Recently, I’ve realized how far removed I am from “normal” Magic. I’ve played maybe five Regular REL events in the past two years and maybe average one
non-sanctioned Cube or Vintage event a month. When I do side drafts, it’s basically playing with the same rules as a Grand Prix top 4.
This has led to some rather out of place situations. I showed up to a Prerelease and didn’t know missed triggers weren’t a thing. I’ve asked my opponents
to “play on pace to finish the match” at a random local Standard event. Basically, I’ve been applying my philosophy of playing the same Magic at every
event to some fairly mixed results.
Really, I’m just seeing the flip side of what most people do. The vast majority of Magic players will maybe attend one Grand Prix a year, if any at all.
The Pro Tour is a three-day long stream showing the feature match area that never shows the battles for X-5, mapping out required results to hit Gold, or
defining the difference between a 1-2 and a 2-1 Draft deck.
So, as I’m relearning the FNM ropes, I figured it would be a good idea to try and open the curtain to show things in both directions. Below are a few of
the things I consistently see from high level play where people’s expectations just don’t match reality.
The Glamor of the Pro Tour
Recently, a blog post made the rounds where the author basically complained a bunch about the Pro Tour. While some of the Pro Tour versus other e-sports
competition discussion is a lot deeper and has a lot of good points on both sides, there was one point made that I really disagree with.
The author was really rough on the physical appearance of the Pro Tour. That it was just another event in another warehouse-esque event site and less
glamorous than the feature matches make it look.
Honestly, I’m not really sure what the person is looking for. It’s just an event. There are still logistics of getting 400 people playing in some random
area of the globe. You can’t get 400 recliner chairs half way across the world every four months, or give coverage to every match. It’s an event with
higher stakes, but at the end of the day you are playing between eight and nineteen rounds of Magic.
And honestly, that’s good enough.
Paul Rietzl’s response to this comment is probably the best. A big part of the Pro Tour is actually wanting to play the game to… you know… play the
game. The modest monetary and notoriety are just bonuses to Magic itself. At the highest levels, Magic is a really unique and awesome puzzle to solve. The
bar is always set by other humans, meaning it is always increasingly difficult, it’s dynamic from game to game due to randomization, making pattern
memorization that is prevalent in Chess less important compared to rapid evaluation, and is constantly changing with each set, preventing stagnation.
Nothing else I’ve played really brings the same depth to the table.
The Pro Tour is not really a means to any end besides playing Magic. It’s just the best place to play the best game in the world. If your first expectation
is for it to be something more or different, you really need to reconsider if the Pro Tour is the best route to your goal.
What Makes a Pro
Similar to the above, people have really high expectations of Pros, especially their standard of play. A personal favorite of mine from the recent
discussion about scouting was “You are a pro, you shouldn’t have to scout to win.” A lot of Pros have stories of people making awkward plays to beat tricks
because “they clearly have it.”
I’m probably the 143rd person to say this, but the margins are way smaller than you think.
First and foremost, a lot of the edge the Pros have over the average player is just making obviously incorrect decisions a lot less. Not like “I attack
with this creature instead of this so that marginal red combat trick #3 results in a less profitable trade, forcing him to use a removal spell and then
allowing me to do XYZ.” Literally “I have a Mardu Scout to draw in my deck, so I play my Mountain first so I can have double red on turn 2.” Or “I can play
this three-drop or this four-drop that are interchangeable. Playing the four-drop is more mana efficient, so I’ll cast it.” All of the little things past
this point are dwarfed in relevancy by this and a lot of the things people get so hyped up about. Leveling your opponent basically doesn’t matter if you
don’t just make baseline good plays to begin with.
The rest is a combination of a bunch of very small margins. For example, with generous estimates, scouting gives you maybe a 1/3 chance of knowing your
opponent’s deck, which in turn maybe adds 5% to your game 1 win rate off mulligan decisions. Knowing the exact combat tricks in a format turns things from
“I’m playing around a generic pump spell or expensive trick” into “This mana up is exactly Press the Advantage, so I should block to minimize that card” is
maybe another couple percent each game. Having well-defined sideboard plans? Another few percent.
