I’ve been writing for Wizards for “Ask the Pro” since August. I’ve received hundreds of questions, most of them being rules questions that I still don’t answer. But among them, there are some questions that actually made me think a lot, and lead to more elaborate, accurate, and interesting answers. Some of those interesting questions – or interesting enough to write an article about – concerned Luck. What role does Luck play in Magic? What format has the most Luck involved? And what, exactly, is Luck? Everyone thinks they know the answer, but it’s tough to put it down in words. I’d like to share what I’ve been thinking of regarding this topic, and the conclusions I’ve drawn.
First of all, I don’t like the word “Luck”. It makes the process sound like some supernatural power, ruling over mankind and choosing who deserves to be successful and who doesn’t. I like to talk about "Randomness" instead. That is, the sum of all random factors that lead to an unexpected or unlikely situation. Random factors can be anything over which you have no control. There is nothing you can fight, and you have to accept such factors should they occur.
Random factors are everywhere, in everything we do, and definitely when we play Magic. To form a good understanding of what Luck in Magic really is, it may help if you understand the reasons for an unexpected success or failure in the game, and know what to learn from such happenings.
I’ll go through different kind of random events, each related to Magic. We’ll examine what happened, and try to learn from them.
GP: Yamagata, Round 4, 3-0 after three byes.
I’m playing against a very average player who’s showed me very mediocre cards so far. It’s game 3, and he’s just played a Dream Stalker to bounce back his Jedit’s Dragoons. That’s his only card in hand. I have a Haunting Hymn in hand, and finally see a window where it could be played efficiently. In his draw step, he draws a card. I play my Haunting Hymn. He jumps a little in his chair, and slams a Draining Whelk on the table.
How can that be explained? Is there anything to be explained? I didn’t know he had a Draining Whelk in his deck. He was on 3-0, without byes, but that didn’t mean his quality cards included a Draining Whelk. But even if I had known, I would probably have played the Hymn during his draw step anyway. Had I been playing around the Whelk, I would have been an idiot. What are the odds that the next card he draws is the absolute worst card for me in that situation? Quite low. What could I have done? Nothing. It was a bad beat. I was a huge favorite on paper, but sometimes you just lose. How many times have I avoided the “absolute worst card off the top”? Many, many times. But it has to happen sometimes. Playing too carefully around cards you don’t even know about will probably cost you more games than playing straightforward.
That’s the classic example of a flat bad beat during a game… the good old topdeck.
PTQ Charleston, teaming with Tiago Chan and Javier Dominguez, semifinals, Day 2 of PT: Prague
Failing to make Day 2 of the Pro Tour, Tiago asked me to play a team PTQ, along with Javier Dominguez (who happened to have all the cards to play, except for a couple). Tiago was running Magnivore, and was missing a few Tidings to complete the deck. We searched the whole room for Tidings, but the dealers were sold out, and no one in the room had any. It felt absolutely terrible to play with suboptimal versions of Standard decks because we didn’t actually own the cards. Tiago replaced three Tidings with three Boomerangs. In the semifinals, a match that decided whether or not we would fly to Charleston for free, Tiago is paired in a mirror match.
I’m sure you can see it coming…
Tidings are the nut low in the mirror, and Boomerang, along with the rest of the land destruction arsenal, are key spells. Tiago won, and we triumphed.
The fact that no one in the room had spare Tidings meant we won the PTQ.
17th Round PT: Yokohama, playing for Top 8 against José Paredes.
I’m attacking with a Sulfur Elemental, putting him down to eight life. I pass the turn, and he uses a Tendrils of Corruption on the Elemental to kill it. I Sudden Shock it in response, so he doesn’t gain any life. Then I’m starting to wonder, why he didn’t play the Tendrils before attackers to save himself three life… that could be quite relevant against Mono-Red. I could kill him with the exact number of damage a turn or two later, but I couldn’t understand his play. It’s only when I read the coverage that I understood what happened.
I had a Fungal Reaches in play, and he was holding a Cancel. He was playing around Stormbind, that I could cast off the storage land… I wasn’t even playing Stormbind in the deck, but the Reaches made him believe I did. How come the Reaches ended up in my deck? I revealed why in my PT: Yokohama report.
A few minutes before the tournament, I was talking to Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, and he told me to add storage lands. I had one Molten Slagheap already, and he talked me into adding at least 2 more. I added Fungal Reaches so I would notice during the games if they helped me more than screwed me. They should definitely have been Slagheaps to optimize the Magus of the Scroll, but I didn’t think of that back then. And the fact that they could provide Green mana instead of Black won me a very important game on the way to the Top 8.
How random is that?!
…
I chose those three examples because they show how little control (apparently) you can have on decisive factors that can influence a game (and also because they are fun). But they all teach a lesson.
