The Hidden Power in Cheap Draw

 

We have seen power creep in most areas of magic (only really excluding mana acceleration), both ultimately over the whole existence of the game, and more consistently in recent history too. While creatures, and then necessarily the removal to cope with them, have received most attention of the power creep it is likely that value or card advantage have crept the next most. Most colours now have access to it in some form or other and the going rate for it in terms of mana and hoops to jump through has plummeted. 

Now, with this being the case, cheap raw draw is still nearly impossible to come by. All the power creep in value seems to be in the mid and top end of the curve. Night's Whisper remains the second best "pure" card advantage spell in terms of mana paid to net cards drawn after Ancestral Recall. This seems wild to me. Divination is an embarrassingly low power card and yet still the standard. Why are they throwing free added value on stuff all over the shop but being so restrained in printing cheap cards that just do value? 

The short answer is that you end up with a card that is a bit too good at all points on the spectrum. Magic is a game that starts out with lots of card based resources but few mana based ones and transforms into the the reverse over time. Late game the player with access to more cards tends to win while early game the player who is able to deploy the right things, or indeed, anything at all, will be the winner. 

This is where cards like Preordain come in. They offer negative tempo and no value but they cheaply do a lot to ensure you cast the right things early on and so more than merit the cost. In terms of the early game, drawing X cards and scrying X has a near identical boost to your chances of casting the right things and winning the early game. A cheap card draw spell simply doubles up as a card quality spell while the costlier value sources come a bit late for that to be a big saving grace.

It isn't that effectively scrying for 2 at 2 mana is too good, nor that drawing two cards for two mana is too good, it is that rolling them together into one card, as you must physically do in any Night's Whisper esque card, you wind up with something that is too convenient and potent at all points without enough real drawback. It is value for late and consistency early. There is a hidden internal scaling with card draw as you reduce the cost, you need to pay for both the card draw and the card quality aspects of the spell, else you get too good of a deal.