It’s the start of a new year, and the holiday season has been full of ups and downs for me. I’d long since eaten up the last of my vacation days at work, spending the last full day available to me on Grand Prix: New Jersey in November, and the “holiday” schedule at work was not very friendly or forgiving… Christmas Day off, of course, but neither the Friday before nor the day after, contrary to the prior year’s very generous holiday schedule. Much the same for New Year, and in both cases it was made all the worse by the fact that on the Friday before both we were given leave to go home as early as 2:00… and the way my planned experiments panned out would keep me chained to the lab bench till after 5pm. Now I may not be the most holiday-oriented person around – being an atheist, Christmas isn’t as important as it could be – but the holidays are at least important to people I care about, and I was destined to do a fair bit of traveling over the weekend leading up to both holidays. Add to that the fact that the Friday before New Year, when I could have left at two but had to stay almost till six, was also my birthday… well, you can see how I might have been a little Scrooge-like with my holiday cheer.
As far as Magic goes, because presumably that’s what you care about, the holidays are a terrible time to try and organize playtesting. I didn’t necessarily help the matter much, getting engaged over Christmas and getting sick following both holidays, but one would hope that at least somewhere in there a little gaming could be had. One could go into the key strategy of team-building, and the need for networking over an Internet interface such as MTGO or (as Flores used to prefer) Apprentice, and make the holiday joke of ensuring that your playtesting schedule can remain flexible and robust if you’d just be so careful as to include a schlemiel or schlimazel alongside your Christmas-celebrating friends. More importantly, however, might be breaking the dichotomy of needing a brain, a deck, and a friend, and learning how to playtest by yourself if need be. Today’s lesson may not be particularly new to a certain small sub-set of the population, specifically a knowledgeable elite that is already clued in and in the know… but to other intrepid souls it may prove invaluable.
If your local testing group isn’t around, and you have a reasonable collection on Magic Online, you can always just build the deck you fancy and get your game on in the Tournament Practice Room. You can put your deck through a simple stress-test to see if it hangs together as neatly as you’d hoped, running test-draws against random opposition to see if, for example, you need to add a land, or perhaps shave one. Less structured testing like fishing in the Tournament Practice Room isn’t good for very much, as it’s from structured testing that you’ll learn the most important lessons. If nothing else it can let you get a basic feel for your deck, fine-tune the decision-making processes behind each card you’ve chosen to run with and adjust any numbers that aren’t working out as well as you’d hoped. If you don’t have the MTGO collection of the Gods, however, this may not be a very realistic option… MagictheGathering.com writers like The Ferrett and Mike Flores have the luxury of an infinite collection, while average Joe Schmoes like me (and quite possibly you) don’t get a full playset of everything when they log in. So if you’re by yourself and the Internet isn’t a realistic option, because you think testing randomly over Apprentice or Magic Workstation is a waste of time, you can always just play with yourself.
(I mean Play Magic with yourself. Get your mind out of the gutter.)
I first learned this particular method from Adrian Sullivan, making it the Sullivan Method. The Sullivan Method is suspiciously like the Pat Chapin method, and the method used by any of a number of other old-school players from back in the day, except that they no longer invented it anymore. As far as physical components, you’ll need one piece of paper and two poker decks (if you’re playing a test deck of your choice against an actual opponent), or two pieces of paper and three poker decks (if you’re… ahem… “playing with yourself”). So far our “material components” budget is up to a whopping $3, assuming the paper was free, and the only outside materials needed are a pen, which if you’re truly thrifty you can steal from most banks without being penalized at all nowadays.
The third deck is going to be used for spare parts, to give us extra “unique” suits. My personal poker deck is pimped out to the extreme, built out of two Magic: the Gathering-backed poker cards that come in the size of actual Magic cards, which I got for getting a Legends membership with the DCI back in 1996. Except for the fact that some of the cards now have marker on them and they’ve been shuffled well past the point of being sale-able, this would probably be a $25 find on eBay if anyone had any, which is like Vintage players popping $80 for their foil Polluted Deltas or that judges’ foil Balance… definitely way above a “sane” cost for most players. I got it back in the day and felt it was amusingly appropriate, and besides… why would Wizards ever make cards you couldn’t play? You get 52 unique cards in a poker deck, plus two Jokers; to get to 60 cards, you need to pull from a second poker deck and find a way to differentiate some of those cards from a regular card already found in your starting 52. I like using Jokers and jacks with a box drawn around them, “black bordering” them to make them Jacks-in-a-Box, but as several of my readers have noticed over time, my sense of humor is highly suspect. If you were reading the Internet for good humor, I’d suggest The Dilbert Blog instead. At least he knows how to use a semicolon, and does so only sparingly.
