I don’t have a lot of time here because I’m boarding a flight for Barcelona in a matter of hours, but I have a few subjects to cover today. They say I am supposed to be helping fuel the excitement people have been experiencing recently as the release date nears for “Next Level Magic,” and I am very excited, no question, but I really believe that this is not a product that needs an infomercial.
It’s simple. What I bring to the table is results. Whether it is helping people win Pro Tours, PTQs, Regional’s, or their local FNM, I have made a career out of helping people produce the results they are looking for. I am interested in what is useful. When it comes to strategy writing aimed at helping people actually accomplish their goals in Magic, that means helping people not only understand comprehensive Magic theory, but also providing step by step instructions on how to improve their game and accomplish whatever it is they have specifically set out to do, whether it is qualifying for the Pro Tour or Top 8ing FNM.
I understand that different people want different things out of Magic. Some people want to compete on the biggest stage in the world, and are looking for help on how to actually go about qualifying for a Pro Tour (no small feat, these days). Others have so much going on that it is hard to find the time to practice as much as they would like, but still care about the game and want to understand it better, as well as win more when they do get to play.
If you are looking to do what it takes to elevate your game, “Next Level Magic” is designed specifically for this: to produce results. If you are not willing to read 300 pages of material on Magic in an effort to move closer towards perfect understanding, honestly assess your game and what you need to do to improve, admit your mistakes and move forward, adjust the way you practice Magic, study games, and take the time to think about your actions as well as the results you are getting… Well, then this is not the course for you.
The “Next Level Magic” preview (with Jon Finkel) last week led to a lot of helpful feedback, which I appreciate, as well as talk about my latest deck that I have been sharing with readers to help them qualify. I couldn’t play in Regionals this year, but once again I decided to throw secret testing for the GP to the wind and publish my real deck list before the tournament.
This week’s preview includes material from a couple of sections on the four perspectives (ways of thinking) and how they relate to building decks, including extra focus on Bottom-Up thinking and how it can help us build better decks. This is of particular interest to those that want to be able to build better decks themselves, as well as understand the decks others make and how to adapt them to fit their playstyle.
Before I get to that, though, I want to say a few words about marketing, which I hope can help illuminate my position. Marketing a product is like painting a wooden house. It is pretty vital and it is foolish not to do it, as it is a necessary step, but no amount of paint is substitute for walls and doors.
Next Level Magic features an enormous amount of useful content, and I am very proud of the product, but I still need to market it, just like I would have to paint the nicest house. I know how good it is, you can probably imagine how good it is, but there are some people who might not even realize that I have this course coming out soon that is the result of months of careful work and a lifetime of experience.
The point is, I will make you a deal. No hard sale, no shocking attempts to grab attention… Just some useful results that demonstrate what I am able to help people achieve and then we’ll take a look at the sections I mentioned earlier.
Last week, I included an innocent P.S. in my email, with the deck that I said I would play, if I could have played, at Regionals. It turns out that all of the interest over the Jon Finkel report ended up translating to a lot of people reading my little P.S.
I’ve started getting word from all over the place that the Five-Color Blood deck that I shared created quite a stir at Regionals.
On Monday in my premium article, I reported that a student of mine, Ari Lax, a rookie to the pro scene, grabbed the decklist from that P.S. and ran with it all the way to a Regional
championship and a berth at this year’s U.S. Nationals.
But what I didn’t know then, and that I’m starting to find out, is that a number of folks parlayed my new deck to success.
Here’s a letter I received:
Hi Patrick!
Thanks for the deck, I love it.
I qualified for National championships with one of your new decks (5CB). It was amazing! It felt like being one step ahead of the metagame, catching people
completely unaware.
I also won a FNM yesterday with your new version, I only changed a
Cascade Bluffs to a second Sunken Ruins. The tournament was a complete
blowout, with me winning every match 2-0, despite making bad play
mistakes in 2 games. I played against B/W Kithkin round 1, B/W Tokens
rounds 2+3 (half the tournament was B/W, I think) and Boat Brew in the
Finals. It was really funny how everyone was b*tching about the lucky cascade mechanic
afterwards.
Martin
Congratulations Martin!
I remember the first time I qualified for Nationals. I can still recall that feeling of
excitement. It’s really exciting to see folks succeeding with what I’m sharing at all levels…
Patrick Chapin is one of Magic’s brightest minds and one of the most fun people to hang out with at events. Patrick’s clever innovations for Five-Color Control helped me win Grand Prix: Denver.
