“An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a narrow field.”
— Niels Bohr

Picture this:

It’s the final round of Day 1 of the Grand Prix. You’re on the bubble—the winner of this match gets to go onto the next day with an X-1-1 record and a shot at the Top 8; the loser gets to sleep in. The format? Standard, in the dark days when, for a brief month or two, Stoneforge Mystic, Jace, and Batterskull were all legal together. The result was a sea of Caw-Blade mirrors all over the top tables that would make Arcbound Ravager shake its head and say, “Too dominant!”

With Caw-Blade mirrors, every game of every match is a grind. The deck didn’t rise to dominance from being easy to beat. Caw-Blade was renowned for its tenacity and ability to pose a variety of threats far more than for its blistering speed. Sometimes from turn 3, each player is gaining four life a turn. The result—it’s been a very long day of Magic. It’s 9 PM. Every round has gone 30 minutes overtime, and you’ve made more hard decisions today than you can remember making in a good while. Time is starting to tick down on this match, and you know you need a result, and fast.

You attack. He’s on the back foot. He chumps with a Squadron Hawk and goes to 1. You have two Batterskulls in play; there are five minutes left in the round. You’re a game down. It’s down to this final turn; you have to kill him to have a shot, for some sort of small miracle to happen game 3. Your friends are watching. God, the time pressure is killing you.

He taps out to equip, swings with his lifelinking Bird, and passes the turn. This is it, you think. Your draw: Sword of War and Peace. Totally superfluous, you have this game in the bag. Attack with everything, opponent tapped out—he’s dead, right?

“You’re dead,” you explain to your opponent, helpfully.

He gives you a quizzical look. “Block here, gain 8, take 12, go to five?”

Wait. Isn’t he on one??

Oh no. You’re joking.

You forgot to note down the lifegain from his attack.

The next one puts him up to 13. You fight back, but already the game is slipping out of your grasp. Three minutes left, one minute left, you’re in turns and he’s back over 20 life. You could stack the top three cards of both your decks now and it wouldn’t matter.

The handshake feels muffled, somehow, like you’re wearing gloves. All of your thoughts feel muffled, like your head is packed with cotton wool. You lost, you’re out of the tournament, and it’s entirely your own fault.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a mistake.

Mistakes

Articles about mistakes tend to come in a few standard varieties. The most common, by far, is:

Here are the mistakes most players make. I’m going to teach you how to not do these anymore.

These are useful. After all, getting better at Magic is a process of identifying and eliminating errors. The question for writers is how to write these articles in a way that will actually change behavior. If you don’t mulligan enough, and you read an article that says “mulligan more,” will you mulligan that two Pyretic Ritual, Desperate Ritual, Seething Song, Grapeshot, two lands hand the next time you draw it? Most people won’t. They know at an intellectual level—the most superficial—that they don’t throw back enough hands. But at a deeper level, they still have the same set of rationalizations and mistaken beliefs they started with. “It’s all right, this hand’s great if I can just draw that Past in Flames! Keep.”

There’s also the:

Not all mistakes are bad. Some open your eyes. Coca-Cola was invented because of a mistake; so was penicillin.

This is not saying “some mistakes are good” so much as it’s saying “not all mistakes are actually mistakes.” Makihito Mihara in the Top 8 of Worlds against Paulo Vitor da Rosa springs to mind. For those who’ve never heard the story, Mihara, playing Dragonstorm, started going off. After casting his first Rite of Flame, he realized the one thing combo players never want to realize. He’d miscounted… and only had eight mana, one mana shy of casting his big spell and winning the game.

After frantic recounting, re-recounting, and tanking, Mihara sighed, paid two for a Repeal on PV’s Savannah Lions, and slowly peeled the top card of his library. It was, in fact, the third Rite of Flame—the only card in his deck that would get him out of his predicament and let him Dragonstorm PV’s face off.

As much as you can denounce the comical misplay of not successfully counting to nine, you have to admire Mihara’s tenacity. He knew he’d screwed up, but instead of sighing and passing the turn, he made the most of the situation he found himself in. A few short matches later, Makihito Mihara was the 2006 World Champion. Yes, he needed a little help from Lady Luck along the way, but he helped her help him by playing to his outs.

The “great mistakes” of history have a similar backstory. Was it because of his sheer brilliance that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, which, along with vaccination, has saved more lives than any other single discovery in human history? Not really—it was because he wasn’t careful with his bacterial cultures. Fleming, who bears a striking resemblance to Draco Malfoy, left a culture containing Staphylococci open and a fungus started growing there, destroying bacterial colonies. Many scientists would have thrown the plate out, but not Fleming. He wanted to know what agent the fungus produced that was so toxic to bacteria, and it’s thanks to his curiosity that many of us are alive today.

On Kirtar’s Wrath

Some mistakes lead to revelations we wouldn’t have imagined.

The majority don’t. The majority of errors are like what happened to me in GP Singapore, described in the opening of this article. They’re stupid, they’re heartbreaking, they make you want to throw your deck out the window or get drunk and yell at policemen at 3 AM, or ask yourself what makes you play this game when you’re clearly useless at it. We aren’t interested in them. We want to get rid of them. Who could possibly want to say anything in defense of them?

I would.

Here’s food for thought:

The only way you improve at anything is by constantly screwing up at it.

There’s an alluring fantasy that writers, and often readers and players, like to buy into. It goes something like this: If I make my writing good enough and accessible enough, people will be able to understand things in the space of an article. If you can sit people down and explain the concepts to them very clearly and without nonsense, then they should be able to go out and apply those concepts flawlessly. Right?

