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Deep Analysis — Cause and Effect

After waxing lyrical about Tenacious Tron for a number of weeks, Richard turned his back on his baby and rolled up to a PTQ with a new and interesting deck. Unfortunately, things didn’t go smoothly that day… but does his subpar performance mean that his deck choice was a bad one? This enlightening article looks at cause and effect in Magic, and posits that the path to success is never as clear as it first appears.

Awhile back, I saw Derrick Sheets make a masterful play with Tenacious Tron.

There were four minutes left in game 3, and Sheets and his Rock opponent had run each other out of threats. Sheets had Academy Ruins out and a Razormane Masticore in his graveyard – which was his only way to put the game with such little time left – but his opponent had a Tormod’s Crypt out to counter it.

Finally, Sheets announced, “End step, Repeal your Tormod’s Crypt.” The opponent thought for a second, then activated the Crypt in response. Sheets happily responded by using the Ruins to get back his Masticore, and then revealed the mastery:

Repeal gets countered by my Chalice for one.”

Boom.

Masticore went all the way, and Derrick Sheets took the match.

Sheets tricked his opponent into blowing the Tormod’s Crypt for no reason, giving him a window to retrieve the Masticore and put the game away. I was congratulating him later on coming up with such a great play, when he pointed out something I hadn’t thought of.

“Yeah, but if he’d just let the Repeal get countered, I would have looked like a real idiot.”

Can you imagine the difference in the audience’s reaction had the opponent not taken the bait?

Scenario 1:
Sheets: “End step, Repeal…okay, in response, Ruins the Masticore. Repeal gets countered.”
Crowd: “Oh, wow. That was a great play.”

Scenario 2:
Sheets: “End step, Repeal. No responses? Okay, Repeal gets countered.”
Crowd: “Wow, he just forgot about his own Chalice. What an idiot.”

Now consider the reactions of his friends after the match, had either of these situations played out. If he wins the prize, everyone’s clapping him on the back and telling him what a master he is for taking such a risk and seizing the day. If the opponent shrugs and lets the Repeal go down, he has egg on his face and everyone’s telling him the play was too risky, that he should have just waited for a topdeck like a reasonable person.

Ever noticed that? When you do something risky and it pans out, everyone’s quick to congratulate you for being such a risk-taker… and when it fails, the same people are scolding you for having taken such a stupid risk? Mixed messages, to say the least.

Believe it or not, this is the process by which pretty much every play in Magic is made. You reason out what will give you the best shot at winning the game, the match, the tournament – weigh some riskier plays against the odds that you’ll pull out a win if you don’t take a risk, and then you choose either a safe play or one of the risky options.

Most of the time, you choose the safe play, and it’s not close; for example, it’s probably too risky to attack your Elephant token into a Loxodon Hierarch in Constructed – who’s going to believe you have the pump spell? There will be times, though, when you decide your best chance at victory is to go against the grain. Those are the times when you serve with the team even though a correct blocking configuration will wreck you, because if you don’t swing for the fences, your only chance at defeating his evasive clock is to topdeck your one answer within three draw steps.

Sometimes he blocks correctly, and you look like an idiot for having sent in the team. Other times you smash face in glorious fashion.

By the way, I just posted my worst PTQ finish of my entire career.

1-3 at the St. Louis PTQ. Playing Tenacious Tron?

Nope. I played something else.

What did I do wrong?

“You didn’t play the thing you and Zac spent two months tuning into a Tier 1 deck, dummy.”

Yeah, I just forgot we did that. Forgot about my own Chalice. What an idiot.

No – I took a calculated risk, and it didn’t pan out for me. I looked at all the Destructive Flows and Aggro Loam builds maindecking Putrefy (which kills the deadly “Chalice for two”) and Ghost Quarters alongside their Life from the Loams, and said, “I don’t think I can make it through a Top 8 with this deck. I’m going to play something else.”

I did play something else, and now I have egg on my face.

Has this ever happened to you? Taken a risk, looked like a fool, and had to figure out what you did wrong? Then I’m with you. We have to figure out what we did wrong, so that it doesn’t happen again.

Here’s the list I played.


By now the audience has figured it out.

“You played a four-color Destructive Flow deck? Are you mad? Your mana must have taken you down faster than –”

I had no colored mana problems the entire day.

“Okay, then it was the Boros matchup. Man, I’ve never seen a deck so vulnerable to –”

I didn’t get paired against Boros.

