Two Situations And Two Big Concepts

The following two situations are like many situations that come up in many tournaments; rather, situations very much like them occur probably every second round (and almost certainly every final round) of each and every big tournament. What is different—and what is worth talking about in these cases—is how the players in question dealt with otherwise common fact patterns in uncommon ways in order to produce stellar results.

Situation One: The End of the Day

There have been a couple of different clean-break tournaments—Pro Tour Tokyo (Team ABU), Grand Prix Detroit (Peppermint Von Corduroy), Worlds 2005 (Glare of Subdual), Pro Tour Berlin (any and all Elves), among others—where one deck completely dominated the field and put some insane number of players into the Top 8; in most cases, the dominating archetype in the hands of a Katsuhiro Mori or LSV will take it all, and then sometimes 3/4 of our heroes will fall in the quarterfinals, and the lone rogue will fail out, and the story will be ruined. Like, I dunno, by a Zvi Mowshowitz.

The following is more-or-less an account of a similar case by a similar domineering deck (albeit at admittedly smaller scale). You probably know some version of the story but probably not the secret origin of how it came to cast a long and ultimately super successful shadow across the Top 8.

Such is the wonderful case of New York States 2005, the year that Julian Levin won the Jushi Blue mirror match over YT, the year that all three Jushi Blue decks in the tournament made Top 8, littering the streets with the corpses of Boros players and Sakura-Tribe Elders, where we only lost to each other (plus one-half of the Critical Mass decks made Top 8, and in fact Top 4). A State Championships six years ago might not seem like that big a deal, but this tournament—and the upfront and open publication that precipitated it on this website—was the pivotal event that ultimately tipped the once uncertain scales in favor of StarCityGames.com Premium (relative to then-Brainburst Premium), such that the service you are reading is the only one that continues to exist today.

You can probably tell that I consider it a point of pride, not just from a deckbuilding / player standpoint, but from a professional one.

Now “everyone” knows the outcome of this story, but most of you probably don’t know about the gambles and sacrifices that were wagered to make it a reality.

In the last round of the tournament, our friend Mark was [potentially] odd man out. We weren’t certain, but it looked like even if he won to go x-1-1 he would miss Top 8; Mark had lost in the first round, and his breakers were quite bad. I had been paired with Danny Olmo (Critical Mass) the previous round, and we were both x-0-1, with Danny talking about previously beating some kind of blue-hating deck that included Birds of Paradise, Elves of Deep Shadow, Ninjas aplenty (Ninja being quite resistant to our newly-adopted card Remand), plus second-turn Hypnotic Specter, and even Dimir Cutpurse. I was paired against this deck (he was paired up), and Danny was also paired down against an x-1 player. Julian Levin, at x-1, intended to draw in.

What is the optimal play here?

To answer that question we must first ask another: What was our objective?

Simple: I wanted all of us to make Top 8.

Let’s assume Mark plays; Danny, Julian, and I can all draw… In this case, Danny, Julian, and I will all make Top 8 with a high degree of certainty, as will the blue-hating Ninja fellow I have been paired against. Conversely all four of us can choose to play. Mark will probably finish around tenth at x-1-1, assuming he wins. Julian will miss Top 8 if he loses, but Danny and I can both eat a loss, so there is very little risk on our part.

Plus, I have an additional superpower: Danny has beaten the blue-hating Bird-Ninja already. If I give him a second loss, we not only make Mark’s road to Top 8 easier, but we take out a player who could very well have ended up the New York State Champion.

Invoking Certainty

There are six fundamental human needs, the first of which is certainty. You are absolutely—one might even say 100% certainly—reliant on certainty as a driving principle in your everyday life. Just as an example: If you weren’t absolutely certain the ceiling above you wasn’t going to cave in (even if you were not consciously certain of this), there is no way you would be reading this article right now. The certainty of a degree of comfort and sustenance is simply required, or we have upheaval (personal or greater). The Occupy movement can be seen as a reaction to many humans losing their senses of certainty.

Certainty is important for Magic players in particular because in a negotiation—and most competitive Magic games that can actually be won by one player or the other are essentially negotiations—the more certain party typically prevails. Ergo learning to channel and master certainty can be highly advantageous.

In the case of the last round of Swiss, I was able to give Julian the certainty he needed to play.

“We need to all play—and we need to all win—or Mark isn’t going to make Top 8.”

“If I lose, I don’t make Top 8, and I can draw in.”

“Your opponent is Boros, and I beat him in Round Two. You’re not going to lose.”

“Boros? Why didn’t you say so!”

