The Ari Lax Travel Scale

If you have followed me on Twitter for any amount of time, you may be aware that I’m prone to travel… adventures. Or mishaps. I like to think that most of them weren’t my fault, but it keeps happening to me and I have to wonder if I really am a subtle cause or indirectly setting myself up for them.

If you follow Magic design you may be familiar with the Storm Scale. This is a retrospective grade Mark Rosewater likes to apply to mechanics to show how likely they are to return in Magic.

Today, I would like to introduce the Ari Lax Travel Scale. From 0 to 10, how much does the travel mishap impact my life?

0 - We get there at or ahead of time, without any issues.

Believe it or not, this does happen to me sometimes.

1 - You get there with maybe a minor delay.

You leave Boston in rush hour post-work traffic. 

You drive from DC to Pittsburgh and a wild Breezewood appears in the middle.

Your plane takes off, lands, but you are row 37 and wait to get out.

This covers most Magic trips. It’s the “evergreen” state of travel.

2 - Something happens, but just to someone else you know. At most they had a card or two for you.

In the 2013-2014 Pro Season (Theros Block in Magic time), Conley Woods was on some kind of roll. He played a really wild selection of decks at events, highlighted by Pro Tour choices of 3 Birthing Pod Melira Pod in Modern, Abzan Enchantress with no Elspeth, Sun’s Champion or Thoughtseize in Theros block, and Necromancer’s Stockpile Golgari in Standard. 

This wasn’t limited to Pro Tours, his Grand Prix decks were all swings for the fences. One of these times, I felt he had struck gold. This was Born of the Gods Standard, a format of Mono-Black Pack Rat, Mono-Blue Devotion, and Esper Control, and he wanted to play Golgari Dredge with Nighthowler.

Somehow, his flight from Denver just failed to take off. I made it to the event, played his deck, and lost playing for Top 8 with the big Conley brew hit of the year.

That’s just some bad timing.

3 - Something happens to me, but it’s largely an oddity or inconvenience

I look up at the ceiling of the Ted William tunnel, pictured above for non-Bostonians. I can see it because I’m outside of any moving vehicle, walking down the service side rail with the other thirty people that were on my bus.

Well, the broken down bus. We were the problem holding everyone up in horrific Boston traffic, and now the new bus taking us to Logan airport is 20 feet ahead of us loading people in the middle of traffic in the tunnel. 

At least I had 4G service the whole time and left early for the airport. Unlike the elevator incident (a 4.5 on the scale) I don’t think I had the foresight to live tweet the experience.

4 - Something happens to me, it’s a moderate inconvenience, but doesn’t really change my plans. Or it’s a slight inconvenience, but I’m definitely at fault

This is one of the places on the scale where story equity peaks.

PT Hour of Devastation 2017 in Kyoto. I’m flying Baltimore to Atlanta to Seoul to Kyoto. My Baltimore flight gets delayed, putting my connection time through Atlanta in the 20 minute range from landing to boarding closing.

I sprint across the Atlanta airport, make it from B terminal to my international flight in about 12 minutes (Google says this is a mile with human obstacles in the way), and am insanely glad I checked my main bag. 

Oh wait, my checked bag needed to make that trip. Will I even have clothes once I land in Kyoto? Oh wait, my teammates are saying that I read the train schedule wrong and once I land in Kyoto I have 50 minutes to deboard, clear customs with said potential bag, buy a train ticket, and get on the last train to Kyoto or I’ll be stuck in the airport for seven hours. 

I land, and Pierre Dagen randomly arrives at the same time. My bag magically shows up, there’s apparently a bus that is not only faster but picks up later than the train, and I make it to Kyoto. 

But wait, there’s more, and here is where I’m at fault for my own.... experiences.

My behind the times travel quirk is that I never set up international cell access, which means I have no navigation. I have the address of the AirBNB I’m staying at, but it’s English characters with what I can only assume is not enough kanji to be the full address. From my prior experience many Japanese people can read English but not speak it, so I should be fine right? I have a static map of the area on my phone with a GPS pin for me (today’s lesson: GPS is a one way signal and doesn’t require data) but no GPS pin for my destination, just a broad idea of the area I need to go.

My late night cab driver doesn’t read English characters, and I’m appropriately punished for being a stupidly presumptive American. He doesn’t have a GPS, just a digital map. I point him to around right spot, and we head off. He gets me within a couple blocks according to my GPS and approximate knowledge after getting a bit lost, hands part of the fare back to me because he got lost, and I leave.

But wait, it’s not over, and I’m still at fault for this part. I’m outside in the neighborhood, I have a broad idea of where I’m going, but there aren’t really addresses. Or street signs, not that I could read them. And I know the place is down some dead end small street without a clear marking somewhere near the river. 

