You’ve been locked in a tight game three, but the match is edging towards an unfavorable closure. The last few turns have been an attrition war, and the life totals are close, but you look across the table and the sinking feeling that your opponent firmly has the upper hand sets in. As is, you’re dead on his next attack step. You draw your card for the turn, look down at your board, then at your hand, and realize there is no way you can win the game with the cards you have. No matter how you block, you’re facing a no-win situation. You’re completely out of options.
…Or are you?
Magic is not a game solely governed by cards; it is not played by two perfect computers who infallibly calculate the correct decision. Magic is played by humans, and humans are prone to making mistakes and being distracted. There is always room to try and buy extra time if you can find an exploitable hole in the game state. While you will not always be successful, there is little harm in trying. If it works, you might have a chance at pulling out an otherwise impossible win.
There is a single unifying strand in each method which allows a player to overcome a seemingly unwinnable situation: deception. As Sun Tzu once said, “All warfare is based on deception.” If your opponent was not deceived in some way by whatever you did, he would simply kill you.
If you are trying to exploit your opponent’s humanity, first you must figure out how you are going to deceive him. One of the more common ways is playing the game as though your own cards do something different. (Note that this is very different from playing your cards and actually doing something differently with them — that’s cheating!) This tactic is kind of a subset of bluffing and Jedi Mind Tricks, but requires a different set of skills to execute. I’ll lead with a simple example:
You are at two and have an Auntie’s Snitch in play that you’ve been attacking with for the last few turns. Your opponent is at four and has a tapped Lys Alana Bowmaster in play. You have no nonland cards in your hand. What do you do?
Regardless of if you attack or not, neither play will help you towards a win assuming your opponent just attacks with the Bowmaster on his turn. It’s a classic example of a no win scenario. Attacking yields no positive result on the game unless you honestly think you can trick your opponent into skipping his combat step. (In which case I recommend you take a break from Magic and focus a career in politics.) Much more likely, however, is the possibility that your opponent simply doesn’t realize Auntie’s Snitch can’t block. While that occurrence may seem unlikely, there is no harm in simply leaving the Snitch back; you don’t get any bonus points for leaving your opponent at one life. When you leave a creature that has been attacking back on defense, it signals “that creature is going to block” to your opponent. There’s no reason to attack in this situation, and not attacking could give you an extra turn to swing the game around if your opponent opts to not attack.
That example was fairly straightforward. Let’s take a look at something more complicated:
Your opponent is at six. You are at five. Your board position is a 2/2 Blood Cultist, a Blister Beetle, and Hissing Iguanar along with a Dregscape Zombie in your graveyard. Your opponent has a tapped Kathari Screecher and 2/2 Wild Nacatl alongside an untapped Waveskimmer Aven and Steelclad Serpent. You draw a Viscera Dragger. What do you do? (Assume the top card of your library is a land and you have enough mana available to do whatever you need.)
This time, you aren’t dead on board. It all likelihood, you will have another turn. However, what is it going to buy you? Unless you have a way to deal with both of his fliers and shut off unearth, holding back isn’t going to accomplish anything. So then, in the case that it’s time to attack, which creatures do you send in? How do you plan it?
I feel like, in this kind of situation, you have to go for broke. If you can’t win this turn, you’re not going to turn the game around next turn. I cycled my Viscera Dragger and confidently unearthed both of my creatures, then attacked. He set up some test blocks, worked out the math in his head, then conceded — despite the fact that Hissing Iguanar doesn’t trigger off of itself or unearthed creatures. I had no way to deal the sixth point of damage! Although you may not think a chance like this would ever come up at a large event, this situation took place in round 7, game 3 of a Sealed PTQ. A lot of people would have just sucked up the loss and conceded, but by trying to take a less conventional route to victory I was able to grab an extra win.
As a final note on the above methods, they work considerably better if you’re a well-known player in the event. Whether you’re someone as prominent as Luis Scott-Vargas or just a local up-and-coming player at a PTQ that your opponent knows and respects, people are going to be more inclined to buy into your plays when they know you typically do not make a lot of sloppy mistakes in your technical play.
To put what I mean on different terms, I’ll liken it to a story about competitive Scrabble. In the finals of a major Scrabble tournament, a player who was highly renowned for his ability to play the game formed a long word his opponent thought was questionable. However, figuring there was no way this great player would make such a rookie mistake, his opponent opted to not risk losing a challenge on the word. The word ended up not existing, and the crafty player ended up winning largely in part because his opponent believed he would not make such a “mistake.” The same can be said about a game of Magic. Your opponent may think you know exactly what’s going on and therefore buy into playing along with your choices, when in reality it’s all one major diversion from the truth.