“Then it was the… uh… the… I don’t know. Your deck’s awful!”

That one always gets me. What do you say back to that? I guess “Your mom’s awful” is pretty classy.

Anyway, I built this deck in about a week. In formats past, you could actually test against an entire environment with only a week to work with, because there were only a handful of playable decks. These days, however, your gauntlet is monstrously large:

TEPS, Aggro Loam, Midrange Flow, Scepter-Chant, Affinity, Opposition, Boros, Ichorid, and the Kitchen Sink.

Many of these decks don’t even make Top 8 all that often, but they’re still popular in the Swiss, and so you still have to prepare for them. If you do a ten-game set against each, however, you’ve played eighty games of Magic and still hardly know what you’re doing against any of them. (Apparently a “healthy” format is one that taxes innovation with endless hours of playtesting that will only matter if the pairings say so.)

Lacking time, I went on theory. I knew Midrange Flow beat Tron. I knew Trinket Mage could team up with maindeck Tormod’s Crypt to yield a favorable Ichorid matchup, and the same Crypt would give me a lot of mileage against Loam; “four” maindeck Pithing Needles against Scepter-Chant combined with Duress and Therapy and sideboarded Ancient Grudges should make that matchup fine as well. Running through the decks in the environment, I knew that Trygon Predator would be able to productively munch on things against most of them – including equipment in the mirror – and that there weren’t a whole lot of creatures around that could block him. I did manage to get some games against all of the above decks except Ichorid and Opposition; those were omitted as I ran out of time.

Boros was unwinnable, and I couldn’t really tell one way or the other on Opposition (having had no time to playtest it), but I liked my matchup against everything else. The mirror was build-dependant; if they had four Wild Mongrel, four Call of the Herd, and four Troll Ascetic, they could outrace me in game 1 even though my Trygon Predators gave me equipment advantage and my Iwamoris could stall the board unless they had Putrefy or Jitte advantage. However, I had a sideboard stacked to beat the mirror, with Meloku, Darkblast, and four big copies of the offense-halting Carven Caryatid ready to play.

So what went wrong?

Round 1, I played against a guy who started off by saying he enjoyed my articles. The guy next to him agreed. (A pleasant way to start any PTQ, yeah?) My opponent appeared to be Aggro-Loam based on his first few turns, but unfortunately my most threatening cards were a pair of Dark Confidants. He only had one Red, though, so I decided to take a risk, playing out both Confidants and banking on him lacking either a second (non-Forgotten Cave) Red source or the Devastating Dreams to punish me for it.

He had neither.

The Confidants drew me tons of cards. Several turns later I had an Iwamori down along with them, a Jitte in hand, and my opponent’s board was absolutely barren. Then he played Solitary Confinement, and my offense ground to a halt. Apparently he was playing an Aggro Loam / CAL hybrid that ran both Terravore and the aggro-smashing enchantment in the maindeck.

On my next turn, I flipped Trinket Mage with one of my Confidants, which was undesirable for several reasons. For one, he now knew I had it in hand, and so could Cabal Therapy it if I didn’t play it right away. For another, I only had five mana available, so I couldn’t play it and Engineered Explosives for three (to take out Confinement) in the same turn. I could get Tormod’s Crypt to take out his Life from the Loam, but he still had around five cards in hand, and as my Jitte couldn’t get counters while his Confinement was in play, my two Confidants would probably just kill me from 10 life in the five turns it would take the Confinement to go away on its own. So I played the Trinket Mage, fetched the Explosives, hoped he didn’t have the Therapy, and passed the turn.

He untapped, said “Skip my draw,” and…

Oops. See what he did? He forgot to discard to Confinement. I pointed it out to him, and he apologized and discarded a card, saying “this is the first time I’ve played this deck at a tournament.”

Every single time in my entire tournament career – literally, every single time – I have encountered this situation, I have held firm. If you mess up and forget to discard to it, you must sacrifice it. I would expect no less mercy if I were in the same position.

But I was in a good mood. He was a nice guy. I didn’t want to ruin his day by having him walk around kicking himself for having forgotten to discard, so I let it slide.

“You let it slide?”

I let it slide.