I like Jokers, but they have to be a four-of in whatever deck you’re playing, because they are impossible to distinguish from each other, as jokers don’t usually come suited like the rest of the cards in the deck. And if you’re a weirdo and want to play more than sixty cards, this is not the method for you. That said, you now have either one or two decks of poker cards with somewhere between 56 and 60 unique faces, and just need to make up a chart to represent your deck. For example:
| A | 6 | J | |
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Heart
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Diamond
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Spade
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Club
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| 2 | 7 | J | |
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Heart
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Diamond
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Spade
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Club
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| 3 | 8 | Q | |
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Heart
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Fire/Ice
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Diamond
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Fire/Ice
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Spade
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Fire/Ice
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Club
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Fire/Ice
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| 4 | 9 | K | |
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Heart
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Diamond
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Spade
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Orim’s Chant
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Club
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Orim’s Chant
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| 5 | 10 | Jo | |
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Heart
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Orim’s Chant
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Diamond
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Spade
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Club
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Of course, in testing you’ll find that your poker deck may not work quite the same as you are used to:
| Poker Hand | |||||||
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A
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A
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A
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A
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K
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K
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K
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| Magic Hand | |||||||
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A
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A
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A
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A
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K
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K
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K
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Now, you’re ready to playtest with a friend (if you have one proxy deck), saving any number of draft commons from death by Sharpie and saving plenty of time switching from test-deck to test-deck as you Sharpie another draft deck or whatever method you use for proxying… I’m sure it’s more complicated than filling in blanks on a gridded piece of paper, which you can even print out blank all pretty-like as an Excel spreadsheet to fill any number of decks out on. (For the truly lazy, I’ve made one up myself and sent it along to Craig, who presumably will find a host-site for it and link to it here.)
Testing with a friend is easy… you now have any number of different potential proxy decks, drawn together to form the Voltron of test-decks. Testing by yourself is hard, and you have to make some very honest decisions going into it about “information management”. You get to see both sides of the picture, and have perfect information. You know if, for example, the opponent has the crucial Counterspell or is just bluffing… so you can’t always make an unbiased decision about what the proper play is, even if you think that having all the information would let you know what the right play is every time. Knowing everything takes away some of the risk / reward interplay that goes into making decisions, and can skew results in two very specific ways. It can skew results to take away the consequences of poor play, like “well if he has a counter and I try this now, I just get destroyed, but if I wait a turn I can back it up with X”… and it can skew results to look at the worst-case scenario of each matchup. That latter “skewing” is actually quite useful, helping you to figure out how bad the matchup really is if you’re being consistently outplayed and what the important tools are, so while I suggest leaning on these sorts of results for statistical meaningfulness right away, it can help teach you about how these things interact, letting you gain experience and make plans of attack to try.
Let’s try a test-game of what one might see as being a reasonably common matchup in the upcoming PTQ season: the Boros versus TEPS match-up. We’ll translate the data through the Matrix for you, looking at hands that are already translated from gibberish like A1 23 72 Jo1 J1 54 102 to “Savannah Lions, Grim Lavamancer, Kird Ape, Wooded Foothills, Sacred Foundry, Molten Rain, Lightning Helix”. Boros goes first:
Savannah Lions, Grim Lavamancer, Kird Ape, Wooded Foothills, Sacred Foundry, Molten Rain, Lightning Helix.
Versus:
Sulfur Vent, Bloodstained Mire, Darkwater Egg, Burning Wish, Seething Song, Cabal Ritual, Rite of Flame.