Gerry Thompson
It is not just my decklists that produce results for people. Shortly after getting Martin’s message, I got a Facebook message from Jason Tams:
I don’t know if you accept random friend requests from readers, but I wanted to let you know that I love all your stuff. I know it seems like a random barn message, but since I’ve started reading your stuff I’ve had 2 PTQ Top 8s and quite a few other higher finishes, and I owe it to your in-depth way of thinking and writing, because it
really helped my playskill. I’ve been playing for a long time, and just now starting to actual see results. I finished 13th at Regionals playing a hybrid version of you 5CB deck (hybrid between the Mannequin version and the Leech Version). Anyway, good luck in Spain!
Jason
Thanks, and yes I do accept Facebook friend requests. The majority of my Facebook friends are Magic players, and it gives me a convenient way to stay in touch with people in the Magic community, as well as answer questions ranging from what sideboard option is best to what country I am in at the moment
Anyway, that’s great news about your PTQ Top 8s and your Top 16 performance at Regionals…
… Don’t let a little success slow down your improvement, though. Honestly reflect on your game and what you can learn, and who knows, maybe Five-Color-Blood will be your ticket to the Pro Tour this PTQ season!
I have been extremely busy preparing for the upcoming Grand Prix and Pro Tour, as well as putting the finishing touches on “Next Level Magic,” but I am very happy to hear from everyone writing in with questions or just excited about the upcoming release. The volume is great, no question, but what is truly an honor is the passion.
Before we go any further, I want to take a good look at an important section on deck construction from Next Level Magic that fits right in with the success of Five-Color Blood this weekend.
Here’s the rundown:
This first excerpt sets the stage for our adoption of the four perspectives, as well as how they are useful to us, particularly in deck building. There are no shortage of people out there that will suggest what to play, but useful tools for becoming a better deck builder are not nearly so common.
From: Four Perspectives for Deck Building
… Is there any one system which will allow us to get the most out of our playtesting, game-playing, and strategy-planning? Imagine you just completed playing out an eight-man draft. To perform even better in your next draft, you need to learn as much as possible from the one you just finished — and you need to do it in the shortest amount of time.
Often, you hear things like “Bitterblossom is game over,” or “I got mana-screwed, then mana-flooded,” or “It’s all about tempo and mana curve,” or “Just draft removal and bombs,” or “Just pick a Shard and stick with it.” Sometimes you’re even the one saying these things.
These narrow observations are surface-level, and reveal only a small part of the picture of what is going on. Fixed perspectives like these are weak compared with a reasoned, multi-layered, systematic analysis. With a simple system for maximum analysis, you can get eight times the learning from your drafts. That number comes from the idea of using four perspectives instead of only one, and from the synergy between the different angles.
If you view things from only one perspective, you will see only one part of the picture. A second perspective doubles the information you are taking in. A third perspective actually quadruples the information, as you can look at the experience from one perspective one way, and then apply another. Using all four of the perspectives talked about here is how we arrive at a focused understanding that offers up to eight times as much information for us to use.
In this section, it may be useful to get a notebook and a pen, rather than sorting through the perspectives in your head.
While your peers are making obvious observations about the draft, you will be smart. Here is what you do: first, think of all of the moments in your games when either player made a play that gave them a significant advantage.
You should also think about moments during the draft itself when you made decisions that gave your deck a noticeable advantage. You can think of general strategies (like “Picked decent creature removal over decent creatures”), mindsets (“When in doubt, I attacked”), attitudes (feeling aggressive or defensive), or mind tricks that worked to your advantage.
This is an example of Top-Down thinking: perspective number one. This is analysis.
– Top-Down thinking is when you look to see what is there.
It is usually best to start with Top-Down thinking, and then proceed to what can be called Bottom-Up thinking: You think of all the plays by either player that did not give them an advantage.
Which spells turned out to be comparatively useless? What mistakes were made? Note that playing a card that gives no advantage isn’t just neutral; it works negatively against you because it cost you a card (and possibly mana, or some other resource). Bottom-Up thinking is essentially a test of creativity, because your imagination must fill in the gaps as we discuss what is not there.
– Bottom-Up thinking is looking to see what is not there.
Which Draft decisions did you make that ended up hurting you? What general strategies affected your outcome negatively — maybe “Pick decent creature removal over decent creatures” ended up being disadvantageous in this case. What mindsets affected your outcome negatively?
