White Decks Don't Jump

 

White decks do something no other colour does, or rather they don't. All the other colours relish a bit more mana, it is just fuel for the fire. White, not so much. Now I am not for one minute suggesting white don't need mana. White still absolutely wishes to curve out with a fresh juicy Plains each turn for the first portion of the game, be that just three or four lands in modern or five or six in slower formats. What I mean is that white has no interest in spending time, cards, or mana upfront, in developing their mana beyond this one land a turn. This obviously excludes Pearl Mox with it being a potential boost in mana at no real cost or risk. However, even the likes of Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond are not lock in cards for a white aggressive deck and will need concessions or otherwise appropriate lists to get the nod. This is something I find interesting and wish to probe.

Intuitively it doesn't make that much sense that a strategy that uses speed and tempo to its advantage eschews ramp and burst mana options. Generally speaking we understand more mana to be synonymous with more tempo, and if that is how you are winning then that sounds great. I always sort of assumed that it was lack of card advantage, and to some extend good mana sinks, that meant white didn't go for ramp. In my homemade cube however there is significantly greater access for all colours to high quality card advantage. Even with all the cards white could ever want, and some really quite tasty options to boost mana, the white builds still seemed to just want to pay normal prices for things and develop at the one land per turn rate. The mystery was becoming more interesting and I had more information to try and solve it with!

Black and blue simply draw cards in order to spend any extra mana they might find them selves in possession of. Both are very mana hungry colours. Red being red, and so direct, just seems to win a bit quicker, at minor consistency cost, when afforded ramp tools. Green will invest in high impact, high threat cards, so as to put extra mana to effective work. White and green are effectively opposite in this regard.

I now think whites aversion to investing in ramp comes from two factors working in tandem. The first of those is efficiency. If you can use Sword to Plowshares to kill something then you are probably pulling quite a significant mana advantage from that. To compliament whites incredibly efficient removal tools white also has some of the most effective cheap threats. Whites dorks might get rather more lacklustre as you go up the curve relative to to other colours but it is hard to compete with what they got in the low end. Why waste time and consistency on ramping when you could just be getting on with deploying your cards that are already above rate at that point in the game. Simply put, it is better casting a Savannah Lion on turn one and another two on turn two than it is to ramp on turn one and then dump out all three "Lions" on turn two. You are a card down and an attack for two damage worse off, not to mention the consistency cost if you take the ramp path.

The second factor is how white aggro decks tend to win. It isn't that explosive flurry in which a red deck ends it but much more a slowly ratcheted end, akin to how a boa constrictor defeats prey. Each little threat is part of a web of threats that lock you in place and secure the kill. It might be that Suntail Hawk equivalent that gets in the final points of damage but it was that Luminarch Aspirant that made it sufficiently threatening, and that Giver of Runes that protected both of them from spot removal, and the Selfless Spirit that protected everything from the mass removal, the Voice of Victory that allowed them to resolve etc. etc. White just has this kindof inherent self synergy where the various tools all empower each other a little towards the same end goal. If your goal is inevitable victory from a thousand small cuts then you are better off with more cuts than quicker cuts. Ramping out your threats in white simply means you will wind up with fewer or less well supported threats. Green will put their eggs in few baskets but those baskets will be huge. White likes to present every egg in a basket of its own and thus has no need of big baskets.