Dead wrong.

If you want to have a chance at understanding anything, you need to go out and do it. A lot. This means screwing up, a lot. My very first Constructed tournament was a PTQ way back in Odyssey block. I played U/G Madness. I didn’t have any Circular Logics in my deck for a very simple reason: I couldn’t find any. My sideboard contained such hits as Obsessive Search and Aven Smokeweaver. I was 13, and I wasn’t tall enough to rest my arms on the table while shuffling, so I had to stand up.

By Round 5 I was 3-1, and playing for Top 8 against none other than Ben Seck, then without doubt the best player in the country. Earlier in the tournament, I’d kept a seven-card hand without green sources, and only been saved by my opponent getting mana-screwed and having to discard on turn 3. The first spell cast that game was my turn 5 Arrogant Wurm. Ben Seck was playing Wake; he didn’t keep a lot of hands without green sources, as a rule.

Game 1 he had an awkward draw. No Wake, no Moment’s Peace, nothing to deal with my attack force starting from a Mongrel on turn 2. I could’ve discarded Basking Rootwalla EOT, but I held it until my attack step so my Mongrel would be pumped—that’s value! A few turns later, he was on 6, and still hadn’t done anything relevant. Triumphantly I added my fourth creature to the board and passed the turn. Surely there was nothing he could have to deal with such an attack force.

Wait, Kirtar’s Wrath? What does that even do?

I’m sure this anecdote seems comical to many of you reading this, and that’s because you’ve long passed the point I was at then. But that Kirtar’s Wrath was my first experience in learning what this “play around” concept means, and it was an important moment in my development as a player. If I hadn’t had my dreams crushed and been knocked out of that PTQ, that lesson would never have stuck. It’s easy to forget something you read by that guy who writes on the internet. It’s a lot harder to forget it when it happens to you.

Flash forward three years later and I was preparing for my third ever Aussie Nationals. The first two hadn’t gone smoothly—I’d played control decks in the Constructed portion and gotten systematically trounced. They weren’t my thing, I didn’t like that you always had to make decisions. I wanted my deck to do the work for me!

For some context, Saviors of Kamigawa had just come out. Affinity had been completely neutered with the banning of Ravager, Disciple, and all six artifact lands. Red was the aggro deck of choice, Tooth and Nail was combo, and there was the original blue Tron on the control end of the spectrum. One thing nobody expected was the return of the former elephant in the room, led by Erayo, Soratami Ascendant complete with Frogmite, Scales of Chiss-Goria, and Welding Jars.

Erayo Affinity was for real. Some games you locked them out by turn 2. Other games you killed them in the air by turn 4. It wouldn’t have been a great deck if people knew it existed and were packing Kataki or Hearth Kami or Chalice of the Void, but at the time Kataki was getting about as much airtime as One with Nothing. Flipping Erayo made Tooth and Nail practically a bye. Cranial Plating + Ornithopter made anything without the Magma Jet a bye. The red matchup was interesting and not especially easy, but still no worse than a coin-flip, especially if they didn’t know how to play against you (and no one played around Scale of Chiss-Goria. Seriously, go look that card up.)

So naturally I ended up playing… Mono Red. 1-2 in Constructed and 1-2 in Draft later, I was out before Draft 2 had fired up.

Why? I hadn’t yet grasped the crucial concept—never play a decent deck in the dead center of the metagame, a deck that everyone’s prepared for, without a very good reason (I would nevertheless make the same mistake five years later at PT Amsterdam, but that’s another story). I played against opponents who knew exactly what to do against me and had five cards in their deck specifically to deal with me, while I could barely figure out how to sideboard against them. If I’d played the deck for months beforehand, tweaked it, and knew it inside and out, that would be a different story… but really I picked it up a few days before the tournament. I knew it was fine, just fine, and didn’t want to rock the boat.

There have been so many more mistakes over the years. Too many to count. In the Top 8 of GP Sydney 2006, I second-picked Deathspore Thallid over Mangara of Corondor in pack 1 because I “Didn’t want to end up G/W” after taking Tromp the Domains first, which can easily be splashed. In the Top 8 of Nationals 2008, I didn’t Momentary Blink my Mulldrifter with damage on the stack. I was saving it for my Venser, which was going to stop his Mistbind Clique championing the Bitterblossom that would otherwise kill him… but when the Venser was countered, the Blink ended up useless, and I lost a nail-biter. At PT Hollywood in 2008, I tapped out against a combo Reveillark opponent when I had Rune Snag in hand. My reasoning: There’s no way he has both the Body Double and the Greater Gargadon. What are the chances of that?! Well, they were small, but the consequence was that I lost a game I was well ahead in.

But who hasn’t? The process of getting better at Magic is a process of making mistakes at a higher level. You go from knowing that Kirtar’s Wrath is a card to making better deck choices to getting the right percentage plays in complicated situations, and even then you look back and wonder if you should’ve held that Spidery Grasp a turn longer. Nobody’s perfect. It really frustrates me when I see kibbitzers criticizing pros who made suboptimal plays in complicated, high-pressure situations. Of course they made errors. If you don’t like it, go make the Top 8 of a Pro Tour and show us that you could do better.

In the meantime, the rest of us will celebrate errors instead of trying to squash them. Errors make us better, and errors make us human. No one has fallen in love without first being hurt, and no one has won a Pro Tour without first getting crushed by that Kirtar’s Wrath.

Until next time,

Jeremy