Turn 1: Boros starts off with Wooded Foothills for Stomping Ground, going to 17, casting Kird Ape. Assuming going first they don’t know what the opponent is playing, this is the correct lead-off play. TEPS draws Chromatic Star and plays Sulfur Vent.
Turn 2: Boros draws Lava Dart, and plays Sacred Foundry untapped, going to 15. Boros attacks with Kird Ape (15, 18) and casts both Savannah Lions and Grim Lavamancer. TEPS draws Geothermal Crevice, and plays both Geothermal Crevice and Chromatic Star.
Turn 3: Boros draws Windswept Heath, and plays Windswept Heath before attacking. Boros attacks for 5 with its animals (15, 13), uses Windswept Heath to get a basic Plains (14,13) and casts Molten Rain targeting Sulfur Vent (14,11). (Sulfur Vent is targeted because it taps for RU, two useful colors, while Geothermal Crevice taps for GB, only one of which is really useful to the Perfect Storm deck. Channel the Suns is less relevant than a Sac-land providing Blue mana off the bat.) Boros has two cards left in hand, can deal six damage next turn with creatures, and possibly close the deal if their top card plus two cards include a land and can deal five damage for three mana. (Helix, Firebolt or Helix, Lava Dart). TEPS draws Chrome Mox, and now has to calculate the odds of going off and fizzling versus the odds of being dead next turn. They play Bloodstained Mire, and do some thinking.
Their hand: Chrome Mox, Burning Wish, Darkwater Egg, Seething Song, Cabal Ritual, Rite of Flame. In play: Bloodstained Mire, Geothermal Crevice, Chromatic Star. Graveyard: Sulfur Vent.
The best play available includes getting Threshold before casting Cabal Ritual, which requires both Lands and both Artifacts to be sacrificed, and Seething Song and Rite of Flame both cast first. This leaves Chrome Mox and Burning Wish in hand, and the Mox can actually make colored mana in addition to upping the Storm count if a colored spell is drawn. We need to have UURB1 available before Cabal Ritual can be cast, resolving with UURBBBBB and letting us Wish for Mind’s Desire. This means both the Star and Egg have to provide those two Blue, as the land we fetch with Bloodstained Mire has to be tapped for Red mana. So long as it’s some flavor of Mountain it doesn’t matter if it’s Mountain, Blood Crypt, or Steam Vents… Boros is tapped out and we’re dead if they get another turn anyway.
Geothermal Crevice is sacrificed for GB. Mountain is tapped for Red. Rite of Flame is cast to get RRGB. Seething Song is cast to get RRRRRB. Chromatic Star turns R into U, so we have RRRRUB. A meaningless card is drawn. Darkwater Egg is cast for R, and turns RR into BU. We now have RBBUU, and draw another meaningless card. We now have Threshold, with three lands, two Artifacts, and the two Red rituals in the graveyard. Cabal Ritual is cast, turning BB into BBBBB, leaving us with RUUBBBBB. For RB, Burning Wish is cast to get Mind’s Desire with UUBBBB floating, and Chrome Mox is cast and not Imprinted just to up the Storm count. Mind’s Desire is cast, and Storm copies Mind’s Desire for the Rite of Flame, Seething Song, Darkwater Egg, Cabal Ritual, Burning Wish and Chrome Mox drawn this turn, for a total of seven copies.
Boros shuffles up for the next game, because it either dies or TEPS fizzles, and he no longer needs to be here for this edition of Magic: the Puzzling. Isn’t playing with yourself fun?
We flip over seven cards: K1 Q3 21 61 43 82 A4. What, you wanted the translation still? Fine, be that way: Sulfur Vent, Bloodstained Mire, Lotus Bloom, Burning Wish, Channel the Suns, Darkwater Egg, Sins of the Past. This one is now strictly academic. Boros loses.
