My friend BDM tried for years to get me to read the bestseller Moneyball. If you know anything about me (and you probably do / BDM certainly does), you can probably figure that Moneyball is squarely in my wheelhouse. It is about metagaming a known system, fooling the other guy by giving him what he wants (but taking something much more valuable in return), and general winning shenanigans using unpopular or misunderstood routes.

I put off reading Moneyball for years, on account of not being remotely interested in baseball. But last year the Brad Pitt movie was coming out, so I—like countless others I assume—finally read Moneyball in anticipation of the film. Both were quite good.

One of the things Moneyball really tries to hammer home is the idea that on base percentage (the likelihood of a hitter getting on base, regardless of how he does it) is closely related to scoring runs; scoring more runs than the other team is how you win in baseball. The heroes of Moneyball knew this and put together undercoated and over performing baseball teams by valuing things like how many walks a chubby, weird-looking hitter could produce and giving away guys who had maybe stronger defensive capabilities (defense being less valuable for runs production than on base percentage was for runs production) or just looked good in a uniform (actually a thing, if you can believe it).

What I really got out of all of this is that traditional models for baseball put a lot of importance on the pitcher. The pitcher’s skill is what is important in terms of the other team’s performance. Moneyball‘s protagonists argued that a hitter’s ability to control the strike zone (identifying hittable balls as well as helping them to draw walks) was maybe even more important and certainly underpriced in the pitcher-hitter standoff. Otherwise, how could there be guys who could accumulate so many walks, or why weren’t ace performances more predictably aces?

This article is going to help you identify and later control the strike zone in your tournament Magic interactions; they don’t get you on base, necessarily, and don’t win the games by themselves, but they can help shift agency in your favor or at least give your opponent heretofore unknown opportunities to screw up… So you can, you know, have a better chance of scoring more runs than your opponent does.

Presupposition

Doubtlessly, most of you already know that the most powerful copywriting tool is presupposition, or the assumption that something is true in a statement or question, whether or not it actually is. Lawyers—famous for weasel words, double-talk, and legalese—will often use presupposition and combinations of presuppositions to get witnesses to falter or even crumble on the stand. For example:

“Mister Kilstein, at what point did you stop beating your wife?”

Consider how difficult it might be to actually answer this question.

The lawyer assumes all kinds of things.

He assumes your name is Mister Kilstein!

He assumes that you were, at some point, beating your wife…but at some other point, you stopped. Two different assumptions. In fact, the only way to answer this question is with a date or point in time. Something like “yesterday” or “July 4, 1992.”

Well, what if you never beat your wife?

Or (much worse), what if you never stopped?

Consider all the different strategies you might have for answering this question, depending on what kind of Mister Kilstein you are.

I mean, you can come out and declare, “I never beat my wife!” But, again, that’s not an appropriate answer to this question. You actually have to step back, decide you don’t like the question, and answer another one (which is much more work mentally). You have to engage consciously to do that.

How do you think you can transfer presupposition to a game of Magic?

Let’s say you are attacking into two 1/1 tokens with a 2/2 Zombie. You care about the damage not at all, but kind of want to limit the number of tokens he has in play should he draw Intangible Virtue.

How might you approach the next thing you say?

Will you say nothing?

How about, “Are you gonna block?” (He can just say no.)

Say you want to tussle with just one? How about, “Which [one] of your tokens will you block with?” Assumption: you will block with one token.

Or, “How many of your tokens will you block with?” (“Zero,” is a bit of an unnatural answer here, relative to one or two or—can you hear it?—”Just one.”) Assumption: you will block with some number of tokens.

[Quite] a few years ago I won a PTQ for which I wrote no tournament report. The reason was that I had literally stretched the genre of the mind game across an entire tournament. It was like the Alan Moore’s Supreme of PTQ wins. I think I had won the tournament 0-13-1, with the intentional draw “1” a massively -EV decision for my opponent when neither of us was a lock for Top 8, a la that time I charmed Chris Mascioli into giving me a Nationals Blue Envelope two years ago.

