Fortune Cookie

"NO MAN IS WITHOUT ENEMIES."

It kind of hit me like the "diamond bullet" that Brando’s Kurtz talks about near the end of "Apocalypse Now." For a long while in my youth, I had pretty much thought that I could get anyone to like me, or that I was really just likeable. I had some charm and I didn’t rock the boat much. I didn’t go in for hazing and horseplay. I didn’t cause trouble. I flowed… but this little note changed all that. Somehow, in that moment I knew that everyone didn’t like me, and I really couldn’t make everyone like me. That just wasn’t the way of the world, and from it I realized that there were just some folks that I couldn’t make happy and other folks that I couldn’t please enough. We have acquaintances that come and go… and they usually go over some disagreement.

In the realms of Magic, I was reminded of this by this article on Mindripper by Mike Turian…

I’m just wondering now if we need to chip in and get Mr. Turian introduced to Dale Carnegie. Yow! I mean Turian makes points that I’ve at least come close to before. If you want to be better at Magic (like the Pro Tour level), then you have to PLAY Magic – and lots of it. You probably aren’t going to bet better by just reading a lot of articles. Okay. Well, I wasn’t particularly enlightened by Turian’s article that day, but perhaps others were. I’d actually guess that to be so. Turian goes on to call fellow Mindripper regular Theron Martin’s recent work as "that pile of poop." Ouch! You Monday Night Nitro fans might want to keep an eye on Mindripper. Things might heat up over there.

I had to think about what that meant, as I’ve rather enjoyed Martin’s work over the past year – if for nothing other that he took the time to actually gather the raw numbers on deck efficiency in relation to the metagame. That data tells you something important, I think. It shows you what decks are "good." Beyond that, Martin offers his own opinion on things, and as it IS opinion, I think the mature reader would know what to do with that and what to get from it. That it is not the end-all, be-all of the thing – the metagame – but really a jumping off point. I’ve met others with rather low opinions of Theron’s work. I’ve read folks with low opinions of different Magic writers, like Sean McKeown. "He wouldn’t know a good deck if it fell out of the sky and hit him." I KNOW that I’m not the guy to be telling someone what is or isn’t hot in the metagame right now, as I’m maybe – maybe – just a rung higher there than Friggin’ Rizzo, and certainly not as much fun of a read…

…but the interesting thing is this.

Those folks, those players, those writers were all of a certain class of higher-ranking players, for the most part, and they don’t either need or want the opinions of almost anyone that is writing on the net. They are NOT the real audience that Theron Martin, Sean McKeown, and the like writes for. It’s the beginner; the intermediate player who I think is the target for this type of writing, and I think it helps them. Should they be disparaged for that? Turian makes his point that you are not going to get much from the top tier of Pro Players in the area of "free tech"… but the beginners and intermediates will take what they can get from whomever they can and build on that. I say this: "Read EVERYTHING…and take it with at least a tiny grain of salt." Turian finally gets topped by Randy Buehler in his latest Sideboard article, which endeth: "The Rule is there is no rule."

I missed States. More of the "I can’t get my house deal closed" saga. Ah well…

It now appears that R/G beats with Fires of Yavimaya should be the top deck emerging from States. This deck was pretty much under the radar on the ‘net. As previously stated, few want to share the really good stuff out on the net when all they have is something to lose. My good buddy Greg Smith had hit the R/G beats trail early, and was touting this color combo. I wasn’t looking at it closely, but Fires had cropped up in a couple of conversations with Blasty. Getting another attack from the untargetable beatstick was pretty much seen as a Good Thing. Anyway, he and I had sort of been involved in what I thought was a loose team… and loose it was. Everything was undefined. We were working with another, more known, personage in the Magic community, and he concocted a very good deck – namely, a Counter Wrath version that stomped a lot of stuff. For my part, I created some janky piles that had even worse holes. Still, I thought I was picking up on, and picking out some, things to worry about with Counter Wrath. Valid points of concern, I thought. In the wild and woolly States environment, I thought that you perhaps had to build and play a deck that was a little different on the control end of the spectrum.