When a new set comes out, we can ask, “Which card types don’t we see in this set?” For example, there are few good options for countermagic in Shards Block. Cancel, Double Negative, Countersquall, Bant Charm, and Punish Ignorance are all reasonable cards, but none are great.
In some sets there is no Armageddon effect, so you can play out your lands with little fear. Shards Block has Realm Razer, so if you are playing a strategy that requires you to play out a lot of land, that is the primary constraint holding you back.
For both of these perspectives, you can have a mental (or actual written) checklist that you go through for new card sets.
• What are the dominant creatures?
• What is the cheap removal?
• What mass removal exists?
• What library manipulation and tutoring is there?
• How can people get card advantage?
• What mana acceleration is there?
• What countermagic exists?
• Do people use their graveyards?
• What relevance is something being removed from the game or brought into the game (like Wishes)?
• What are the most dominating Artifacts?
• Enchantments?
• Planeswalkers?
• What are the powerful Sorceries that people could play?
• What victory conditions are the strongest?
• What is the most punishing thing someone could do to you if you have no removal in your deck?
• Are there powerful combos in the format?
• Do you need to be able to destroy lands?
• How fast are the aggressive decks?
• What sort of discard exists?
• Land destruction?
• Direct damage?
The list goes on and on. If you actually write it down, you can add to it whenever you think of a new category. Thus, you avoid having to reinvent the wheel every time a new set comes out. The existence of cards in each of the categories is important, and the non-existence of cards in those categories is just as important.
If you notice that a set is very much like a previous one, except there is no good permission, that might lead you to important insights, because the absence of that one effect might create a chain reaction of changes. People might have previously been unwilling to play decks with expensive Sorcery-speed cards and assume that such decks don’t work — but you wonder, “Hrmmm, what if…?”
As you see, the Top-Down and Bottom-Up perspectives are two sides of the same coin. One is about looking for what there is and considering the implications of that. The other is about looking at what is not there and considering the implications of that.
The next two perspectives, which also go together somewhat, are Front-Back and Back-Front thinking.
Front-Back thinking is when you imagine how things will play out in the logical order from the start until the finish.
Back-Front thinking is when you imagine how things will end and work backwards in your mind to the beginning.
With all four of these perspectives, there isn’t a perfect question to ask for each one. The very act of placing yourself in one of these perspectives leads to particular kinds of questions. Ask better questions, and you will get better answers.
Remember! In school and in our culture, we are typically rewarded for having answers. In real life, however, questions must come before answers. Answers flow very easily once you ask the right question. Therefore, truly brilliant and successful people spend most of their focus on the process of asking better questions. This is in contrast to spending most of your focus trying to prove how smart you already are!
Back-Front thinking should not be confused with reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is when you start with a product that you’ve seen, and then try to build it on your own. That is actually forward thinking, not reverse. If we don’t have a decklist, we sometimes try to reverse-engineer a deck from seeing it in play.
To do genuine Back-Front thinking, what you do is first imagine what the finished product might be like, and then ask, “What would have been the situation one step before that?” Then a step before that, then another. If you imagine casting a game-ending Cruel Ultimatum, think about what would have to happen just before. What would the game state have to be to allow you to play it successfully? What would your opponent have to have done (or not done) on his turn? What about the turns before?
Make sure to ask what would happen realistically. Many, many people design weak decks because they can only imagine best-case scenarios.
No matter which of the four perspectives you are using, you always have your goal in mind, first and foremost. The four perspectives are applied after you know your goal and are trying to think your way through to reaching it successfully.
With Front-Back thinking, you ask yourself where you will be (or are) when you start. Then ask yourself what steps will take you closer. When designing a deck, ask “What would I like to have happen on turn 1? What kinds of cards do I want to see in my opening hand?”
Then ask yourself, “What do I want to do on turn 2?” If you are playing with Noble Hierarch, you will want to play something like Doran the Siege Tower or Rhox War Monk on turn 2 — but what if your Hierarch dies, or you don’t draw it? Tidehollow Sculler is a fine backup plan when you don’t have the luxury of a Hierarch, and Birds of Paradise is a fine way to have more than four Hierarchs.
Many people would be tempted to play a more aggressive two-drop — but remember, if you draw a hand with Noble Hierarch, Rip-Clan Crasher, and Doran the Siege Tower, the Rip-Clan Crasher starts to look pretty disappointing. It is a fine card, but it doesn’t mesh with how you want your deck to play out.
