Load Leveling in EDH
Creating a well Phyrexian-Oiled production line
Disclaimer: I’m going to talk about a production ideology that Toyota uses to manufacture cars and how it applies to EDH. EDH game is NOT a production facility. I play primarily at bracket 2 and this represents a play style preference rather than an “ultimate good” for the format, as I am just a bit of self-aware text on the internet.
Ultimately this article is about viewing your deck like a production line, a progress engine, and taking the observant stock of your deck’s outputs… and even if you don’t agree with my play style, doing so will make you more mindful of a deckbuilder than not doing so.
What is Load Leveling?
Load Leveling (A.KA. Production Leveling or Heijunka 平準化), is a technique to reduce variance in output (A.K.A. Mura 斑) which creates waste (A.K.A. Muda 無駄) by producing things at a more consistent rate.
Demand Leveling
Demand Leveling is easy to understand: imagine a rush-hour gridlock, and then imagine that same street at night when it’s almost empty. This system is inefficient, leading to a lot of time when people are sitting in their car uselessly, and a lot of time where the road is effectively unused. We could make this system more efficient (resulting in less people sitting in traffic) by using demand leveling, and trying to get people to use the streets in a more even pattern throughout the day - perhaps by coordinating work schedules to different times.
Companies use demand leveling all the time when they offer discounts during off ours to encourage customers to buy during their lull, or when they charge extra during peak hours to encourage customers to wait and buy after their surge.
Output Volume Leveling
Volume Leveling approaches the problem of uneven use from the production side of things. For example, if you are selling something and expect:
20 orders on Day 1
10 on Day 2
5 on Day 3
5 on Day 4
If you made 20 on one day and 5 on another… the on the day where you only make 5 you waste production time and effort, and your employees sit around! Whereas on the on the day you make twenty 20 your system is over-stressed, leading to machine breakdowns, worker stress, and production inconsistency. We can make this system more efficient using volume leveling. The average amount of orders in this sample is 10, so if you made 10 each day you could easily optimize your time, effort, and processes so that making 10 is easy and efficient. This keeps your system running smoothly with less waste in both directions.
There’s one issue with this: If you only make 10 orders on Day 1 (the day you have 20 orders to make), you’ll be 10 orders behind. you’d make a buffer of 10 items (the difference between 20 and 10). On Day 1, you’d make 10 and have 20 (including your buffer), then you’d start refilling that buffer on Day 3 and 4 when you only make 5.
Production efficiency is maximized when your production is full of slow and steady tortoises, not hares who move fast on one day but stop to nap on another. Slow and steady wins the race.
In other words, rather than meeting a surge of demands with a spike in production - and a lull in demands with a lull in production… we would rather produce at a steady rate. We avoid spikes and lulls for consistency, because spikes and lulls are wasteful. Another upside of this is that we don’t have to keep a large inventory, only a small buffer inventory.
Load Leveling in EDH
In order to talk about how and why you should consider Level Loading in EDH, I’m going go participate in the time-honored tradition of complaining about Sol Ring.
To start with I must admit I haven’t run Sol Ring in a while, primarily because I also follow the dual commander banlist so that my deck runs more smoothly for 1v1 games, but also because it’s fast mana: It’s not quite as strong as the late Mana Crypt, but it’s in the same general ball park of game-warping power. When played early, the player who has used it will usually accelerate their gameplan into the archenemy seat (so long as they are not otherwise suffering from mana screw or a lack of healthy card draw). I know that “Power Level 1-10” is effectively defunct in this age of brackets (and thank the vasto lorde that it is), but put simply: on a day where your deck draws Sol Ring at a reasonably early timing, it functionally plays as if it were a few power levels higher for that game.
This is also a criticism I’ve leveraged against combos (read my article on combos, particularly in the section about power creep if interested). In the game where your combo does nothing, your deck feels a few power levels lower... and in the game where your combo goes off, it feels a few power levels higher. This leads to a wide variance in perceived “output.”
What do the time honored laws of the Kiichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota and thus proprietor of the Toyota Production System, say about this? Well if your deck sometimes plays as a 5, and sometimes plays as a 7, you should streamline your deck to play at one or the other to reduce unevenness and waste. You should avoid surges and lulls, and aim to play at a consistent power level.