The first example shows an in-game random factor being decisive. The top card of your deck is the single card you want to see… you draw it, and you win. On the losing side, it appears to be one hell of a lucky draw. In this case, it probably also felt the same on the other side!
But let’s take other famous moments from the Pro Tour that are similar. I can think of two, and I’m sure you all know them: the fifth game of PT: New Orleans ‘01 finals between Kai Budde and Tommi Walamies, and the game of PT: Honolulu ’06 semifinals between Craig Jones and Olivier Ruel. Both games came down to one draw: a Morphling for Kai and a Lightning Helix for Craig.
However, both players put themselves in a position where the card would win them the game. That’s the important point here.
But replacing them with Boomerangs may not have been that random.
They turned the deciding match from a 50/50 mirror into a 65/35 favorable match. Tiago found the card he thought / knew would give him an advantage in a matchup, one that maybe made up for the lack of Tidings in the deck. The fact that the match that was worth the most – the fact that it won us the tournament -just makes the story more “spectacular.”
The third example shows a random factor influencing an opponent. José made a mistake during our match because he misread the information. The signal the Fungal Reaches sent to him, quite fairly, was “beware of Stormbind.” There may be many reasons the land made him believe I had Stormbind… maybe he had been playing against versions of Red that all ran Stormbind, or maybe he believed that because as I’m a "famous player" I must be holding the worst card possible for him, so he should play around it. (I don’t want to sound arrogant. It’s just that players in general give too much credit to "famous players," and believe they always have the answer to everything… which I have to say, serves me well!).
All in all, he played around something I didn’t even have in my deck, took three damage too many and thus lost the game. Had he known the Reaches were only in there at the dubious command of Billy Waffles (Guillaume’s Americanized name), he would have probably played differently.
I can think of a thousand different situations in which someone called his opponent (or himself) lucky. But Magic is a card game, and the lone fact of shuffling cards together involves randomness. But being successful at Magic requires patience. The really good players don’t emerge in one given tournament, but over the long run.
…
In a game of Magic, theory says that the better player wins more often. How much more often? What part does skill have on the game itself? How much is Luck involved in a match? When we approach Magic this way, we can define Luck as the factor that will make the underdog win. But then you also need to define the level of a player (luckily, I’ve been through that already! ).
Let’s say two players play a match with decks of the same level. A Limited match, with only commons and no bombs. If the players have the same play level, when they sit down at the table they each have 50% chance of winning. This also means that random factors entirely determine the winner of the game. That’s right: 100%. The better a player is compared to his opponent, the more chances he will have to win it through his own work. This advantage could be 60%, 70%, up to 85-90% in a game between a pro and a beginner. Thus, the underdog will need much more Luck in order to win.
Jon Finkel, undeniably the best player before Kai (I’m not saying that Kai was better, I’m just saying it was undeniable before Kai), won 63.4% of his matches in high-level tournaments (these stats are taken from his Hall of Fame profile). That means that, on average, his opponents were 36.6% underdog when paired against him. If we consider him the best player when he was active, and if we consider Luck or random factors as the difference in a match between a good player and a less skilful player, it mattered in a little more than in one-third of his games.
There are a lot of factors in Magic that you can’t overcome. Being paired against the nightmare matchup in Constructed, drawing one-land openers, drawing five lands in a row, or even just losing the die roll.
The more a player improves, the more he’s aware of random factors. And it’s also the reason why you will hear more bad players complaining about bad luck than good players. Good players are the ones who realize, consciously or unconsciously, that random factors are integral to the game. If a good player messes up, he will realize his play level dropped and that he lose the game because of his mistakes that lead up to that point.
However, the most important point is that good players take advantage of random factors more often.
When my opponent draws a Draining Whelk, there is surely nothing I can do.
When Kai waits the whole game to draw his Morphling, the odds were not on his side before that last card off the top… but they probably were earlier in the game.
When we don’t find Tidings for our Magnivore deck, Tiago decided Boomerang was the best alternative.
When José sees my Green mana and takes three “free” damage, would he have done the same against another opponent?
Sometimes, random factors don’t seem so random after all…
How many times will you draw a card at the last possible moment, when you’ve been waiting to draw it for a number of turns?
How many times will your last-minute changes win you games because you had the right intuition?
How many times will your opponent be misled by hints you left behind, be they purposeful or accidental?
To each of these questions, the answer is the same: The more experienced / better you are, the more often it will happen.
In fact, the more experienced you become, the more chances you have to turn random elements into favorable ones. In the long run, your stats will improve thanks to your rising play level and to the random factors, and you will learn to take advantage of this. Playing for a card that you will eventually topdeck, having the right intuition when it comes to last-minute card and deck changes, understanding that you picked a card that will screw your draft, knowing when toy change focus and switch gameplans… there applications are endless.
Sometimes you don’t have to be good to have things turn your way, but when you are good, things turn your way more often.
Until next time… stay lucky.
Raph