ThreatenThreaten | Art by Pete Venters

I've made a career here on EDHREC by writing about social elements of Commander. With titles like The Etiquette of Removal, When Should You Concede in Commander? , and Let's Talk About the Magic Final Fantasy Prices, I've always been fascinated with various aspects of why players get upset. One little concern has cropped up here and there in my articles but I've never dedicated an entire article to it: the feelings surrounding threat assessment.

What is Threat Assessment?

Mark Rosewater, the head designer for Magic: The Gathering, said in his Drive to Work Podcast #24, "the person....adapt[ing] their skill set to the situation is very skill-testing and adds a lot of strategic complexity to a game...there’s three kinds of complexity we talk about: comprehension complexity, which is 'When I read the card, can I understand it?' Do I know what it does? There’s board complexity, which is 'Can I understand looking at the board, what is capable of happening?' And then there’s strategic complexity. 'Do I understand the big picture, what is going on?' Not what can happen, but what strategically matters."

I would say that threat assessment is the ability to combine all the types of complexities that Rosewater talks about, but there is another element. There is a wild card of social deduction into effective decision making. What do I mean? Roman Milan breaks down some of the important specifics of threat assessment in his article How To Be New at Threat Assessment in Commander. He says something that I think is particularly interesting here, "But there's another layer to threat assessment, and that's the social deduction aspect. A lot of the things we do at a Commander table, like spreading around damage, not going all out with early attacks, these are things we do in an attempt to label ourselves as not the threat."

Threat assessment seems simple, right? Understand your cards and others, how it fits into the overall board state, how to pick out when is the right time to strike, while factoring in how social contract affects our decision making and you'll be golden? Right?

I googled "threat assessment" a little while ago for this section of the article and there were a lot of similar iterations of the same interpretations. Why, then, do we all struggle with this same problem? We don't always have good threat assessment even when we usually do. What is our barrier?

The Strategic Barrier to Threat Assessment

Rosewater said in that same podcast that, "part of... keep[ing] interest in the game, part of that...add[ing] a lot of strategic depth, right... If Thing A is always good...that’s not as good as 'Well, Thing A is good at a certain time, and you have to know when and where to use A.' Later on, maybe A’s not so good...and that adds a lot of strategic depth...what makes a good strategic gameplay is the ability to adapt on the fly."

The design of Magic was conceived with the intention that this element of the game — the ability to parse threatening or powerful moves — would be difficult. It was designed to make the value of a card matter conditionally on the other cards in hand and on board. We play with concealed information in Magic. We see a threat and hopefully, upon seeing it, it isn't too late. In Commander, the knowledge of the meta gives us an idea of what might be coming, when something should be stopped, and how quickly.

A Rhystic StudyRhystic Study on turn two or three is extremely powerful. It slows down the table's ability to progress efficiently unless they want to fuel the fire that is the owner of the Rhystic. Do we Time WalkTime Walk ourselves, using mana inefficiently until we can remove it? It's a double-edged sword. Slowing yourself down could be your death as well. But if that player played their whole hand and needs the card advantage, that might change which option makes more sense. That's also without factoring the strategy and intentions of your own deck though.

All of these elements play a role in the strategic depth of interaction. Being able to balance all of these things, what we know, what is concealed, what is experienced, how it fits into the puzzle of the current board state, is all such a tremendous undertaking. I am frequently on a Twitch stream called The Breakdown. Benjithebrewer hosts a Monday night Commander gameplay show where he and his guests slow down the game and talk through threat assessment. The intention is to be accurate, without revealing hidden information, trying to avoid gaslighting each other or gaining an advantage in the discussion of threat.

In this game, I am frequently surprised by what players find scary. Hidden information plays a big role in the game swinging in someone else's favor. Well-timed board wipes or optimal sequencing on a turn after removal has been blown, tells us a lot about where the game is going. Benji does something interesting at the end of The Breakdown that I find very effective in building the threat assessment muscle: asking what was the play that ended the game. As Benji often reminds, it isn't always the card that was played right before a win, but the card that turned the game down the road that led to an inevitable victory for whoever wins. It retrospectively shows us how the cascading of decisions in a game leads to a win.