Not a match went by where I my opponent didn’t resolve Natural Order, I had been Wastelanded to zero permanents with lethal in play on the other side, convinced a High Tide opponent to pass priority into my Wasteland in the middle of his combo, or fooled a 2x PT Top 8 competitor into mana burning for four using entirely on-table interactions.

When I was playing for the finals, I was at five and he was at five; I had a 3/2 and a Cursed Scroll, he had a 3/4 and nothing else. If my 3/2 lived, he was pretty much dead the next turn. More than one turn of the midgame was spent with him giving his Steel Golems Swampwalk with Funeral Charm so I couldn’t block and trade with my active Scroll. But it devolved into a pure barroom brawl, all attacks, and now neither of us had cards, nor between our ~36 Hymns, Consultations, Duresses, Charms, and Poxes between us was there much expectation of either of us holding cards for very long.

Me: You have so many live cards… You win on a Lightning Bolt, a Guerilla Tactics, even a Funeral Charm!

Him: Yes!

(he shows me the Funeral Charm)

Me: Sigh. I guess your Steel Golem will get Swampwalk.

Him: Yes! Swampwalk my Steel Golem.

…

Him: Wait!

Table Judge: Your Steel Golem has Swampwalk.

I’m sure you realize why no tournament report was ever written. Writing out the conclusion of every such match would have been approximately 13x as embarrassing.

Embedded Command

Embedded commands are a lot what they sound like: imperative commands hidden—literally embedded—in other statements. One example might be an infomercial where the narrator says, “By now you’ve probably heard of such-and-such great product…”

To your ear this might sound like, “Buy now you’ve heard of such-and-such…” The written-out sentence is “by now,” but the auditory embedded command is to, you know, buy now. Tricky, huh? That’s how late-night infomercials afford all that airtime despite offering essentially nothing new.

Embedded commands are pretty fun and easy to make. It can be like a game! Notice how I used them in the examples for presupposition, along with actual presupposition superpowers.

“Which [one] of your tokens will you block with?”

“How many of your tokens will you block with?”

“…your Steel Golem will get Swampwalk.”

In the first two cases I am covertly suggesting “you block” to the opponent. Again, nothing has to happen any differently than if you had just asked the less mighty, “Are you gonna block?” But I would guess (based on literally millions of cars sold and certain presidential election outcomes) that your long run results will be a bit more favorable with a small change in how you convey essentially the same information, especially after a very long day when your opponents might be fatigued (e.g., the Steel Golem suggestion). Controlling the strike zone and so on.

Criteria

Let’s say that in order to win a particular remote game you need to not only assemble an improbable amount of burn, withstand a blue mage’s stacked hand, but get a particular Wolf token through unblocked when your opponent has a dandy little army of disposable temps. How do you convince the other chap—who happens to be a pretty good player—the coast is clear when it really isn’t?

Brother, you’ve got a bridge to sell.

In high-powered sales there is this notion of criteria; that is, there is some t that must be crossed, some i that must be dotted, before any sale is made. Sometimes the criteria is simple and cut-and-dried. You desire this thing, “a sleeping bag.” But which one? What are the qualities of a sleeping bag? A camper needs it to be warm or weather resistant. Durable. My sister on the other hand… Her sleeping bag looks like a The Empire Strikes Back tauntaun (that being the sole criteria above and beyond price). Actually, she has two.

Hoarders might just want to feel like they are “getting a good deal,” even if the thing they are buying has no purpose or utility in their life. That “good deal” feeling is what they are going for, which is why when the good people from A&E show up at their houses with a film crew, they inevitably find empty, soiled cages (in houses with no pet birds), uneaten (and expired) food, and you know, the odd cat skeleton. But hey, good deal.

I love how PV recently described a bluff: you have to sell your opponent on an alternate reality. In order to make such a sale to your opponent, you will have to 1) figure out, and 2) fulfill his criteria…or at least make him think you have.

