Image courtesy of Scryfall.com
Using Embeddings to Cluster MTG Cards: A Close Look at Suffocating Fumes
If you’ve spent any time chasing consistency across MTG formats, you’ve probably noticed that “similarity” is a moving target. What makes a card feel like its distant cousin—sharing mana curve, effect scope, or strategic role—can blur across colors, sets, and mechanical families. That’s where embeddings come in. By converting card features into high-dimensional vectors, we can quantify similarity in a way that goes beyond surface-level tags. Think of it as teaching a machine to notice that two black instant spells, one from Ikoria and one from a different era, actually occupy the same strategic niche in a deck-building puzzle 🧙♂️🔥💎.
To ground the discussion, let’s anchor our exploration with a concrete example: Suffocating Fumes, a common instant from Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. This little black spell costs {2}{B} and quietly sits in the “tempo control” family—efficient for silencing threats, while offering a cycling option that helps you dig for answers when you’re deep in the late game. Its text reads: Creatures your opponents control get -1/-1 until end of turn. Cycling {2} ( {2}, Discard this card: Draw a card.) The card’s color identity is Black, and its set, Ikoria, is famous for mutating monsters and a bold, photogenic monster-sphere aesthetic. The combination of a direct effect and a cycling line gives it two separate signals a well-trained embedding model can pick up: board control value and a guaranteed card-advantage path when cycling into the late turns 🧙♂️🎲.
What Embeddings Capture in MTG Card Data
- Card text and cost: The actual wording and mana requirements help models infer tempo and resource alignment. Suffocating Fumes’ -1/-1 effect hints at soft removal and stall potential, while Cycling adds a card-draw axis.
- Type and color identity: Instant, Black—these determine when you can cast it and which archetypes might value it (midrange, control, or sacrifice-focused decks).
- Set and rarity: Ikoria’s thematic design and rarity inform long-tail value and play patterns across formats.
- Flavor and narrative cues: Flavor text and art direction surface in embeddings as “contextual” signals about style and approach, even if they don’t affect rules text directly.
- Artwork and artist tendencies: Visual motifs can hint at mechanic families (mutate, capture, or grim aesthetics) that align your card with others in a shared design space.
When you combine these signals, an embedding-based system can cluster Suffocating Fumes with other cards that share a similar strategic arc—clean, economical disruption with optional draw-the-card leverage via cycling. The magic lies in the nuanced proximity: a card likeفا another black instant from a different era might sit close in the vector space if it trades tempo for a cycling payoff, even if the surface details differ. This approach is especially powerful in commander or cube environments, where a broad pool of black spells must be navigated for tempo, answers, and recursiveness 🧙♂️⚔️.
“Yesterday it was flying tigers and crumbling bridges. Who knows what today will bring?” — Dol, Lavabrink quartermaster
That flavor-forward line from Suffocating Fumes’ flavor text is a reminder that MTG cards inhabit a broader world—the lore and the card’s function breathe together. Embeddings don’t just map numbers; they map play patterns to narratives. In practical terms, you might use embeddings to answer questions like: Which black instants share similar tempo-shifting capabilities? Which cards pair well with cycling to create a late-game engine? How does a set’s design language affect the likelihood that two cards, separated by years and blocks, still “feel” related to a given archetype 🧙♂️🎨.
Context: Suffocating Fumes in Ikoria and Beyond
Suffocating Fumes sits in Ikoria’s common slot, a release that paired familiar MTG staples with a bold new mutative flavor. The set’s design ethos encouraged players to see familiar mechanics in new guises—hence a humble -1/-1 axe of instant speed, paired with an optional draw engine via Cycling. That dual identity makes it a compelling anchor for an embedding-based grouping exercise: it’s simple enough to classify at a glance, yet rich enough to reveal deeper connections when you compare across sets and eras. In terms of gameplay, the card’s -1/-1 to opponents’ creatures helps modulate big boards, while Cycling provides a safety valve for clunky hands—two axes that resonate with similar cards across black’s history ⚔️🔥.
From a design perspective, Ikoria’s creature-centric, behemoth-heavy world invites an exploration of how small spells interact with behemoths and tokens. Suffocating Fumes’ tempo play can be a bridge to more aggressive disruption, while its cycling makes it flexible in the late game. Mind that the card’s foil and non-foil variants, along with its low current market price for a common, reflect the card’s role as accessible technology rather than a premium collectible. But for embeddings, that very accessibility is gold—more instances mean richer data to shape clustering, recommendations, and deck-building heuristics across formats ⛏️🧩.
Practical Takeaways for Deck Builders and Data Enthusiasts
- Use a multi-modal feature set: rules text, cost, color, and type. Don’t forget flavor and set metadata as optional signals to enrich clustering with narrative context.
- When comparing cards, look for two dimensions: tempo (instant speed, tap effects) and resource efficiency (cost relative to impact). Suffocating Fumes excels at the tempo/resource cross-section because it adds immediate board impact with the promise of card-drawing leverage through cycling.
- Embed across formats to surface cross-format relatives: a black instant from Standard-era sets might reveal siblings from Modern or Pauper that share tempo-control DNA.
- Consider price and availability as signals for practical play: the common rarity and budget-friendly price point of Suffocating Fumes encourage experimentation without fear of large financial risk, which can inform how you weight rarity in an embedding pipeline 💎🎲.
If you’re curious to explore these ideas hands-on, imagine building a small prototype that ingests card data (mana cost, text, type, set, rarity) and creates a vector space where proximity signals “similar play patterns.” Such a system could offer deck-building suggestions, sideboard ideas, or even targeted drafting guidance—perfect for the MTG enthusiast who loves data as much as dice and draft chaff 🧙♂️.
On a practical note, while you’re optimizing your play and your models, a comfortable workspace helps keep the focus sharp during long reads and drafting sessions. That’s where a certain ergonomic accessory comes into play—no, not a spell—your own ergonomic memory foam wrist rest mouse pad, designed to reduce strain during those marathon build-and-sit sessions. It’s the quiet hero behind the scenes as you plot the next expensive tutor or masterful curveball of a play. For a product that helps your setup stay as sharp as your MTG strategy, check out Ergonomic Memory Foam Wrist Rest Mouse Pad Foot-Shaped. 🧙♂️🔥💎