds once again when you process your draw step.

That’s hot.

I will admit that when I first built UB Fish on paper, I avoided running a full playset of Force of Will in favor of two Force and three Disrupting Shoal. My theory was that everyone would assume you had Force, especially if you managed to play it once a match. Disrupting Shoal is a good card, and I think it might yet see some play in Vintage, especially since most counter-worthy spells cost between zero and three, but it’s too narrow to be an effective replacement for Force of Will in a deck where most cards cost between zero and two.

Then I realized that real men don’t wuss out when they’re playing black. You’ve got to be prepared to Necro to one to find that last Dark Ritual when your opponent has red mana open, or to Demonic Consultation for that Mind’s Desire even though you know it’s restricted and you’ve got fewer than 30 cards in your library. Sacrifice doesn’t matter when it ends with you winning the game!

I want my deck to be strong, so I’m going to be prepared to eat a Lava Axe like the champion I am!

This is coming partly from experience and partly from mad probability skillz. I’ve been playing four Confidants, four Force of Will and 52 other cards for almost four months now, and I think I’ve countered Browbeat four, maybe five times, and it was worth it every time. It has happened twice in a game exactly once, and yes, I did lose that one. (It happened twice in the same turn, actually, and I only had 10 life, but I laughed at Urza’s Rage and shuffled up for game two. See “Ruby Slippers” for more information).

Look at the rest of a Fish deck’s composition. My deck has 20 lands, two moxes, and four Chalices of the Void. That means that after my opening hand, my chances of taking zero damage from Dark Confidant are almost half (considering I’d like at least two of those things in my hand for first turn). Everything else in my deck costs either one or two mana, and I can use Dimir Infiltrators to pull two two-casting-cost spells from my deck.

Don’t fear the Reaper, I say, because the numbers get prettier every time I think about them.

Honestly, I would have up to two Dark Confidants in play if I felt there wasn’t too much of a chance of my opponent burning me out. Your odds get twice as bad, but you’re drawing three cards a turn and attacking for four! Plus, as I said before, about half of your draws will be for zero damage.

The numbers don’t lie. It’s just that sometimes it takes a while for them to be fully realized.

For this reason, I think if I had it and could find room, I would run Tinker and Darksteel Colossus with Dark Confidant. The chances of revealing a card for Confidant and having it be, um, eleven Death Sparks are pathetically miniscule, around 2%. If Tinker cost two and could be fetched with Dimir Infiltrator, the combo would already be in my deck. Also, I think I might be morally opposed to Indestructibility, but that might just be because I don’t own Colossus.

Anyway, Magic is at its basest level a card game, and, like all card games, understanding probability will give you better insight and better playskills. You’ll start to recognize the differences between thinning lands from your deck by using fetch lands immediately (which Fish wants) and leaving yourself more flexible and less vulnerable (which something like Gifts wants). Soon you’ll be letting math guide your plays, recognizing that your opponent has two Forces of Will in his graveyard or only three cards in hand and going for the game winning play that turn rather than waiting for him to get another draw step.

I recognize that I am usually too hesitant to take chances myself, fearing the negative outcome rather than expecting to relish the positive, but I also recognize the importance (and legality, and necessity!) of counting both your and your opponent’s cards when you can.

I leave you with some inspirational words from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey: "You might be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later you’ll dance with the Reaper," so you might as well enjoy it. Also, since math never really goes out of date, you might be interested in checking out this site.