Now let’s say you are in a Limited stall situation. No one is getting in or getting through, at least based on known information and both players’ behavior. You have a bloodbath in your hand (let’s say a Guided Strike), but he ain’t giving you a window to murder a hole in his battlefield.

You are both listless over the stall after a couple of turns. You shuffle your hand, shuffle your hand. You always be shufflin’ (like Brian Kibler). You clumsily drop the Guided Strike on the table. “Oh whatever!”

At the end of your opponent’s turn you burn the Guided Strike on his guy to cantrip the card.

He sees an opening!

He attacks!

You destroy him…

…with your other Guided Strike.

Boom!

Different players in different winnable-but-uncertain games will have different thresholds, tensions, hot buttons, and triggers. What they all have in common is some criteria that must be fulfilled before taking some action that is favorable to your way of thinking. The above is a kind of retelling, by the by, of a regular (if well known) mage juking and making Day 2 on the back of a Hall of Famer. He sent a clear—and clearly untrue—signal that the coast is clear.

The HoFer needed the price of combat to be lowered. A drop more certainty. Our hero lowered the price and the sale was made, reserving a little bit of uncertainty.

Did you notice how reasonable burning the cantrip was? Totally believable, right?

Bloodbath.

Processing Negatives

Simply, your unconscious mind doesn’t process negatives.

One of the biggest communications problems parents (or various people in everyday situations) give themselves is that they communicate in [unprocessable] negatives.

“Don’t stick your tongue in the electric socket!”

Read: Don’t [S]tick your tongue in the electric socket!

You have just embedded commanded the kid to stick his tongue in the g-d electric socket.

Consciously you are reading the negative, are aware of it, etc. But like 80% of your mental process is unconscious. If you were conscious of everything you did you probably wouldn’t ever make the embarrassing in-game errors that you do. The whole reason we drill you to tap your Island instead of your Glacial Fortress (all other things held equal) is so that tapping the Island becomes habitual. You will snap-make the right play instead of having to process the play (again, all other things held equal). As you can see from all these examples, it is quite easy to process incorrectly, especially given the proper prompting.

Have you ever heard this one? Don’t tell me what you don’t want?

Lots of the time subjects / clients / friends / victims tell their [whatever noun] all kinds of things they don’t want. That isn’t going to get them to where they need to be; if anything it can end up reinforcing exactly the stuff they are trying to avoid in the future.

I can relay many stories about how I screwed up my on negative processing in games (realizing later, of course, how I was mashing myself with an embedded command) to comically bad results. But they are all the same as sticking my tongue in the veritable electric socket or (in your most gruff and fatherly voice): absolutely, positively not going out with that boy (young lady)! I figure you’re chuckling to yourself over an occasion or two from your own games.

I guess the takeaway here is if you form good habits, you will be less likely to screw yourself up in game.

… And to know what you want.

The Practical Awesomesauce of Magical Multipliers

I was having a Katz’s corned beef with my friend Patrick Chapin last night and told him that—believe it or not—something like 65% of my Magic (even overall) worldview is formed by two episodes of The Eh Team podcast, episodes where he and Gerry Thompson appeared. Pat’s was about the nature of the game; Gerry’s the nature of wealth for a Magic player. My algorithm is like the Jeet Kun Do of personalities. I constantly jettison useless or outmoded information to improve my results, which makes me impressionable but generally improving.

So I have a very soft spot for The Eh Team’s KYT, who last week posted this flattering Tweet.

Basically KYT wasn’t sure where he wanted to go with his site (once just his personal blog) and was considering some (to my mind) fairly low-EV options. I figured out the criteria of his primary negotiations opponent, told him to stop telling me what he didn’t want, and—without giving anything away—told him what language to use to fulfill the necessary criteria.

The result was a more than 2-3x improvement in his site’s already impressive position with the partner, which is embarrassing for me and how little I have worked to monetize my fabulously popular own blog :)

Figure out the imperative yet?

LOVE
MIKE