I do have the Wifi network name and the password though, and my phone has plenty of power. I wander in the right direction, playing high tech Marco Polo, and eventually find the right place via Wifi signal strength navigation. Overall, it takes me about 20 minutes extra.

I still haven’t ever set up international data on a trip.

5 - Something happens to me, I get there on time, but it’s a significant change in schedule

Flying to Grand Prix Los Angeles last August, I scheduled my flight out of Dulles in around 4pm with a short connection in Denver. 

There’s an almost daily thunderstorm in the DC area, that hits the Dulles area around 4pm. Maybe I should have thought this through better.

We land in Denver, I clearly miss my flight, and I check the board for options. There's another flight leaving for LA in 45 minutes, but apparently United just can't put me on it unless I talk to the specific airport customer service agents. Not the phone line, not the gate agent, not their online weather rebooking, just one woman at one desk with 300 other people in line from other flights. After 20 minutes, I accept I'm stuck with the 6am option tomorrow.

Some luck is on my side, and I end up with a bed despite the vast majority of Denver just going yo the GP. Matt Nass was in town due to having hit Platinum, Sam Pardee was flying to the Grand Prix anyways, and that meant there was an open bed to mise. I get there, sleep four hours, go back to the airport for a 6am flight, and get to LA. Without a built deck, obviously.

When I land, I'm greeted with the best possible outcome. The best Jewish deli in the area opens at 7am, it is now 7:30am, and it is directly between us and getting to the site on time to get my missing cards.

Somehow even the messes work out OK in the end.

The rest of the event…. Let’s not talk about that. We are grading travel beats here, not losses due to Magic cheats.

6 - My plans are jeopardized, but largely due to events that don’t physically impact me

Grand Prix Columbus 2018. I’m teaming with Tommy “stainerson” Ashton and Adam “awinnarisyou” Ragsdale.

Tommy is from DC. I’m from DC. Adam is from Toronto. It’s summer, not winter. Keep this all in mind.

I drive the six hours from DC to Columbus because I can take a half Friday. I make it to Columbus on time, order a pizza, and chill in our team Airbnb. Tommy’s flight gets delayed from 8pm to 9pm, then 10pm, then 11pm. Fortunately Jake Mondello is just there to hang out, so I have a backup third on deck in case things go wrong.

Just before I pass out, Adam Ragsdale mentions his late flight out of Canada is delayed 15 minutes.

I wake up at 4am, probably because I ate a whole pizza 8 hours before, to a slew of messages. Tommy isn’t in Columbus, his flight was cancelled because the plane broke, good luck friends. Adam isn’t in Columbus, his flight was cancelled because the plane broke, and they almost locked him in the Toronto airport. 

Because this is still fairly routine nonsense, I shrug and try to assemble a team. Jake is probably asleep, but probably in. I post on the usual circuits, head over to the site when it opens, and decide to ask everyone I know from the area if they have a free agent, and call it quits if I don’t find someone by 9am.

The first local I find to ask is Ben Weinburg at about 8:45am. He says he saw Riley Curran on Discord playing League of Legends at 7am and knows he had no plans to show up. He messages Riley, who hasn’t read any of the Dominaria cards that were just released that weekend but will gladly show up as soon as he can be ready, and I lock it in. 

Jake responds at 8:57 saying he just saw the message but will be there. I sit down for deck build as a team of one. A judge takes pity on me and helps verify a pool with me, and Jake shows up about 10 minutes into deck build as I’ve laid out the playables. Riley shows up 30 minutes later, we have a deck in front of him, he reads all the cards, and it’s go time.

We lose playing for Day 2. Riley was given one rare, a Dread Shade, and had the best record on the team. 

For a one player team as of 15 minutes before the event started, I’ll take it.

7 - My plans are jeopardized, and there was a real chance everything would fall apart

Grand Prix Providence 2011. Notably the Mental Misstep Grand Prix, but that’s not today’s story.

Two cars are meeting up at RIW Hobbies in Michigan and driving down together-ish. I just drove my car down to DC for a SCG Open (a trip that was a solid 4 on the scale with a splash of 8), so it’s someone else’s turn to drive. Their car revs a little hard, but we get on the highway to RIW fine. Before we begin our 14 hour drive one of the four people from the other car runs over, yells “kids in the back!”, and hops in to discuss Storm for the next half day.

We get about five hours into the trip onto I-80 in Ohio. It’s a toll highway with few exits and we are just churning along. Traffic merges to one lane for construction, it starts raining, and now its stop and go. And stop and go, and stop……

No go. 