Some match-ups are harder to test than others. Truly interactive matchups, where decisions can be made between two subtle decks based on a war of card advantage and information, are very difficult to test against yourself, while one subtle deck versus one straightforward deck is much easier. Two straightforward decks that are not really strategically interactive, like Boros versus Perfect Storm, are very easy to test and get a feel for… and since those are two of the most important decks in Extended right now, that’s pretty good. Boros made exactly one “meaningful” decision all game, and that was which land to target with Molten Rain. Knowledge of the fact that Rite of Flame and Seething Song are more plentiful than Channel the Suns dictated that Sulfur Vents be killed over Geothermal Crevice, because it can tap for two mana and provide Red, making it clearly the better land. The same outcome would happen in either case, however: the numbers would be the same, leaving TEPS still very much so in danger, with the best-case scenario for them if they pass the turn involving going down to 1 and not being able to use their fetch-land anymore… not a good option. If they didn’t have Burning Wish, they’d still probably have to go for it, and hope that the two cards drawn off Darkwater Egg and Chromatic Star included one copy of either Mind’s Desire or Burning Wish. It wouldn’t be the prettiest math you’d ever seen, but it’d be more “in their favor” than saying go and having a very realistic chance of being dead on the fourth turn.
This method of using a poker deck is excellent for situations like this, where you just need test-draws against a variety of decks that aren’t really going to warp any results because you know both sides of the table’s hands. It’s also excellent for decks that are reasonably straightforward and don’t go through too many cards in a clump to reasonably identify, because you aren’t going to see individual cards with card-names, casting costs, card color, and big whopping pictures to help you identify them and thus play most correctly. Perfect Storm is actually pretty hard to play this way. There are lots of 2’s and 3’s muddying up the neat, orderly grid (unlike Boros’s pile of four-ofs), and you go through a fair chunk of cards you need to identify between all the cantripping and flipping past things with Plunge into Darkness or revealing spells you can cast for free via Mind’s Desire.
I wouldn’t suggest testing Ichorid in this fashion, as identifying six or more new cards added to your “resources” (in this case, graveyard) that you have to correctly identify and account for in your planning is harder than it sounds. Maybe you wouldn’t miss that key Cabal Therapy if it weren’t the two of clubs. So clearly there are flaws inherent in the system… but its benefits in time and ease of use are worth giving it a serious consideration as a testing tool, for those times when you may not actually have a brain, a deck, and a friend.
Happy 2007… I’ll be back next week with a more meaty article about Extended, following up on my upcoming first-week PTQ, and close out the last article of my first year’s stint here on the free side every week writing Magical Hack in two weeks’ time with a Planar Chaos pre-release primer. It’s best to wait a bit and let the official previews percolate, so we can at least get a feel for what some of the cards in the set are going to be like before I try and figure out Sealed Deck and Draft. (Some in the industry call this “sticking my foot in my mouth”, but I’ve been reasonably successful at it so far.)
Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com
What do you do with a B.A. in English,
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college and plenty of knowledge,
Have earned me this useless degree…
Avenue Q
*: The astute reader will note a slight change from “my” Scepter-Chant list from previous weeks; while butchering and bastardizing the deck, I also realized I was having at least some difficulty in the early game against Boros if they had Molten Rain, and wanted another basic land against decks with Destructive Flow. After realizing that the clumsiest card in the deck was the fourth copy of Cunning Wish, because sometimes just sometimes I drew more Wishes than I knew what to do with, that was the card earmarked for a possible change. Snow-covered Mountain was the basic land I most desired, giving me a land in play untapped with those two Wooded Foothills without having to pay the extra two life, and because of those two Foothills this one basic (and I guess Snow-mana-producing) Land felt like three, even if it didn’t tap for Blue.
I’ve also changed my sideboard a little, because I haven’t found I need access to Wrath of God in pretty much any matchup so far, while long-time NY-area Scepter-Chant player Mike Stein slowly but surely convinced me that Kataki, War’s Wage is needed in the matchup against Affinity. I didn’t want to be convinced, but reading up on the current events in Frank Karsten’s “Online Tech” this week suggested to me that Affinity might actually be reasonably populous at this weekend’s PTQ, so room could be found for the pesky Legend at the expense of sideboard cards like Wrath of God, or maybe a Wish target I’ve never actually bothered to get, like Condemn. If “just” listening to the guy from around here who’s been playing the deck for two years and keeps winning qualifiers with it isn’t enough, listening to Frank Karsten should be.
You do all read Online Tech nowadays, right?