In the past few weeks, I’ve talked about a plethora of decks. This is better than that, this put up such-and-such for numbers, this is what made the Top 4 of the Grand Prix… but we’re two weeks into the season, and as you know, two weeks in is plenty of time to find out that everything you knew was wrong. Metagaming is a very fluid trend, often unpredictable, but based entirely on what information has been presented to the public and how much of that so-called “wisdom” has been taken up by the local area players that you will actually be facing in magical combat. Two weeks ago, the metagame to beat was one Black/White deck, one Red/Green or Red/Green/White deck, and one “Other”, usually something that played at least a few counterspells. The default configuration in a lot of peoples’ minds was the one that won the Grand Prix, Heartbeat plus B/W plus R/G.
Heartbeat beats Ghost Dad, Ghost Dad beats Red/Green, Red/Green beats Heartbeat. Rock/Paper/Scissors. The exact wrong (or right) pairings leads to a 3-0 sweep, while most other results will see one mirror match played and a 2-1 victory for whoever wins the mirror match, or three mirrors and results highly variable based on play skill. This is a format in which the best players will consistently win, because it is structured warfare. If everyone plays by the rules, the best team wins. Playing by the rules, however, defeats the spirit of the game to some, and I don’t just mean those who would like to start with a full grip of eight cards on the play, or even those who “keep the Impulse.” Playing by the rules of warfare isn’t how the United States won its freedom from Mother England, and as we have learned in the wars of the last half century those who ascribe to such polite frivolties such as “rules of warfare” tend to have a difficult time dealing with those who set no such limitations upon their actions.
Anyone who follows the rules is a target. Those who keep moving, keep adjusting to learn what the target is and how to beat it, they are the ones that are dangerous: they will not be the stationary target you are expecting to face, nor will they present such a vulnerable spot of their own to hit. And there are a lot of ways that things are shaking down that are just another way in which the format is becoming codified, the rules are falling into place, the target is being raised.
One key facet of the format is that there is open communication by teammates, and all members of a team are allowed to contribute towards finding the right play for each situation. This can help compensate for a lot of problems a team might face, like a last-minute audible to a deck the pilot just isn’t going to be as familiar with as one of his team-mates might be, but those two players can’t just switch. If one person is playtesting less than the others, for whatever reason, they may just have to accept being handed a deck they are not as familiar with when the two players who are testing often enough to have a sense for the motion of the metagame make the call to change decks. With a friend to help out in making the non-obvious plays, ones that actually require playtesting experience, such a dire situation can be turned around entirely by having someone ghost-pilot the second deck in addition to their own. Pretty nifty, and it means that you don’t have to have three players completely absorbed in testing Standard twenty hours a week just to have a chance to win the PTQ. Not everyone can make equal commitments, and communication allows for pooling that knowledge and experience.
It also leads to one very simple, seemingly obvious assumption: that the best player on the team will sit in the middle, so as to better direct his two team-mates. Admittedly, to do so would be easier if that was your goal. However, a lot of different teams have a varying level of strengths to bring to the game, and it’s not clear that each team will have a consensus best player. In the recent example Mike Flores set forth, discussing his recent trip to the finals of a Connecticut PTQ, he explained that his team felt that the best player would be sitting in the middle seat. This is a team with Paul Jordan and Steve Sadin, and I think when it comes to play skills most people in the know would assume that it was actually Mike himself who was the weak link on the team. It’s somewhat difficult to place Steve over Paul or Paul over Steve, to figure out which one should be in the B-seat to coach their team-mates; by looking at the decks, one would assume that the better player playing the combo deck that requires the most attention to his own game (Paul) would be the worse choice for sitting in the B-seat and advising the team.
If a team doesn’t have a clear pecking order, it’s harder to see who is going to sit where. Two good players and a third along for the ride can either nominate a head of the team between the two best, or they can be very trusting of each other’s skills and sandwich the weak player, allowing both of the good players to advise their weaker team-mate and balance out the play skill differential. Three good players combined will probably fight tooth and nail amongst themselves to nominate a lead player, or they will assume it doesn’t matter and place themselves helter-skelter trying to capitalize on a metagame call based on the predictions of which deck will end up where. You can make solid estimates like “Heartbeat won’t be in the middle very often, because it requires a lot of attention to play well and thus defeats the purpose of being seated in the middle to help both team-mates.”
