Unsurprisingly, we all strive for perfect technical play. After all, winning games of Magic happens a lot more often when you’re actually making the right plays. There’s a very different domain you can shine in, though. It comes up less frequently but sometimes pays even bigger dividends—it allows you to win when the cards make it impossible to do so. That element of Magic has many names and applications. Bluffs, mind games, Jedi mind tricks—all of these refer to situations in which you gain advantages or even win games by beating an opponent outside of playing the right cards at the right time using the right mana.

Mind games are one part of the game I personally find utterly fascinating as they allow direct interaction between the players—instead of interaction through the cards—to influence the result of the game. The Jedi mind trick, the ability to use nothing but controlled communication to induce misplays in your opponents, is what I’m going to talk about today. 

To me these types of plays add a different arena to the game that gives it an incredible amount of additional depth. A perfectly executed Jedi mind trick is one of my favorite things to hear about or see, not to mention do. Though I’m far from perfect in that area of the game, few things give me the same kind of rush as getting a Jedi mind trick to work does. 

As such, the recent reactions among the community to a certain incident involving Mike Flores and Zack Hall are quite shocking, even somewhat frightening to me. They make me fear for the future of Jedi mind tricks in general.

For those who don’t know the gist of what happened, Zack’s description of the situation is available on Facebook, and you can find Mike’s take on the issue here. To give a short overview: 

Early in game 1 with Zack tapped out, Mike Vialed in Nomads en-Kor during the end step, ticked his Vial up to 2 during his upkeep, and Vialed in Cephalid Illusionist. He then revealed Force of Will and a blue card from his hand and said something along the lines of, "I have you." Zack answered, "Show me," or maybe, "Show me the combo," at which point Mike flipped over his deck and started pulling out the Narcomoebas. Zack asked to see the deck, and once he had taken a good look he said, "Tell me when you’re ready to move to your draw step."

So much for the incident itself. Here’s what the community discussion focuses on—to simply quote Zack:

"Mike gets very upset, telling me what I did was low, claiming the friendly banter of the match meant that a play like this should have never been done, that I should just scoop. I say no of course, as he’s the player who messed up his combo and milled his entire deck. "

Cue in other players—including Jon Finkel and Tom Martell—accusing Zack of misdeeds that reach from breaking a social contract and scumming to outright cheating. The weirdest thing? Zack wasn’t even trying to Jedi mind trick Mike—at least that’s what he says—he just unintentionally phrased his statement in a way that led Mike to think the game was already over and sent him into what I’d call "go through the motions mode."

Those accusing Zack of scummy behavior mainly claim one thing: because of the ambiguity of his statement, what followed was his fault.

You know what? If your opponent says something that could be interpreted in different ways, make sure they mean what you think they mean. When you’re playing combo and tell your opponent they’re dead, if they don’t start packing in their cards, the onus is on you to prove your opponent is actually dead—no matter what you think they said.

If they do anything other than very clearly ask to verify you actually have a win condition in your deck, admit defeat, or pick up their cards, you should always understand their statement as, "Go right ahead and kill me."

As long as you still have to make plays and execute the mechanics of your kill, the game is still going on. They’re asking you to actually go off, be it to prove you can actually win, to gather information, to make sure you actually know how your deck works, or simply to tax your mental strength before the next game.

You then have to go off correctly or lose the game. That includes being in the correct phase for your combo to work. I mean, if you’re playing Storm with Past in Flames, if you show them the Tutor saying, "Gotcha!" and they answer, "Show me the combo," do you put down your cards, pick up your deck, and pull out the Tendrils and Past in Flames?

As to breaking a social contract, there’s a significant difference between asking to see the combo process and asking for a specific card as in, "Just show me the Tendrils."

By saying just show me the card I die to, they have tacitly agreed that they a) know exactly what’s going to happen and b) accept that the game state as is will neither change nor need to change for you to win.

