My friend JR told me a funny story about the Ravnica Prerelease. His friend, who’d just gotten back into playing after a long hiatus, didn’t play Faith’s Fetters in his white Sealed deck. When questioned as to why, he admitted “I saw the words ‘gain life,’ and I stopped reading.”
I can’t blame him too much for skipping over the rest of the card. After all, for nearly a dozen years prior, there hadn’t been more than a handful of cards that gained life that were playable, and most were Drain Life spells. He was sitting down to a new set, not having seen any of the spoiler, and used his limited construction time to best create a Sealed deck using what he knew as golden rules, and one of them was “life gain is bad.”
We do this all the time in Magic. We create shortcuts. We learn ‘fundamental truths’ and use them to quickly evaluate cards, decks, and board states. It would be hard to get through a game, let alone a match or tournament, if we didn’t create some of these. We just don’t have the mental energy to constantly reevaluate our entire inventory of Magical knowledge every time we get priority. We have to lock in what we can and keep our focus on the things that really matter. The problem comes when what really matters changes.
This can bite you in the ass when in a long, drawn-out game, you fail to realize that it’s probably going to come down to decking, but you keep drawing cards in a vain attempt to finally overwhelm your opponent. You might be dead-set on the “Ramping Up Jace” plan in the Dark Depths mirror, when time is called in the round, and you simply don’t have the turns left to actually deck them. Maybe your beloved deck that was winning you tournaments left and right has started to underperform, but you just can’t switch because of your comfort level with your exact 75.
Magic isn’t the same game it was seventeen years ago. We’ve gone through at least three major card face changes, five huge rules overhauls, new developers, new designers, and more errata than you can shake a stick at. The game used to be defined by undercosted spells and underpowered creatures. Now that’s virtually reversed, with the exception of planeswalkers which trump them all. So many aspects of the game have changed, but many people’s strategy and knowledge comes from those early days. Even if they weren’t playing since then, they were taught by people who were taught by people, who were taught by people who opened up their first pack during Alpha. Biases, shortcuts, and prejudices about the game have been passed down ever since. They aren’t all bad, but if you don’t know their basis, they’re hard to apply to future problems. You may not even know that you have these things, but they’re there in the back of your mind, hidden behind layers and layers of new information.
The early days of Magic were all about Card Advantage. Brian Weismann first mainstreamed the idea with The Deck, and people latched onto it as gospel. I have no doubts that if Brian Weisman had been struck down by a rogue bus in 1995, there would be a Cult of CA still meeting in game store back rooms, and tapping their Disrupting Scepters every night when the clock struck midnight. It gave people a way to really contextualize and break up what was happening in the game, +1 card, +2 cards, -1 cards, etc. and generally provided for the first great leap in how people played the game. And much like all such leaps, people felt that they had reached the apex of all knowledge and technology.
This mentality caused many cards to be overlooked at their first upon their release. Cursed Scroll and Living Death were viewed as terrible cards because they rewarded bad play. After all, having more creatures in your graveyard, or an empty hand was a sign that you were losing. It was an affront to The Weismann. This was Wizards dumbing the game down, and nothing less. It also beat the crap out of our deck, and it wasn’t fair.
Around 1999, EDT wrote an eye-opening piece about how sometimes a card can be worth a whole lot of cards — an almost unlimited number of cards, in fact, without you really noticing. The idea, virtual card advantage, was one that people had kind of understood, but never really put into words, was that a card like Moat would invalidate every single non-flyer your opponent played. If they had five Grizzly Bears in play, your Moat was worth five cards. If they drew another, it was worth six. Even if it didn’t really remove those cards from the board state, they were for all intents and purposes useless.
Unfortunately, that’s about where we are today. Card advantage just doesn’t have the same meaning today as it used to, not when a Grave Titan produces +2 when it comes into play, and +2 when it attacks. There has to be a better way to look at things, but I haven’t seen anything that has quite worked yet. I’ve seen people like Flores who’ve worked on the idea of a Grand Unified Theory, but it’s still all too theoretical and not applicable to real games — at least not yet. I’m sure someday, someone will come up with a better way to break up and describe what’s going on in a game in a meaningful way, but that’s for the future.
