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4. Speed in MTG
Speed: This is a complex concept made up of several subcomponents: resource speed, offensive speed, defensive speed, and strategic speed. Rob Hahn points to another of his articles, “Theories of Deck Speed,” to help us better understand it. I’ll lay out the core of that article here so you can grasp this concept directly.
Hahn starts with the premise that most Magic players are well aware of how crucial speed is to the game. In fact, the differences between various Magic formats can be described purely in terms of speed (Sealed Limited is slower than Standard, both are slower than Modern, and so on). For the author, one of the first major breakthroughs that elevates players from beginners to intermediates is realizing just how much deck speed impacts game situations. Once you understand that a 1-mana 2/2 wins more games than a 10-mana 13/13, you stop stuffing your deck with "the bigger, the better" cards and start building strategies based on mana acceleration or low-cost spells.
Both of these approaches are dimensions of speed. However, Hahn makes an interesting observation: slow decks regularly win at the highest levels of competitive play. He uses the pre-1997 Type II control deck based on Winter Orb and Armageddon (a very famous prison deck back then) and Weissman’s U/W Scepter-Lock deck as examples. Today, we could easily point to 4c Control, Jeskai Control, Jeskai Lessons, or Sultai Control in the current Standard metagame (May-June 2026).
This observation leads the author to ask: what does "Speed" actually mean in this game? It is impossible to play Magic at the highest level without a clear understanding of what this word truly entails. Hahn believes that top players grasp it intuitively but rarely sit down to think about it. "Speed" in Magic is a combination of offensive, defensive, resource, and strategic speed.
These four dimensions are so closely linked that they often blur together. But once you wrap your head around the basic concept of each component, you can understand the overarching meaning of "Speed" in the game.
"Offensive speed" refers to how fast a deck can consistently win. To filter out fluke results—where you win incredibly fast purely because you got lucky—we use the "goldfish test" to get a reliable measure of a deck's speed. The method starts from an opening hand and counts how many turns it takes to defeat a completely defenseless opponent. For example, if you are building a RDW (Red Deck Wins) deck, you draw your opening hand, deploy creatures, and attack a hypothetical opponent with twenty life who does absolutely nothing but play lands.
"Defensive speed," on the other hand, is how fast a deck can consistently defend itself. This requires us to define what "defending" actually means in MTG. According to the author, defense in MTG isn't just about not dying; it’s about disrupting your opponent’s game plan in any way possible. Defensive plays are varied and multifaceted.
It can be countering a removal spell targeted at your blocker to prevent incoming damage, or casting Armageddon on an empty board when your opponent has no lands left in hand and you do. Any action aimed at throwing a wrench in the opponent’s strategy is defensive, and the speed at which you can deploy these actions makes up your "defensive speed." Hahn uses the classic U/W Control deck with Swords to Plowshares, counterspells, Force of Will, and disenchant effects as an example, but he makes sure to explain that you shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking only direct removals and counterspells count as defensive plays.
In 1996, the Necrodeck boasted some of the highest defensive speed around, relying on completely different, hand-and-land-disrupting plays like Hymn to Tourach and Strip Mine.
Moving along, "Resource speed" is an attempt to standardize the rate at which a deck can rapidly deploy its resources. Before diving in, the author revisits the concept of "resources" in the game. He notes that in tournament Magic, resources are life totals, tempo, and cards. (Keep in mind that the author gave a much broader definition of resources in "The Schools of Magic").
This isn't a contradiction, and we'll analyze it later to avoid confusion. For now, let's stick to Life Totals, Tempo, and Cards. If you run out of Life, you lose. If you run out of time—meaning actual match time, not the modern concept of tempo explained earlier—you lose or draw.
If you run out of cards, you're highly likely on your way to losing. Zooming in on the "Cards" resource, Rob Hahn divides it into Permanents, Mana, and Escrow. Permanents and mana are resources we are all familiar with, and they are well-documented in the game's Comprehensive Rules (Rule 106 for mana, 110 for permanents, and all their sub-rules). Escrow, however, is a slightly trickier concept to grasp.
In its simplest form, it refers to the cards in your hand. The cards in your hand have the potential to do something, and their mere presence can influence the game. The same can be said for cards in your library and graveyard. The playability of these escrow resources depends on multiple factors, including mana, but their value lies in the fact that they are at your disposal.