Now imagine if it was a Tidehollow Sculler! A turn 3 Sculler is a fine play, especially if you can combine it with a removal spell in the same turn, while hitting your opponent with a Doran. If your Hierarch dies, you still have a nice turn 2 play.
This is why the Noble Hierarch decks that Brian Johnston used to Top 8 Pro Tour: Kyoto chose Tidehollow Sculler and Gaddock Teeg as its two-drops. They are fine plays on turn 2, but are selected because they can be played to great effect on later turns when his deck opens the way he plans (with Noble Hierarch or Birds of Paradise).
We must remember to imagine how each step will play out. What is next? What is the next step? When we are engaged in a task, we will often use Forward-Back thinking, as it is the perspective of action…
…
As you can see from that section, the best way I know how to improve at Magic starts with how you think about the game. Thinking about Magic in a clearer and well organized way leads to better results. The four perspectives give us a lot to think about, and they take some experience to fully exploit, but they are worth it.
This next section talks about using Bottom-Up thinking and applying it to deck building. This is very much what was going on behind my thought process as I developed 5CB, and there is no reason why you can’t use this line of thinking to help you build decks, or modify existing ones.
From: Bottom-Up Thinking (Removing the Weakest Links)
… After you have made progress by thinking about what the “big picture” is, you want to start thinking about what shouldn’t be in the picture at all. You want to find cards that cost too much for what they do, cards that are hard to cast, and those that don’t help what we are really trying to do. Those cards have got to go.
Make sure you don’t spend weeks of quality playtest time tuning a deck that doesn’t stand a decent chance against for the best decks in the format. You don’t want to spend months preparing for an event, only to strike out early as a result of not using new sleeves or insufficient shuffling.
It is important to follow the Top-Down perspective on a problem with a serious look at every card in every deck, every player on your team, every decision that you make that affects your improvement at Magic. You need to hold them all accountable, and that accountability starts with you. If you don’t shuffle your deck enough every time — and I mean really shuffling, like six to seven riffles, perhaps even pile shuffling — then don’t complain when you get a bad draw.
If you get a hand with no lands, take a split-second to ask yourself if you might be responsible for this in some way. Mentally check to make sure that you are shuffling enough, that your sleeves are not too worn, that your opponent didn’t do anything suspicious with your cards. This is not to say that an opponent cheating is your fault, but stopping someone from cheating you is your fault.
Bad luck happens, no question, but one way to get better luck is to make better choices.
These means after every time you’ve finished playing a deck, ask yourself: “Which cards shone?” You should start looking for cards to cut, in much the same way a football team must ask itself which players to cut. A single weak player on defense can cost your team any number of touchdowns.
Having the wrong card can lose games in just the same way. There are many players who chose to run a mixture of Remove Souls and Negates in their Five-Color Control decks in Kyoto. When the opponent plays a Mistbind Clique and they can’t Negate it, or the opponent plays a Cryptic Command and you can’t Remove Soul it, don’t tell me they got lucky. Were you really using the right card for the job? If Remove Soul and Negate aren’t doing what you need, consider other options. Broken Ambitions is probably not as strong a card as either, but if it does what you need, then you should take a look at it.
Some people would rather close out games with burn spells like Banefire and Resounding Thunder. They like these over Cruel Ultimatum because of their early utility. By all means, try whatever ideas you think seem interesting… but if you are having trouble creating a “won game state,” maybe you need a card that does more to win the game than just dealing a bunch of damage to your opponent.
It goes both ways, though. At one point, I was working on Shards Block Constructed and was piloting a deck that used Cruel Ultimatum to gain a game-winning advantage… in theory.
After a little playtesting with Manuel Bucher, I realized that Cruel Ultimatum wasn’t doing what I needed in this format. I love Cruel Ultimatum, no question, but I want to win more than I want to play that card. It wasn’t working, so I cut it and tried picking up Martial Coup as a free agent. Business is business.
(The format has since changed quite a bit as a result of Alara Reborn, but the point is to not be a slave to a card you happen to like.)
Another use of Bottom-Up thinking is to shortcut the deck selection process by recognizing cards (or combinations of cards) in an environment that essentially makes a certain type of deck unplayable.