We all four played; we all four won; and Danny, Julian, and I all knocked players who were going to make Top 8 out of contention that round (including the dangerous Ninjutsu deck), ensuring an All-Keiga, the Tide Star Top 4. Mark must have had some kind of bad breakers because despite jumping three unhappy Magicians (who had probably been certain of their opportunity to draw into Top 8 a few minutes earlier), he rolled in at #8, to meet YT in the quarterfinals.

It wasn’t just a good deck: That is how you get the Jushi Blue Top 8 story.

For a little bit more about certainty (and the other five human needs), I invite you to check out this video from TED.com. It is unambiguously the most important speech that I have ever seen / listened to, and it completely changed the course of my life in a dozen ultimately very productive ways.

Robbins addresses a superstar-studded TED audience that includes Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Al Gore (and even gets a sick burn + high five on Gore at about 5:30). You will probably see yourself or someone you know at 17:52, and at 19:40 (about ten seconds to the end of his allotted time), big Tony sets the bar for what a good—actually great—public speaker can do to an audience.

Mild warning: Tony runs the “it-shay” a couple of times… Still the greatest speech I have ever seen.

Now some of you are probably scratching your heads at the decision we made. You think that maybe we did something wrong.

I would challenge that we did anything remotely wrong. We didn’t steal any Top 8 spots; we just allotted them to different people, one of whom happened to be our friend. All of us had to battle our ways to Top 8, and the three players who didn’t make Top 8 could have earned their ways to Top 8 by simply winning in that last round.

It is more likely, if you feel otherwise, that you have a problem with the notion of cause and effect.

Here is a great crossover clip. It caps what is considered by many to be one of the best fights to use to transform people who are not into MMA into raving MMA fans. It is the knockout moment between Lyoto Machida over Randy Couture, in Couture’s last professional fight. The video itself is less than ten seconds long:

The story is great!

Randy Couture is one of MMA’s greatest stars, a Hall of Famer who came out of retirement to become the World Heavyweight Champion. A 40+, as dangerous as he ever was in younger decades.

Machida is a celebrated fighter by true fans of the art of war but considered “boring” by many casual fans. There is no doubting Lyoto’s technical skills or his unequaled transportation of karate to MMA (few successful MMA fighters utilize karate principles over jujitsu or some kind of kickboxing)… But as a strategic and scientific striker, Machida’s main goal, historically, was to get ahead in points and then avoid getting hit for the rest of the fight.

In those ten seconds, Lyoto teleported the final moments of The Karate Kid not only to a real fight—but to a real fight against one of the game’s most celebrated warriors, ending his career on the spot.

The story is great!

You need both Couture and Machida for the story to occur. If Machida had knocked out any old fighter, no one would care. If he had won the fight over Randy in his typical “get ahead on points, then get out of there” style, no one would talk about it.

So here’s the question: Knowing full well that both fighters are necessary to make a great story, is it better to be Machida or Couture?

This is the essence of cause and effect; and empowerment—at the Magic tables or in any other facet of your life—comes from being at the explosive tip of Machida’s crane kick, rather than at Randy’s admittedly famous and movie-headlining face.

Which is better:

• “I was mana-screwed” or “I chose not to mulligan”?
• “It was a bad matchup” or “we didn’t anticipate Tempered Steel”?
• “He topdecked me” or “I put him on a 4/48, and he hit it this time”?

I am sure that it is easy for you to see that all of those describe the same situations, but they come from very different places.

Can you do something about being mana-screwed? It turns out you can do all kinds of things. You can play more lands. You can play blue (or green). You can actually learn the math of how opening hands work, rather than “going on gut” and acting all surprised when your hand of two mismatched lands and five clunky five-drops doesn’t get there in a fast environment. You can choose not to mulligan, sure. You can’t win them all—and that’s a fact. But you really don’t want to lose to being mana-screwed. Ever (no matter how mana-screwed you are).

How about a bad matchup? Can you do something about that? It turns out you can! You can do more research. You can test more. You can network better to find the right cards and the right decks to play. Heck, given the right weekend and the right tournament environment, you can adjust your decklist for the next tournament. Or you can interface with other players on your same deck to see if you can’t find a way to turn the matchup around. I generally believe that the right sideboard can flip almost any viable deck to a 60/40 at least with even the worst matchups in a metagame if you are willing to do what it takes to get there. Part of that is knowing that you need to get there.

Even [name redacted] gets topdecked. The notion of the 4/48 comes straight from his Twitter feed. [He Who Shall Not Be Named] said that he slightly misplayed to give his opponent an 8% chance to win… and then he did. But the ball was in Voldemort’s court, and he took responsibility for the choice.