When explained this way, Hahn's breakdown in this series of articles doesn't contradict the definition of "Resource" he gave in "The Schools of Magic." In "The Schools of Magic" he simply expanded it, whereas here in "Theories of Deck Speed" he shifts the focus slightly to the most critical resources, adding match-time management and grouping "Cards" and "Mana" together by nesting the latter under the former. After this detour on the concept of resources, Rob Hahn presents a thesis: "Resource speed" depends primarily on managing your cards across the various zones they occupy. While there are different ways to manage your life total and the length of a game, they all ultimately depend on cards (unless you cheat or slow-play, both of which are detestable).
Cheap permanents, like low-mana creatures or artifacts, boost the speed of your permanent resources. Spells like Dark Ritual, mana-producing creatures like Llanowar Elves, or mana-generating artifacts like Mox Pearl all boost Mana speed. Cheap cantrips like Ponder provide Escrow speed through card draw or library manipulation. To make resource speed a bit more concrete, let's look at a few examples.
Hahn brings up Birds of Paradise. Playing a turn-one Birds of Paradise has no offensive or defensive utility. Its sole purpose is speed—it accelerates your mana resource. Similarly, Sylvan Library doesn't do anything offensive or defensive, but it accelerates your escrow resource by moving cards from a lower escrow state (being unknown in your deck) to a higher state (being known in your hand).
You can evaluate the relative speed of resources by comparing them when they have similar effects within a given timeframe and/or format. For example, we could compare Ancestral Recall and Braingeyser in old-school Type I. We'd quickly realize that the difference between the two is a matter of speed rather than effect. A deck has good "Resource speed" if it can quickly deploy its card resources while simultaneously manipulating its Escrow resources.
Finally, "Strategic speed" is the overarching principle that unifies all three types of speed we've discussed.
"Strategic speed" is the answer to the question, "How quickly can you play your game?" which translates to: "How long does it take your deck to execute its primary strategy?" For a deck to achieve its strategic goal as fast as possible, the author notes that resource speed and defensive speed are always necessary, whereas offensive speed is not. The answer to how long it takes a deck to execute its strategy depends on several factors, as decks have different game plans and the best decks often have more than one. Still, you can get a good sense of "Strategic speed" by comparing tier-1 decks of a format to lower tiers, or by pitting different strategies against each other.
Let's take two decks from current Standard: Mono-Green Landfall and 4c Control. On turn one, Mono-Green can play Llanowar Elves while 4c Control might play Thunder Magic. On turn two, the first deck can play Badgermole Cub, but the second deck can also play plenty of things depending on the exact list, such as No More Lies, Abrade, Lightning Helix, or Get Lost. It's a very simple example, but it illustrates how both strategies possess their own version of "Strategic speed."
All four speed concepts merge through "strategic speed." A deck is fast if it can execute its strategy quickly, and the concept of "quickness" is entirely dependent on the format you are playing in.
"Strategic speed" relies on "Resource speed," which is why, for instance, green-based decks are particularly dominant in the current Standard.
"Strategic speed" is also always linked to "defensive speed" and only secondarily to "offensive speed." This is because the author believes a deck should always be capable of defending itself, whereas offensive speed only holds major strategic weight when the attack is fast enough to completely disrupt the opponent's game plan—and only a handful of decks can pull that off.
Rob Hahn wraps up "A Theory of Deck Speed" with four empirical observations:
- Simple strategies are also the fastest. This is the classic case of RDW decks. When looking at "offensive speed," for example, attacking the opponent quickly with a straightforward "go for the throat" approach is always faster than trying to assemble a more complex strategy around unblockable creatures.