This is what all adds up. Pros are a little bit better at a lot of things, and the whole 20% more likely to win the match comes from addition. The whole
“You are a Pro, you don’t need to do something to win” is exactly the opposite. Pros are there because they find the edges where they can take them and
convert many of them into a large margin.
This last part is really interesting, as it allows for a lot of diversity that you wouldn’t expect to be there. There are so many different ways to pick up
your small percentages that each Pro can be good at their own unique set of them and effectively specialize in being good at Magic.
The Narrative Fallacy
In Pat Chapin’s AMA this last week, someone asked
about his perspective of whether he saw himself as a “good guy” of the Pro Tour and if he had ever seen himself as the “bad guy.”
Pat had a good response, but if asked the same I would respond:
“What do you think a good guy is?”
For the most part, a lot of the good/bad conflicts on the Pro Tour are somewhere between manufactured wrestling storylines and media hyperbole.
Not that I fault this perspective for existing. From the coverage side, you want a narrative. Without personalities and stories, you are just producing
technical content. For the X% of the people reading who are super Spikes who want to just know more about how to approach different boardstates and plays
that might be fine, except doing so perfectly in real time is nearly impossible. That X% also is not even close to the majority of your audience.
But watching Paul Cheon play a match at Grand Prix San Jose that decides if he gets a Pro Tour invite for the next weekend and suddenly has a real shot at
making it back onto the Pro Tour full-time? Watching Craig Wescoe play his teammate Paul Rietzl this last weekend for not only Top 8, but Platinum on
Wescoe’s side and a likely World Championship slot for Paul? Those are all easy sells. People even keep tuning in to watch Brad Nelson in the Swiss portion
of Standard Grand Prix despite already knowing that he is going to win and very easily Top 8.
So you end up with matches where Huey is playing against Oliver Tomajko for a Grand Prix Top 8, and suddenly you have a David and Goliath story with a
clear “villain” (Huey) and “hero” (Oliver). Or people viewing Pros attempting to maximize their chances of winning as them oppressing the up and comers who
“deserve a chance.”
Except at the end of the day it’s just a match. Someone wins, someone loses. “Cosmic justice” and “right and wrong” don’t change the result of probability,
tournament preparation, logistics, and technical play. The scoreboard is the final arbiter here.
Realistically, 95% or more of the people on the Pro Tour are pretty good to hang out with and actually like interacting with people. Even only considering
the ones that are miserable to play against (myself included), the odds are really stacked in favor of them being reasonable people to chat with. That
isn’t to say there aren’t individual actions or circumstances that are clearly good or bad. Just that people, barring the extremes of cheaters in the
negative and Reid Dukes in the positive, usually fall somewhere in the middle.
This isn’t an easy mindset to step out of. I’ve rooted against players for what are realistically completely irrelevant reasons (they beat a friend, I
think their outlook on something is wrong, etc.), and I know it’s dumb. The Player of the Year race has been a nice outlet for this because I can
legitimately root against Efro/Sam/Owen and know I’m doing so because them losing makes actual sense and directly benefits me.
Note that the same is true of other attributes, like saying someone is Limited specialist or Standard master. Sometimes they will have a format they don’t
know how to play. Sometimes the draft master ends up playing a Constructed deck they inherently understand inside out. Just because they are biased towards
one field doesn’t mean they are a brick in another. Again, a label is not the whole story.
Making Concessions
Over my time on the Pro Tour I’ve been on every side of the scoop issue. I’ve missed two Pro Tour Top 8s where my opponents could have scooped both of us
into Top 8 and had legitimate reasons to beat me instead. I’ve done the same to an opponent playing for a Grand Prix Top 8 and multiple matches where I
opted to crush my last round opponent instead of drawing.
Asking for and giving concessions is always a hot topic. There’s a large crowd of people who believe in the “purity” of events and that every match should
be played to the “deserved” outcome. There are then people on the other side who feel like people who don’t scoop in the classic live for top 8 vs. dead
for top 8 scenario is slighting the community.
See above point about Magic not being about “fair” or “cosmically right,” and more about “what happens happens.”
You can always ask your opponent to scoop. They can always reject. The discussion is pretty simple and it resolves pretty simply. If they say yes, sign the
slip. If they say no, start shuffling.