The next method of winning in a no-win situation is a little trickier. They are verbal and/or gesture based methods of deception, and so I would like to remind you to please, please make sure that you are not cheating when trying anything like the examples below. There is a fine line between what you can and cannot say or do in Magic. If you actually make an illegal play, it is (surprise) illegal. You need to make sure that you clearly distinguish what you say.
With that warning notice aside, these are some of the more famous ways to win in a no-win situation, and usually fall into the category of Jedi Mind Tricks. Through careful phrasing or gesturing, you receive a result that would otherwise be impossible. A recent example of such a victory would be how Patrick Chapin successfully snuck his creatures through for lethal by using Profane Command. The issue? One of his creatures was a Chameleon Colossus.
How did Patrick do it? It’s all in the wording. He declared something akin to, “I’m going to make you lose six life and give all of my legal targets fear.” When he attacked with the Colossus he certainly did not do anything out of the ordinary to indicate it had fear. However, that didn’t stop his opponent from opting not to block, and therefore losing the game, because he thought the Colossus had fear.
At a similar incident at the Seattle PTQ, Bill Stark had to deal one damage to his opponent in extra turns. He played a Ranger of Eos, which would normally just fetch up one of his two Mogg Fanatics and deal the last point. However, Bill ran into a dilemma: he didn’t have any more Mogg Fanatics left in his deck. A lot of people would just stop there, seemingly out of a route to victory. They’d probably throw in some offhanded comment about how they would have won if they hadn’t cut the third Fanatic. Not Bill. He played the Ranger, pointed to the Mogg Fanatic in his graveyard, then said he was going to go fetch another. His opponent promptly conceded.
Jedi Mind Tricks are all about perception. If you think your opponent is going to perceive something incorrectly or not look into your odd phrasing, if you gamble on him making a mistake and he takes the bait, that’s not your fault. You’ve done nothing wrong. Let me provide an example from my experience:
It’s late in the game of a Shadowmoor block sealed tournament. Your opponent is at fourteen and has had his creatures pecking away at your life total all game, which is now a precarious three. There is only one card standing between your opponent and victory: Knollspine Invocation. You’ve been using it to deal with his creatures all game, but he’s been drawing a lot more threats than you have, and he has two effective vanilla 3/3’s in play. It is your opponent’s end step and you have seven untapped mana and a Hollowborn Barghest as the only card left in your hand. There is one other spell which costs seven in your deck. What do you do?
You have two obvious options here. You can either nug one of his creatures and hope to draw another spell next turn, or you can throw the Barghest at him and hope to draw your other seven casting cost spell. On initial examination, the first option is far superior because it gives you a more realistic set of outs. However, the astute reader might notice that I opted to not kill one of his creatures seeing how it was his end step and conclude that I planned to torch my opponent for seven and hope to draw my other seven casting cost spell. You’re getting warmer, but in reality I did something different.
You see, the information I couldn’t tell you in the description without giving what I did away is that the entire game my opponent had blindly been following what I had told him. I had already been forced to correct what he had for our life totals to be accurate several times (each time it was in my favor, no less) and he more or less at my command. So, I came up with a plan. I started by tapping seven mana and Barghesting my opponent, then untapping my lands and letting him know I was just going to do the same thing with the next card I drew to deal the final seven points of damage. He conceded.
What happened in all three of these situations? The opponent, in each case, was deceived because they were unaware of some variable and didn’t take the time to check for themselves. Don’t be that person. Always check the game state before you go to pack in your cards, and always make your opponent play their plan out unless you’re seriously worried about finishing the match in time. On the other side of the coin, if your opponent is showing signs of naivety through constant use of shortcuts or seems to blindly believe whatever you say, you’re going to have a much easier time having them play into your plan than if they were somebody like Gerry Thompson.
The final category takes a step outside of the game: the distraction. Let me paint a picture. It’s your turn, you attack, your opponent flashes in two blockers, you Darkblast one and Slaughter Pact the other, your opponent blocks with his other creatures, you pass the turn, your opponent thinks, sends in his lone attacker, you decide not to block, he casts a Glen Elendra Archmage, has some wily banter with you about how far behind he is, ships the turn, he asks to check your graveyard, you excitedly remember you have a Darkblast in your graveyard and dredge it, then go to your mainphase and —
“You forgot to pay for your Pact,” your grinning opponent reminds you. Just like that, you’ve lost the game. Do you see what happened there? Between all of the thinking, banter, and tricky graveyard checking, you forgot to pay for your Pact. In other words, you just lost the game. A game which was looking awfully good for you, no less. Whoops.