- Similarly, looking at "defensive speed," any single card that answers a threat, like Lightning Bolt or Day of Judgment, is always faster than a combination of cards working together to achieve a similar result over a longer period of time (e.g., Solemnity + Phyrexian Unlife, and other combos that only see play in casual formats precisely because of their inherent inefficiency). Card combinations are always slower;
- "Resource speed" does not increase the overall speed of the deck on its own, but it makes doing so possible. We can see a modern example of this in the current Standard control decks that run Tablet of Discovery. These decks would otherwise have a slow strategy that would struggle to keep up with the format. In fact, before Tablet of Discovery was printed, those strategies were in a terrible spot. However, while Tablet doesn't make the deck's overall strategy faster on its own, it makes it possible by accelerating the casting of every other resource. The exact same thing happens when we want to build a deck that relies on high-cost win conditions (Planeswalkers or creatures at five or more mana) and we run ramp cards like Llanowar Elves, Ancient Cornucopia, or Shared Roots to accelerate them;
- A strategy that prioritizes defensive speed increases the overall speed of the deck, while a strategy that prioritizes offensive speed decreases it. This might seem counterintuitive until you realize that defense equals disruption of the opponent's strategy, and deck speed is measured in terms of Strategic Speed. No fast attack can withstand an equally fast answer. Instead, the attacker's strategy will be disrupted and slowed down. Conversely, the player who emphasizes "defensive speed" can safely deploy their disruptive strategy and establish total control of the game at their own planned pace.
With all this in mind, the author states his reasoned opinion that a deck with high resource speed that enables an extremely fast defensive strategy achieves the absolute highest deck speed.
Side Note: To start, it is no longer entirely true that the main difference between formats can be described in terms of speed. With the overall power creep of the game and the diversification of abilities and card effects, formats (at least competitive ones) can see their internal speed fluctuate wildly. While Legacy is undeniably faster than Standard, it is no longer a given that Standard is always faster than Draft. For example, the Phyrexia: All Will Be One Draft format was visibly faster than the Standard format of the same era.
Furthermore, after Hahn’s articles, new formats were created with an ideal, pre-established speed limit in mind. For example, Modern was designed around the unofficial guideline that no deck should consistently win before turn four. This was never an explicit rule, but rather a balancing guideline known as the "Turn Four Rule," which first appeared in Tom LaPille's article "Welcome to the Modern World" on August 12, 2011.
I won't debate whether this rule is still respected today, but it was the standard for a long time across several banlist updates. This also means some formats are intentionally kept slower or faster, while others are left alone. A format that was slower than another just a short while ago might suddenly become faster because it isn't subject to the same design policies. Nowadays, speed is more indicative of a format's competitiveness than its type. It is undoubtedly true that competitive formats tend to degenerate toward extreme speed because they are driven by efficiency.
However, it is also true that once you pass a certain speed threshold, you paradoxically lose competitiveness. Formats that are too fast become heavily dependent on the die roll, exponentially shrink the "Cards" resource you actually get to play with (and therefore the Escrow), and systematically cut down interactive lines because there are fewer draw steps to find answers to game situations. This and many other factors prevent the development of a real game strategy, reducing matches to who can string together more unanswered power plays from their opening, second, or third hand. Beyond this aspect, within the concept of "Card Speed," we can jump back to the previous side note to update the concept of Escrow.
This is definitely the aspect that has expanded the most over time. Today, Escrow can no longer just refer to your own library, graveyard, and hand, but must also include exile and the sideboard. Moreover, all of these zones (aside from the sideboard) no longer belong to just one player—the owner—but to both players. Since Hahn's article, countless mechanics have been printed that let you interact with cards in these zones.
From the classic Reanimate from Tempest (October 1997), which can target both graveyards, to Grave Researcher. From Burning Wish for our sideboard to North Wind Avatar. The expansion of Escrow has undoubtedly made the game deeper and more tactical, as it requires players to keep track of multiple resources across different zones simultaneously. Additionally, the evolution of MTG has brought about another feature that makes Escrow highly relevant.
Today, Escrow is a resource not just because it contains cards you can play, but also because cards can influence the game simply by being there without ever being cast. Take the recent card Flow State, which is heavily played in Standard and sees some play in Vintage. The effect of Flow State becomes significantly stronger if there are two specific card types in your graveyard. In other words, if your Escrow resource has a specific composition.
Those two cards in Escrow aren't relevant because you might play them, but simply because they are sitting there. A final area of updating we must reflect on is the tiers of Escrow. Hahn doesn't go into great detail about this, but he tries to convey the idea that not all Escrow is created equal.