There are a huge number of reasons to not concede or draw into Top 8, including but not limited to:
-Thinking that you are a bad matchup and wanting two shots at eliminating you from the event.
-Wanting a higher seed for play/draw reasons.
-Having friends with an outside shot at Top 8ing.
-Wanting Planeswalker Points.
-Wanting to 16-0 the Swiss of a Pro Tour.
-Just wanting to play a round of Magic that matters.
If your opponent no sirs you, you have every right to be upset in the disappointed sense. But if the only situation where I would be actively upset at them
is if the scoop costs them little to nothing and you winning actively benefits them. The classic example of this is the pair down against a testing
partner. I probably would extend it to scooping a good matchup into Top 8 without costing myself seeding but wouldn’t necessarily expect other people to go
that deep.
The other big concern voiced here is that there is an in-crowd scooping to each other to keep everyone else out. That really isn’t the case. Most people
are willing to sacrifice more for their close friends and teammates, but that is to be expected. Beyond that, most concession discussion is handled the
same regardless of party. The in-crowd perception is mostly derivative of two things:
-
Most concessions on the Pro Tour are the result of someone needing Pro Points, and the people most likely to need them are people already
established on the Pro Tour. -
People’s close friends and teammates in events tend to be people that they play with a lot. On the Pro Tour, this usually means people who have
been around a while.
Very, very rarely is anyone trying to be malicious in the discussion of a concession from either side, yet a proportionally large amount of the time, that
is what is assumed. People often fail to realize everyone has their own free will to make their own decisions, and people often fail to realize that it’s
not irrational to want to maximize your own benefits without a direct cost to others.
Handling Judge Interactions
Unsurprisingly, this is one of the places I get a fairly large edge in events.
I don’t know what it is, but people just freak out when a judge gets involved. They get offended that a judge gets called and start getting aggressively
defensive. They panic and do stupid things like lie about what happened. There’s this association with other authority interactions where “tattling” leads
to negative outcomes on all sides, and resolving the issue on your own, while not great, is still the best all around.
This is the exact opposite of how judge interactions should be handled.
The primary role of a judge is not to punish a wrong doer. A warning is not them handing out a sentence.
Judges are there to fix the inevitable mistakes that happen in physical Magic and to keep the tournament running. If a judge is called, their role is to
try and patch things up as best as possible. Warnings and other penalties exist to prevent abuse of the system and to give incentives to not repeatedly
overburden the event staff with accidental stupidity.
The process of a judge call is far simpler than most people act.
Step 1. Raise hand, call judge.
Step 2: In a straightforward and orderly way, explain exactly what happened.
Step 3: Answer any follow up questions to the best of your ability.
Step 4: Listen to ruling. Appeal if you disagree. Ask for extension if necessary.
Step 4b: If you appeal and still disagree with the result, look up the relevant rules, find the judge at an appropriate time, and have a discussion with
them as a human being about it.
If players disagree, the judge is going to have to make a decision. It’s possible that if your opponent is telling a different story, they are deliberately
misleading the judge. It’s also possible that their actual perception of events differed from yours based on what actions you each paid specific attention
to. Regardless, if there are two people yelling at each other across a table, the judge is going to be unable to really discern what is happening and is
forced to make a decision not based on the full facts that upsets one or both people. If the people are just straightforward about it, the judge can
usually make a completely correct decision that can be properly explained to both players, leaving everyone at least satisfied the ruling was correct and
fair as per the rules agreed upon by everyone joining the event.
Calling a judge is not a directly confrontational action. It’s simply a mediation to resolve a potentially messed up scenario and should be treated in a
matter of fact way.
As I spend the next month taking a small break from the Grand Prix grind, I’m looking forward to getting back into playing some Magic that doesn’t matter.
I’m hoping to pick up on a few more of these differences that I may have missed only viewing things from my side of the table these past years. On the flip
side of that, if there are any aspects of high level Magic you have seen from the sidelines that seem weird or out of place, feel free to ask about them
and I’ll do my best to respond and explain whether that’s the truth and why it is or looks the way it does. In the end, understanding of all sides of the
community is really important for making the best event experience possible.