In reality, players have done this with some degree of intention for a long time. I’ve seen and heard of a ton of people losing due to being distracted from their Pacts, dredge players forgetting to dredge because their minds have been kept busy by jovial conversation from their opponent, and game losses being handed out for overly complicated upkeep steps leading to drawing a card with Solitary Confinement in play. And that doesn’t even count the endless swarm of mana-based upkeep costs people forget to pay on a regular basis!
Recently, this tactic has been brought further into the spotlight in an article by Olivier Ruel. Olivier wrote about how he fooled one a player at Grand Prix Rotterdam into forgetting to pay for his Wild Leotau by asking how many cards his opponent had in his hand right after he passed the turn. He went on to win the game because of the turn he bought by receiving an essentially free Dark Banishing.
I will admit that I have never used a distraction tactic before, and I would like to make it very clear that different judges may rule different ways about this at different levels of rules enforcement depending on what exactly it was that you did and how you went about it. However, despite being seen as an underhanded tactic by many people, I believe this to be a perfectly legitimate strategy. No, it’s not exactly one professed in the rulebook, but neither is getting tells off people. Not to mention, we can put markers on top of our libraries now. There’s no excuse for missing an upkeep trigger because you didn’t care enough to put your pen cap on top of your library.
In any case, the key to successfully finding a way to win in this no-win scenario is to take your opponent’s mind off of whatever the pressing payment or event is. If you can successfully divert their focus, then you can capitalize on their mistakes. Don’t try too hard, though. Your opponent is not going to forget to pay for his Pact if you’re taking obvious measures to distract them from it.
There are few events more satisfying than somehow winning from a no-win position. They make for great stories, and require a complex level of thought to put together. Hopefully this article outlined some of the ways you can set yourself up to get out of no-win scenarios, or other difficult positions to come back from. The major difficulty in trying to teach this art is that each situation is unique in its own way, and so you have to construct a plan on the fly without it being overly suspicious. If you draw your card, think for a minute, and hopelessly shrug before you try and get out of the situation, your opponent is going to identify that something tricky is amiss. This article contains frameworks through examples and discussion, but it’s up to you to apply the ideas in those examples toward future game states you’re going to encounter. To help you out and generate some discussion of what ideas might work best in unique situations, here are some sample scenarios to look over in the forums:
1. You’re playing in a TPF draft and things have taken a rough turn for you. You’re at nine to his seventeen and need to deal with some of your opponent’s creatures to have any chance of topdecking back into this game. Your opponent is attacking with Ivory Giant, Nantuko Shaman, and Moorish Calvary, and is leaving Flowstone Channeler untapped with two mana open and a card in his hand. You have Calvary Master and Amrou Seekers in play, both untapped. You have two cards in your hand, but they’re both just useless lands. How do you try and play out this combat step?
2. You’re in an AAC draft and you have a decent board position with two fatties, Incurable Ogre and Wild Leotau, in play. Your opponent is at a paltry two life, which would be great except that you’re sitting at an even lower life total: one life. You just finished quelling an aerial assault with creature removal, but your opponent cast a Sanctum Gargoyle on his last turn to put you in imminent danger. Worse, he has two Guardians of Akrasa clogging up the ground. You draw your card for the turn hoping for some burn (after paying for your Wild Leotau, of course), and see a Mosstodon staring back up at you. You have six lands untapped. What is your plan this turn?
3. You’re playing Faeries in current Extended, and you are at six life. You have a Mana Leak and a Spellstutter Sprite in your hand with a Vendilion Clique and two islands, a Steam Vents, and a Riptide Laboratory in play. Your Naya Zoo opponent has a Seal of Fire along with six lands in play. He draws and slams down his card for the turn: it’s Char, targeting you. What do you do?
4. You are playing Naya Zoo against Affinity. Your opponent has a 8/8 Master of Etherium, an Arcbound Ravager with one counter, and a tapped Ornithopter, equipped with Cranial Plating, along with two tapped Seat of the Synod, a tapped Great Furnace, and an untapped Tree of Tales. You are at two, and he is at six. You have a Kird Ape in play, along with seven untapped lands which can produce whichever colors you need. In your hand are a Seal of Fire and a Lightning Helix. What do you do?
5. You receive a distress signal from a friendly ship which has struck a mine in a neutral zone. There isn’t anyone else nearby, and it sounds like the crew is desperately in need of your assistance. Do you go?
See you in the forums!
Team Unknown Stars
Rabon on Magic Online, Lesurgo everywhere else