We get out of the car, with the entire interstate stuck behind us. A neutral push starts it up, but the next time we stop we don’t get going again. As we push the car off the road, we actually see the other Michigan car driving with us go past, with Michael Jacob’s incredulous stare prominently in the passenger seat. “These idiots, I can’t believe someone would just break down in a one lane highway”. 

We convince them (well, not Mike, but the other two guys) to wait at the next rest stop for us as a tow truck arrives. A tow truck with one passenger seat, but a very courteous driver who doesn’t want to leave us in the rain off a highway five miles from an exit. We are told “I’m not supposed to do this, buckle up” and we remain in the dead car as its raised onto the flat bed. Going 70 miles an hour in a turned off car a couple feet up on a flatbed feels as weird as it sounds.

We get to the rest stop, and a numbers problem ensues. There are five spots in the other car. There are three of them, and four of us. The owner of the defunct car opts to wait in Ohio to save money for a new transmission. That leaves two slots, three people, and one solution. 

We game. I’m safe first, and I pull two cards from a Pauper Cube saying one person will have their ride Cancel-led. The first person flips their card up, it’s a 1UU instant, its Ca….psize. The second person, who was the one who arbitrarily swapped cars to begin with, is left in Ohio with a Cancel and the promise of “another car from Michigan is coming in seven hours”. Thankfully Twitter existed, and the internet found him another ride significantly faster.

So yes, I have randomly determined if who was going to be stuck in Ohio once. Once you play for stakes that high, most other gambles aren’t that big a deal.

8 - My plans are jeopardized, and there’s definitely additional risks involved

Grand Prix Montreal 2014, early March.

In October, the drive from Boston to Montreal is basically the stereotypical idyllic Northeastern fall excursion.

From November to close to May it's a frozen hellscape.

There are five of us in Jackie Lee's Prius. We are almost windblown off the road in the Canadian tundra on the way there, right in front of this church with weird, spiky, blood red crucifixes in front of it. Canadians have to be proactively friendly, otherwise the country would likely descend into full on Donner party every winter.

On the way home, we safely make it back to America but it isn't like Vermont is much better. It's about 17 degrees F(reedom units) and icy as hell.

This time when the car engine goes out we are moving, so we can coast off the road instead of pushing.

This time I ask if the tow truck has seating for five before it shows up, as the alternative might be freezing to death.

Of course, it's midnight in the middle of nowhere and the tow truck will be at least an hour. And every person that sees us pulls over to offer help. And each time we open the window, we lose heat.

Fortunately the tow truck is on time while car is still merely brisk and not freezing, actually has seating for five, and is willing to give us a ride back to Boston for the same cost as other transit. We get home an hour or two later than expected, and my bed is really warm that night.

9 - Wait WHAT? You still got there?

“Excuse me ladies and gentlemen, you may have smelled that. There’s a bit of an electrical fire somewhere. We aren’t quite sure where, and it’s not causing any issues yet, but we are going to take the plane in juuuust to be safe”.

That’s not really a paraphrase. When your pilot says something like that, you tend to remember it almost word-for-word.

At least this was on the leg of the flight to Hawaii that was over land, as opposed to the Pacific Ocean.

Specifically, that land was Iowa, and not Des Moines. Waterloo, Iowa technically has an airport you can land a 747 at, but not enough seats for everyone once they get off the plane that is still ON FIRE SOMEWHERE BUT WE DON’T KNOW WHERE.

The mayor of Waterloo was on it though, with free pizza and a bus to the casino, which made things a lot better as we waited for a new, significantly less on fire plane to show up.

10 - I miss the event, or the issue is seriously traumatic

I have yet to experience a 10 on this scale. I really don’t want to. 

The closest I’ve come is booking Spirit a red eye flight. I wisely skipped that entire event for unrelated reasons.

To quote a recent flavor text favorite on mine: “I’m a master of making great bad choices”.

The Unknown Shores Rant: The Cost of Fixing in Limited

Last post there was a rule of War of the Spark Limited I skipped. Because it’s this entire post instead.

Rule #6: Splash Less Than You Think, Then Even Less Than That

Why? The fixing just costs too much.

Let's define what too much means.

Shimmering Grotto and Unknown Shores have been around a long time. For a lot of that time, I’ve gone to a classic (Andrew Cuneo?) quote for these cards.

“You know they allow you to play as many basic lands as you want?”

When you play Shimmering Grotto and use it for colored mana, your spell costs one more.

In your average Limited deck, how many cards would you be happy paying an extra mana for?

Have you played Limited decks where your cards are all slightly overcosted D-level playables? It is horrible, and you lose a lot.

That’s what happens to your on color cards when you play Unknown Shores. Sure, if it was an off color basic land you couldn’t cast your spells, but playing a turn behind the whole time is still really bad.