They’re asking you to perform an otherwise illegal action—searching your deck without casting anything that lets you do it, in this case—to shortcut through the actual combo process and jump to the point where they can verify you actually have a way to kill them.

In short, just because you think you’ve already won doesn’t actually make it so. As long as game actions are still taking place, the game is still on, and if you think otherwise and kill yourself, that’s your fault.

Personally, I’d even be fine with Zack’s actions had he intentionally tried to get Mike to combo off during his upkeep. I’d look at it as a very devious but well employed mind trick, and given that Mike himself wrote this article, I would’ve expected him to see it the same way.

A friendly atmosphere during the match doesn’t change that—as long as you’re playing a sanctioned match of Magic, you need to play flawlessly until it’s certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that the game is in fact over. Until then, you should expect your opponent to mind trick you into screwing up when you let them.

The Inner Workings of the Jedi Mind Trick

Speaking of mind tricks, let’s finally get to the part of the article where you might actually learn something. The basic principles behind a Jedi mind trick are very close to what con artists do to get their victims to part with money or vital information. You create a fictive reality that differs from objective reality in one small but crucial detail and find a way for your opponent to mistake that fictive reality that only exists in their mind for the real one. The process can be broken down into a few steps:

1. Prepare the field.
2. Figure out what you need your opponent to do to be able to profit.
3. Figure out what the situation has to look like to induce your opponent to do whatever it is you want them to do.
4. Mobilize every iota of acting skill you possess to make the fictive reality you want them to believe in seem like the objective reality. Keep in mind that over-acting and acting well are two very different things, though. Exaggerated sighs when looking at your hand may get you there at an FNM; they obviously won’t work against PV.

One thing to keep in mind here is that it’s much easier to sell someone on something they actively want to believe—maybe that you don’t really have anything to interact with them—than to convince them of something that is actively detrimental to them.

You getting mana screwed is, overall, a net positive for your opponent, so it’s much more likely for them to want to believe that than that you’re holding a fistful of removal spells. If you led on turn 1 with Llanowar Elves and want them to kill it (because you have a ton of lands in hand), you might want to snap play the land you’ve drawn on turn 2 before considering which of your multitude of (possibly imaginary) three-drops you play. 

In Magic, a large part of your "acting," that is to say your management of the flow of information, will actually consist in correctly timing and managing your in-game resources. Which lands you tap, how you arrange your lands before casting a spell, or making sure your last two counterspells came from the far right of your hand before having your actual hand hover over that part of your hand of cards when trying to bluff a counterspell—make sure it looks unintentional though—all can work depending how good you are at it and how experienced your opponent is.

A well-executed example of this kind of controlled information "leakage" can be seen in the first game of the finals of GP Pittsburgh between Yuuya Watanabe and Lukasz Musial (watch it here if you haven’t seen it yet).

On turn 3, Yuuya was facing down a large squad consisting of two Memnites, a Vault Skirge, and a freshly cast Steel Overseer with only a Squadron Hawk to his name and a Dismember in his hand.

Instead of just killing the Overseer, Yuuya cast Preordain, which indeed found a second Dismember, and slammed that on the Overseer straight from the top of his deck. Sure enough, on his opponent’s fourth turn—after Hawks had traded with the Skirge and a Memnite— his opponent (tapped low from activating Contested War Zone) neglected to play his land before casting Glint Hawk, and Yuuya caught him with his pants down by Dismembering the last Memnite in response, killing the Hawk. His opponent could only sheepishly play a Nexus—which could’ve activated the one already in play to save the Glint Hawk.

A mind game like this is comparatively straightforward. What you do is to use the way you play your cards to suggest a particular kind of conclusion to your opponent, hoping that they will make wrong assumptions as to what your options are.

The true Jedi mind trick goes a step further. Instead of just playing in a particular way to create the fictional reality you’re trying to convey, you use the additional actions that make up a match of Magic—gestures, movements, and the words you say as well as what could be called the gestalt image of the gamestate as a whole—to provide one impression while in reality something totally different is going on.