The Consequences of an Unleveled Power Load
In general level loading is said to have a variety of benefits. It places less stress on systems, it allows you to have less functional inventory, and thus it allows you to save on a lot of costs by maximizing efficiency. But this is an EDH blog, isn’t it? (isn’t it? Sometimes I’m not so sure) What systems are we stressing? What inventory are we managing?
Stressing Players
The primary system that we’re stressing is our playgroup. Remember back to the example of production loading in which the average (mean) order amount was 10, but on one day the order amount was 20? If we assume that those numbers somehow vaguely correspond to the power level of the output of your deck — people aren’t really going to remember the “10,” but they’re definitely going to remember the “20.” That is, they’ll remember feeling pub stomped, or feeling like your deck is too scary and they need to target you and your stuff more.
Even if the average power output looks like this:
Mean: 10
Median: 10
Mode: 5“That time your power output was 20” is going to stick in opponents’ heads and influence their decision making.
In other words, if you have a dorky Purphoros, God of the Forge deck that mainly sneak attacks attackers with ETB/LTB triggers for value… the one game that you sneak attack out a Blightsteel Colossus is going to earn you a lot of undue heat and aggro that you may not be ready to deal with. If you’re trying to find a random pod at an LGS, you may even find difficulty finding the right pod to play with you where they are “high power” enough to be fine with a Blightsteel loss, but not too “high power” so as to just stomp you.
Efficiency of Output
What about the other purported downsides of not using production leveling? Let’s talk about efficiency: Sol Ring lets you be two mana above your turn count and cast higher mana value spells. This seems unambiguously good, right? But does it open up any inefficiencies in our deck?
Sol Ring will make it easier to cast bulky high mana value spells that might otherwise rot in our hands, which means that running Sol Ring can sometimes cause us to bulk up our deck with too many inefficient cards. Like the highway brought to a gridlock due to high demand, running “a couple of Sol Ring like cards” can lead our hands to becoming a gridlock due to high mana demand during games we don’t draw it.
On the flip side, if we are used to playing things relatively on-curve and drawing a steady number of non-burst and non-cantrip cards… cards like Sol Ring can lead to us emptying our hands too quickly and simply running out of things to do. Like the empty highway, “having Sol Ring when not used to it” can lead to our hands becoming an empty road with no action left.
Excessive Costs
Another cost of not leveling the power output of your deck is an actual literal cost: the monetary cost of cardboard (doesn’t apply if you proxy, of course). Sol Ring is a cheap example, but many “power outlier” cards are expensive game pieces and will drive up the general cost of buying your deck.
Hidden Problems
Another issue with having a deck that “sometimes is a 5, but sometimes is a 7” is that it may cover up some of the issues that your deck has. You may have a bulky uncastable card in your hand and think “only if I had a few more mana” or a slow draw engine and think “if I got X I could’ve cast it earlier and gotten a lot of value!” Worse, you may become used to the general pattern that “sometimes my deck randomly plays better or worse” and use that as a blanket excuse for things you should otherwise scrutinize. After all, if it “acts like a 7 sometimes” things are probably ok, right? In other words: having such high variance in your power output may prevent you from realizing problems that your deck otherwise have.
Leveling the Power Level
In general to vibe check the power level of your deck and only run cards and game patterns that contribute to that speed of gameplay, not cards or patterns that work as functional power level outliers for your deck. I can’t really tell you when a play pattern jump is too much for you and your group because it’s largely a matter of personal taste: if you’re main goal is to win, you want as many spikes in power as you can get and you won’t be worried about your opponents unnecessarily targeting you (because you should be a group where that’s the established norm so they’re taking all the spikes they can get too).
The Buffer
Remember before when talking about production leveling I mentioned that you needed a buffer inventory for those surge days? In terms of EDH deck functionality, spot removal acts as that buffer, which can keep you afloat when the game demands more of you without bumping your production up to 20.
Game Changers as Load Leveling
The new WotC (praised be thy name) commander bracket system includes a list of cards called “Game Changers.” You can’t run them in the lowest power bracket, you can run them as much as you want in the highest power bracket, and you have a point-buy system where you can run a specific amount in the middle tier bracket. The way the game changers list works is a great example of forcing an amount of level loading for lower brackets. Sure the list isn’t perfect, but ensuring some of these high power staples aren’t in lower power decks helps prevent those “high volume games” from taking over there.
