The faster you can play, the more matches you will win. Of course, you have to counterbalance that with the fact that playing too quickly will cause you to make bad decisions, costing you more than you gain by playing fast. There are a lot of good reasons to play fast, some of which are not well known, but none of them will save you if you’re making a lot of mistakes. The good news is that speed can be learned, both in general and for a particular deck or format. I consciously developed my ability to play at a hyper-fast pace and rather than weaken my play it made it better. First, I’m going to offer some motivation.
Reciprocity
When you play fast, your opponent tends to also play fast. When you slow down, he slows down. There are several reasons for this, but they all have their origin in the fact that there is no “correct” pace at which to play Magic. This can be seen during untimed rounds, where play slows down dramatically. Often matches have to be told to be sped up because they are taking several hours to complete. Obviously no one is stalling to run out the clock, so the conclusion has to be that they’re doing it to try and win. A little Hollywood is involved, to be sure, as the top players give off fake timing tells to each other, and I know one opponent of mine who slowed down just to piss me off, but the bulk of that time is spent thinking. Consider what would happen in an untimed chess match between strong players, which could take months or years if the stakes were high enough. When a game is adjourned for the night, there’s much work to be done.
This combined with the fact that using time hurts both players equally but is most often harmless leads many players to treat it as a sort of implied contract. They have their own standard pace of play, but most players have at least two others: A fast pace, which they use in fun games and when time is tight, and a slow pace where they only move when they’ve considered everything they can think of. Whether they realize it or not, those players tend to adopt your pace and they do so even more when they’re distracted. You’ve subconsciously told them that this is the pace to play at, so that’s how they play.
Most of your opponents are not trained in the art of playing fast, so the faster you get them to play, the more mistakes they will make and the worse they will play overall. They will start flashing tells all over the place, from whether they drew a land to whether they think they’re winning. They’ll make good plays without looking for great ones. This is a tremendous asset if you can exploit it, and makes a small downgrade in your play worthwhile.
This also applies to the attitude towards the match. If you appear tight and on your best game, most players respond by trying to play their best game, figuring they need it. Everyone loses sometimes, but no one likes being outplayed. On the other hand, if you don’t seem to be bringing your A-game, they often don’t try and bring theirs. They will instead have a lighthearted attitude towards the match. At my peak, I was joking with all of my opponents the whole hour. This also has the added bonus of making Magic more fun, but the main reason to do it is that your opponents will loosen up. That goes hand in hand with speed, because a fast player is loose and a slow player is tight. The less you appear to have your game face on, the better.
This also applies to asking them to speed up. If you still get into time trouble, you have a far more credible case when you ask them to play faster and most players will be shamed into agreeing. Calling a judge becomes far less stressful because you don’t have to worry about him turning on you.
Flexibility
If you can play a strong game while playing fast, then you never have to worry about having to sacrifice your play to speed things up, but you also put yourself in a position where you can slow down for those crucial turns of the game without risking running out of time. When I played ID19, I would often take a ten to fifteen minute turn where I would consider every possible play, but because I took almost no other time off the clock I could do this safely and my opponents did not mind too much. They didn’t need to spend much time either and knew I had difficult probabilistic decisions to make.
It also makes you a better player to learn how to play fast, because it teaches you to focus on what matters and learn about the game. The best way to not have to spend too much time thinking is to have done that thinking last week… or last year. You can do it out loud, with friends, and without giving off any tells. Many opponents can’t believe what I have in my hand because I seem to have never considered playing the card so I “can’t” have it. You can also reverse this once you have extra time. A well considered pause on their end step suddenly means something even if it only lasts three seconds. You gain the ability to think when you need to and the ability to bluff when you need to.
Lunch
Don’t forget lunch. It’s good to eat lunch, and the faster you play the more likely you’ll have at least one round where you have enough time to go get some. Let’s hear it for lunch.
Training
When I started writing up the methods I use to play quickly, I realized something. Most of the methods I use to play quickly aren’t primarily concerned with playing quickly. They’re concerned with playing correctly, but by knowing how to play correctly you enable yourself to play quickly. I also noted that when I’m playing quickly it tends to mean I’m playing my best Magic. When you’re good, you can play quickly, so don’t waste time you don’t need. When you’re rusty or off your game, you need to slow down, relax and think. Learning to play quickly with a deck trains you to be a better player.
Rule 1: Do Your Thinking In Advance
This is not just a speed issue, it is a general Magic strategy issue. For example, you are playing Rock and on the first turn you have Birds of Paradise and Duress in your hand. Which one do you play? Obviously to some extent it depends on what your opponent is playing and the rest of your hand, but this comes up often enough that you shouldn’t walk into a PTQ with Rock and not know what you will do in this situation. If you have both Birds of Paradise and Llanowar Elves in your hand and need to think, that hand better be damn weird. When you hesitate before playing the Bird, you most certainly should not have another one-drop in your hand!