Fundamentally, what a Jedi mind trick does is abuse the suggestibility of the human mind. Say I tell you, "Don’t think of a pink elephant!"

Most people will automatically picture a pink elephant in their mind’s eye (did you?).

When you perform an actual Jedi mind trick, what you do is often quite similar to this, though much better hidden. Let’s see how this works by studying a few examples.

The Pen Trick

This is probably the most well-known of the Jedi Mind tricks. The board is favorable for your opponent to attack on, but you’re holding a trick that will blow them out. If they’re playing around your trick by attacking conservatively, though, you’ll likely end up losing the game. As such, once they start to decide which creatures to attack with, you pick up your pen as if to just write down the life total change, hopefully leading to them attacking recklessly.

If you want to see this in action, check out the finals coverage of Worlds 2007, Patrick Chapin against Uri Peleg. You can see Patrick reach for his pen at 1:19, followed directly by Uri finally deciding what to attack with after deliberating for about a minute.

So let’s see how this breaks down:

1. Preparation: make sure you pick up your pen to note down your life total when they move to declare attackers whenever there is clearly nothing you can do. Otherwise, picking up the pen might actually tell them they should be afraid of a trick now, especially if they know about this one.
2. You need them to run into your combat trick, obviously.
3. Clearly for them to all-out attack it has to look as if they’re easily getting in some free damage.
4. Pick up your pen; don’t look suspicious. This shouldn’t be too hard as long as you’ve been doing it all game already.

Controlling Focus

The basic idea here is to focus your opponent’s attention on a play different from the one you plan on making. A classic example of how that works is the "thinking out loud" approach.

You’re playing Reanimator in game 3 against an opponent that has access to Relic of Progenitus and Tormod’s Crypt, though this game he has only played two Flooded Strand so far. On your turn, you drop another land and play a Pithing Needle, musing aloud, "Hmmm, Crypt or Relic…." Your opponent decides to put some pressure on and tells you to make a decision—at which point you name Flooded Strand and essentially double Time Walk them.

And the breakdown:

1. You’re actual preparation here is minimal. The basic reason for which Pithing Needle is sided in is to deal with hate—which means your opponent is already halfway to where you want him. Being generally vocal about meaningless decisions helps, obviously.
2. You want to turn your Needle from anti-hate into a tempo blowout by naming the fetchland.
3. For this to work, you need your opponent to ignore the possibility that you might name Flooded Strand, which is best done by a) directing his attention to Needle’s traditional role as anti-hate and b) getting him to acknowledge the fact it resolves in a non-standard way. If you ask, "Resolves?" it generally leads to opponents considering their possible responses to the spell—which is exactly what you don’t want to happen. Much better to make them feel like they should get you to finish this irrelevant decision already; after all, they’re quite unlikely to have either Relic or Crypt if the hate isn’t in play yet.
4. Don’t be too obvious about what you’re planning to do. Even the thinking aloud is optional really—or might be actively detrimental to your plan—depending on your opponent’s skill level. Looking thoughtful or checking your opponent’s face for a read for a moment when putting the Needle on the stack might well be enough. On the other hand, you could go to particular lengths if that’s what you feel it takes to get your opponent. One particularly devious way this has been done is to actually ask a nearby judge to confirm that something like Faerie Macabre can be Needled before casting the Needle.

The Imaginary Win

This is the most powerful of the Jedi mind tricks and the reason you should always—yes absolutely always—ask your opponent to show you his win condition before you decide to scoop to an otherwise clear combo win. What you do is to convince your opponent to scoop when there’s actually no way for them to lose.

There obviously isn’t one exact situation to remember here, but in general these plays rely on your opponent missing something about the game state or how the cards involved actually work, leading them to jump to conclusions as to what is going on. One example is my Vendilion Clique play from some time ago but I’d rather go with something a little more famous, performed by our very own Jedi Master Patrick Chapin. In his words:

"I have Chameleon Colossus, Cloudthresher, and two Wilt-Leaf Liege, as well as 8 land. My only card is Thoughtseize. I have 10 life.