All of this is so say that threat assessment is complex. It is a muscle you have to train with good habits and experience. It's looking back on your games and understanding how your actions contributed to a win. But before we can get to the real reason I wrote this article, we have to talk about my specialty, social elements of threat assessment.

The Social Barrier to Threat Assessment

In one of my previous articles I wrote, "I fly into a rage when I see Exquisite BloodExquisite Blood because it is a very political card. I love a little politics in my games, like a Tempt with DiscoveryTempt with Discovery, but the reason I can't handle the politics of Exquisite BloodExquisite Blood is because most of my opponents don't recognize it's a political card... The easier, most relevant game action might actually be player removal. No player, no Exquisite BloodExquisite Blood, no player with the combined life of your opponents after you eliminate them."

In this article I talk at length about the social contract associated with removal and interaction. Sometimes doing something strategically advantageous breaks a social expectation, upsets the social contract. Removing a commander over and over is a taboo. Playing CounterspellCounterspell typal is taboo. Tergrid, God of FrightTergrid, God of Fright is taboo. Playing a reasonable FarewellFarewell is even taboo. Sometimes these strategies are actually beneficial but they also bring this anxiety and anger from your podmates.

There is sometimes a force of social pressure to play suboptimally, to distance ourselves from accurate threat assessment. I think this is why there are varying degrees of success with accurately threat assessing. Some players are banking on the sympathy of social structure to keep their Fire Lord AzulaFire Lord Azula from getting popped for the third time. That messes up how clearly people see threats.

Do We Hate Other Players or Poor Threat Assessment

I've been tossing around a concept in my mind: a lot of salt in a game of Commander comes from poor threat assessment. Hear me out. Why does everyone hate Farewell? It's a card that sets everyone back to zero except the lands deck. Everyone windmill slams all modes with Farewell. We hate how long it makes the game. Is it actually strategically advantageous to do this...ever?

It costs so it'll likely take your whole turn. So everyone gets a turn rebuilding before you. It's not an advantageous thing to do. Farewell is actually an excellent and powerful card. It just isn't always utilized the way it should. It's not an emergency reset button, hoping you can get back to where you were faster than everyone else. It's efficient targeted removal of four very powerful archetypes of play. Good threat assessment here, complexity of strategy, is utilizing that removal to your advantage, pushing yourself ahead.

I think players hate Cyclonic RiftCyclonic Rift, but it isn't an unofficially banned card in local metas the way Farewell is. I think this is because Cyclonic Rift is a good thing to do for your game plan, gets you closer to winning.

In a similar vein, I think players also get more frustrated when something of theirs gets removed when that piece wasn't the most important thing to remove. Most players — not all because I know players aren't a monolith — are more understanding and reasonable when their Rhystic StudyRhystic Study or Smothering TitheSmothering Tithe is removed. Especially when it was doing actual work for them. Accurate threat assessment here leads to less salt.

On another note, players get frustrated when they've been beyond stopped, knocked back to the stone age, mainly because the advantageous thing to do with your removal is simply stopping a player, making space for yourself, not making sure they never have a chance to win again. Making a player unable to recover by using all your interaction to dismantle their board is a bad use of resources. The next player in turn order with a win in-hand goes unstopped because everyone overcommitted to stopping the first player. This is a lack of foresight. This is an inability to strategize around your own possibility of win. It's putting your blinders up and hyper focusing down one threat without the thought of the next. I think this inability to threat assess, this lack of board complexity, is what is actually frustrating to players.

Lastly, I think players get frustrated at the difference in social expectations of threat assessment. One player is saying to remove the Kaalia of the VastKaalia of the Vast for the fourth time, while the Kaalia player is saying it's miserable playing against a deck that uses all these removal spells. It's hard to navigate that impartially. What do you do? Whatever you choose, someone is going to feel like the choice is inappropriate. The accurate threat assessment is to run as many removal spells as you need and removing whatever gets in your way, but if I'm being honest I'd certainly consider you an unfun person to play with if you remove a commander four times on your own.

Ultimately, my point is that some of the reasons we think we hate certain interactions and situations in Magic are because of how difficult it is to reconcile threat assessment in ourselves. Threat assessment isn't as easy as it seems to parse strategically, let alone emotionally. I think we should still attempt to train this muscle, assess our boards and potentialities before acting, but those are just my thoughts. What are yours? I'm @strixhavendropout on everything.