What’s the point of throwing up your hands and exclaiming, “How lucky!” Eight percent doesn’t mean that the topdeck should never happen. It means that it happens about 8 times in 100. So some of the time it is going to happen to you. It isn’t “how lucky”… it’s just the math. Could the most talented of Dark Wizards have played to give his opponent a less-than-8% chance of victory? It looks like the answer is probably. But despite how much he might have disliked the outcome, he still put himself at cause. That’s how you get to be the most feared Slytherin ever to attend Hogwarts.

How different would the Jushi Blue story be if Julian—just Julian—had lost?

Situation Two: The Beginning of the Day

Let us consider for a moment the case of See and Em, which is more-or-less based on a real situation. They don’t know it yet, but their second-round matchup at 1-0 may determine a Blue Envelope.

Em is playing a plodding Grixis deck that has something like fourteen lands that come into play tapped, whereas See is playing a lightning quick Red Deck. See (also a passable player, though not really Pro caliber at this point) is perhaps Em’s worst possible matchup. Worse yet, See wins the flip.

Em knows that he is facing his worst matchup. Em is exceedingly clever and has a long history of mising Blue Envelopes by using every part of the buffalo to his advantage.

“Draw?”

See is understandably confused.

“Why would I draw?”

“To avoid a loss. You’re pretty good, so I am trying to be nice. Anyway, I will crush the U/W decks in the draw bracket, and so will you.”

“Um… no.”

So they play. See has a super fast start whereas Em mulligans to five and stumbles on land. Game one is a slaughter.

“Draw?” Em offers again (and affably) but with Absolute Certainty.

…Notice the consistency of Em’s brand here. If you were See, might you find yourself a little bit uncertain? Em is New Coke telling you how much better he is than Coke. Is New Coke actually better? Why else would they take away Coca-Cola? Meanwhile they change THE PRIMARY INGREDIENT (sugar to corn), and no one outside of Mexico even notices. Coke (New or otherwise) is a Ninja.

“Draw? Why would I draw? I am up a game!”

See’s very questions belie the fracturing of his certainty. He doesn’t say, “No, that’s ridiculous,” but actually ponders why this ludicrous New Coke human questionnaire across the table would be proffering the draw again. The frame superpower of Em’s outlandish question is actually working!

Now Em uses every part of the buffalo as we have said, and this game is a perfect example. It is almost better for Em that he was mana-screwed and lost game one. If game one had been competitive (and Em lost), that would actually have hurt his story. It is possible that Em could have offered the draw at the end of an [unlikely] game one victory, but now we are in hella dubious territory, aren’t we?

Remember, though, that Em’s acceptable results this round include a draw.

Em, on the play this time, curves out perfectly, draws all his fast removal and life gain, and utterly demolishes See the way only a control deck can against a less powerful beatdown deck. A win is a win, and a loss is a loss, but overwhelming wins by beatdown over control are typically fast (if painful) like pulling off a crusty week-old Band-Aid, whereas overwhelming victories by control, by their very drawn-out-ness are humiliating. Life point here, another life point, kill that, big threat (that you throw your whole hand at to kill), another big threat, take 100 years to win. Yay.

Em draws it out unnecessarily.

He can win faster, but his goal is not to win this game. His goal is to send a message. An excruciating message. Em in fact wins the game with two copies of Cruel Ultimatum in his hand. He can always cast one if he has to (can get back five life, etc.), but he doesn’t want to make this one at all simple.

Every unfavorable Trish exchange erodes poor See’s resolve. A Vampire Nighthawk dies to a Lightning Bolt, but not before it earns two life. A Malakir Bloodwitch picks up two before buying a pair of burn spells like a flying, 4/4 Hymn to Tourach. All the while, manlands are coming in while red mana is left open for defensive instants, and Consuming Vapors slowly consume not only See’s creatures, but his very soul for the next too-many minutes. I thought this was a good matchup, thinks See to himself. But I am getting demolished.

See doesn’t know that Em has drawn every sideboard card. Lots of his sideboard cards are acceptable maindeck cards. See doesn’t know that Em won’t get this smooth of a mana draw with his Drowned Catacombs and Lavaclaw Reaches again or that Em will struggle to play Cruel Ultimatum with nine lands in play in a pivotal round later in the day.

All he knows is that he is being bled, twenty times over, one pinprick at a time. One drop at a time.

Finally, after game two is over, See finally opens his teary eyes and says the only thing he can: “Wow, your deck is very good against mine after sideboarding.”

