Holy flaming Moses.
Look, again, the terms "relevant" and "quality" are intangible and thus, ironically, irrelevant to card advantage.
There are two scenarios. In scenario one, you cast Ancestral Recall and draw a Yawgmoth's Will, a Time Walk, and a Black Lotus. In scenario two, you draw two forests and a Wall of Wood. One is clearly better than the other, but either way it's still functionall +2 CA. Now, Yawgmoth's Will, when you cast it later, can gain you further CA, but attempting to redefine CA to include concepts like usefulness or what the other cards you draw into later are going to do later is silly because we can't measure it. All you do is muck up a perfectly useful concept, which is basically card counting.
The rule of card advantage, from days of yore, has been;
"The person who sees the most cards tends to win, as long as those cards do something relevant."
We acknowledge that potency of cards exists in levels other than CA, but CA is a useful property by itself that's clearly measured. There's no reason to mash concepts together; in fact, it's detrimental. If you want to attempt to categorize card quality somehow, that's fine, but don't try to fuck up existing terminology by jamming it in with CA.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
I think at this point I must link to my favourite article series on Card Advantage (by Geordie Tait, so it's also entertaining to read):
YOU'RE GIVING ME A TIME MACHINE IN ORDER TO TREAT MY SLEEP DISORDER.
Perhaps, we should restrict see as card advantage every cards that generate cards for Hand. However, cards advantage must asolutely separated from Cards Quality. Cards Quality is what is relevant at a certain moment of the game. Obviously, the more you draw, the higher are your chances of drawing into a relevant card. Thus, maybe, the false link we do between cards advantage and cards quality. Luck must never be forgotten
Card disadvantage, in my sense, is a term that should be banned from discussion. No cards generate cards disadvantage. I gave the stupid example of a cad that make you lose all cards in hand and make you sacrifice it when comes into play. That is disadvantage. But no serious player play such cards. Cards disadvantage would be a card that when played, instead of having a positive impact on the game, has a negative one. This definition alone prevent all players from playing bad cards.
Some cards do generate advantage (not by giving cards in your hands, but by turning situations upside down), but are more situational. A wrath of god requires opponent to have creatures for it to create an advantage. Armageddon, to create an advantage, requires that you are leading on the board, or requires a specific strategy. I think Extirpate can be seen in that category. Extirpate if played wrongly, does nothing or little. Wrath of god, if played wrongly does nothing or little, etc.
Seeing things this way, and i hope i made myself clear, perhaps we can accept the fact that graveyard removal are useful, and can be useful, can generate advantage, not in the sense of cards advantage, but in the sense that they can change the game. (Yes, extirpate can change thegame. It has been said many times, but you can disrupt opponent's long term strategy with it)
Robert
edit : too slow. Nihil posted a good link :)
I'm pretty sure there was like a month and a half of several different authors having flame wars as a result of these articles. FWIW.Originally Posted by Nihil Credo
edit: and One With Nothing was in a couple sideboards at PT Honolulu.
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
Intuition does not result in a net gain in cards. It gives you +0 CA. However, the Loam that you get with Intuition is capable of generating card advantage. The distinction is important because you still have to resolve the Loam before you are ahead in cards (at which point, you still have to convert the extra cards into a W), and because Loam is obviously limited in what kind of cards in can "draw" for you.
It clearly is card parity, or the terms lose their meaning. Even if you Ponder into Predict, Swords, Tarmogoyf, the Ponder itself is still +0 CA.
Intuition is a 1-for-1 tutor that can be used to find Life from the Loam, which generates card advantage by recurring multiple lands at the cost of a single card. When Intuition finds Loam, it can incidentally set it up, by stocking the graveyard with a couple lands to recur. However, the value of those cards as a resource is completely contingent on Life from the Loam, which is, after all, the actual engine. Thus, we cannot count Intuition as anything but card parity in this case.
Now, if Intuition was getting cards that have some intrinsic value while they are in the graveyard (think flashback spells), things would be different.
"Card Advantage" is a very basic concept that provides a very general guideline.
What really matters however is not "card advantage", it is "power advantage". How much power you have compared to your opponent. Having more cards doesn't necessarily mean you have more power than your opponent. Power is judged based on the ability to sustain an initiative to win.
In short, "card advantage" is just a means to an end, not the end itself. And the end being the amount of power achieved with those cards.
No, what really matters is "match win advantage," which is how many more matches you have won than the other competitors in a tournament.
...
Card advantage theory obviously isn't the only way to explain how to win games of Magic, but it has withstood the test of time better than most, especially when it comes to decks that aim to win via attrition.
Or in better words, I should say card advantage is only relevant to the quality of those cards.
Card advatage is to me what material advantage is in chess. If all things are equal, then it matters most, when there are positional imbalances, it matters less. And in Magic there are tons of imbalances, unlike chess.
card advantage is just hyped up because it's the easiest concept we can grasp. It's easy to count cards but it's not as easy to measure initiative of deck builds.
You haven't come out and said it, but your heavy use of pejorative terminology implies that you believe card advantage to be somehow useless, or outdated, which I think is wrong.
As you point out, card advantage is something that we can easily measure, which sets it apart from other, more nebulous concepts. Many, many games of Magic are won by the player who is able to gain a mathematical, definitive advantage in cards over his or her opponent, and it is precisely because we can measure this advantage that the idea is worthwhile.
Counting cards is highly useful when building decks, evaluating individual cards, and even when making play decisions within a game. This is all because of the simple fact that putting yourself ahead of your opponent in cards is a proven (and intuitive) way to increase your chances of winning.
Not that traditional card advantage isn't useful anymore (it's very useful, especially in limited), but it completely fails at demonstrating how decks like Burn, Combo, and Aggro in general ever win matches. Virtual Card Advantage is a better model.
The Bohr model is a great model of an atom to teach to an elementary school student, but eventually you need to grow up and use the quantum model.
I think the problem I have with the term "card advantage" and its history thus far is that people think (or come off to think) that only card advantage matters. It seems to me there is often a mentality that card advantage > card selection which is not always the case (I in no way propose that it's never the case). I stand by what I said before. It depends on the style of the player to construct a deck that takes advantage of the strengths of either card advantage or card selection and for that particular style of play, it is optimal and it works. There is no rule that says one trumps another and there shouldn't ever be.
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