The sub-clause of this, when trying to come up with a plan for metagaming, is that good players hate to play beatdown decks, because they waste a lot of their talents on decks that do not require finesse to play. A lot of teams are going with this notion, which again might place Steven Sadin in the middle in Mike’s example because of the three decks chosen Steve’s is the most vulnerable to a quick aggressive strategy: Stone Rain does not target Savannah Lions or Isamaru very well. If your bet is that a) good teams won’t have beatdown in the B-seat and b) bad teams may have beatdown in the B-seat but they are bad and you will beat them anyway, it certainly seems likely that “the rule” is to place the best player in the middle seat with a non-beatdown deck. We still however have not presented proof that this rule exists, because we have looked at one option and considered it to be the best case.
As of the Grand Prix in Wisconsin, good teams were still playing Red/Green decks. Slowly but surely, Ghost Dad is choking out the existence of Red-based aggressive decks, because it takes away their lunch money and stomps them to the curb much more often than the Red/Green players would like. “Good players” sometimes make judgment calls, and I haven’t heard anyone saying that PT Honolulu winner Mark Herberholz “isn’t a good player”. If a team feels they will gain an advantage placing a beatdown deck in the B-seat, because they think everyone good is going to assume no one good is going to do so, that assumption has stopped being a helpful thing and is now a weapon to be used against you, a liability crafted from your own perceptions that everyone not fitting your world-view can be dismissed. Assumptions and beliefs are only as good as the results they get you, in this case, and this thought-game can be played on so many levels it’s not even funny.
Two weeks into the format, I think any publicly “known” belief (“The best player will sit in the B-seat, and the best player on a team is the least likely to play beatdown”) about how to metagame the metagame is best chosen as a target instead of taken on yourself, and every team that wins a qualifier with Red/Green in the B-seat will silently think to themselves, “Thank God for Mike Flores,” in much the same tone of voice that Mike recently said “Thank God for Ben Goodman.” Anything that increases the order present in the environment, that causes more teams to behave alike, is a boon to those who want to beat the system… also known to many as “win the PTQ”.
You got away with it to earn your qualification, Mr. Flores… but don’t be so mean as to insist that what worked for you for X, Y and Z reasons will still be true next week after a small Mongolian horde of your readers and supporters have decided to act upon your advice in exactly the fashion you have presented to the world. Now that it’s “public knowledge” and the one-trick pony worked, it has ceased to be useful and instead become a liability. Place the weakest player in the B-seat and let the stronger two players on your team pick off the weaker two players on his team, and you’ve got a winning strategy. Place a deck that beats control decks (Gruul? Owling Mine?) in the B-seat, and take advantage of everyone looking to follow the footsteps of their betters onward to Charleston and greatness. Place a deck that crushes beatdown mercilessly in the B-seat, to compensate for all the people who are going to compensate for Flores’ words and play decks that are strong choices if you can ignore the beatdown element. Pick A, B, and C at random to make sure that nobody can correctly “game” the system that you use for placement of your decks.
Mike Flores creates metagames out of thin air and a stream of words, but it takes a consensus to turn his opinions into a reality. The metagame, at the end of the day, is still the sum total average of what all of your opponents are bringing to the table, and beating the metagame depends on knowing your opposition and knowing your odds. Mike Flores creates metagames… but he needs the unquestioning acceptance of his words to do so.
In the game of Magic, there is in the end one correct play, often several “good” plays or “acceptable” plays, and an endless assortment of fun ways you can boba it up if you aren’t following the interplay of the game or just don’t see what’s about to happen. In the game of selecting a deck with which to play Magic, however, the existence of one correct choice is often put to the question. Sometimes it’s right, and you should shut up and play Vial Affinity like the other 50% of the room, because the space monkeys shall inherit the earth and you’d rather be a member of Project Mayhem than a victim of it. Often, there are a variety of good choices and no clear-cut best choice, and very rarely (but more often than never) there are more than a dozen equally good choices that present different strengths and weaknesses to bring to the tournament, requiring you to have a solid knowledge of the risks you are taking.
That latter part is what we started with one month ago, with the results of Pro Tour Honolulu. A very fine razor has been shaving away at it ever since, the weight of perception, opinion, and the onward roll of the MTGO metagame progressing forward on a weekly, or sometimes even daily, basis. What was first perceived to be an open metagame populated by nearly two dozen decks with a wide variety of strategies has slowly been reduced by the inevitable action of repetition: that which is good stands out from the crowd. To most, Ghost Dad is considered to be the first deck on the team, for its ability to destroy most aggressive decks and to overpower most decks that foolishly “play fair” with it. Recently, Osyp Lebedowicz said he felt that Promise-Husk B/W Aggro is the best B/W aggro deck, because it uses more of the power cards in the B/W matchups and has an overall more explosive game-plan… thanks to cards like Orzhov Pontiff that are “at their best.”