The idea was this: This version of Counter Wrath had only four Air Elementals for the kill. I brought up this scenario: I’m playing Counter Wrath, and my opponent Lobotomies me with a Dark Ritual after their second land drop. I can’t counter and I have an Air Elemental in hand. That is an autoloss. The reply to this was that U/B decks with Lobotomy were inferior. Okay, I said, I’ll give you that – but what does that have to do with our auto loss possibility? I said some random scrub (there was a joke here, because I was putting myself in the random scrub spot since I was the guy who was working through lesser U/B builds and giving up like 300 rating points) plays "inferior" U/B, basically coaxes the luck, and beats you. You still lose a match, and that isn’t helping you win a tourney.

This is all convoluted, because I’m having these conversations with a guy with a lot of good experience and a very high rating. I was pursuing other weaknesses of Counter Wrath, not because I thought it was bad but because I thought it was good. Another problem for the deck that involved Air Elementals was that with red, I thought there was a good chance that the first Air would get burned out. First-turn Seal of Fire and then Urza’s Rage would do that. Ritual-Apparition wouldn’t be fun, either. Ritual-Blazing Specter on turn two. So I was trying to look for solutions to these problems that would fit into the deck. Wrath is not a fast or consistent answer in a two-color deck… and we wound up having these conversations that went right past each other.

The problem was assessing the deck’s consistency in an untested inconsistent environment. He had it tweaked and was testing against a group of the very top decks, but that also excluded U/B discard bounce and any R/B build. The examples wound up being tosses at each other. For my part things got worse when he called Red the best color but assessed that U/W Counter Wrath had the best decks. I mean I guess that is possible, but I find it unlikely. Red looks like the best SPLASH color, perhaps. That looks quite clear and believable, but I continued to have trouble reconciling the statement – and that got in the way of deckbuilding and our relationship as a quasi-team. So where does this lead?

Rule?

Most folks have a bias. They are biased in color and they are biased in deckbuilding. They are biased in what they want to read about on the net. It’s like this. IF you build a ‘good’ deck and you plan on taking it to a tourney to WIN, then you are going to believe that it is best. You are going to ‘defend’ your deck against attacks, just as you believe that that deck will defend your life as it takes your opponents. You sort of have to believe this. You need confidence… or you need to blow all that kind of thinking up and have fun…

Rule?

Randy Buehler >>> "There are no rules."

Or maybe it’s "Take everything with a grain of salt"…

I don’t believe for one second that there’s not someone out there that couldn’t probably just spend some chunk of time reading about Magic, and come out and do darn well at it. That’s just the way the world is, too. It’s fuzzy about rules when you go from the general to the specific. Yeah, most folks might need to play their backsides off 24-7-365 to be good… and then there’ll be some other guy that pops up every once in a while and cleans house for the most part. The guy that comes out of nowhere to win…

We’ve been "Searching for Jamie Wakefield." We’ve been told we’d best perhaps try and be more like Aaron Forsythe. I’d just maybe like to meet Ped Bun and have him sign a Rector or something, and tell him that winning Regionals with the deck he took was INSPIRED AND INSPIRATIONAL…

Me? I’ll keep reading everything I can. I didn’t need Turian’s article, but I read it and, well… he got things right, I think. In the end, he made assessments that I agree with but that I had already known. It wasn’t "poop," but it seemed about as harsh as a corncob after a squat in the field and perhaps a lot less necessary… but then again, he made it to States and won. He didn’t write the kind of article, though, that he likes to read. That had me feeling a little like trying to figure how Red was the best color, coming from a guy saying that U/W offered the best deck. I’m sorting through cards on MagicShop, having fun, and writing a short article this week… and maybe wondering if I made any enemies doing it.