Prologue: Show Me Your Tats!
When I was at the Planar Chaos prerelease, I saw a girl with an Akroma tattoo. I mentioned this while writing up the whole prerelease experience, and she emailed me. With a picture. Of the tattoo.
Not a bad thing. She was a pretty girl, even if the photo was only of her back.
I asked her whether I could post the picture of her tattoo, and she told me “Sure.” And I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to do so, and it just hasn’t arrived.
Cut to last Friday. I was talking to Chuck, our sales manager, and he mentioned that he’d gotten his most recent tattoo — the Planar Chaos logo. “It’s a little crusty,” he said, “But it’s good.”
“How many do you have?”
“Every one since Guildpact,” said he.
“Well, send me a picture,” I replied. “I wanna see ‘em.”
In fact, I realized that’s when I had my usual bouts of curiosity about the world as a whole. Tattoos always fascinate me because they’re a permanent addition to your body — at some point, you have to decide, “Barring expensive laser surgery, I want to carry this image on my flesh to my grave.” That’s a commitment deeper than a lot of marriages.
And I wondered: What parts of Magic did people choose to ink into their skin?
So here’s what I want: I would like to assemble as complete an encyclopedia as possible of Magic-related tattoos. Send the photo to [email protected], and I’ll post as many as I can next week. But don’t send huge photos — cut or crop ‘em down to below 250k so they don’t choke my inbox. And please, God, one picture per tattoo — I’m sure your image of Dakkon Blackblade is lovely, but I don’t need seventy angles of it.
But it’s your chance for more immortality. Show me where you and Magic have melded. I wanna know.
Losing Yet Winning
I know a lot of people who’ve been playing Magic for years. At one point, they were better than I am. Now I’m better than they are.
That’s not because my native skills are superior.
They want to get better. I see them going to PTQs, drafting, doing everything they should be doing. But then they hit a certain level of competency, and plateau, and never get beyond it.
And man, do they bitch about it.
You can hear ‘em after every PTQ and GPT. They win one once in awhile, usually with a good metagame call or a bomb-centric pool… But mostly they go and bomb out 2-1 or 0-3, and then spend the rest of their day complaining.
They had an awesome deck. It was built perfectly. But that stupid frickin’ lucksack of an opponent outdrew them, or they got manascrewed, or there was some sort of bad beats that nobody in the whole wide world could have avoided and man it’s all luck, dammit, luck.
So it goes. They never really get better. Because every loss is a pure loss.
My losses, on the other hand, are an incremental improvement.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I’m a great player. But just as when I told you the skills involved in being a mediocre player, I can tell you that I’m a stronger player than I was two years ago, and with less actual card-slinging than what some of my MODO-addicted friends have accomplished.
Lemme give you four hints on how to recoup some improvements from your losses, my friend. It will help to ease the bitter sting of defeat.
Assume You Are In Control.
Yeah, we all get manascrewed. But rather than flinging your cards to the table and screaming at The Mana Gods, try to remove as much “luck” as possible from the equation and see what you might have changed.
It’s the classic newbie error: Man, I got manascrewed. But if you watch them play, they kept a seven-card hand with two lands that required at least five lands to really work.
“Why didn’t you mulligan?” you ask. “Why didn’t you run seventeen lands instead of sixteen?” And they really don’t have an answer.
Of course there are times when you mulligan to five and draw nothing. I’m not denying the existence of bad beats. But when you act as though all the bad beats stemmed from some cosmic Bad Beats Factory that exists solely to dispense 0-2 losses to you, then you abdicate all personal responsibility.
When I was really serious about qualifying for the Pro Tour, I used to get together with my friends and break open two card pools. We’d build our decks, play five matches, and then switch card pools and play five matches. It was amazing how often the better player won, even when the weaker player got “the good” set of cards.
That was when I realized how much of this came down to talent.
You need to look at what you can change. Because you know, Gabriel Nassif and Rich Hoaen encounter the same odds that you do. It’s not like the mathematics of chance have decided to throw them fewer lousy hands. Somehow, they manage to pull out wins, and you don’t.
Try to figure out why that is. Which leads to…
Ask Your Opponent.