Now, I for one have had Pontiffs in my Ghost Dad deck for three weeks now, and, despite the shocked horror from the originators of the deck that I changed a few cards here and there, I considered it a pretty awesome switch. Its ability helps control or overpower a wide variety of problem situations. Maybe with Osyp backing me up when I say that the Pontiff is nuts, Ben Goodman and the Superfriends will be less doubtful of my removing their Descendants of Kiyomaro in order to squeeze them in. Just because the latest fad is the Husk deck doesn’t mean what has come before has been invalidated… go ahead and show me any card Osyp can cast that RidiculousHat cannot, and try to do it without a smile on your face. Decks change and evolve constantly, because with as much work as is being put into Standard at the moment by the collective efforts of a very large number of players (whether they realize they are involved or not), to stand still is tantamount to suicide.
Some decks will just naturally eclipse others, and, like homo sapiens did to homo erectus, it’s a very natural thing to see two decks enter but one deck leave. Where we see Ghost Dad, Ruel B/W, and Promise-Husk right now, the continued trends of parallel evolution will likely see one or even both of the “competing” flavors of Black/White aggressive decks eclipsed by the best of the bunch… whichever that may be. All three will interchange working parts like there’s no tomorrow, trying to build a better mousetrap or at least settle for a better Black/White deck, and we’ll all get a good laugh when Dissension comes along to top over our favored playthings with an entirely different set of decks.
Assuming that everything is “just” as simple as choosing the three Honolulu decks that beat the other team’s three Honolulu decks because you are clever enough to position yourself well enough to ensure a consistent series of good matchups may work week one, and even week two (because if the PTQs are three hundred miles apart, week two is someone else’s week one), but it shouldn’t be your overarching goal from now until the end of the season. Everyone is wise to that trick now, reading as far as they can into the placement tendencies of other teams, based on a few tenets that are ingrained in the system and the belief that those who are not wise to those trends are the kind of people that aren’t worth worrying about anyway. Now, we’ll see a lot more originality coming out of the woodwork, as tactical deckbuilding continues to evolve the metagame when new decks come to feast upon the old. Let’s return for a moment to the example provided in living color by Flores, of his week one and week two configurations: Paul Jordan playing Heartbeat, Steve Sadin playing U/R Magnivore.dec, and Mike Flores playing B/G/W Control (week one) and G/W Ghazi-splat (week two).
Week one, their philosophy on deckbuilding presented three decks that have game against Red/Green style decks, two of which basically can’t lose to decks like that (B/W/G, Heartbeat) and the third which can beat most common configurations even if the games can be tight. Those same three decks were intended to have a good matchup against a “bad” Black/White deck, Ghost Dad, because all of the hype and all of the spin on the Internet was pushing the Shoals and Tallowisps as hard as possible. It is because of the proclivity of this deck, progressing to the point where you could mostly guarantee any decent team having a copy on their side, that Flores said “Thank God for Ben Goodman,” for his advocacy in advancing the deck in the mind of the public, not because Ghost Dad is specifically a bad deck. That which is known can be attacked.
What changed from Week One to Week Two, I wonder? What brought forward the audible to trade what Mike had been calling the best deck he’d made since Napster in order to shuffle up some Green and White cards? In the end, it would have to be the kind of tools the deck brought to the table, such as the post-sideboarding audible to let four copies of Chord of Calling “tutor” for the fourth Goblin Flectomancer on the team, despite having no way to cast it whatsoever. Did this change prove itself over the course of the Week Two qualifier? Well, Mike’s team won the qualifier after all, it just happened to have done so in the second round and walked out with their rating qualification to make their way out of King of Prussia, PA, which given my experience with that particular venue strikes me as a particularly good idea. He left with a 2-0 record with Ghazi-splat [Ghazi-* if you’re wondering, because it combines elements of several different PT Honolulu variants of Ghazi-Glare, GhaziGood, and Ghazi-Chord] but two match wins does not defend a decision, especially when those matches were not necessarily against the most difficult opponents in the room.
What philosophy drove the change, however? What does G/W do that B/W/G does not? The first thought after reading both sides of the final match from Connecticut seems to be to prevent the deck from offering Flores too many ways to make complicated decisions badly, providing a similar brand of power to the deck without adding all the complexity of possibly making a bad decision. That doesn’t necessarily hold water, however, simply due to the fact that Chord of Calling is at least as complex as Dimir House Guard when it comes to how it affects the decision-making process and is probably a good deal more so, simply due to the nature of the Convoke ability and how it interacts with aggressive tempo.