The printing of Path to Exile radically changed the Standard landscape beyond the obvious added option of a nice removal spell. As a result of the widespread adoption of Path to Exile in White decks, cards like Chameleon Colossus and Demigod of Revenge disappeared. The ripples don’t stop there, though. Decks that relied on Chameleon Colossus and Demigod of Revenge not only disappeared (or changed into something entirely different), but decks that struggled against these cards no longer had to fear them.
We had Path to Exile in our Five-Color deck for a while, since it is a great card and we liked having an answer to Mistbind Clique that also dealt with Chameleon Colossus and Demigod of Revenge. But in the end, Path to Exile turned to be so good that we cut it. It was clear that enough other people were going to use it that they would scare our opponents away from using the very creatures that we wanted to Exile!
This sort of advanced Paper-Rock-Scissors among cards that beat other cards is a big part of enjoying success in Standard. It is one of the primary reasons why it is dangerous to just rely on copying last week’s Top 8 decklists. There is much to learn from reading StarCityGames.com; you find out what has been working for people. But if that is all you do with the information, you are not going to be any better off than any of the countless others who read StarCityGames.com!
A common mistake that many players made was to actually talk trash about Path to Exile. After all, it was the most hyped card in the set, and they felt that it couldn’t live up to the hype. Well, the truth is, it was overrated by some (a number of people who claimed it would be superior to Swords to Plowshares, which it wasn’t). In the end, however, it proved to be one of the defining cards of the format.
Maelstrom Pulse, from Alara Reborn, shares a similar story. When word first spread of the new card, people heralded it as the second coming of Vindicate. As a result of this huge popularity surge, there was a backlash of people claiming that it is nothing more than a difficult-to-cast Oblivion Ring.
The truth is that Maelstrom Pulse is not Vindicate — and if you ask it to be, you will be sorely disappointed. However, what it is turns out to be a powerful tournament staple that will help define Constructed for years to come. When evaluating new cards (and new decks!), it is important to view what you are looking at for what it is. Do not write it off just because it is not something old.
What you want to do is take this information and figure out what the future might look like based on this information. For instance, if everyone starts taking Path to Exile out of their decks, then maybe it is time to bring back Demigod of Revenge or Chameleon Colossus. We realized that most players would play 1/1 fliers or direct damage at Pro Tour: Kyoto, so we took the metagame a step further and maindecked Wall of Reverence instead of Wrath of God.
A good player is likely to copy a successful new deck and pilot it in a tournament of their own. A great player may watch that trend and build decks on the next level of the metagame by using the Bottom-Up principal.
A great example of a card that can make the Bottom-Up perspective more apparent is Leyline of the Void. Ever since the advent of the Dredge mechanic, people have been abusing Dredge as a way to fuel graveyard combos. Since the printing of Future Sight (which brought Narcomoeba and Bridge from Below), graveyard decks have reached a scary point of having so much power that they can literally destroy an unprepared opponent so quickly that they never get to interact with the graveyard deck.
However, graveyard decks like Dredge are classically extremely vulnerable to graveyard hate such as Tormod’s Crypt, Relic of Progenitus, Yixlid Jailer, and especially Leyline of the Void. As a matter of fact, Leyline of the Void provides an uncounterable trump to the entire Dredge deck that you can start with in play before you even take a turn. As a result, if you are thinking about playing Dredge, a factor to consider is how many people are playing Leyline of the Void.
You can sideboard in Chain of Vapor, you can try to beat down with Stinkweed Imps… But at the end of the day, you are probably going to lose if your opponent plays a Leyline of the Void. What’s more, since they start the game with it in play, you can’t even try to make them discard it.
This is not to say that you can’t play a Dredge deck in a field with a fair amount of Leyline of the Void. It just means that you have to illuminate the situation and look at what is really going on. From there, you react accordingly. For instance, if a Dredge deck is perfect for beating everyone who doesn’t have graveyard hate like Leyline of the Void, and all of the people who play graveyard hate have it in their sideboard, then you can usually count on winning game 1. Then you can sideboard enough answers to give yourself a shot fighting through the hate in one of the next two games…
…
Alright, I gotta go pack. If you are serious about improving at Magic, check out “Next Level Magic.” Whether you are playing in PTQs or FNMs, this training course is useful, and its fun. It is up to you to decide for yourself what you are trying to accomplish in Magic. If you want to win more and understand the game, you know what I bring to the table, so I will skip the sales pitch.
See you guys next week.
Patrick Chapin
“The Innovator”