This also applies to the spell you are splashing. The issue is a bit more debatable here, but keep in mind it is still an issue. I would pay gladly 3B for Ob Nixilis’s Cruelty, but I’m unsure I would be excited to play that card if it meant risking my mana for the rest of my deck.

The real failure point is when someone splashes a multicolored uncommon creature this way. Pirates and Dinosaurs in Ixalan were huge offenders. If you splash Storm Fleet Sprinter and pay four mana for your 2/2 haste unblockable, is that really better than an on color four drop?

The one thing Unknown Shores is okay at is making all five colors at once. Mountain doesn't cast Doom Blade and Lightning Strike in your Azorius deck, but Unknown Shores does.

My usual answer to this kind of deck building is just play better mana and worse cards. Unless the cards are super broken rares that autowin games when cast on turn five or turn fifteen you aren't gaining enough, and even then Unknown Shores better be the last piece of five color fixing you need on top of a few others. You can wait for a format with better five color fixing to have fun.

This is probably a good time to bring up the caveat that splashing without any fixing is typically a bad idea. I don't have the true numbers, but the basic gist is you usually need at least eight sources of your primary colors to reliably cast those spells early. You need three sources of your splash color to find it semi-reliably, two if you are OK waiting until you have seen a larger portion of your deck. The bare minimum for a two color deck and a splash is eighteen lands, and that's straining your mana to do it. This worked in Dominaria where the format was slow, full of card draw, mana intensive so eighteen lands was good already, and having another impactful card mattered a lot, but not every format is as forgiving.

War of the Spark Fixing Costs

The big issue with splashing in War of the Spark is taking a turn off. The concept of playing to the battlefield is just hammered home again and again by planeswalkers on both sides. If you take a turn off for fixing that's a wrap.

Hmm, that sure looks like spending a card and a turn.

That's also a turn. So is Gateway Plaza.

That's a turn spent producing a creature and fixing. And Paradise Druid blows all of these out of the water as a fine two drop that lets you dump your hand faster and splash.

I think the point should be clear. The non-green fixing costs a turn, the green fixing largely doesn't.

I'll also bring up that if you aren't green, you are blue or in Mardu colors. Mardu trios are too proactive to want to typically splash, or Orzhov which has its own issues. Dimir and Izzet already struggle with playing to the battlefield to defend and pressure planeswalkers, splashing only opens that weakness up more.

Azorius though I don't mind a splash in. The spots where I've found splashing in non-green decks to work are largely on the back of the cheap, easy to pick up white removal duo of Gideon's Triumph and Divine Arrow, using those to recover the lost tempo.

I'm still splashing unbeatable rares if possible, but my bar for possible is higher. I'm also way more partial to non-planeswalker rares that don't get much worse if I spent a turn fixing. The odds I splash Enter the God Eternals off colorless fixers are higher than the odds I splash Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord.

Again, this is all outside of green. In green, I'm fine mixing fixers that play to the battlefield with those that don't to get workable splash mana.

Why is New Horizons exempt from this? First off, the +1/+1 counter is often relevant battlefield presence. The proliferate upside is really overstated, but it's there. And the double fix lets you splash even more absurd cards like God Eternals, making New Horizons unique for the format.

To look back a set to Ravnica Allegiance, splashing was great even at fairly high costs (Open the Gate for Gateway Plaza is how much mana?). The reason is simple to derive. There were absurdly high power uncommons to splash that could easily make up for spending that time, like Archway Angel and Gates Ablaze. Even in a not all-in Gates deck, the multicolor cards were just distinctly. If your opponent played random mono-color creatures with untapped lands, then you played Aeromunculus and Frenzied Arynx with mostly tapped lands you were way ahead.

And unlike Guilds of Ravnica, these splashable cards were just face value good without synergy. In that other format, you could splash good removal like Artful Takedown or Hypothesizzle, but the power in multicolor cards was largely low cost creatures like Skyknight Legionnaire or linear payoffs like Goblin Electromancer. You could splash but the odds you found a card worth it were just low enough that it was unexpected, where in Ravnica Allegiance the main reason to not splash was that other people took all the fixing you needed to reliably do that.

This all brings us to the Unknown Shores variant in Modern Horizons: Cavern of Temptation.

Modern Horizons isn't going to be as tempo-oriented as War of the Spark, just because there is one planeswalker per sixty packs instead of one per pack. I would be into playing Gateway Plaza in this format.

But this is an Unknown Shores, not a Gateway Plaza. It's a per use tax, not a one shot payment.

I'm not going to tell you not to play Cavern of Temptation. Just play it as a land that sacrifices for value more than a fixer.