But Magic’s about a lot more than just card advantage. When I started playing, the golden rule was “If it costs more than four mana, it has to win the game.” Our decks had 24 lands, though generally around eight of them didn’t tap for colored mana, and we played exactly twenty creatures in our aggro decks. The rule about nothing costing more than four mana was actually very practical — with Balance, Strip Mine, and Armageddon running around everywhere, the chances that you ever hit more than four mana was a pipe dream. You might be able to make exceptions for powerhouses like Ihsan’s Shade or Autumn Willow. I won’t feel bad if you need to look them up. At the same time, spells more than four mana rarely did anything more efficient than those at one, two, or three — they just had some crazy extra text that was hard to understand. You were much better off playing the cheap spells.
We now live in an age where you get what you pay for. Good five and six-mana creatures abound, and if you’re paying seven mana for a spell, the chances are it’s going to have a massive effect on the game. At the same time, the effects that prevented you from getting up to that much mana have all but been removed from non-Eternal formats.
Over time, the game of Magic has changed, but many of its players haven’t changed with it. Even when there weren’t the risks of Hymn to Tourach and Armageddon remaining in Type 2, old-school players would hoard their lands in their hand the same way that Type 1 players of the day played with their cards spaced out over an obnoxiously huge area to combat the long-banned Chaos Orb. People, much like dogs, are creatures of habit. Once we’re trained to do something, it takes an act of God to break us of it.
If we’re to continue to succeed and advance in the game of today and the future, we have to be willing to let go of the old ways of thinking. If you aren’t taking the time now and again to look at what you’re doing, and what you hold to be true, you’ll lose the ability to judge anything you do objectively. You may be able to peel back a few layers when your win percentage dips below .500, but you’ll tend to only go far enough down to put you back above even. It’s a hard thing to face, that everything that you know could possibly be wrong.
If there’s one thing that teaching new players about Magic does to improve your own game of Magic, it’ll force you to examine what truths you hold to be self-evident. Always play lands before you attack. Always cast removal spells on your opponent’s turn. Always keep one land in your hand. What you’ll find is that there’s a good chance that most of your fundamental truths are at least partly wrong. Don’t worry — everyone else’s are too, and it’s how each of us is wrong in our own way that makes us the players that we are. We need the people we play with to be wrong in ways different from our own so that we can learn from each other. As we challenge each other, we get better.
It’s important to fight for what you believe in — you can’t cave on everything right away; you’ll never figure out what you actually have right — but you also need to be willing to accept when you’re wrong. It’s important to find out the places where you’re totally off-base and it’s costing you a lot of opportunities to do better, and the ones where you are mostly right, but your line of thinking could use some more development.
When you’re right, though, don’t get too confident. It doesn’t last forever. As in life, everything in Magic is based on context. The game is constantly evolving, and what was a powerful card two years ago could be trash today. It isn’t all just power creep, sometimes it’s just that the specific conditions of the environment the card existed in aren’t there anymore. I know the movies would like to make it seem like a herd of Dinosaurs released into a wilderness area would quickly breed and take over the world, but the truth is that they’d probably all die in a few weeks from a combination of lower oxygen levels, along with the sixty-five million years of the biological warfare arms race that they missed out on. I know — not quite as exciting as Jurassic Park.
We’ve had a few prime examples of this in recent years. People were excited to see Call of the Herd and Psionic Blast back in Time Spiral, with both cards peaking at $15-$20 when the set first came out. The people who played with them before knew how good they were, and they drove the price up trying to get their sets before everyone else realized that they were going to be staples of Constructed for years to come. But paying three mana for a vanilla 3/3, even with a four-mana flashback, wasn’t something that could compete with the power level of creatures anymore. Meddling Mage met a similar fate. Two colored mana for a Grizzly Bear was competitive in the Invasion era, but it didn’t do enough by the time Alara was released. On top of that, Meddling Mage was traditionally great against decks that had very low threat density, or one big spell they needed to cast to win. With the introduction of planeswalkers, even control deck had a half-dozen different cards that could win the game by themselves, so stopping one big spell was no longer a back-breaking effect.
The inability to evaluate cards in a vacuum doesn’t just make us overvalue some cards, it make us undervalue others. Was Cancel really as bad as everyone made it out to be, or was it that whenever we saw it, we just saw Frank Stallone. In fact, whenever something really different happens, it tends to be the old guard who can’t evaluate it well. They’ve trained themselves to find the fatal flaw in cards. This is a very useful skill to have when you’re quickly trying to make a great deck, or do better at drafting, but it can backfire when those flaws are no longer relevant.
