Wait!

Wait a minute!

Pause!

Can we do something with this?

Unlike Jon, whose natural talent and clarity of vision have always been his most powerful Magical assets, some of us have had to do our homework to win any matches at all… What if we cross-section takeaway number one (something Jon doesn’t want to do) with takeaway number two (initially a throwaway)?

Here’s a simple chart I just put together based on data from the last several StarCityGames.com Standard Open Top 8 results, illustrating how many Corrosive Gales can be found in the sideboards of the contending decks:

You can see in the first week of Dark Ascension Standard, there are no Corrosive Gales at all. There was a Drogskol Captain deck or so, but Esper Spirits wasn’t a “thing” in the sense that multiple Hall of Fame players (including the luminary Jon Finkel) hadn’t just crushed a PT with it.

In the next week—about the time of Pro Tour Dark Ascension—still no Corrosive Gales. The stuff was too new.

But then?

Pow!

You see as many as ten Corrosive Gales in a Top 8 with multiple decks running four copies in the sideboard in consecutive weeks.

But now?

We live in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, it seems. Perhaps the fear of Corrosive Gale is already higher impact than Corrosive Gale itself. I am reminded of arguably the greatest Finkel takeaway of all time: focus only on what matters.

If what matters—in the sense of what is limiting the success of Esper Spirits in Standard—is the presence of Corrosive Gale, then perhaps that limiting factor…is no longer a factor.

I dunno about you, but this seems like a takeaway that might be instructive for, say, the upcoming Invitational (a pretty important upcoming Standard tournament).

Just for fun:

I decided to track the presence of sideboarded graveyard hate in the Top 8s of Legacy Opens over the same time period. There was a stretch about this time last year where graveyard hate was woefully under-represented (which helped prompt me to play Cephalid Breakfast in the Edison Open)… As you can see, there were as many as 27 sideboarded anti-graveyard cards in the Top 8 last week.

So we can’t say graveyard hate is particularly under-represented.

Some interesting things to note:

1. When Dredge was a viable Extended deck, an average of four graveyard hate cards per deck in the Top 8 (i.e. ~32 in a Top 8) was insufficient to stop a Dredge PTQ win.
2. Adam Prosak won with Dredge in a week with 22 anti-graveyard cards in the sideboards that weekend (and of course Legacy is a more powerful format than Extended).
3. Not all graveyard hate cards are made equal… You can’t invalidate a Grafdigger’s Cage in play (other than by destroying it), but you can a Tormod’s Crypt or Knight of the Reliquary for Bojuka Bog in any number of ways… I counted Ground Seal even though it’s a poor kid sister by any estimation.

Again, just for fun.

… But one more thing:

I don’t know how predictive the recent Grand Prix was, but there were 23.

Okay… Back to Jon.

I recently read what I would generally consider a misguided player complaining about top players/writers talking about stuff like bluffing. The majority of games, he argued, are not decided by bluffing. Why do top players write about this?

I think the answer is obvious to anyone actually interested in winning games of Magic: The Gathering.

Anyone can win obvious games. When the opponent is mana screwed, you typically have a massive advantage. You’re “supposed” to win those games, just as you’re supposed to win games where you have a matchup advantage or your opponent makes a glaring mistake. What’s interesting to read about in Magic is how to win games you aren’t “supposed” to win!

I think what’s interesting about Jon’s comment here is that he sees mana screw almost as a conditioning exercise. If you’re mana screwed and you can pick up 5% here (or your opponent gives up 5% there), you’re talking about one of the things that separates elite players from everybody else. Surely you’ve had the experience of playing an opponent who missed his third land drop? Maybe he even discarded twice? Didn’t it really suck when he came back to beat you? If you’re like me, you fixated for hours or even years afterward walking through the things that you could’ve done differently.

I doubt that anyone reading this is actually going to take action… But you can probably train this skill. In other articles (i.e. building sideboards) I’ve advocated playtesting a certain way, like starting with sideboard cards in hand in order to see if they even work in the matchup; why not play mana screwed on purpose? The goal wouldn’t even be to win every game… Just to see how well you can make decisions while horribly frustrated. It might actually matter!

Mark LePine actually made Top 8 of a World Championships keeping zero lands in his worst matchup (Mono-Blue Control versus Red Deck Wins). He had two Sea Sprites, eventually topdecked two lands, and despite having a pretty scary first couple of turns, ended up making an ultimately productive decision to keep.

Last one…

Just a couple of things to keep in mind here… Finkel is pretty good at Limited. Like one of the best ever (and if the most recent PTs and Limited GPs are any indication, still one of the best).

It’s important to note that he isn’t saying Magic Online makes players “bad” at Limited. In fact, it might actually improve most players’ abilities at Limited (especially if they would have no practice otherwise)… It just creates an artificial upper limit.

Limits are interesting in Magic. What is the limiting factor in Constructed Magic? The player or the deck? It’s pretty obvious it’s the deck (some players will vehemently argue otherwise; they are wrong). You can give the best player in the world (say Luis Scott-Vargas) a viable deck…say a viable Standard deck. Now give a passable/competent Vintage specialist some kind of busted Vintage deck with full Power Nine and mana-and cards-breaking regalia. Is Luis going to win a lot of games? Very unlikely. He might make tight play after tight play…but he is ultimately going to be limited by the capabilities of the cards in front of him. A much less talented player with a more powerful stack—and in this hypothetical a stack with a massive power level gap advantage—is simply going to win much, much more often.

That’s the kind of limitation Jon is referring to, I think. He isn’t saying Magic Online makes you worse per se, but just as mana screw can be instructive by forcing you to play from typically unexpected and uncomfortable positions… So does playing IRL draft with competent teammates and opponents versus “just” on Magic Online.

You draft a train wreck on Magic Online, you’re going to 0-1 with your head hung nine times out of ten… But when your buddies are counting on you to grab at least one win—and they are there to help you find the hidden playables in your disaster stack—you get to take away additional technology that can be applicable at the PT level.

IRL three-on-threes (at least according to Jon) seem like the surest way of figuring out that embarrassing (if sometimes even more embarrassingly effective) Dromad Purebred.