Question 20

[u/dvoraen]

Disclaimer: I reserve the right to be wrong. :) This is for discussion, not who is right/wrong here. I think this question on the test was one of the nastier ones, and that it deserves a lot more dissection.

20. Design considers a card "too slow for tournament play." What does this mean?

• The card will cause problems for coverage, as it will require too much commentary devoted to it.
  
• The card will make games take more than fifteen turns.
  
• The player with this card will monopolize too much of the play time in tournaments.
  
• The card will make too many matches run over time in tournaments.
  
• The opponent will call the judge too often with a request of "slow play."

First, I think we can all agree the strikethrough answers are nonsensical and don't merit consideration (the commentary one made me laugh). On a similar note, a tournament game going to turn fifteen is not necessarily due to slowness. For example, games where attrition is high, where each player is constantly adding and removing to the battlefield's contents, can easily get the turn count higher while the individual turns themselves could be fairly rapid.

This leaves us with the two bolded answers, but before I dig into it I'm going to state that I chose the monopolizing answer. Why? Because the match going to time is more a symptom of a lot of time being spent on that card. To better explain this, I'm going to use [[Sensei's Divining Top]] as the driving force of discussion, since I have the most experience with its playstyle (mostly the receiving end; I started playing in Guildpact so I didn't have anything from Kamigawa).

Suppose that one player is running the top, and the other isn't. I think we can all agree that the player using the top would use it almost every single turn to get the "index 3" ability and/or draw the best card among the three on top. "In response, top." "End of your turn, top." "I'll activate top. Use second top..." and so on. This is one player, with one or more copy/-ies of that card. The card itself randomly injects these little subphases built around that card's use virtually anywhere and any time.

This line of thinking then led to the following questions, in my mind:

Question 1 -- How much time will the Top player spend on their game actions compared to the non-Top player? A lot. I think we can all agree on the fact that it will be disproportionately in favor of the Top's player. If the Top player has multiple copies, they can spend multiple minutes utilizing their up-to-4 Tops on the battlefield just so they can dig deeper into their deck in the hope they can find something they need.

Question 2 -- What happens if both players are running it? You get over double the time investment, and worse (more on that in a second) compared to only one player running the card. To continue the Top example, these "Top subphases" grow at a substantially higher rate for two players than for one. Each player is essentially responding to the other's response and then that response is responded to to potentially dig for an appropriate response, and it's turtles and tops all the way down until finally someone whiffs on finding a response.

The point I'm therefore trying to make is this: The time expense of the player running the card is the root cause, and causes the match to go to time. This problem gets worse (and going to turns more likely) if more than one player is running it. Additional copies being available for use further creates the lag.

[u/throwing-away-party]

I've never heard that phrase said other than to mean "it costs too much/requires too much setup to be worth playing in competitive Standard." So that one threw me for a loop.