My opponent has been playing off the top and has a Siege Gang, 4 Goblin tokens, an Elspeth, an Elspeth token, two Stillmoon Cavaliers, 2 untapped mana, and 17 life. I drew the Profane Command and immediately showed it to him very happily, hoping to draw the concession. He does nothing. I say, "It is a Profane Command. You are at 17, right?"

He says yes, but what are you going to do with it? So, I think and have to decide in a split second whether to kill Siege Gang and be likely doomed in time or try a bid at the win somehow.

I tap all 8 land and say,

"Profane Command, you lose 6 life and all of my legal targets gain fear."

Then I think he asks me something to the effect of, do you attack with everything? Then I turn all of my creatures sideways and attack with the team.

He does not block with anything but the two Stillmoons and is dead as a result. I immediately tell him afterwards, both for his personal use in future situations and to avoid any confusion with random people watching the feature match pointing out that he could have blocked afterwards."

Tricky? Undoubtedly. Legal? Definitely, as confirmed by multiple judges. Impressive? I sure think so. Effective? Well, it won the game. That does seem fairly effective…

Let’s take a look at what happened here:

1. The fact that Patrick simply revealed the Profane Command before doing anything else is not only an easy way to hope to draw a concession, it’s also the perfect set up for the play to follow (even if he doesn’t mention that) as it communicates the impression that you’re convinced drawing the Command just won you the game.
2. You need to get at least two of your guys, including either the Chameleon Colossus or the Cloudthresher, to connect. As such, you need for them to block only with the Stillmoons which can’t block the Colossus.
3. Your opponent needs to assume Chameleon Colossus has fear once you’re attacking with it.
4. Given that any clear indication from your side that you’re targeting the Colossus with Profane Command or that it has fear as a result of the Command is cheating—it can’t as it has protection from black—you have to rely on your opponent to draw that conclusion all by themselves. What you can do,however, is to phrase your targeting in a way that doesn’t make it obvious you can’t target your Colossus before confidently sending in the team. Don’t waver; don’t wait. Once it’s clear Profane Command has resolved, turn them all sideways with as much conviction as possible.

Taken all together, Jedi mind tricks rely on the basic principle of setting up a trap for your opponent through controlled communication and suggestion. You withhold vital information (that you aren’t forced to reveal), send false signals as to what your actual options are, or misdirect the opponent’s attention to a part of the game you don’t really care about.

All of this serves to create a fictive reality which is different from the real world in one important aspect you plan to exploit. If you manage to draw your opponent into believing in this fictive reality instead of the genuine product, the battle is mostly won.

Note that I’m no Jedi master and have only attempted to give you an understanding of how these plays work and what is going on fundamentally. If you want to learn more on the subject of actually employing them yourself or simply how to protect yourself from getting mind tricked, I suggest you read this absolutely brilliant article by Patrick Chapin about Jedi mind tricks in particular and mental edges to be gained as a whole (as soon as you’ve finished reading mine, obviously). He has progressed far further down the road of Jedi mastery than I can even imagine, and that article is an excellent way to continue learning about this part of the game.

The Question of Morality

These kinds of plays are perfectly legal according to Magic tournament rules, though they sometimes skirt the line. That doesn’t answer the moral questions surrounding them, though. Is winning games through anything but in-game interaction against the spirit of the game? If not, how far can you go? Would you do that kind of thing to a friend of yours? How about someone who is very obviously new to the game?

These are questions we each have to answer for ourselves. Here is how I feel:

As stated above, I’m a big fan of Jedi mind tricks. They make the game deeper and more interesting by adding an additional level of interaction to the proceedings. As such, I pretty much stick to the official rules.

As long as you aren’t lying to your opponent about public information (forbidden, not to mention bad behavior outside the game) and your words still accurately reflect the game state, what you’re doing is fine in my book. After all, it only takes a well-placed question, paying attention, or some unbiased thinking to figure out what really is going on.