Cards in your library are at a lower Escrow level than cards in your hand because they are unknown and cannot be played immediately under normal circumstances. With the multiplication of Escrow zones, however, this tier system must become more nuanced. What makes Escrow a resource is the potential influence that the cards inside it have on the game. This potential depends on several factors, the most important of which are knowledge and availability.
Knowledge depends on whether the card is known, and to whom. Availability depends on whether the card can be played without major restrictions, or if it is in a zone where its playability is limited by the rules of the game. Of these two characteristics, the primary one is knowledge. Nothing in the game can be played before it is known.
Following this logic, the highest tier of Escrow consists of cards in your hand. These are known only to the player holding them and are immediately available. Right below them are cards in the graveyard and exile of both players, because they are known to everyone and available either through specific abilities on the cards themselves (like Flashback or Adventure) or through the effects of other cards (like Reanimate or the Valiant trigger of Emberheart Challenger). In the third tier of Escrow, we find cards in either library that are unknown but can be made known and available through the effects of certain cards or permanents (e.g., Profane Tutor, Stoneforge Mystic, or Mystic Forge).
In the lowest tier of Escrow sits your sideboard. In theory, cards in your sideboard should never enter the match, so they are essentially treated as unknown. We shouldn't even look at our sideboard during play; it shouldn't concern us. However, if you play Temur Omniscience in Standard, you'll likely run North Wind Avatar.
This card is one of those rare designs that grants access to a sideboard card, bringing it from the lowest tier of Escrow straight to the highest. Cards of this nature are incredibly rare in over thirty years of Magic history. That is why the Sideboard Escrow is at the lowest possible tier. Finally, I must point out that I no longer agree with:
A) the idea that prioritizing offensive speed reduces a deck's strategic speed, and consequently
B) the idea that defensive speed is always positively correlated with strategic speed. Rob Hahn wrote during an era when control strategies were truly optimal. He operated under the assumption that if the opponent's plan is to win as fast as possible with offensive spells like creatures, you can simply counter them with defensive spells of equal or lesser mana to come out ahead. This is because you are trading 1-for-1, but the opponent has lost both tempo and a vital resource to execute their strategy.
Meanwhile, we are buying time to safely deploy our win condition. Hahn assumes that when an opponent throws a Ball Lightning at us and we counter it with a counterspell or exile it with Swords to Plowshares, we are massively ahead. All of this was, and still is, absolutely true in concept. The logic hasn't changed, but all the variables in the equation have.
Today, there are threats so incredibly powerful and cheap, like Ocelot Pride, that you are sometimes forced to use a counterspell to neutralize them. You are trading a 2-mana resource to deal with a 1-mana card. In this case, prioritizing offensive speed has boosted the offensive deck's strategic speed, while relying on defensive speed has dragged down the control deck's strategic speed. The same argument applies to any offensive spell that costs less than the defensive spell used to answer it.
For example, Unearth targeting Abhorrent Oculus in Modern Grixis Reanimator. This happens because defensive spells have lagged behind offensive ones. They have lost efficiency because the game has evolved toward a state more focused on permanents on the board rather than instants on the stack. On top of that, modern offensive spells often come with powerful cast or ETB triggers.
The former partially invalidates counterspells, while the latter weakens removal. If we are playing Living End in Modern, we might get our Shardless Agent countered, but the Cascade trigger still goes on the stack and resolves. Countering the creature in this spot makes very little sense because the value of the counterspell is practically zero. Similarly, if we are playing Selesnya Landfall in Standard and cast Badgermole Cub, the opponent can remove it right away, but we've already animated a land that can be used for various plays.
The value of that removal spell is still there, but it is drastically diminished. In these latter examples, defensive spells often cost less mana than the threats they target, yet they are still less efficient because modern aggressive cards often leave something behind even when answered. In these cases, offensive speed translates into strategic speed much better than defensive speed does. Lastly, I think we should spend more time reflecting on a potential "Theory of Counterattack."
Many of the newest and most powerful spells blend defensive and offensive elements, allowing you to advance your own board state while simultaneously slowing down your opponent's strategy—all wrapped up in a single card. This is easily one of the most effective ways to boost a deck's strategic speed today. A classic example of this is Countersquall, which was heavily played back in the day.
I will return to this concept in future notes with more modern, widely known cards that follow the same design philosophy, such as Solitude.
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