Certainly a deck playing the full boat of Kodamas North-side and other expensive spells like Chord of Calling and Yosei can’t be said to be “at its best” against Heartbeat, the deck that gets to five mana and then kills you. It seems difficult to believe that this deck plays very well against Wildfire.dec, as the only creature that survives Wildfire costs six, and the deck is not really aggressive enough in its design and its eye on the mana curve to arguably race either of those decks – the two decks Mike can easily point to as being excellent, based on the performances of his team-mates. Ghazi-based decks are essentially at their best against Red/Green decks, and can take on Ghost Dad admirably, but these are the decks Mike expected to face, not the decks Mike said were the best decks a team could throw at him. And it’s arguable that Green/White may be an excellent audible, to sit next to a Heartbeat deck and not interfere, if all the G/W deck has to give up is Sakura-Tribe Elder. If, that is, that deck can be made to have game against the other good decks he should be worried about… you know, like the ones his team was playing.
An individual deck decision for one deck on the team is, after all, pretty irrelevant. It is the sum total of all three decks, and the averaging effect of their good and bad matchups, that is truly relevant. As we move further into the season, the simple expectation of being able to gauge and predict the matchups the opposing team brings to the table becomes more and more difficult, as more information and more experience with the field provides the kind of impetus needed to get deckbuilders off their butts in order to find a new combination of cards with which to game the system. Soon, gone will be the days of “knowing” that your opponent was likely to field a Red/Green deck, and with that disappearance so too perhaps will Ghost Dad begin to fade back into the aether as its key prey becomes more and more scarce. The rigid codification of Team Standard deck choices is the kind of thing that is advantageous for individual teams to move away from instead of towards, because keeping away from the average trends of the metagame can keep you safe from those who would prey upon them… and with Mike and Steve and Paul qualified for Charleston in just over one PTQ worth of play, it’s fairly obvious to those who have an eye for such things that this is something you can do.
But it will only work if the rest of the world stands still in order to give you a fair swing at it, and good luck with that. The proverbial cat, after all, is out of the bag.
Week One: One PTQ (Connecticut) + One Grand Prix (Wisconsin)
Connecticut:
Winners:
C – U/R Control
B – Heezy Street
A – Greater Gifts
Second Place:
C – Heartbeat
B – Magnivore
A – B/W/G Control
3rd / 4th:
C – Ghost Dad
B – Heezy Street
A – Greater Gifts
C – Ghost Dad
B – Magnivore
A – GhaziGood
Wisconsin:
Winners:
C – Heartbeat
B – Ghost Dad
A – Heezy Street
Second Place:
C – Zoo
B – B/W Rats
A – Izzetron
3rd / 4th:
C – Heartbeat
B – B/W Rats
A – Magnivore
C – Heartbeat
B – Zoo
A – B/W Rats
Week Two: 4 PTQ’s (Maryland, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan)
Maryland:
Winners:
C – Zoo
B – B/W Control
A – Magnivore
Second Place:
C – GhaziGood
B – Izzetron
A – Ghost Dad
3rd / 4th:
C – Zoo
B – Ghost Dad
A – Heartbeat
C – B/W Husk-Promise
B – Magnivore
A – Heartbeat
Washington:
Winners:
C – Heartbeat
B – B/W Rats
A – Magnivore
Second Place:
C – B/W Rats
B – Magnivore
A – Critical Mass
3rd / 4th:
C – Izzetron
B – B/W Rats
A – Greater Gifts
C – Heartbeat
B – B/W Rats
A – Zoo
Pennsylvania:
Winners:
C – Magnivore
B – B/W Husk-Promise
A – GhaziGood
Second Place:
C – B/W Rats
B – U/W/R Firemane Control
A – Heezy Street
3rd / 4th:
C – Izzetron
B – Heezy Street
A – Ghost Dad
C – Heartbeat
B – B/W Rats
A – Heezy Street
Michigan:
Winners:
C – Ghost Dad
B – Heezy Street
A – Heartbeat
Second Place:
C – Heezy Street
B – U/W/R Firemane Control
A – B/W Aggro
3rd / 4th:
C – Heezy Street
B – Heartbeat
A – Ghost Dad
C – Heezy Street
B – Heartbeat
A – B/W Aggro
This is of course based off the assumption that decklists are being posted in (C, B, A) order, as I matched the teams whose seating configurations I knew to their Top 4 decklists and simply have to assume the best from there. Not the most certain answer, as it’s somewhat predicated on hopes and well-wishes instead of actual concrete fact, but you take what you can get. Instead of looking at these for a sum total of what decks made the cut how often, I want to challenge the notion that different seats may face a different metagame because of a biasing effect resulting from the assumption that a better player sits in seat B, paired with the fact that said better player will avoid playing beatdown.
