Every wisp of smoke in the restaurant seems to want my face. They curl in smoky twines, my nose and eyes magnets of some cigarette polarity, silhouettes like ghosts and itchy pillows. I am sitting here in my usual tea-house haunt, post-Singapore, having figured out for the most part what went right and what went wrong, feeling alternatively renewed and disappointed, fresh and eerily exhausted. It was a good weekend.
Here is the list that Juza, PV, ManuB, and Sam Black sleeved up (with one or two card differences depending on personal preferences) for the Grand Prix:
4 Spell Snare
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Mana Leak
2 Thirst for Knowledge
4 Ancestral Vision
3 Venser, Shaper Savant
3 Umezawa’s Jitte
3 Engineered Explosives
4 Vendilion Clique
2 Sower of Temptation
2 Vedalken Shackles
2 Chrome Mox
1 River of Tears
1 Hallowed Fountain
1 Polluted Delta
3 Riptide Laboratory
4 Mutavault
1 Breeding Pool
1 Steam Vents
11 Island
Sideboard:
2 Sower of Temptation
2 Stifle
3 Threads of Disloyalty
3 Relic of Progenitus
2 Future Sight
1 Engineered Explosives
2 Flashfreeze
But this article is not about the deck. I’ve talked a lot about Faeries over the last two weeks. Nor is the article about what makes the deck Next Level, although it is. We’ll have an explanation of this list’s departure from Kowal Faeries next week. This article, though, is about how, I feel, too much priority is given to the pre-PTQ feeding frenzy for technology, with playskill taking a back seat to innovation for innovation’s sake, with the resulting effect being that of the guy carrying $20,000 clubs who can’t even read the green. Such a trend, of course, is great for Wizards, and in a sense it’s great for places like StarCity from whom these same players trade paychecks for Pithing Needles or whatever happens to be hot at the time. On another level, though, this article is about the feeling you get when you’re playing at your maximum, the thrill and exhilaration that comes with truly peak performance, the thing that, in my opinion, makes this entire rat race worth it in the first place.
I’ve tried for a while now to understand why it is that I’ve found myself growing angrier and more frustrated at my losses here in Malaysia than I ever had been back in the ‘States. I’ve written articles on this very site, even, about how such behavior was counterproductive, even dangerous, and I’m astonished when almost unconsciously I start to exhibit the same behavior I criticized and condemned not even a year ago. What I realized, though, was that the thing that frustrated me was not the loss per se but rather the corresponding frustration at not really being able to figure out what I was doing correctly. I miss the caliber of players I had in, say, Madison, with its many legends of the game. This is not to say anyone in Malaysia is bad—congratulations on Hafiz and Ikmal, for example, on just missing the top 16 on tiebreaks, and certainly outperforming me—but I think it’s fair to say that testing over the week with Martin Juza, Manuel Bucher, Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, Olivier Ruel, Sam Black, Brian Kowal, and Gaudenis Vidugris really gave me the feedback necessary to get myself back to maximum performance.
With that feedback came a corresponding rush of humility and determination. Humility, because so many of the decisions I was making were stone wrong. Determination because I understood why they were wrong and thought that I’d be able, over the course of two days, to correct virtually every mistake I made. The thing is, I was playing extremely good Magic, relative to your average Faerie player (for example) and still making game-losing errors—errors that, crucially, I had no idea were even happening. I had truly advanced to the next level. The best analogy I can come up with is: so you’re playing Spore in the veryveryfirst like protozoa-stage and all of the sudden you eat yourself *just* enough little green particles that the camera zooms out a teensy weensy little bit. All of a sudden you’re eating monsters that were previously chasing you, and you’re seeing on the periphery these giant like behemoths looming and lumbering, which you’d previously believed to simply be a part of the landscape.
The feeling that comes with truly reaching the next level is almost indescribable. It feels like you’re walking in one smooth transition from the brown dense rush hour of Jakarta into one of those pure-100%-oxygen chambers inside which I imagine Michael Jackson chooses to sleep. Unfortunately, despite Blisterguy’s best efforts, my round five feature match against Saito didn’t make it onto the internets, but I feel like it was one of the best matches of Magic I’ve ever played. Both he and I were literally doing everything right. Our third game ended at an impasse, and while I feel fortunate to have squeaked out a draw, I also feel like had he not played like a total master I’d have been able to get there. It’s humbling, in other words, to watch someone not lose a game with a deck—Zoo—that players like myself commonly deride as inconsistent and draw-dependent. Clearly, there’s a level somewhere that I’m not at when it comes to playing Zoo.
That’s why I choose not to play it.