People tell you to never let it slide, and usually, I don’t. People tell you to play to win – play to be a champion – and usually, I do. But there are some times when you don’t play to win. There are sometimes when you concede to your friend so that he can make the cut, even though, in doing so, you have explicitly made it impossible for yourself to win. Nothing runs counter to “playing to win” quite like a concession, but we concede to our friends all the time because they’re our friends. Here, I (effectively) conceded because I didn’t want to ruin a nice guy’s day. I’d never allowed a take-back before this match, and it might happen to be that I never allow another as long as I live… but at that time, at that place, I let it slide. And so I lost the game.

I won game 2, despite a timely Krosan Grip on my Jitte.

Game 3, I was chipping away at him with a Trygon Predator while holding off Loxodon Hierarch with Iwamori, when I happened to draw my one Chalice of the Void. I played it for two, as he had been Loaming left and right in the past few turns. He thought for a second, then responded by tapping his only untapped land to cycle Tranquil Thicket and dredge back the Loam.

What did this tell me? Well, I saw Krosan Grip in game 2, had just put a Chalice for two on the stack, and he dredged back a Life from the Loam in response. The only way that makes sense is if he’s holding a Krosan Grip right now; otherwise, why would he explicitly dredge back a card that will be countered immediately if he attempts to play it?

On his next turn, the opponent played a Terravore and left three mana open. I’d drawn three fetchlands, unfortunately, so it was 3/3 from those alone; the two lands he’d been Loaming around until I had played the Chalice – Tranquil Thicket and Wooded Foothills – beefed it up to 5/5. I untapped, drew, hit with Trygon Predator again, and played Trinket Mage for Tormod’s Crypt.

Here’s where things got complicated, so I’m switching into the present tense.

I’m not at a very high life total, so I cannot realistically afford to take a hit from that Terravore. It’s a 5/5 now, meaning I can’t block with Iwamori or else risk getting completely obliterated if he has a Cycling land to make it a 6/6. Crypt can take it down to a 3/3, though, meaning neither the Hierarch nor the Terravore can attack into Iwamori until the opponent finds two more lands (without Loaming, no less); by that time, racing with Predator might actually be realistic.

So I have to play the Trinket Mage and the Crypt this turn or else I’ll lose to Terravore, but if I play the Crypt and don’t sacrifice it, he’ll just use that Krosan Grip I know he’s got and I won’t even get to remove the two lands he has in his graveyard right now.

My only option is to play the Crypt, activate it, and pass the turn. He can still Grip the Chalice, but I drew a Jitte for the turn and am okay with the Chalice going away so that I can play it and triple my Predator’s clock.

So I play the Mage, Crypt him, and pass the turn. He untaps, and…

Wait a second.

Why didn’t he Krosan Grip the Chalice? I played Chalice for two, he dredged Life from the Loam in response – indicating that he did not care about the Chalice for two – and then I pass the turn and he didn’t have the Krosan Grip?

This is an unexpected turn of events. His next play is Seismic Assault (which costs him the mana that would have let him regenerate Terravore with Hierarch), followed by an attack with the 3/3 Terravore and the 4/4 Elephant.

Now I have a brand-new dilemma. He played Seismic Assault when I had out Trygon Predator; what’s he up to? Ordinarily I would assume that he’s drawn two lands, and is planning on killing the Predator before I can get another swing in, but the last time I made an assumption like that, he didn’t have the Krosan Grip; anything is possible at this point.

If I block the 3/3 Terravore with Iwamori, and he has the two lands, then Terravore becomes a 5/5, and we trade. That’s a problem, because then I have only a Trinket Mage and a Birds of Paradise left to chump against Loxodon Hierarch, and I’ve lost my only offense (Predator) to the Assault.

However, if he has only one land, then his play still makes sense – even if it is a bit preemptively desperate. If he has only one land, and I block either Terravore or Hierarch with Iwamori, then he trades the Assault and a land to get my blocker out of the way, leaving himself with either a 4/4 Terravore or a 4/4 Loxodon Hierarch.

He’s only had three draw steps to find two lands; you’re at eight life, so you can’t let both attackers through, your only blockers are Iwamori and Trinket Mage… how do you block?

I blocked Terravore with Iwamori. He threw two lands at my Predator (this time he played as predicted), the Lhurgoyf and the Legend traded, and the dust cleared with his Assault in play, his Hierarch in play, and my Trinket Mage looking unhappy.

I never drew a way to deal with the Hierarch, and it killed me. I lost the match. It could have been a 2-0 sweep if I had been a stickler in game 1, but I chose Nice Guy over Champion, and lost instead.