Leveling your game Progression
Alright so we talked about load leveling in terms of power variance, but there’s another way to look at it… your deck’s overall “output” when we talk about progression towards winning the game.
Let’s refer to these as Leveling the Power:
Removing power outliers and under-performers so the deck performs at a more consistent power level.
And Leveling the Pace:
Trying to make your deck function at a more consistent pace throughout the game.
Let me explain what I mean, and let’s use an aristocrats deck as an example: To win a game, you generally need to make each opponent lose 40 life. Let’s assume your deck needs to win in 10 turns based on your playgroup’s game-length vibe. You could:
Deal like 40 damage all at once on turn 10 with an explosive sacrifice engine
Deal 4 damage a turn for 10 turns with a consistent sacrifice engine
Plan 2, of course, is the leveled pace. Similar to leveling our power, sticking to plan 2 (or close to it) has a lot of benefits! Including that your opponents are going to view your boardstate less like a ticking time bomb (“better stop it; it could go off at any time”) and more like a cigarette addiction (“I can stop it at any time, I better save my removal for something more pressing”).
A key parenthetical was included in the prior paragraph: “or close to it.” The goal isn’t to literally deal 4 damage a turn (who can deal 4 damage on turn 1 consistently?), but to more evenly spread the chipping so that it FEELS like more of a slow burn. The goal isn’t to completely remove all explosive damage sources from the deck, but to cap the explosive damage so that when it happens it doesn’t feel like a bomb going off.
Compared to the leveling the power of a deck, this type of Load Leveling has a key tradeoff: explosive decks can take more sudden “out of nowhere” wins, where as consistent engines feel like they’re “doing stuff” throughout more of the game. For a casual player, this is a big boon, because it means your deck isn’t “all or nothing” and you’ll spend less time stressing your playgroup.
Similar to leveling the power of your deck, having lots of spot removal and consistent access to it (read: card draw) is going to function as a buffer. Spot removal helps keep your afloat in turns where you deal more than or less than your expected amount of damage.
But… Variance!
Most players agree that variance is a good thing. Some amount of randomness and on-the-fly decision making keeps the game fun and interesting. EDH was specifically made to be 100-card-singleton for a reason, wasn’t it? And those reasons are things like “slowing games down by reducing consistency” and “keeping games fresh by increasing variance.”
A key takeaway for me is that variance in gameplay patterns is a good thing, whereas variance in power level output is not ideal.
So let’s talk about how to increase variance in gameplay without causing power level spikes.
Clones/Theft: Copycat effects increase variance since you will have to carefully think about what you’re copying/stealing each game, and how it will contribute to your win. Since one game your Clone might play as a dragon, and another it might play as a snake, your single game piece functionally will play as a different game piece each game. Further, since you might be reliant on the power level of what your opponents brought to the table, a clone will rarely represent your “power level spiking beyond that of the table.”
Modal Spells: Modal spells are another great way to get variance out of the same card. Basically, one spell can play several different ways. Dawn Charm, for example, can protect a creature, protect you from a certain spell, or fog. Rakdos Charm is usually just graveyard or artifact removal, but those games where it’s player removal are kino. (for a fun article celebrating modality, check out my article about kicker)
Cutting Tutors: Running fewer tutors and more card draw spells means that you can keep seeing more cards - your card velocity is increased - but you can’t rely on having the same tried and true cards every game. This naturally increases variety of gameplay.
Scaling Cards: Any card that interacts with your opponents. Soul Warden and other simple scalers can be really effective one game, or not-so-effective the next. This sort of variance isn’t ideal since the card might be a dud. But, similarly Charismatic Conqueror can create a bunch of tokens or act as an Imposing Sovereign, leading to benefits in either case, but changing benefits.
Voting Cards: Similar to scaling cards, any card that gives your opponents choices will have different results in many cases. Círdan the Shipwright, for example, can create a lot of varied game states.
The End
There it is. If you have read a lot of my articles you’ve heard constantly talk about why you need more card draw… but now I finally wrote an article stressing why you should run more spot removal.
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
A quote dubiously attributed to Martin Luther
And that’s all she wrote.