See, what I’m increasingly realizing is that, far more than the degree to which one deck ‘beats’ another deck, the degree to which you play a certain strategy against another excellently determines who, in the end, wins the game. This is not as simple as saying “playskill matters more,” though, because that’s not really what I’m going for. It’s more like: so we’ve just played a ten-game set of Faeries versus Zoo and lost 2-8. The most common, easiest, quickest, and most dramatic response is simply to start changing cards around until you have a net higher density of constructive interactions. Then you see if the percentage changes. The problems with this plan are that 1) you’re potentially squandering your growth as a player, 2) this process tends to skew decklists towards what is being tested against the most rather than the expected composition of the field, 3) that your lists become inbred, and 4) that you get ‘lazy,’ because you want the deck and not you to do the work, and you fail both to erase mistakes from your palette and to implement constructive, proactive, next-level strategies for winning.
Instead, you really should be asking other players around you who have tested your list how their matches are going—and, crucially, what they are doing differently from you. Watching is important, but so is having conversation. I tested for Valencia and for Worlds 2007 almost exclusively through talking about what I expected to happen, and it proved immensely useful. Often strategies that radically depart from common sense can be, in the end, the most effective routes to victory. Manuel Bucher in particular is excellent at identifying this kind of counterintuitive technique, whether it’s by not Charming Bitterblossom or (as it was this weekend) by not actually caring about early beats from Zoo, instead focusing on trumping their trumps at any cost and trusting your deck to mop up whatever slips through the cracks. In fact, once Manuel observed you could never win a counter war against an opponent whose Ancestral Vision resolved on turn five on the play, Sam and I proposed simply not fighting over it unless you had your own Vision coming the next turn.
The issue comes down, honestly, to why ‘commonly-accepted’ theory is commonly accepted in the first place. Magic is a game of nearly-infinite complexity, and because of that it’s important to narrow down decision-trees into a set of ‘reasonable’ options that you can evaluate and digest. The problem, of course, is that theories are models, and models are only approximations. To reach the next level, sometimes you actually have to cast those models aside and actually plan for everything—and you have to do it without being guilty of slow play. Talking with ManuB about Mono-U Wizards was actually frustrating sometimes because he’d dismiss a line of play with statements like ‘…because doing that is bad’ or ‘because that card is terrible.’ GerryT is also sometimes guilty of this, but the thing is that in their minds, I’ve realized, they’re not oversimplifying. When I pressed Manuel about what he exactly he meant (we were arguing over whether I should tap out to equip and swing with a Jitte) he simply outlined every conceivable possible play the opponent could make over the next two turns, and how we beat every one of those with the resources we currently possessed. What this means is that you have to turn away from thinking about aggressive/control roles, fundamental turns, strategic moments, or whatever—at least in those terms, as the last example is actually related to an aggressive strategic moment, but more complex—and actually ‘do the math,’ as it were.
One of the reasons I think that many of the game’s most prominent theorists achieve only middling success at the highest level is that while their means of approaching game states is far beyond the average player, far more complex and intricate than your average person who just picks a deck up and starts casting spells, they fail to understand the moments when you really have no analytical framework for evaluating a situation and have to actually just think through everything. I know I myself am notoriously bad at doing this, and I have watched Richard Feldman declare literally out loud that a certain play was incorrect only to have a brain-fart and do it anyway. Execution can be difficult, sometimes, even with everything looking all proper in our brains.
As for me? I’m happy with my top-32, to a degree. On one hand it’s nice to be making money and Pro Points again, even if it isn’t much, and nice to compete at the highest level. On the other, I was yet again one win away from a top-16, and with Juza watching my last match it was extremely frustrating to be doing literally everything right only to lose because I couldn’t draw a land for four turns in a row. Yet another almost-Q under the good ol’ belt, another thing to add to the heap of Magic-related frustrations that has been the 2009 calendar year. It does reinforce, though, how difficult it can be to qualify for the Tour, makes me appreciate anew with every single close-but-no what I was sacrificing by not taking events seriously when I should have. And, of course, my weekend wasn’t mistake-free. I had to settle for a draw because I couldn’t figure out how to kill my opponent when I had a stacked board and he had two Vedalken Shackles, but I’m convinced there was a way, and I definitely didn’t understand the layers of who-owns-what when (for example) there are multiple competing Shackles and Sower effects on the same creature. I also definitely Vensered a Flames of the Blood Hand on my turn once when I should have eaten the damage in order to be prepared for a potential Sulfuric Vortex the following turn.
Finally: I’m sure many readers are growing frustrated with the glut of articles about blue decks in Standard and Extended right now. The thing is, they’re just the best decks. You can make a good argument for Boat Brew in Standard, I suppose, but if you’re not playing Faeries in Extended you really need to have a good, legitimate reason. Patrick covered it well in his article yesterday. You are a wonderful aggro-control deck and a solid pure-control deck, with many of the format’s nut trumps and zero strategic vulnerability to well-placed hosers. Your matches are skill-intensive but not grindingly long, are intricate but decisive in their moments of victory. I’ve heard some people use the excuse of not being able to play well enough to pilot them. My answer to that is: if you don’t think you’re good, why are you playing in PTQs?
Make yourself good. Earn the next level. Do what it takes. It’s worth it.
Zac