In the next round I played against Cedric Phillips with U/G Heartbeat, and game 1 took forever. That’s two nails in my coffin; by far, the two biggest weak points in my Magical game are (1) whenever I play against a friend, I enjoy myself, but can’t seem to stop my play from becoming hopelessly sloppy, and (2) I make roughly eighty mistakes per second as soon as I know there are ten minutes (or fewer) left on the clock. One need only look at all the thought I put into the complicated board position of the last game, and compare it to platinum-hit plays like “Duress your Nostalgic Dreams over a relevant spell when I have both my Tormod’s Crypts in play” to illustrate this.

For the first time in a very long time, I started off a Constructed Magic tournament 0-2.

I stayed in, hoping to keep my 1937 rating from sinking below 1900 (which would cost me a bye at GP: Dallas), but lost to Goblins after defeating a Magnivore deck.

1-3.

So again I ask, “What did I do wrong?”

The purpose of this article is not to try and convince you that I did everything right and lost anyway. Clearly, I made several major blunders in this tournament that led to my horrendous record. Instead, the purpose of this article is to illustrate that the things I did wrong were not the same as the things that I appeared to have done wrong.

I spoke earlier of risk. Clearly, I took a risk when I played Four-Color Flow instead of Tenacious Tron. Was that a good risk to take? The intuitive answer is that “No, it was not. You went 1-3. Don’t ever play that deck again.” However, this is not the correct answer. The correct answer to the question of whether or not I should have taken that risk is this:

I don’t know.

That’s the kicker. My losses had nothing to do with the risk I took, and everything to do with the choices I made during the tournament. I lost round 1 because I allowed a take-back, and that changed everything. I could have been a stickler, advanced to 1-0, and perhaps even gone on to win the tournament. I certainly wouldn’t have lost to Cedric in round 2 had I done this, as we would not have been in the same bracket, so seriously – who’s to say that I wouldn’t have won the tournament had I held firm on the take-back? Moreover, there were Destructive Flows aplenty at that tournament, so who’s to say I would have done better than 1-3 with Tron?

The point of this article is that you can’t look at two tournaments (I made Top 8 at the last PTQ with Tron), take note of only the major differences between the two (I dropped Tron and picked up Flow for this one), and conclude that the difference in outcomes is due entirely to that one major change. Cause and effect are more complicated than that.

Effect? 1-3 at a PTQ.

Cause? Intuitively, the fact that I didn’t play Tron. Actually, it was one simple, non-Magical decision in round 1 that led to this record. Had I made a different decision, my record could have been absolutely anything – save for 0-X, that is.

When you fail at a tournament, other people are always there to tell you what you did wrong – but they don’t always have all the facts. How often do you take a risk, go against the grain, switch your deck, make an offbeat play… and have people tell you that what you did wrong was to take the risk?

More importantly, how often do you stop to double-check that they’re right? It’s easy to let them have the high ground and assume they’re right, because – after all, they didn’t just mess up the tournament; you did, so clearly they must know something you don’t.

But was it actually the risky move that caused your loss, or was it something else? What if you played a rogue deck you’d tuned to beat the field, then lost to U/G Madness and Dragonstorm (in Extended) in the first two rounds? Why on Earth would these strange pairings lead you to conclude that your deck was worthless because you 0-2’d with it? There will be no end of people telling you never to play that rogue deck again, and that it was the deck, not the fact that you paired against two matchups that no one could have possibly prepared for, that caused your loss.

So what did I take away from this PTQ?

No more than I should.

I’ll tell you one thing that I didn’t take away, and that was the notion that I should throw the Four-Color Flow deck away just because its pilot 1-3’d. The most surefire way to miss out on a potentially broken deck is to trash it because it didn’t perform well, especially when the poor performance had nothing to do with the deck itself.

So remember this, the next time you fail at a tournament. The effect was the loss; what was the cause? Was the deck a bad choice for this tournament? Will it still be a bad choice for the next tournament? Did bad plays knock you out? Were you misunderstanding a matchup? Sideboarding wrong?

These are the questions you should be asking; the only way to completely fail at a tournament is to walk away with a knee-jerk, entirely incorrect understanding of why you lost.

So to those of you headed to Dallas, I’ll see you there, and hope you find the process of choosing a deck for that tournament easier than I do. (Right now it’s a real head-scratcher.) To everyone else, good luck at any and all tournaments you’ve got this weekend instead.

See you next week.

Richard Feldman
Team Check Minus
[email protected]