It’s Monday night and I’ve not yet even begun to recover from my trip to Boston for the Grand Prix, and our illustrious editor Craig has asked us all to move up our deadlines significantly as the time he would usually spend editing my article this week is best spent playing in the UK Nationals instead. I consider this a very reasonable requirement on his part indeed, but unfortunately it means that my article will inevitably be a bit strategy-light. I could just do a tournament report of the weekend, but I fear I didn’t do well enough to really go into depth about it, and haven’t really digested everything I’ve learned. So instead of my at least somewhat-focused strategic content, I fear this week’s article is going to be more for the entertainment than for the hot sideboard tech.
Much like Patrick Chapin, I tend to ascribe to the view that for pretty much any decision in life, there’s a correct choice and probably numerous incorrect choices you can make, and one’s sense of ethics and devotion to reason can very clearly distinguish the difference between the two. And much like Patrick, I don’t see much of a difference between the two. I’m something of an absolutist when it comes to ethical play, even if I did cross over from the side of pure angels for my Hall of Fame vote this year by voting for Antoine Ruel despite knowing with certainty that his past is sketchy and there has been no public repentance, and thus no guarantee of clean play for the future. I have jokingly gone so far as to instead say ‘one correct play’ based on the fact that I find all too often that game theory applies to real-life situations, and one of my favorite moment from this weekend had been as hilarious as it was due to the fact that even as it was occurring it was being discussed in the third person narrative from the game theory perspective.
Wild tales of alcohol and cougars are not to be found within. I did find I was staying in a hotel room crammed full of interesting times, as I was apparently to be number seven jammed into our room and suddenly very glad for the fact that in recent months I’ve just traveled everywhere with an air mattress in the trunk of my car. Save for one other person at least somewhat close to my age, the average age of the roomgoers was about twenty and that is being generous in my estimations, and the other person even within arm’s reach of pushing thirty claimed he was fourteen on the inside so that was no help. I was apparently the babysitter for the group, and things were planned to take a turn for the strange as a pact was made Friday night regardless of the outcome of Saturday to go drinking and working the bar somewhere to correct the fact that one of the people in our room was still a virgin. (Names mostly withheld to protect the innocent, as well as the very, very guilty.)
Somehow, the promise that I would wingman for this individual was extracted, perhaps out of the idea that somebody would have to babysit this group of wild children to protect ordinary society from their fumbling attempts. One could also posit that it might help if someone there actually knew how to interact with women besides the ‘begging for sex’ maneuver, which seemed to be the modus operandi of this gaggle of might-as-well-be-teenagers. Come Saturday night, we have zero out of seven players in our room playing on Day 2, and better yet one of those seven (Josh Jacobson) lost a bet with Calosso Fuentes and will be attending Grand Prix: Tampa in some nonsensically ridiculous costume for his failure to make Day 2. (I’m rooting for a Bruno costume, myself.) With some steely resolve, it was agreed that it was time to hit up P.F. Chang’s in the same mall complex as the tournament for our late-night dinner, then the remaining fellowship of down-and-out souls would hit the bars to see what could be accomplished for the benefit of our most innocent member.
Five made it to dinner, with a sixth straggling in about an hour late because he was busy trading and then showering and ‘dressing up for the ladies’ while we were enjoying a moderately expensive and (let’s face it) moderately crappy meal at Chang’s. One of this intrepid five was one Miles Rodriguez, mentioned previously in Magical Hack as a frequent car-mate for PTQ travels and one of the group of four that raided the Richmond PTQs for Top 8s at the start of the season with the B/W Kithkin deck, and over the course of dinner apparently the plan changed as the person I’d been recruited to wingman for had cold feet after the long day and felt he’d rather just get a decent night’s sleep and be ready for the event in the morning than to attempt to go ‘balling’ with the other ‘ballers,’ as they liked to fancy themselves. Somehow it became apparent that Miles really liked our waitress and thought he had a chance if he played his cards right, and struck up the plan of convincing her to come out drinking and carousing with us all, then convince her to do a whole lot more than that, presumably while wearing a whole lot less.