Once the match is over, and if you’ve got the time (this is a problem with Magic Online), ask your opponent a simple question:
“What could I have done better?”
Thing is, your opponent usually has a much better idea of what would have completely hosed him at any given moment than you do. He’s looking at the board from an entirely different perspective — and since he’s more aware of his weaknesses than you’ll ever be (assuming you’re in roughly the same ballpark when it comes to talent), he’ll have caught some of your worst moves.
He knows if you should have gone all-in with that last attack. He knows that he was happy as hell when you Cancelled the wrong spell. He knows that you left the wrong card when he would have sideboarded it out, and he knows you overextended right into his Damnation.
So ask him. They’re usually happy to tell you, if they have time. People like to talk about Magic at Magic tournaments, and they like to feel smart, and this covers both of them at once.
Keep in mind that your opponent is often wrong when it comes to this stuff, because he doesn’t know what you had in your hand or what else was in your deck. But he’ll often raise points that you hadn’t considered, leading to a spirited debate over what was the right call in that situation (and onlookers may join in), and that in turn will help you understand the game a little deeper.
Hell, if you’re out of contention for the Top 8 (never give information away if someone else might see it) and it’s a Limited event, show him your card pool and ask him how he would have built it. If he’s a better player, he’ll give you some good ideas for future tourneys.
It doesn’t always pay off. But every so often, the guy who just pounded you will highlight that one turn where you had victory in your hands, and show you where (and why) you pissed it away. It’s times like that that it’s worth it.
Every Game Is Serious.
I am totally guilty of this. I’ll be dorking around with MODO, playing in the Leagues, and I’ll have some movie on or I’ll be chatting with someone or I’ll be surfing the Internet.
How am I going to learn anything when my eye is not on the ball?
Likewise, when you’re testing for a format, test seriously. Don’t allow takebacks; if you make a stupid move, nothing cements it in your mind more firmly than having the salt of a dumb mistake rubbed into the open wound of a salvageable loss. Don’t play with your mind on autopilot, throwing down lands in the wrong order and shrugging as you go into it because hell, it’s just a fun game.
Don’t assume that the changes to your deck have had no effect. You know what happens when you tweak Deck X to beat Deck Y? Deck X is now weaker against Deck Z. But you see it all the time:
“My deck pounds the crap out of Affinity.”
Then they bring it to a tournament, and their deck is now so narrow that it loses to anything that’s not Affinity, and they lost for no reason because it was a really good deck and the stupid idiot was packing a deck that nobody in their right mind would play.
No, dumbass. That’s your fault. You just assumed that your deck stayed the same against everything else when you changed it, and you assumed that everyone thought the same as you did. That’s you.
(Not that I haven’t been guilty of this myself, mind you. Dumbass, heal thyself.)
If you want to improve, treat this game, right now, as something that’s critical. Don’t shortcut anything. Assume that every change is significant.
And when you play, put yourself into it. No game is insignificant. Even if it’s a matchup you’ve tested a thousand times before, assume that there is something still to learn.
Your goal? To find it.
Stop Bitching.
Nobody cares, dude.
Honestly. We’ll sit there and yawn internally while you tell us how unfair the world is, and how bad all the other players are, and how that rip was so awful, but do you know what we’re thinking deep inside?
If you’re that good, why aren’t you on the Tour?
I’ll listen to Kenji Tsumura bitch, if he wants, because Magic is about your skills as a whole. We take the length and breadth of your career into account, and we know that every player occasionally bombs out on any given Sunday. The cards are occasionally aligned against you, and luck’s a factor. So when Kenji goes 0-2, I listen.
But when you, Mister Random Guy Who Qualified Once And Then Blew It At The Big Event, tells me how bad everyone else in the room is, I don’t think you’re much better.
That time you spent complaining about the universe might be better spent looking inside. See my first tip: chances are good you could have controlled something.
Rather than screaming to an audience that does not care, look inside. And find the time to improve.
The Weekly Plug Bug
Finally! The end of the three-month “Beast” storyline has finished, and Tanner and Izzy are together at last. But the possum has attacked Izzy, and today’s strip explains why. Then we have a few codas to explain what happened to Seth and Ann that fateful night….
And don’t forget! Send me your tattoos!
Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Here Site Here Guy