I’ve heard people question just how dumb Magic players used to be to not know that Necropotence was a broken card. They feel like anyone who saw the card should’ve
known
how good it was. What they don’t understand, and probably couldn’t because they weren’t playing at the time, was that having seven cards in your hand was a bad thing. Ice Age came out at a time known, not so affectionately, as the Vice Age. The Balance/Rack decks had recently been restricted into oblivion (with much joy) and in its place came a million decks that wanted to abuse Black Vice (there was no joy in this). The power of a turn 1 Black Vice was so high that every deck just ran four of the card. Control deck? Four Black Vice. Aggro deck? Four black vice. Discard deck? Might as well run four, just in case you didn’t get to Mind Twist your opponent’s hand away on turn 1. The ability to play one on the first turn and end up killing an opponent who was forced by the mulligan rules to keep a hand of Strip Mine and six colored spells was just too juicy to not take advantage of. The major strategy of the day was to keep your opponent on seven cards as long as possible just so that your Black Vices could do their damage.
In this environment, where your goal was to get down to four cards as quickly as possible, a card that allowed for nearly unlimited seven-card hands wasn’t going to win you games. That didn’t mean that the card wasn’t good, just that it wasn’t good right then, at that moment in time. But, since people are bad at evaluating card quality in a vacuum, the card was quickly forgotten and thrown into the fifty-cent bin until long after Black Vice met with the Restriction Hammer (which is the Ban Hammer’s smaller, mostly forgotten brother).
You might think that the lessons of Necropotence, Cursed Scroll, and Living Death would’ve taught people something, but they didn’t. If you look at the Prerelease reports from Urza’s Saga, a number of players including top-level pros knocked the set because everything was so expensive. Not expensive in the way that we’ve begun cowering with fear when a new set comes out (do I buy lunch this week, or a Primeval Titan?), but in the sense that a six-mana spell should do something more than simply untap six lands and draw each player a new hand. Five-mana creatures shouldn’t require mana to give them flying, untap them, give them shroud, or pump their power and/or toughness, and they definitely should be larger than 3/3s. These are the same people that felt that Wasteland’s non-basic clause made it so much worse than Strip Mine that it should be taken out back and shot.
But now we’re living in the future; we’re all enlightened, and we know exactly what cards are good when a set comes out, right? If you think that, Frost Titan would like to have a word with you. So would Time Reversal. It wonders why nobody ever calls it anymore. The chances are that we’ll never be able to get things 100% right, and that’s what keeps Magic interesting.
As a player, this means you need to spend more time questioning everything. Really try, and think things out for yourself — don’t rely just on what people tell you. Player A is going to say this card is amazing, and player B is going to say it’s trash. You have to decide what you think for yourself. No matter how much you try, your views and evaluations on everything will always be tilted by what’s come before. Sometimes it will work to your advantage, and sometimes it will work against you. What’s important is that you know that your bias is there, so that you can work around it.
Questioning my fundamental beliefs is something that I’ve been working on for a while, and even more now that I’m writing about Magic. I know that as a player, I have a number of prejudices when I’m looking at a new set, especially for Limited. For some reason, I have a huge mental block when evaluating cards over six mana. In my brain, for whatever reason, the jump from six to seven is the equivalent of that minor step between the steam engine and landing a man on the moon. I know that isn’t true, but I still look at Myr Battlesphere in my opening draft pack and secretly think, “But really… am I ever going to be able to cast this?” I don’t think the same thing about Steel Hellkite. There, I think “Haha, this is coming out on turn 5 every game!”
These prejudices aren’t always bad. The same prejudice that kept me from playing high-casting-cost cards made Zendikar block a snap for me. I already had an unhealthy fondness for 2/1s for two in Limited, so a format where they’re good gave me an edge up on my competition, at least early on. I was very good at evaluating them, and attacking with what could only be called reckless abandon. The same skills, however, didn’t serve me well for the first few weeks of Rise of the Eldrazi, where if I wasn’t playing U/W levelers, I wasn’t winning. When I had the chance to learn how to draft a ramp deck, I did much better.
Building shortcuts in thinking is an important part of becoming a better Magic player. It lets you play individual games faster and spend more time thinking on higher thought processes instead of the nitty-gritty of game mechanics. It lets you build lots of new decks, instead of starting from scratch each time you start looking through a new spoiler. Unless you’re spending your entire waking life playing Magic, you just don’t have time to reinvent the wheel every day. Just don’t let your shortcuts turn into ideologies. A rigid ideology will probably serve you well for a time, but it’ll be much harder for you to adjust. There’s only one real fundamental truth about Magic, and that is that it’s constantly changing. If you want to succeed, you’ll have to change your thinking with it.