Some say at the highest level of tournament play the real key to winning an event is envisioning yourself doing just that, hoisting the trophy to cheers of congratulations, and then working backwards from the point of victory to figure out what exactly you have to do to get you to that point. To win a Pro Tour, you figure out how you win your final match, the intricacies of play that you will have to push through, and press backwards through the semifinals and quarterfinals all while figuring out the level of mental toughness you will have to present, the exceedingly high standard of play you will have to meet if you want to succeed at the highest level. Figuring out how to navigate the Swiss, you can envision how much draft practice you’ll have to put in (and not in 4322’s, either!) to sharpen your Limited game to carry you through the Limited rounds, and choose a Standard deck based on the expected metagame that can get the requisite number of wins and is very stable, or at least pick a swingy deck that has a high rate of failure and a high rate of success but a low rate of ‘mediocrity’ that will give you at least a chance of it being your day to be a winner. Envisioning each step, you know what choices you have to make, what behaviors you have to cultivate, and how you have to react at each point along the step. To some, this is hoodoo hogwash and worse than meaningless, it’s counter-productive wishing… but to some it is a powerful technique for framing their potential for success in reasonable goals to be achieved stepwise to work towards that ultimate end, and with its assistance can foresee complications along the way enough to recognize them when they stumble onto them and to apply their previous thought-work and planning to overcome each obstacle.
Miles clearly envisioned his end goal: breakfast at her place, then another go. (This is clearly a much better plan than his previous stated plan of gunning Kithkin at the PTQ regardless of its inability to succeed in the present metagame. Or it might be the same faulted decision, but at least he’ll have had booze if he has to be out the money.) Stepping backwards from that end goal, however, was proving quite difficult indeed. Our waitress was well out of his league, in addition to being more my age and thus probably not looking to pick up a baby-faced twenty-year-old for a roll in the hay.
Enter Magic. I may not be the best mage, but at least I know how to play the game, to the point where when I have my confidence and can assess those higher states of play that allow you to avoid mistakes and let your intuition guide you by assessing every play and every gesture to figure out what the opponent has, what the worst they can represent is and how to play around all of these things… and when they just don’t have anything and you don’t have to play around when you can just go for the throat instead. After a long dry spell punctuated by entirely too many misses, failing to Top 8 in the last round at PTQs by misplay or the inevitability of a poor deck choice crashing down around your ears, I’d given in to my inner Spike and lost the fear my Johnny had, that if I am not being original that I will have to play the same thing as everyone else will, and they will beat me because they are better at Magic than I am. Accurate deck choices started to come, even if people will mock me for my Ponders in Extended… I’ll stand by the decision 100%, as I wasn’t just aiming to play the same net-deck as everyone else but to extract the pure essence of what it meant to be the deck I’d chosen, play the version that acted most consistently like what it was and just play the same game over and over again when that game is inevitably in my favor rather than try and twist and tune one-of add-ins to mise for the right moment. Why plan to mise when you can just plan to win?