This doesn’t just apply to the first turn. Have a good idea how to play all major matchups, especially when it comes to things like counters. Annul is a lot worse when you don’t know what it is worth using on and so is Mana Leak. Thinking fast and thinking often, including discussions with other players, will lead to a developed sense of intuition. You need to make your decision right away. If I cast a Viridian Zealot and I think about my Mana Leak for fifteen seconds, I now pretty much have to use it: I’ve told you it is there. If I’m not going to counter, I need to say okay within about two seconds. Thinking last week is key, and so is thinking in advance. The moment I looked at my hand, I started asking myself which cards I would counter on turn two and which I would let go.
It applies double to sideboarding. If you have to think during sideboarding against anything but an extreme rogue deck, that’s a very bad sign. Those lists of cards to take in and out save a lot of time but that isn’t even the primary purpose. If you don’t have them, you’re going to build your sideboard wrong and then not sideboard properly when the time comes. Sometimes you’ll get away with it, other times not so much.
Rule 2: Play the Game in Advance
This is the extension of Rule 1. Why think when you can outright play out the game? Playtesting the same situation you are in is the best way of thinking about it. When a player seems to be able to find the right play way faster than he could have considered all his choices, there’s a good chance he didn’t have to: He already did. If your opponent is thinking in common situations, especially while he is sideboarding, you know he didn’t test.
It comes down to more than that. The most important rule of playing fast is: Make up the rules! Always play the Urza’s Mine on turn 1 if you have it, no matter what other lands are in your hand, or always lead with the Tower? Make a choice and stick with it unless you have an opponent smart enough to fool and with a deck that can punish him for it. I like to express my knowledge in terms of rules, which like all rules you need to know before you can break them.
Rule 3: Do What You Gotta Do
The moment you can be certain that an action must take place no matter what, you can go ahead and do it. For example, if you draw Brainstorm and there’s no way you won’t be casting it on your main phase, cast it now (unless there’s a reason to wait, but that is rare). This gives you more information before you do anything else, and it also gives you the information to make the rest of your decision. If you think before casting Brainstorm, you waste time on a problem that might be very different once you see the top three cards. Always get all the information you are going to get later before you decide on an action that it doesn’t hurt to postpone. The more you can apply Rule #2, the faster you will be, because it forces you to take action so figure out what you gotta do and do it. This includes untapping: Don’t think on your opponent’s end step, think on your main phase if you still need to. At least you’ll know what you’ve drawn. If you know that you’re going to attack this turn with everything no matter what happens, you can’t find extra tricks and you don’t need to save the attack step to clear mana pools then go ahead and attack right now. While he’s dealing with that, you can keep thinking and find out what he’s going to do about it. Another variant of this is when you realize that if you don’t take a certain action then you can’t win: Do it. You might as well.
Rule 4: Assume You Can Win, Work From There
If you can’t win, then it doesn’t matter what you do. This is also a general rule of Magic play but it speeds you up a ton as well. If the top three cards of your library have to be Plains, Plains, Wrath of God in that order and your opponent has to draw blanks then so be it. Presume that is what will happen. If he has to make a mistake, assume that too. The moment you can confidently say that something is the only way you can win, that should be the end of the discussion.
Rule 5: Get On With It!
This is the only real trick, and the slower a player is the more he probably needs to learn this. Slow play comes from not knowing what to do, but it also comes from refusing to accept that you already know what you’re going to do so go ahead and do it already. Dave Humpherys used to be an extremely slow player because he was methodical in the places he didn’t need to be in addition to those where it was necessary. Rule three involves thinking only at the juncture where you can most efficiently think, assuming you can’t think while your opponent has priority when the thinking is always free. Rule five goes a step further: Once you know what you have to do, get on with it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the consequences of your actions as long as you know that it must be the right play. Often I could figure out whether I was going to win the game, or what I needed to draw, but I try to ignore those questions when they don’t impact what I am going to do. You’ll find out soon enough.
The Downside: Tells Revealed
A player who never takes time he doesn’t need and rarely needs time tells you a lot about his hand on those few occasions that he does have to pause. That pushes some fast players to play even faster in those situations to the point where they make bad decisions. This can’t be helped, since it is a real concern, but it is the flip side of making your pauses meaningful. If your opponent is paying attention then the only effective defense is a good offense, the timing bluff.
So there you have it – by learning to play faster, you will often play better as well. In addition, you put yourself in a better position should you ever need to call a judge, and you can subtly force your opponents to play faster through your own speed of play, sometimes throwing them off their game as a result. Last but not least, you create enough time for lunch. Never forget lunch.