It isn’t as if I haven’t ever gotten caught, either. Oliver Daems, a friend of mine famous as the creator of the Vintage deck database website morphling.de, once killed me by forcing me to mana burn of off a Mana Drained Gush by playing it during my attack step shortly after the latest errata went into effect, for example.

I didn’t hold it against him. We were playing a tournament after all; the goal is to win by any legal means available. If I allowed him to get me, that was my own fault. I instantly added that play to my own repertoire.

The competition and battle of wits of tournament Magic have always been what has led to my fascination with the game. Mind games are an integral part of this duel, and the game would be much poorer if we didn’t have them. As such, I wouldn’t ever hold it against an opponent if they tried to go Obi-Wan on me.

The fact that I actively enjoy these mind games isn’t all, though. Once you consider mind games immoral, where do you draw the line? Is bluffing a combat trick and continuously attacking your 2/2 into their 3/3 fine? Does sighing dejectedly when you draw your best possible opening hand count? How about the common all-in attack the turn before you’d lose anyway in limited, hoping they concede? How do you feel about winning the game because you tapped an opponent’s land during their upkeep with Rishadan Port that led to them forget their Pact of Negation trigger?

What about Cedric’s literal interpretation of, "Esper Charm, targeting myself"? Is letting your opponent scoop up his cards in response to a convincingly slammed non-lethal Brain Freeze (when the storm count is well visible in front of them) out of bounds? What about revealing a theoretically lethal Yawgmoth’s Will from your hand, which you can’t actually cast with the mana available, saying, "Drew the Will?"

Once you start ruling out certain plays on an objective, non-personal level because of honor, it just becomes all murky and unclear. Honor simply isn’t an objective concept.

That shouldn’t keep you from developing your own subjective code of honor. There are few things Magic-related I’ve been as impressed with as Kenji Tsumura quest to keep his opponents from forgetting to pay for their Pact triggers—at the Pro Tour no less. While I clearly wouldn’t give away those free wins, that doesn’t keep me from admiring Kenji’s poise.

There’s one situation I wouldn’t play tough in, though. I wouldn’t try to Jedi someone that’s clearly new to the game and already has enough trouble following what’s going on anyway. Children are always treated as if they deserve special protection, and I feel like someone totally new to the game should have the same kind of special dispensation.

Once he’s competent with the actual game mechanics, though, we’re back to "all is fair in love and war." After all, if I don’t get him now, how is he ever going to learn how to defend himself against a real Jedi (I’m probably a Padawan at best)? Getting burned is still the surest way to remember a lesson. Not to mention that’s how I learned to look out for this kind of thing, after all, and the enjoyment I derive from playing Magic hasn’t suffered because of it.

It’s All In the Mind

Mind games are a powerful tool for anyone that is looking for an edge outside the actual realm of the cards, and they definitely help create the powerful experiences that make this game so fascinating. There’s a very clear line you always need to be aware of, though: outright lying about public information is cheating. Trying to make plays that don’t work following the rules is cheating. All you can do is to try to get your opponent to make a mistake: no more, no less.

That doesn’t mean you can’t decide you’re above such tricky means of taking a match. The kind of greatness Kenji exhibited when enforcing the payment of Pacts is something I can only admire, even if it shows a much different attitude from mine when playing the game. The amount of honor that man has shown is just awe-inspiring.

His success is also brilliant proof that you don’t need to play to every edge to succeed. Just playing technically superior Magic and putting in the necessary preparation will win you many more games than all the Jedi skills you could ever accumulate in the world. So long as you’re aware they exist, remain on your toes always ready to counter them by paying attention, ask well-timed questions, and avoid information leakage, the Jedi have no power over you.

However you plan on winning your matches, I hope this article gave you a basic understanding how mind tricks work in Magic and how you can avoid falling for them. Until next time, may the force be with you!

Carsten Kötter