And having at least some success at Magic reminded me that in at least some capacity my ability to reason was still intact, and that I just had to identify the root problems and correct them if I wanted to reason my way out of the problem I had gotten myself into. The power of rational thought and the judicious use of reason is not to be underestimated; even after I fell out of the Grand Prix at 5-3 in round eight I knew the deck I wanted to play for the PTQ the next day, as the metagame had shifted drastically since my first PTQ two weeks before and where I was an early adopter of the Five Color Control deck-choice and leveraging cards that would give me an even larger advantage against the matchups I expected like Baneslayer Angel and Jace Beleren. Here is what I wanted to play:
The Modified Conley Woods Special
4 Twilight Mire
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Vivid Grove
3 Fire-Lit Thicket
3 Vivid Crag
2 Vivid Marsh
2 Forest
2 Mountain
1 Swamp
1 Sunken Ruins
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Putrid Leech
4 Mulldrifter
4 Shriekmaw
4 Anathemancer
2 Caldera Hellion
4 Volcanic Fallout
4 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Makeshift Mannequin
1 Cruel Ultimatum
Sideboard:
4 Great Sable Stag
4 Blightning
4 Kitchen Finks
2 Thought Hemorrhage
1 Caldera Hellion
Having watched the trends, and also the counter-trends as Faerie decks began to replace their Agony Warps with Lightning Bolts and either main-deck or sideboard Firespout as-needed to answer the “32x Great Sable Stag” problem, I was content to believe that 5c Control would be the most-played and also most-targeted deck, and not enjoy such an advantage as it possessed at Nationals when people still somehow believed the format was diverse and not hinged around 5c Control but instead a Kithkin-centric metagame. While that had been true a week before, radical changes swept the U.S. Nationals to the state of 5C Control dominance that it enjoyed, and radical changes in reaction to that dominance would carry the metagame further to leave us looking for the next change and rewarding us for attacking the metagame rather than presuming it was ‘solved’ and sticking with it as-seen.
Now, I couldn’t get this deck together between midnight Saturday night and start of the tournament Sunday, and certainly hadn’t playtested to fine-tune my changes and, more importantly, to gain the necessary experience with the deck’s intrinsic subtleties so I could step through the tournament with a sufficient level of skill. Just as I’d willingly dropped from contention trying to flirt with the waitress as a wingman must if their lead man is to ever see successes, I might as well have not played the PTQ at all as I was playing two week old technology against a wildly different field, and I managed to see myself out after two rounds of play and then go on tilt to lose a draft as well before realizing that in the state I was in I was just chasing losses, the $20 handed to Matt Boccio making me realize that I’d somehow decided I was invulnerable despite the fact that this was a poor bet to choose to make when I myself was all too aware of my relative inexperience with M10 draft, chasing losses in a defeated attitude to begin with.
It was a long weekend, with some points of excellence and unfortunate moments later in the rounds on Day 1 of play when I felt that my earlier indecision in concluding which of the possible decks I could play would be the one that would win me enough rounds to draft on day two started to grow into a larger form of indecision, feeling as if I were lost in that fog of confusion even as I was sitting down for my round seven and round eight matches because all the things I did that seemed ‘correct’ (like choosing the color combination that was reasonably equal, but capable of playing Mind Shatter) only ended up failing to work out (every time I cast Mind Shatter for almost my opponent’s entire hand, I lost the game because I drew nothing afterwards while they stabilized off the top of their deck). I started to get frustrated because I even went against last week’s advice and only played seventeen lands in my deck but ran into a long series of mana-flood games at the end of my day, and I swear I had the laziest Fireball of all time, splashed for off of three lands in my B/G deck and drawn literally zero times in the six rounds actually played before three losses crowded me out of Day Two contention.
There are some who say if life gives you lemons, make some lemonade; do the best with it that you can, and you’ll find misfortunes turning into opportunities if you just have the skill to look for the means to turn things around. I’ve had some lemons lately in life or so at least it feels, chasing my own mistakes one woman after the next I guess you could say, but have had the sense to figure out the reason behind my misplays. My inability to get enough drafts of M10 limited to really make me feel comfortable with the format certainly played a role in why I lost my confidence in my ability to succeed as we hit the later rounds of the tournament, and frankly by the time Sunday rolled around I shouldn’t have considered myself a Magic player but enjoyed some of the other options available to the casual spectator, as part of the reason I probably had such a gloomy tournament was because I got in zero games of Catch Phrase.
… Talk about a misplay in the game of life!
See you next week, when I promise I shall have far more strategic content because of an unhurried deadline, and yet more Nationals results to see, hopefully including a repeat of our illustrious editor Craig Stevenson to represent the British at Worlds!
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com