I was cruising through my tournament results the other day only to find that I have actually lost more Duelists’ Convention International-sanctioned matches than I have won in the 2007 calendar year. This minor detail doesn’t preclude me from playing in Nationals, somehow, but I was left with a new conundrum: what should I do at Regionals since I can’t actually play?
I naturally had to take on a Flores-style Apprentice to plow through the morass in my stead, and validate my deckbuilding ability while providing some excuse to playtest and drink excessively*. I quickly set my sights on David Glore.
I “spotlighted” Robert Larrabee last week, so it’s time to do some justice to David. DG is 50% good friend, 50% loyal barn, 50% excellent-source-of-cards, and 50% outstanding chef. If you think that adds up to more than 100%, you are right. 200% is roughly appropriate because he is seriously a textbook exercise in multiple personality disorder. I have no idea if he’s ever been diagnosed, but let me explain.
Bringing Dave to a party is like calling seraphim down from heaven. He’s actually all you could ever ask for. This is mostly because he has the lowest tolerance of anyone in the universe, and therefore he doesn’t waste a bunch of your money getting good and sloshed – but he knows it, so he doesn’t pull an Amy Hale and snarf all over your carpet. But he also has this glaring penchant for becoming a master – I am talking an absolute expert – at witty retorts and pithy insults when he needs to. You know that dude at parties who your friend knows and insists is cool, but is in reality the loosest organism on two legs? I am talking the guy whose most redeeming quality is the blissful silence he engenders upon the room when he’s finally done running his mouth? Yeah. Dave has this uncanny ability to slither in next to that guy and, by virtue of a string of insults that would leave Sergeant Slaughter quaking in his boots, absolutely humiliate that guy to the point that he dare never show his face again. And heaven forbid the poor soul try and fight back. Oh boys. You know it’s bad when Dave stands up and begins to point that finger. It’s like talking back to your mom. There are just no outs.
That’s one side, though. The other involves an annoying device known as the “veil of melancholy.” I have yet to see this veil, but I know it exists because short of some supernatural intervention there is absolutely no way an otherwise-jovial person’s mood could change as rapidly as Dave’s does in playtesting. You have to venture to the top of a mountain and study under the tutelage of a wise sage for a minimum of eight years to hone the patience needed to play a pleasant game of Magic with DG. This is because when he’s winning, he is the chattiest, most animated, most excited, most excitable, hum-my-favorite-tune-as-I-send-my-team-into-the-red-zone-and-crush-your-face soul to ever shuffle a deck of cards. But man oh man, does that tune stop dead in its tracks once you resolve a Wrath and blow up his team. The veil drops. He is stone cold. Monosyllabic. Nods. Grunts. Anger. Melancholy. A sigh, a flip of the top two cards before the scoop, a “Jesus, this is the most lopsided matchup EEEEVVVVVEEEEEER.” The problem is that in both modes you absolutely cannot suppress the urge to slap the living hell out of him. It’s awful either way. It’s either “nan nanna boo boo” or “nan nanna screw you.”
That said, he’s good at playtesting. What that means will be the actual “Magic Content” section of this article. Later.
So he and I (more him than me, but that’s neither here nor there) developed the following deck for the world’s most glorified PTQ-for-a-PTQ (Regionals, naturally).
4 Llanowar Mentor
2 Greenseeker
4 Magus of the Bazaar
4 Drowned Rusalka
4 Golgari Grave-troll
4 Stinkweed Imp
2 Life from the Loam
3 Darkblast
2 Flame-kin Zealot
4 Bridge from Below
4 Narcomoeba
4 Dread Return
1 Swamp
3 Forest
3 Island
4 Watery Grave
4 Breeding Pool
1 Yavimaya Coast
1 Underground River
2 Overgrown Tomb
1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
Sideboard
3 Delirium Skeins
1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
1 Blazing Archon
2 Slaughter Pact
4 Krosan Grip
4 Extirpate
Basically, we wanted a very powerful Dredge deck, but more importantly we wanted to be resilient and be able to withstand the hate. A whole lot of people planned to beat Dredge by having a sac-outlet and removing the Bridges whenever it was convenient. Our plan was to say “sweet” to that, because Grave-Troll was our primary method to victory. The Seekers and Mentors, in addition to providing non-Caverns or Spirit Guide turn 1 discard outlets, also made it possible to reliably turn 5 or earlier a Grave-Troll, while still allowing for the possibility of “broken Dredge draws.” This build was also much more effective against a Tormod’s Crypt for that exact reason; you could make them break it to kill a Troll as opposed to having them get all your Bridges, Returns, and Flame-kins. Dave came up with the name “Goodyear,” because it helps you get there.
Yes, the list is 61 cards, and no, I don’t think that’s correct. I would have cut a Dread Return and a Life from the Loam for an Akroma and a list of 60. That’s not how it went, though.