Seat A:
B/W Rats / Aggro – 3
Ghost Dad – 3
Greater Gifts – 3
Heartbeat – 3
Heezy Street – 3
Magnivore – 3
GhaziGood – 2
B/W/G Control – 1
Critical Mass – 1
Izzetron – 1
Zoo – 1
Seat A is a fair mish-mash, with “the decks people seem to like playing” being reasonably evenly distributed, with six different decks played by three teams making the cut to elimination rounds. Seat A seems to be something of a catch-all; by the results here, again presuming that this is based on fact and not looking at the results of random chance when it comes to the order in which decklists are published on Magicthegathering.com following the PTQ season, anything and everything has a shot at doing well in Seat A.
Seat B:
B/W Rats – 6
Heezy Street – 4
Magnivore – 4
Ghost Dad – 2
Heartbeat – 2
U/W/R Firemane Control – 2
B/W Control – 1
B/W Husk-Promise – 1
Izzetron – 1
Zoo – 1
Ah, Seat B, the “good player" seat where no one plays beatdown. With seven aggro B/W decks, four Heezy Street decks and one Zoo deck, I’d say that notion has been effectively blown out the window. Or, perhaps, instead it has been preyed upon already: the game of “if you know that I know that you know…” played out to a logical conclusion, with people sticking beatdown decks in the B-seat to beat down on the people who put decks with a glass jaw in the B-seat figuring they’d get off easy against control decks.
Seat C:
Heartbeat – 7
Ghost Dad – 3
Heezy Street – 3
Zoo – 3
B/W Rats – 2
Izzetron – 2
B/W Husk-Promise – 1
GhaziGood – 1
Magnivore – 1
U/R Control – 1
Seat C, it seems, is the home of the Heartbeat deck, which means that either everyone thinks Heartbeat belongs in the C-seat or everyone is putting the decks that lose to Heartbeat in the C-seat, such as perhaps Ghost Dad, or another deck that is often ill-prepared to square off against Heartbeat in a fair fight. (Probably because in that matchup, Heartbeat just isn’t playing fair.)
Looking at the three seats, if that is indeed how the decklists are ordered, we can hold the metagame in the middle away from the metagame of either side. (If I’ve gotten it a little wrong instead of a lot, and it’s decklists presented in A-B-C form instead of C-B-A, the point remains unchanged as far as how this impacts the B-seat.)
In two weeks of play, it seems that the people who put Heartbeat on the side instead of in the middle saw good results for doing so, possibly despite the fact that Heartbeat generally asks for a better player piloting it in comparison to, say, Heezy Street, which might be a little more forgiving if mistakes occur. Heezy Street, after all, will never “accidentally” manaburn for seventeen. People who put beatdown decks in the middle, well, beat down on those who thought it was safe, and except for the fact that Heartbeat tends to do well on the side instead of in the middle (perhaps it’s all the Rats in the middle?) we have a pretty solidly balanced A/C-seat metagame. Everything is being played in every seat, and the patterns in the chaos do not seem to advance the notion that the best player sits in seat B and plays a control or combo deck that is vulnerable to beatdown. Contrary to the original similarities in play and appearance, the format is not actually Emperor, where you can’t attack the emperor until one of the wingmen has fallen… and so beatdown is not actually discouraged in the seat, but instead seems to perhaps be flourishing on the overall assumption that seat B will have fewer beatdown decks and the efforts to shelter a vulnerable deck from the beatdown in that seat.
Or it could just be noise, with no signal at all provided within, no rhyme or reason to explain why bad things happen to good people or why the Batsuit had nipples when Val Kilmer wore it. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind… if there even is one.
So the moral of the story for Team Limited, or perhaps more accurately the only advice I am willing to give that I think wouldn’t be hypocritical or damaging to do so: challenge your beliefs and assumptions, and don’t be afraid to think for yourselves. Anything that is known for a fact is a facet that can be attacked, and pretty much everyone is aware of this by now, so the presumed trends of the first two weeks have a) changed by now to accommodate for the addition of public knowledge, and b) haven’t necessarily proven true in the first place. Don’t do something just because someone else told you what to do, no matter who that person is or what their credentials are. Think for yourself, and if you still think that the opinions and beliefs and trends still hold true after you’ve had a good long think about them, feel free to run with it.
Remember: all you need is a brain, three decks, and two friends.
– Sean McKeown
– [email protected]
“And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning in the words that it was forming
And the sign said, ‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls’
And whispered in the sounds of silence…”
“The Sound of Silence”, by Simon and Garfunkel