“Yeah,” agrees Em. “I mean I was mana-screwed Game One, but I doubt you want to gamble on that happening again in game three. Heh.” Em is shuffling already and wearing a gleeful grin.

“Um… draw?”

See takes Em’s words literally out of his mouth!

You see Em knows that most people can’t actually be convinced of anything. They hold beliefs—even terrible beliefs—to their chests. That’s mine! The notion that “I’m not good enough” or “I don’t have the training for a good job” or “I’m too old to learn that” is mine, and I won’t let you take it away from me no matter how much sense you are making. The only time most people change their minds is when they think they came up with the idea all by themselves (i.e. any example of me coming around to BDM’s point of view in a podcast or just in life).

Em pauses a moment (let’s See have the moment). “I guess.”

They play a fun one, and See demolishes Em because really, it was a bad matchup, and See was on the play again.

Doesn’t matter.

Five or six hours later, Em finishes off his umpteenth Jace, the Mind Sculptor opponent in the draw bracket and draws in the Top 8 and eventually Blue Envelopes, whereas poor See—seething the entire time over his decision, probably—loses in the last round.

See probably should have just played.

It’s easy to blame See for being weak-willed, or tricked, or just plain stupid… but that is like blaming a jackrabbit for dying to a handful of shotgun pellets to the left haunch. See is completely out-gunned in this case, and in a heads-up challenge of technology, lead beats cute cotton-ball tails… and that’s what this negotiation was. It was never about the cards or the matchup, but about strategy and technology.

What is more interesting is to model what Em did, and how we can learn from the principles of certainty and cause and effect to improve our results in tournament Magic: The Gathering.

• Em embraces the mana screw. It is easy to blame being mana-screwed when you lose. However Em actually went through the process of mulligans in a matchup he knew he was probably going to lose even with a pretty good hand. There was no reason to keep a marginal seven… or six… but a five gave him plausible deniability. Do you want to know a secret? Em wasn’t really mana-screwed. He mana-screwed himself. Em tanked game one because he didn’t think he could win the matchup. Had he been more competitive and lost, the Maxius / Magnus, Robot Fighter / Conley Woods German Juggernaut-ness of his deck’s ability to perform sideboarded (the eventual New Coke he was trying to sell) would have been compromised. You know what’s even better than being Machida’s foot instead of Couture’s face? Being Machida’s foot but convincing the opponent that you are Couture’s face. Em is motherloving Batman!
• Em embraces getting lucky. We talk a lot about players like Kai getting lucky but doing the right things to take advantage of that luck. Em knows he needs a miracle—and a miracle on the play—to win. However he is not unrealistic with it. Remember: Em’s acceptable outcomes of this match include a draw. If he can get lucky into a draw, he is going to take it. He puts on a show that makes See’s head spin, even as his soul spirals. What’s Em’s downside for not getting lucky? He was going to lose anyway!
• Em maintains a face of Absolute Certainty, again with very little to lose. If he plays all “Absolutely Certain” and doesn’t win, do you know what he gets? A match loss. Which is exactly what he gets if he plays his heart out, and the math holds. Em is a vicious dog in this matchup, and he knows it. But because he uses every part of the buffalo—even tools See (and most of you, before you read this little story) doesn’t know exist—he can get the result he wants.
• Em’s certainty in this negotiation continually and incrementally chips away at See’s certainty… which at the start of the match was probably pretty high. Em can’t make himself certain in fact, but his facade of certainty and strategically destabilizing questions (combined with taking advantage of a God draw on the play) snap See’s certainty—maybe not forever—but long enough to get the draw on the results slip. Remember, in a negotiation, the party who is more certain—and in this case less uncertain—will typically win (Em considers a draw a win).

  Remember as well the absolute necessity of certainty in all of our experiences. If you take away someone’s certainty, you end up with the Occupy movement. Imagine if someone were able to completely remove the idea that your mommy loves you, just putting a black hole in the middle of your soul, where five minutes ago—even if you weren’t consciously aware of it—you housed embers of parental affection. Do you think you might be a little off-balance for a minute?

I don’t know about you, but Em doesn’t seem like the kind of person I would want to cross :)

Now of course this is just a fanciful story, but believe you me, many top Magic players over the years have developed these kinds of skills. Some of them deny having “any mental game” while working over regular Pros or volume shooter grinders over like a heavy bag in the basement. The ones who are really good can do stuff that the average coverage reporter never notices.

It’s just like Magic!

Have a happy Black Friday!

LOVE
MIKE