Regionals is sort of like the Dragon-Con of Magic tournaments. All the freaks come out at night. Akroma’s Memorials, Loxodon Warhammers, and all kinds of pipe-playing elves will litter the top tables and sometimes secure Nationals berths. Spectating at a Regionals tournament is great, because it’s sort of like going to a traveling exhibition at the zoo: you never really know what you’re going to see. My favorites from this year:
5) A twenty-three year old Caucasian male who looked exactly like Hisoka, Minamo Sensei and was practicing martial arts moves in the hall when he thought no one was looking.
4) Captain Hollister, a.k.a. Der Unintentional Flatbill, a.k.a. Alex Kim, a.k.a. Chief Wearing-A-Certain-Brand-of-Clothing-Is-Not-Going-To-“Get-You-There”-in-the-$1700-Dollar-Kyle-Sanchez-Sense-and-Neither-Is-Your-Shirtless-Myspace-Picture**.
3) As always, my former team mascot and favorite plumber-judge, Prince Ponytail, who ran an excellent event this year.
2) The freshly re-imaged shaved-headed chinstrap-bearded white-T-wearing Miguel Williams, who might win the “Which Magic Player looks most out-of-place at a Magic tournament” award for the entire United States.
1) Hunter Phillips.
As it happened, Dave made Top 8, losing only one match and IDing Alex Kim into the Top 8, because as much hell as we give AKim he is very good at Magic and is becoming less annoying by the week****. D lost in the Top 8 to a Zoo player, but AKim “got there,” so all was not lost. Nothing ridiculous happened, or anything; the Zoo guy just drew burn for all of Dave’s outlets, and D couldn’t stabilize with Grave-trolls in time.
I guess I’m apparently the only guy who “just loses,” by the way, because at the end of every round I was beleaguered by incoherent bad beat stories like the following:
“Yeah, I was playing against Dragonstorm, and I just had no shot. He had the Lotus Bloom on turn 1 every game. How lucky.”
“How many games did you play?”
“Two.”
Does anybody actually enjoy hearing bad beat stories? I am pretty sure the answer is “no,” and yet… “Man, I went all-in with AA before the flop, the guy called me with KK, and he obviously hit his King. Grrr Rawr Whimper Whimper.” Right. That is why when you lay down the two aces, the dealer doesn’t just ship you all the chips and move on to the next hand right there. You can, you know, lose. It happens. That is how chance works, right? “But it seems like it always happens to me.” It doesn’t. That’s not possible. “The guy’s just so lucky.” That’s not a story, though. There’s luck in Magic and in Poker? Naaaawwwwwwww. “It’s ridiculous. He had the answer for every single one of my threats.” Well, right. That’s why he’s playing, you know, a control deck. If he doesn’t have the answer to every single one of your threats, he probably loses, and if he does, he probably wins. That’s not ridiculous, that’s how the guy’s deck is designed to work.
Ahem.
I took the LSAT yesterday. While my brain wanted to melt at the end of the 5+ hours I was in the room, the whole experience was uncannily similar to tournament Magic. I seriously doubt I would have done as well as I (think I) did if I hadn’t been used to keeping my brain “on” for like, oh, twelve hours at a time every couple of Saturdays. So all you aspiring lawyers whose parents complain about the massive waste of time and money you pump into this little game of ours? Tell them it’s for a good cause.
Content. Right.
I ought, in retrospect, to have penned this before Regionals, because I think it’s very important. I decided instead to get some decklists out there, but with the onset of a new Block Constructed season it seemed that now was an appropriate time as any to talk, once again, about playtesting.
Now, there are a lot of articles out there about the testing process, but I hope to cover somewhat different ground. I want to talk about how exactly you determine what cards to cut and add. A lot of people, it seems, do a lot of testing solely to figure out matchup percentages and determine what cards are good (or bad) at what point in time. A few people even coordinate effective, sometimes-counterintuitive strategies to shore up percentage points in a given matchup. When it comes to cutting or adding cards, though, I think most people aren’t nearly systematic enough. It hurts the final product and can contribute to a whole host of losses. The worst part, though, is that most people don’t even understand why they made an error in the first place.
A lot of people ask me why I started designing decks in concert with Richard, how we wound up becoming a team, etc. Without a doubt, the most valuable thing he’s taught me and really drilled into my head is the following principle:
The only reason a card should occupy a slot in your deck is because it causes you to win more games than any other available card would in its place. What this means is that if you’re wanting to switch one card for another in a given list, the only possible reason you should do so is if the new card (or new combination of cards) causes you to win you more total games when you draw it than you would if you had drawn the old card (or cards) instead.
This seems obvious enough, I suppose – but it really comes into play when you start thinking about its implications, primarily:
A card being good – even extremely good – in a deck is not a reason enough to include it in that deck.
The best way to illustrate what I’m talking about is with examples, and two immediately spring to mind: the inclusion of Tarmogoyf and Magus of the Moon in my Gruul lists.
I currently don’t have Tarmogoyf, but I do have Magus of the Moon. Yet the Goyf in testing was really, really good for me. Why, then, am I not playing it?
