Recently, a lot of the premium writers have been writing articles full of advice on how to win. They have covered skills, attitude, sideboarding, etc. I’m not premium — so I’ll talk about how to throw games. Of course, the secret of advice on how not to lose is to listen to the advice — and then not take it. I’ll also talk a little about my prereleases.
For what it’s worth, I went 3-1 in matches, 7-4 in games at the prerelease, so even I did not take my advice. But let’s get on to that advice.
Here’s how to lose.
Five Plans is More than One
On NPR the other day, some financial an analysts were using Shel Silverstein’s poem Smart to explain some market activity or another. The poem describes how a kid trades a single dollar for two quarters, and the two quarters for three dimes, etc.
The point is, of course, that more is not better. That is certainly true for ways of winning, especially when those win conditions conflict. When developing a plan, you need to develop a plan and stick to it. It took a while to discover what plan my deck could use.
First off, I looked for the bomb rares. Here’s what I opened.
Knight of the White Orchid
Crucible of Fire
Tar Fiend
Time Sieve
Spellbreaker Behemoth
Knight of the New Alara
The last two look pretty good, but there really isn’t anything to build around there. The White was marginal, and I had no dragons. There were only a half dozen artifacts in my whole pool. The only obvious include-if-at-all-possible card was the Knight of the New Alara, since over half my card pool was, obviously, gold cards.
What my pool did not have was any insane “I win” cards. It had a lot of 3/3s and 4/4s, and some combat tricks and some removal. It had nothing to break open the game if it devolved into a big stalemate. It also had no ways of countering or preventing an opponent who did have a Cruel Ultimatum, Elspeth, or even Broodmate Dragon from riding thier bombs to victory.
All I really had going for me was speed. My deck looked like it could be pretty fast. A whole lot of weenies plus a couple Resounding Roars should be quick. It was the only plan that looked feasible.
Here’s the initial build:
Removal
2 Violent Outburst
2 Resounding Roar
1 Intimidation Bolt
1 Magma Spray
Quasi-removal
1 Bloodpyre Elemental
1 Stun Sniper
1 Naya Battlemage
Beats
2 Bant Sureblade
2 Leonin Armorguard
1 Rhox Brute
1 Wild Nacatl
1 Spellbreaker Behemoth
1 Knight of New Alara
1 Grizzled Leotau
1 Enlisted Wurm
1 Naya Hushblade
Mana
1 Wildfield Borderpost
1 Trace Abundance
6 Forest
6 Plains
5 Mountain
And the other stuff
1 Mage Slayer
At first, I had tried splashing a Bant Charm off an Obelisk, Mistveil Borderpost, and an Island or two. That could also let me play a Jhessian Infiltrator, and Grixis Battlemage. I could also add a Court Archers and the Sigiled Behemoth (a 5/4 Exalted dude for 4GW), giving me a minor exalted theme. After all, it would give me a second and third path to victory — beats, exalted beats, infiltrators. I could even add a tiny flying threat with a Cloudheath Drake and a Sewn-Eye Drake. I did have a Crumbling Necropolis and a Grixis Panorama to support the splashes.
After all, four is better than one, right?
Well — no.
My initial plan was to be fast — to drop a 2/1 on turn 2, another gold card to make it a 3/2 beater on turn 3, and kill them by turn 6. Beat, beat, remove that guy, beat, win.
Simple plan. Adding lands that come into play tapped, or require mana to fetch another land — a tapped land — was not a big part of that plan. Even in-color cards like the Sigiled Behemoth was not part of that plan. If the game was still ongoing when I hit my sixth land drop, I did not want to be dropping a mid-sized exalted guy. He would be a 6/5 if he attacked alone, and pretty mediocre if he attacked as part of the crowd. Sure, he was a lot better if I had the Knight of the New Alara in play, but that was true of my two-drops as well.
I think some other writer may have written at length about this. Was it Mike Flores? No, must have been David Price… He was the beatdown.
If you got that reference, you are old school.
Anyway, the point is that you have to know your role, and stick to it. With the lack of real fatties in my deck, and the abundance of cheap removal and combat tricks, I was the fast beatdown. If I tried to dilute that speed, and splash for bigger/better/slower cards, I was probably heading into the losers bracket.
Rule number one — know your role, and make sure your stick to it. Wait, this is advice for losing — so reverse that. Bring everything you need. Just as a sprinter does better if s/he carries a full backpack with sleeping bag, tent, provisions, and foul weather gear, so too should a fast beats deck include answers to every problem.
Be True to Your School
After all, it is important to stick with your Plan, no matter what happens. Don’t deviate. Ignore all evidence that your plan is flawed — it is just there to distract you. Don’t give in to it. Do exactly what you were supposed to do.
Game 2 of my first match went exactly to plan.
Me: Forest, Wild Nacatl
Him: Tapped land
Me: Plains, beat for 2, Bant Sureblade
Him: Tapped land, Tukatongue Thallid
Me: Bant Sureblade #2, beat for 6 (he blocks with Thallid)
Him: Land, Nulltread Gargantuan (5/6, put one of your creatures on top of library) — but I burned the Thallid token in response, so the Nulltread went to the top of his library.
Me: Land, Leonin Armorguard, beat for 12
Him: Concede
That’s exactly the way the deck is supposed to work. However, this was game 2. Game 1, he dropped 4/5s and 5/5s all over the place — and very quickly. My army of fast little dudes was not quite fast enough — and too little to force its way through. I can trade a creature and a burn spell for his creatures a couple of times, but more than that and I can’t handle the card disadvantage. In games 1 and 3, I couldn’t handle it.
Sure, I could have won game 3 had my Magma Spray been a Shock, but it wasn’t.
“I so could have won if I hadn’t lost!” is a pretty pointless statement.
