Is Temple of the False God A Bad Card? The Answer Using MATH!
Friends, today I’m going to give you my take on one of the most hotly debated topics in the Commander community: is Temple of the False God a bad card?
Risk vs. Reward
Temple of the False God is an interesting case of a once praised staple falling out of favor with the Commander community. It's a card presents a very clear risk vs. reward: it's a land that taps for two mana instead of the usual one mana, which is amazing, but if you have four or less lands on the battlefield then it can't tap for any mana at all, making it sometimes a dead card.
If you went back in time to the format's official beginnings a decade ago, Temple of the False God would be found in decks everywhere, as people largely felt that the reward of extra mana greatly outweighed the risk of it sometimes being a dead card early on in the game. For many years the card was held in high regard and ubiquitous in the format; it's even shown right beside Sol Ring in the Game Knights intro, the biggest Commander series out there. The online discourse was very positive about this card in the first few years of the format's history, but that opinion started changing dramatically in more recent years.
In the past few years, however, the common consensus of this card has swung to the opposite opinion: Temple is bad, actually! Nowadays people put more weight on the risk of it being a dead card in the first few turns, arguing having the extra mana later on is not worth the risk of potentially having your early game roadblocked by a land that doesn't tap for mana. So the common opinion these days is that the reward of Temple producing an extra mana isn't worth the risk of it sometimes not producing any mana at all in the early game.
And that's pretty much where the general opinion on Temple of the False God remains to this day. If you ever read an online debate about Temple in the past three years, it seems everyone has a story of playing the card at one point until they had a game where it sat uselessly on the battlefield producing no mana and how awful it felt not being able to do anything. And as soon as that happens, the card gets cut out of every deck. Google "is Temple of the False God bad?" and all the results show the overwhelming majority have a negative opinion on the card. Game Knights has also recently talked about Temple as a card that isn't as good these days, with Josh saying he usually cuts it from his decks these days and Jimmy stating that he wouldn't run it in any non-Green deck. And for the record, this was also my opinion of the card, with me griping about it on Twitter back in January. So if the opinion on this card is so bad, why is it still popular, showing up in a whopping 18% of all decks on EDHREC?
Precon Popularity
It turns out that WOTC is a major contributor to Temple's popularity: every year since 2011, WOTC has been releasing a Commander set comprising of four or five preconstructed decks. These are decks aimed at injecting new cards into the format but more importantly they're meant as an on-ramp to get new players into the format. And with every single set, from 2011 all the way to 2020, at least one of the precons contains a Temple of the False God. I checked all the deck lists and out of the 41 Commander precons, 23 of them include Temple, a whopping 56% of all decks. It even showed up in two of the C16 decks, four-color decks that really need mana-fixing and absolutely don't want colorless lands! ARGH!
Why would you add a colorless land into these four-color precons?
So despite the online community being against this card, it's certainly has fans in whomever is designing these preconstructed decks. Now the preconstructed decks aren't optimized, and that's by design: the intent is to leave ample room for tinkering and upgrading to suit your own taste. So my question to the precon designers is this: is Temple of the False God being added to all the precons as deliberately bad card that can be easily indentified and upgraded, or do the designers value it much more highly than the online community?
Gavin's Take
I had the opportunity to ask WOTC game designer Gavin Verhey his thoughts on Temple of the False God when he guest starred on a Commander Clash episode, specifically pointing out how I don't like that Temple appeared in the precon Ruthless Regiment, the Mardu Aggro deck with a low cmc curve, no land ramp, and only 36 lands. While Gavin conceded that the low lands is an issue, he also defended Temple's inclusion in the precons and in the format in general, stating that he thinks it's an amazing card in commander. He explained that Commander is a format where card draw and ramp are the two most important things, and it's highly unlikely that you won't reach five lands in a typical game, therefore Temple is a great benefit to a ton of decks. Gavin is also a strong advocate of having a higher land count in most Commander decks, which is in contrast to your average casual Commander player trying to get away with just 30 to 34 lands in every deck.
Another important thing Gavin brought up is how our perception of a card's power level is often dictated by how we feel towards them, even if objectively speaking their power level is quite different than how we feel it is. I can tell you from personal experience that I avoid playing the card Gamble outside of a few reanimation decks because it feels so bad to randomly discard the card you tutored, despite knowing that Gamble probably would make all of my Red decks stronger with it. So for a card like Temple of the False God, you're less likely to remember the times it ramped you without issue than you are the times it's a dead card ruining your early game. It may be the case that people undervalue Temple because it feels bad when RNG doesn't work in their favor.
That entire episode is amazing to get extra insight on Gavin's perspective on the Commander format and I also highly recommend checking out his YouTube channel where you can learn way more behind the scenes design stuff about the game we love to play.
Math Time With Frank Karsten!
So is Temple of the False God actually a good card that many of us are undervaluing because of how bad it feels when we get unlucky with it? To find out, we'll need to figure out just how often Temple is a dead card in our games, and to figure that out we'll need to use math.