I knew, because of mana curve issues, that Goyf would probably replace either Scab-Clan Mauler or Dryad Sophisticate in my existing list (Sophisticate has since gone by the wayside, but that’s neither here nor there). So I replaced it first for one and then for the other, all the while keeping the card I subbed out in the back of my mind. Many of the games I won by drawing Goyf were absolute blowouts, and I lost comparatively few games to him being a random 1/2 or 2/3 when I played him. So keep him, right?
No. The problem with that line of reasoning is this: you don’t get bonus points for blowing the opponent out. Whether you halt their entire offense with a two-mana 4/5, or you barely eke out an edge by chipping away with a 2/1 unblockable while your opponent fails to rip a removal spell to kill it, you’ve still generated one match win. The fact is, in most of the games where Goyf was absolutely insane, the Scab-Clan or Sophisticate would have gotten the job done, albeit much less safely or securely. There were times, to be sure, when the fact that he survived Lightning Helix, or the fact that he didn’t need to be Bloodthirsted, or the fact that he makes Dredging early downright embarrassing was extremely relevant. But there were also times when I got Dragonstorm down to one because he was a 2/3 as opposed to a 3/3 with trample, and the like, and at the end of the week those times outnumbered the times when Goyf’s insanity gave me a win where an SCM/Dryad would have given me a loss.
It doesn’t matter that theoretically Tarmogoyf’s four toughness (that’s generally what it is against Dralnu) always makes it immune to Last Gasp. It only *actually matters* when 1) They draw the Last Gasp, 2) They would choose to target Tarmogoyf with it as opposed to something else anyway, and 3) The fact that Tarmogoyf doesn’t die to Gasp while Scab-clan Mauler does is the difference between losing and winning a game.
That’s one example out of many, but you can see how people’s theoretical arguments that seem on the surface very rational (you see this sort of reasoning in a ton of other situations) don’t actually matter very much a good percentage of the time. We heard this a lot in testing for the Legacy GP. “So what do you do against Flash if they’ve got the turn 1 kill and you don’t have a Leyline?” Well, we lose. Fortunately, that doesn’t come up all that much, and we’ve got an extremely good disruption suite on turns 2-5 that almost positively ensure that we’ll wind up taking the match.
It’s for this reason, actually, that I advocated playing Magus of the Moon in Gruul. In theory, he’s real bad against the mirror, and in theory he doesn’t do all that much against Solar Flare and Tron because they all have Signets. But in twenty-games of game 1 mirror testing, Magus of the Moon only lost me two games that would have been salvaged had he been one of the Call of the Herds that used to be in his place. The fact is, while Grey Ogres generally don’t win the aggro mirror, he still kills Solifuge and Sulfur Elemental, and generally eats the same Rift Bolt or Seal of Fire that would have one-for-one’d the vast majority of my other creatures. He doesn’t necessarily do it as efficiently or as effectively, but the mirror match is so alternatively random or play-dependent game 1 that his 2/2-ness in and of itself did not cost me very much – and he won me a game against a three Kird Ape draw because the guy had no basic Forests. Sometimes the matchup was a lot closer than I’d like it to have been because I didn’t have six power worth of Elephants in one card, but a card’s value on the gradient of goodness is not what is at issue. The important issue is how many times it’s the determinate factor in a win or a loss.
Is that Kird Ape situation unlikely? Absolutely, but unlikely situations happen in tournaments all the time. One of the biggest errors people commit in playtesting is saying “well, that was an anomaly because I drew all 4 Seal of Fires in my opening hand” or refusing to mulligan to five because that generally doesn’t happen all that often, and “they want to see how their deck plays out.” No, no, no, no, no. The fact is, randomization is not the same as even distribution, and sometimes weird things happen. I think one of the many reasons people were playing 18 lands and 4 Repeals in Dragonstorm decks is that they’d witness all the games where Repeal was a huge blowout (I tested it, and yes, sometimes it absolutely was) and say “wow, that was insane” but failed to consider 1) how many times they needed Repeal specifically to win that game, 2) how many times drawing a land instead would have still resulted in a win, and 3) how many games they lost due to failing to draw enough land.
Anyway, back to the earlier point, the Magus was winning a huge percentage of games against Glittering Wish and Dredge decks that Call just could not have done otherwise. At the end of a 60-game session, the Magus explicitly won me around eight games and explicitly lost me five. That was enough for me to include it in the deck.
Of course, the corollary to this line of reasoning is that you have to have the numerical data to back it up. But it only takes a few games to consider exactly how important the identity of one particular card is, especially in an aggressive deck. If many of the cards work more or less the same, often it’s better to err on the side of what can earn you the most blowouts, if the only drawback is a slightly less efficient combination of power and toughness.
Thanks for reading. Next week, we go into Theory Mode.
Zac
* Because LITERALLY NOBODY I KNOW OUTSIDE OF MAGIC is remaining in Memphis over the summer. It’s the most annoying thing in the world. At least 50+ people I hang out with on a regular basis are off to the far corners of the globe to either a) do research or b) party a bunch.
** He changed that picture a long time ago, but still. I want to hassle my friends, and the truth is no obstacle, c’mon. And I know y’all are sick of the footnotes. This will be the last one, I swear***.
*** I have no intention of keeping this promise, obviously.
**** Sort of.