After watching his deck perform, and looking at a few friend’s decks, I learned something. This format is a lot fatter than I had expected. I learned to draft in the days when 3/3s for five mana were fatties (Mercadian Masques block, I’m sorry to say), and I have been drafting some Tempest & Stronghold online recently. I really didn’t expect that even non-Green decks would have a half dozen 5/5s around.
It was clear that my speed deck would hit the wall — a 5/5 wall — long before the sprint was done. I had to make changes. I brought in some cards that probably should have been in my deck all along.
In: Crumbling Necropolis, Grixis Panorama, Swamp, two Terminate, Slave of Bolas
Out: 2 Mountain, Plains, Naya Sureblade, Mage Slayer, Grizzled Leotau or Wild Nacatl
Mage Slayer proved to be garbage in this deck. It might be fine in a deck with more fat, but it sucked big-time in this build.
The big issue was the Terminates. Terminate is amazing — but adding the fourth color and tapped lands into the mix really did slow the deck down. I also got a few more hands without the right mana colors in the early turns. It also made the Nacatl a lot worse — it was quite often stuck in hand, or just a 2/2 until at least midgame, and then it was unexciting.
That said, adding three good removal spells was pretty good, and the deck was still reasonably fast. It was fast enough to get there, especially when it could remove the first couple of 5/5 “walls.” It really was necessary to pollute the manabase enough to splash the removal spells. (It was not possible to splash even the good flier — the mana could not stretch far enough for that many Black cards.)
So, second piece of advice not to follow: even if the evidence shows that you have the wrong build, stick with what you have.
Keep your Eye on the Lob
As a kid, I got into a lot of snowball fights. One of my favorite techniques was to pack two snowballs, throw one in a very high, arching lob, and hit them with the second while they were looking up at the first. This would usually work once — but I was also pretty accurate with the lob. On a good day, I could nail them by surprise the first time, then the lob shot would hit them on top of the head the second time, while they waited to dodge my straight shot.
Should have paid attention to the lob, dude.
Let’s provide a Magic example. This one is not me — it’s an example I saw while judging on Sunday.
Game 1 the player was doing a halfway decent job of controlling the board with some token generators and pingers, and getting in a few points to the head now and then. His opponent couldn’t get any damage through. Then, however, the opponent cast the 3/7 that mills 10 cards whenever it attacked. Three attack phases later, the player was decked.
Good enough — or bad enough, depending on which side of the table you were on.
However, after losing to the 3/7, the player decided to completely abandon his build, and side into a five-color build that included Bant Charm, some counters, some bounce and basically every single card that could stop the 3/7. You can probably see where this is going — game 2 the opponent never drew the 3/7, but the player’s deck was now so mangled that he didn’t need to. The five-color build choked on mana and died to beats from mediocre creatures.
The player had become so fixated on the 3/7 that he lost all conception of what his deck was supposed to do.
If You Can’t See It, It Can’t Hurt You
It’s just like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal — if you can’t see it, it can’t see you, so you are safe.
Right. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is not really a self-help book.
You need to see things. Playing with your head in a bucket is almost always a mistake.
I could give some examples here, but everyone has seen plenty of them already. One definition of a bad player is, after all, dying to onboard tricks. Still, it happens a lot. It also results in a lot of judge calls.
“Judge, he declared his creature as a blocker, then used that guy to give it first strike. Can he do that?”
Answer — RTFC.
That’s “Read the Fine Card” — this is a family site, after all.
At the prerelease, I think the most common such mistake was probably some variant on attack with a pair of Sureblades (2/1s that become 3/2 if you have another multicolored card) into a 1/3 and a 2/4 — and not realizing that both Sureblades are going to end up dead. I saw that, well, far too much.
So, remember, don’t pay attention — if you don’t see it, it won’t bite you in the butt.
Give in to the Dark Side, Luke
Remember, if you screw up — or get screwed — that can be a valuable lesson. However, you will not learn from it unless you fully consider the impact, and repeat it to yourself and others. Remember repletion = learning.
It’s not whining if it is educational.
It can even create moral dilemmas.
One match I sat down against an opponent who was still on tilt due to the last round. He had lost a close game when an opponent drew a bomb, late. Worse yet, his opponent was at one life — and the player had forgotten to attack early in the game. It was just an oversight — he was thinking through the next few turns, got distracted by options, and said “go.”
He explained all this — at some length and quite passionately — as we started to play. And, while describing his misplay, he forgot to beat. One turn he didn’t send. The next he left a can’t-block creature at home.
My dilemma was in deciding to tell him what he forgot (I didn’t), and, a turn later, was whether to let him declare the second attacker despite the fact that we were already recording damage (I did — it was a prerelease, after all).
I know several people have written articles about “going on tilt.” It does not win games. When you are playing a game, concentrate on that game, not the one before. That is especially true if you have already lost that game. Obsession on the last game will lose you this game. Of course, when you punt this game, then next game you will stop obsessing about the stupidity of two games ago, and have a new set of stupid plays to obsess on.
Conclusions
All of these techniques are quite good. At the two prereleases I attended, however, I think some techniques were more effective at creating losers than others.
I saw a number of people miss the obvious, but that only occasionally cost them the game.
I saw a couple of people get so distracted by the oddity that they saw in game 1 that they concentrated on that, to the exclusion of actually winning.
I saw too many people play on tilt. They were upset, they whined, they complained, and they paid insufficient attention. They lost.
Of course, adding too many win conditions to the point of diluting your deck had to be the most common. That whole method of losing can be summarized as “building a crappy deck” — and I saw a lot of crappy builds at the prereleases. Not all, by any means, but a lot.
Overall, I enjoyed the prereleases immensely — but then, I never listen to my own advice.
PRJ
“one million words” on MTGO