The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
So many things seem filled with the intent
To be lost that their loss is no disaster.
– Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”
Emphasis is always put on winning. People who win are revered, their strategies are studied, and the intricacies of their very being are examined. With the bustle circulating around the study of winning, it is easy to miss that there is just as much value in the study of losing. There are reasons why people lose, and seldom do the reasons have extreme variation at their core. One basketball team didn’t guard the outside well enough, letting the other hit too many three point shots. One football team hasn’t been working on its defensive line enough, allowing the opponent to keep breaking through. Or, perhaps, a Magic player keeps a two land hand and gets mana screwed. If you are cognizant of the common routes to failure, then you can actively aim to suppress your chances of plunging to defeat.
Think about how you lose games of Magic. Yes, your life total is usually reduced to 0, but think of how you the game ended up that way. While every game is different, there are particular commonalities which lead up to a loss. While sometimes you play very well only to have your opponent subtly swindle you into making a game-ending mistake, more often the games you lose follow a fundamental trajectory.
The most classic example is the one that plagues every player: mana screw. You miss your third land drop, and quickly find yourself following a well-worn trajectory towards defeat. For such a common and oft-uncontrollable blunder, players decide to walk directly over its trap door all the time. You know what I’m talking about… those two land hands on the play you know you shouldn’t keep but if you draw a land you can get there, discarding your fourth land to a Mind Rot because you’re sure that you’ll find another, your one land hand with Wild Nacatl Dark Confidant and Tarmogoyf that you try and rationalize keeping because “it’ll be great if I draw another land” despite the fact that your deck only has 19 other lands in it. Of course, it goes the other way too. How many times have you kept the six land one spell hand because you can play whatever spells you draw, the hand of lands and cyclers which aren’t going to matter until turn seven but the fact that they could be anything makes the hand too tempting to throw back, or even the dreaded five land hand that has two spells on opposite ends of the curve.
Mana problems are the most common way games are decided, yet in a case of repetition compulsion too many players refuse to mulligan hands that they know will cause them grief. But aside from mulliganing to avoid mana screw or flood, there are other methods you can use to help to control the flow of mana. The one I typically use simply involves playing extra lands. In constructed I typically add one, sometimes even two, lands to every deck. In Limited, I find myself erring on the side of 18 lands unless I have a high amount of card drawing or cycling. I simply believe that occasional mana flood is worth the tradeoff of being able to consistently cast my spells. Mana flood is much easier to manage by mulliganing than mana screw: if your deck has more lands than usual then you have a higher chance of finding a five or six card hand with a decent number of lands.
Although mana problems are the most common, there are several other identifiable losing trajectories that a game can take. Another prevalent one is falling prey to beatdown while you are playing a control deck. Control decks are inherently designed to thrive in the long game. In a control on control mirror, you will undoubtedly have the time to craft the game into a position where you can dictate the course of battle. You don’t have that luxury when you end up playing against a beatdown deck. Wild Nacatl, Tarmogoyf, Seal of Fire your blocker and Incinerate you, Helix Helix. Bang, you’re dead. If you’re facing a start like that down, you don’t have a lot of margin to fool around with setting up Gifts Ungiven piles and cleverly activating Riptide Laboratory your Venser.
So, how can you mitigate your chances of losing to a blazing start? Against a deck like Zoo it often feels like there was nothing you could do no matter which cards your draw steps yielded. It’s fitting, then, that the answer comes in deckbuilding. If you’re assured that you’re going to have time to set up your strategy in a control mirror, then you can afford to maindeck cards which are better against beatdown. For example, both Repeal and Tarmogoyf made a comeback in blue decks this past weekend at GP: Hannover. With the upswing in Naya Zoo, Faeries’ maindeck card choices had to be modified. To avoid losing the game in the first few turns before Faeries’ pilots have the opportunity to take advantage of their deck’s power, they added in speedbumps to help them hit the long game.
The same can be said about the matchup from the beatdown perspective. The Five Color Zoo decks, which sported cards like Tidehollow Sculler and Dark Confidant, only had around a 50/50 matchup with Faeries. Five Color Zoo’s reliance on creatures gave the control player slightly more time to utilize their countermagic against the sorcery speed nature of their creatures, and the potential to use a mass removal spell like Firespout to swing the game in the control player’s favor. As a result, player preference started to shift toward the three color version of Zoo because it had Sulfuric Vortex, more instant speed burn, and, in some of the newer builds, the gigantic and difficult to counter Wooly Thoctar: all potent weapons against the format’s most popular deck.
So if those routes cover the beatdown vs. control matchups, what are the common ways you can lose in archetypical mirror matches? In a control mirror match, one of the easiest ways to lose, aside from missing land drops, is to run out of relevant cards. How does that happen? The answer involves spending cards when you don’t need to. If my opponent Peppersmoked my Bitterblossom token they would end up empty-handed and losing to my Scion of Oona six turns later. If they spent their only two counterspells fighting over a Trinket Mage only for me to resolve a crippling Vedalken Shackles a few turns later, it was a path that they could have been avoided. If they Smothered my Sakura Tribe Elder so they could get in with their 4/5 Tarmogoyf and then ending up dying to my lone Tarmogoyf with an answer nowhere in sight, it was a situation they could have avoided. If you don’t spend cards when you don’t need to in a control mirror, then you won’t run out of ways to deal with the cards that matter.
Those examples aren’t to say that you shouldn’t counter supporting cards like Trinket Mage, or that Smothering Sakura-Tribe Elder is always wrong, but if doing so depletes your supply of that kind of card then you have to ask yourself: can I lose the game to something more important than what I’m spending this card on? If so, is the benefit of using this card now worth the possibility of losing to the other card later? It’s important that you don’t store so much gas in your hand that you are slowly whittled away by their incremental advantages, but it’s similarly important that you don’t release all of your energy in one burst and then fall helpless to your opponent.
Surprisingly, the same kinds of principles are true in beatdown versus beatdown matchups. While beatdown decks have a wide range of cards which serve similar purposes, there are typically some key cards which continually provide an incremental advantage that are far more important than the larger-than-average creatures the opponent plays. Have you been guilty of Lightning Helixing their Kird Ape while you’re at a posh fourteen life, only to be toppled by the absurd card advantage of Dark Confidant they follow it up with? Spending your one-of Oblivion Ring on a Wild Nacatl and then losing to Sulfuric Vortex? I know I have. You don’t want to spend the only cards you have that provide precious interactivity with their strongest threats when you don’t have to.
Sometimes the path to losing is impossible to avoid. You can fill your deck with lands, mulligan, and still get mana screwed, add in 10 cards for beatdown and not see any of them, and play your removal or countermagic correctly and still end up losing the mirror match to your opponent’s never-ending string of perfect draws. However, keep an eye on how you lose in playtesting. By following the trends that cause you to fall behind in playtesting, you can ensure that you take measures to avoid them in a tournament setting. Try playing matchups differently, tweaking your deck, or mulliganing in a different manner if you aren’t getting the results that you want to see. The art of losing may not be difficult to master, but the art of learning how to prevent losing is.
Gavin Verhey
Team Unknown Stars
Rabon on Magic Online, Lesurgo everywhere else