Now, I know how to do a little bit of math -- I've read Seth's article explaining hyper geometric calculators and I know how to get basic probabilities out of it, but there's way more variables to figuring out how often Temple is a dead card in Commander that I was clueless on how to tackle the problem. So I went to a far more knowledgeable math person for help: Frank Karsten from Channel Fireball. Frank is my all time favorite Magic content creator, covering all aspects of the game with statistics to back up his conclusions, and his articles on drafting and deck building have proven invaluable resources for me over the years that honestly no other content creator out there can provide. I've bookmarked and revisited many of his articles, such as how many colored mana you need to consistently cast your spells, to use as a basis for my own deckbuilding. I highly recommend checking his stuff out!
Frank generously coded a simulation to figure out this specific question: if we've drawn Temple of the False God by turn x (5, 6, 7), what are the odds we can activate it?
For assumptions:
- We aren't drawing more than one card per turn
- We aren't tutoring cards into our hand
- We're keep our first hand if we have 3-5 lands, mull for free and keep seven if we have 2-5 lands, and if we mull to six we keep a hand with 2-4 lands
- "Rampant Growth" effects, aka 1-2cmc spells that put a land from our library directly into play, count as "lands" for the purpose of this calculation. It's a simplification but it's a negligible difference for this calculation.
Now keep in mind this simulation isn't perfect or all-encompassing: it makes assumptions and simplifies the situation to get a generalized result. We could spend hours nitpicking the details but nonetheless I think this is a great start to answering our question. With these assumptions in mind, let's look at two examples!
We start with Ruthless Regiment, a deck that runs Temple of the False God, 35 other lands, one "Rampant Growth" effect (Knight of the White Orchid), and 62 other spells in the library. For simplicity, this is modeled as 1 Temple, 36 other lands, and 62 spells. Plugging that into the calculation we get:
- P[Can activate Temple on turn 5 if you draw it by that turn, after mulls] = 74.7%
- P[Can activate Temple on turn 6 if you draw it by that turn, after mulls] = 78.5%
- P[Can activate Temple on turn 7 if you draw it by that turn, after mulls] = 81.6%
So the odds of Ruthless Regiment of activating Temple of the False God on turn 5 is 75%, or a 25% failure rate, which in my opinion isn't great.
Frank also believes that this number of lands is too low for an optimally functioning deck, instead recommending 42 lands (including "Rampant Growth"s) as a better number to aim for. He then ran the simulation with a 42-land deck, 1 Temple of the False God plus 41 other lands, and got these probabilities:
- P[Can activate Temple on turn 5 if you draw it by that turn, after mulls] = 85.5%
- P[Can activate Temple on turn 6 if you draw it by that turn, after mulls] = 88.2%
- P[Can activate Temple on turn 7 if you draw it by that turn, after mulls] = 90.4%
So with a 42-land deck, Temple of the False God has an 85.5% chance of activating on turn 5, which is solid odds in my opinion.
Frank's conclusion is that in a mana-hungry deck that really wants to hit 6+ mana and that runs a proper amount of lands (42+), Temple will tap for two mana reliably enough and is worth including.
So ... Is Temple Bad?
Well, here's where I give you the lame answer: it's up to you to determine that for your own decks. Obviously Temple of the False God is terrible in CEDH metas, where every single land must be able to tap for mana on turn 1 and having five lands before the game is over is hardly a guarantee, but in more casual settings where getting to five or more lands is the norm, it's on you to decide how high a failure rate you're willing to risk for the extra mana reward. Now that you've seen some numbers, are you more likely to run Temple in some of your decks?
For me personally, my mind has been changed: I've been converted into a fan of Temple in land-heavy decks, particularly Green ones that are loaded with "Rampant Growth" effects. Gavin is spot-on about that. My Green decks often have somewhere between 36-38 lands and 10-12 land ramp cards, and while none of my Green decks were running Temple of the False God up until this point, they certainly will be running it now. In fact, with a high amount of land ramp, you could even activate Temple earlier than turn 5, which makes the card even stronger than the simulations accounted for.
BUT! The simulation did confirm that Temple is indeed bad in low-cmc decks with low land counts. The math vindicates my disdain for Temple in Ruthless Regiment, a 3-color Aggro deck that only has 37 lands total (including Knight of the White Orchid). Sorry, Gavin, I still disagree with that one!
So my personal thoughts on Temple now after seeing Frank's math:
- It's great in any 1-3 Color deck that has 42+ lands (including "Rampant Growth" effects)
- It's amazing in any Green deck that runs a lot of land ramp
- It's bad in decks that have low land counts (38 or less including "Rampant Growth" effects)
- It's bad in most 4C or 5C decks due to producing colorless mana
- It's unplayable in CEDH decks
Slightly off-tangent, but I think one important aspect to Magic that I feel is overlooked is that all cards in your deck have inherent risk vs. reward. Putting a high cmc spell in your deck usually carries a high reward if it's a high-impact effect, but has the risk of not being castable if you're short on mana. The amount of lands you put in your deck is a balancing act of having enough lands to curve out consistently while not having the risk of flooding out be too high.
We take the risk vs. reward of most Magic cards for granted, but Temple of the False God is very transparent about it so it's harder to ignore.
So, what are your thoughts on Temple of the False God? Did these numbers change your opinion on it at all? Let me know in the comments section below! Do you think the numbers are trash and the simulation should've included X, Y, or Z? Let me know about that too in the comments section below! It all feeds the algorithm, baby!
