I did not play the best Magic of my life at the PTQ in Nashville last weekend.
Plenty of congrats to Pete for winning the whole thing, but StarCityGames.com other intrepid duo fared considerably worse for their efforts. Richard and I opened what we felt to be an excellent pool, but four turns into the tournament we punted away any hopes of winning. Inexplicably, we decided to swing a Skirk Shaman into a Cautery Sliver with a Scryb Ranger on the board, and the other team stared at us quizzically and two-for-oned us into oblivion. Their Viscerid Deepwalker came into play, we didn’t have a blocker, and even though we buckled down and bluffed our way into several winning board positions (through their Empty the Warrens for ten, no less) the other team had the right answers at the right times. Next round we had no answer to an Akroma before it hit us for fourteen, and we were done.
Looking for something to do, I decided to enter a Legacy GPT with a High Tide deck I was handed at the last minute. At least six Advil and as many rounds later, I found myself in the finals. I had managed to play my way through everything from Orim’s Chants to Gaea’s Blessings to Rules of Law – many in concert with one another – and was in store to win the final game of the finals. I was going off in response to an Aether Vial activation that, courtesy of a Peek, I knew would put Meddling Mage into play. I let the Mage resolve after I had set up my hand, Disrupted a Force of Will on my own flashed back Flash of Insight to jack my storm count, and had exactly enough cards in my hand to mill him for lethal. For some reason I decided not to cast another Reset so that I could kill my opponent with one Brain Freeze – and bear in mind, there was literally no reason not to cast this spell – Remanded the Freeze, and milled the last three cards of my opponent’s library. My opponent proceeded to point to his Jotun Grunt, put two cards on the “bottom of his library”, and attack me for lethal.
I am fairly sure that if I had taught an eleven year old how to play Magic that day, he wouldn’t have attacked into a Sliver for no reason, and he would have played those last three spells correctly. His mother would have looked on approvingly while readying her can of mace in case I planned to make a move. It takes literally no skill to “see” either of those plays. You simply have to read the cards on the table in front of you and be conscious enough not to stare blankly ahead and drool on them while mumbling about stuffed animals, coloring books, and pretty ladies.
What I’m going to take a look at today is why we make dumb mistakes like the ones I just mentioned, because I don’t think traditional explanations quite cover enough ground.
Those explanations usually fall into two categories. The first says that, in essence, you’re not paying enough attention to the game state. You’re careless. You’re Zvi-ing your way through a game, and players next to you can actually feel the breeze from the cards you’re slinging at such a blisteringly fast pace. We’re not as good as he is, though, so we overlook some of the details that we ought to be taking into account. In other words, we need to chill out and focus.
The second explanation approaches these problems as a matter of pre-tournament preparation. The idea is that because of a combination of factors – lack of sleep, hunger, distraction, a long drive, whatever – your brain is being lazy. You need awhile to clean out the rust, and until you get to that point mistakes are just bound to happen.
My problem with these trains of thought is that, if true, they ought to apply to the whole of our Magic-playing ability. If I’m not focusing, then I shouldn’t be able to do all of my High Tide math correctly, anticipating the probabilities of drawing card X with Y opportunities and leaving Z mana up as a backup plan if the first plan fails. I shouldn’t realize that the way my opponent played last turn suggests that his method of interaction is spell Q, and I can minimize that spell’s impact by opting for strategy R over strategy S. But I do. We all do. If the problem is that I’m hungry, or tired, or whatever, then I ought not to do this same sort of thing when I’m well-fed and well rested. But I do. We all do. So I’m thinking that there’s something more.
Now, to be sure, this past weekend I was extremely tired. I’ve got Mock Trial Nationals coming up, and both Cody’s and Dan’s cars were shot so I was having to play Taxi for most of the week. Our business is hitting some hurdles – surmountable hurdles, but hurdles nonetheless – and I’ve had several grant applications and article deadlines piled on top of one another. But that’s life, and things like that happen. If you can’t get over it, then you’ve got a long several decades in front of you.
No, I’m thinking the problem lies in some fundamentally different cognitive approaches to separate aspects of the game. I want to liken the difference between those approaches to the difference between strategic and tactical decision-making, but that’s not quite precise enough.
The best way I can put it is that a certain portion of everyone’s Magical thought process is devoted to avoiding mistakes. Obviously this is a part of learning how to get better at the game; on some level, the player who makes the fewest mistakes is the player who tends to win. Yet after you attain a certain skill level, the only way to attain at advantage is to actively win. You have to out-think your opponent based on the information you have access to that your opponent doesn’t. How can you capitalize on his irrational behavior – in other words, his mistakes – as well as his rational behavior: what you think he’ll do based on the information at his fingertips? With a combination deck a lot of the same thought processes exist, only you have to adapt to the probabilities of being able to win the game with access to a given number of cards.
In other words, it’s the difference between the “chess” aspect of Magic and the “poker” aspect. It’s the unlimited information versus the limited information. It’s what you know versus what you think you know, and how you can exploit what you think you know to maximum effect. They’re both a part of the game we love, but there’s a cognitive dissonance between those two fundamental skill sets that we have to be aware of.
I am of the opinion that only a select few Magic players actually have the capacity to carry out strategic decision-making, to really implement long-term strategies and use theory to their advantage. The problem, though, is that you can get by without consciously applying theoretical knowledge by playing a lot of Magic and behaviorally increasing your win percentage through a Pavlov-like conditioning process. If you don’t punt very often, and you can sense what is “good” and what is “bad,” you’re good enough to win PTQs. There’s something to be said for good instincts, because I certainly don’t have them. But the point is that even though strategic decision-making is more of a “higher art” than tactical decision making – and the “limited information” aspects of Magic are much more difficult to master than the process of simply playing out a board position properly – the best players absolutely positively have to do them both.
I think sometimes I get so caught up in my strategy, in the long-term, in how to maximize the expected value of my plays even though I’m behind on the board, that I forget to take the steps necessary to get to the point where all of that stuff matters. I’ve got this sort of conceited mentality that because I’m getting good at all of the “really difficult” plays that are hard to spot and even harder to execute, I somehow don’t have to worry about the tedium of the combat phase. Because I’m “obviously” so far beyond having to actively remind myself not to swing my 2/2 flyer into a Penumbra Spider, I can just forget about all of that because it’ll “of course” never happen. If I have enough cards and enough mana, my deck’s obviously capable of dealing with a single Jotun Grunt. So I concentrate on how to get to the necessary board position and I lose sight of what I need to do once I get there in the process.
I put the term “higher art” in quotes earlier because just because one type of decision-making may be more difficult in the abstract, that doesn’t make it somehow more essential than another. We’ve got to remind ourselves that just because some mistakes are dumb and amateur, it doesn’t mean that even the most seasoned players can’t make them.
The things in life you take for granted are the things that are least apt to be there when you need them.
That might even apply to life outside of Magic.
Take care,
Zac
P.S. For those of you who care, my current B/u/r control list for Block –
4 Stupor
4 Damnation
4 Aeon Chronicler
4 Bogardan Hellkite
4 Foriysian Totem
4 Sudden Death
3 Tendrils of Corruption
3 Void
4 Prismatic Lens
2 Urza’s Factory
1 Dreadship Reef
3 Molten Slagheap
4 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Island
1 Mountain
2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
12 Swamp
4 Curse of the Cabal (this card is ridiculous in control mirrors, especially the Black control mirror where there is just nothing they can do about it)
3 Pull from Eternity (Back again courtesy of the Curse)
1 Plains
2 Enslave
2 Sengir Nosferatu
1 Void
2 Funeral Charm