In two weeks, my Carnegie Mellon career will come to an end. I’ve fought my way through my time here, and I’m certainly looking forward to having it all behind me. Similarly, in two weeks, my Star City Games career will also end. I’ve been writing continuously for almost two years, and I have greatly enjoyed it, but I find myself being pulled away by the real world.
I have a job as a software developer lined up, and it’s even cushy enough that I’ll be starting my time in the workforce by telecommuting; I’ll be living in Washington DC while working for a company based near my home town in Massachusetts. By all normal metrics, my life is on track.
Unfortunately, those metrics don’t really include time for Magic. I’ve loved the game ever since my best friend taught me how to play it in my last year of high school. I have religiously drafted with my fellow CMU’ers every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday for a huge portion of my life. The fact of the matter, though, is that when I move away from Pittsburgh, start working a “real” job, and generally grow up, Magic is going to get squeezed more and more out of my day-to-day life.
It took me a while to really come to terms with this fact. People drop old hobbies and pick up new ones all the time, but it’s not too often that you stop playing the game that introduced you to your best friends, that challenged you with the hardest problems to solve, and that generally shaped the last quarter of your life. I’ll probably still play some on Magic Online, I’ll probably make it to a DC FNM or two, and I’ll be trying hard to show up to the big tournaments that will bring my friends around the country together, but the Magic era of my life is wrapping up.
I guess that the question left to answer, then, is what I’ll be talking about this week (and next week) before my weekly column slot is filled by another writer. My last article, strangely, is going to be much easier for me to put together than this one, simply because I know I’ll be writing about my time at the StarCityGames.com $5000 Standard Open in Philadelphia. On the other hand, I’ve spent countless hours agonizing over what to talk about this week. I think, though, that I’ve finally figured it out.
When I look back at my time as a serious Magic player, I find that the moments in which I improved most dramatically were those moments that I made a colossal mistake. I’ve made some really bad plays in my lifetime, but the ones that stick with me are the match-losing blunders that I’ve made when things really were on the line. I’ve punted away PTQs, GPTs, MTGO Premiere Events, and more, but when the mistake was clear and winnings were at stake, those mistakes helped me improve faster than simple practice.
It is my general understanding that people read articles on StarCityGames.com for one of two reasons (or, I suppose, both). You’re either looking for knowledge or you’re looking for entertainment. Since learning from this caliber of mistake was how I believe I improved the most, I’d like to be able to pass those lessons on before I bow out of the arena. Hopefully the general storytelling vibe of the article will also be at least somewhat entertaining.
Mistake #1 — My First PTQ
Even though I had been playing with the CMU pros since arriving as a freshman, it wasn’t until I was a sophomore that my friends and I felt like it was worth our while to drive five hours to Baltimore to play in a PTQ. The format was Champions-only Sealed Deck. I ended up missing the Top 8 after my roommate crushed me in the final round with an eighteen-point Strength of Cedars; he wound up winning the whole shebang.
However, the reason that I was in the x-1 bracket at all was entirely my own fault. In round 4 of six, I was sitting at 3-0, and while we were in a close game 3, things were looking good. You see, my opponent was at only four life, and I had a Mothrider Samurai in play, Glacial Ray (on the splash) in hand, and mana to cast anything I desired. Happy that the guy sitting across the table had attacked with his only flying blocker on his previous turn, I untapped, drew my card (it doesn’t matter what it was), and swung to put him into lethal burn range. Of course, the bad guy cast the Masako the Humorless that he had won game 1 with, blocked my Mothrider with his tapped Soratami, and killed me on the following turn.
My mistake was glaring: the card I had drawn for my turn really did matter. It was a Kami of the Waning Moon. I knew that my opponent had Masako in his deck, and I even had it written down on my scorepad, but I was too blindly focused on winning that I didn’t stop and take the time to make sure that I actually would win. If I had paused for just a few seconds before attacking, I could have realized that Masako would let him win, played my Kami, and then attacked. If he does have the Masako, then, I can just cast the Glacial Ray and give my Mothrider fear, locking up the win.
This was the moment when I realized that just figuring out how I was planning to win was not enough. After that match, it was crystal clear to me that my opponents could have ways to stop my plan, and that I needed to make sure that I at least took that into account when I played the game. If my opponent did not have the Masako, he was dead no matter what, but if he did have it, he was only dead if I played my Kami pre-combat. There was no reason not to buy three-mana Masako insurance. It seems obvious that you would want to eliminate as many potential outs that the opponent might have as possible, but the real point is that you need to make sure that you’re playing that tight even when victory is a half-turn away.
Mistake #2 — GPT Semifinals
A few months after that first PTQ, Betrayers of Kamigawa was released. By this time, I was well on my way to becoming a local powerhouse; I still had a lot to learn, but I had many amazing teachers and I was really putting all of my time into Magic. Of course, it’s no coincidence that this year also happened to be my worst academic year, but that’s another point.
I was sitting in the Semis of a Grand Prix Trial, looking to scoop the finals like I had been doing for the past few sub-PTQ tournaments I’d played in. This GPT was small, since it was just being held in a store in West Virginia, but it wasn’t exactly soft. (In fact, I’ve seen fourteen-player GPTs that were harder to Top 8 than many seven round PTQs.) After knocking out a player who went up to more than 120 life with Pious Kitsune and his sensei, and finishing off someone who cast the tag-team combination of a fourth-turn Kodama of the North Tree and a fifth-turn Jugan, the Rising Star, I had managed to squeak into the Top 8 by paying nine mana and one life to kill a Lantern Kami with Kuro, Pitlord when I was at two.
My first elimination round was a complete breeze, as my deck was strong and my opponent was not. However, I was in another tight game 3 (usually a prerequisite for this kind of mistake) in the semis when something went horribly wrong. My opponent and I had traded off tons of spells, and we were both playing off the tops of our decks on an empty board. I had just a land in my hand when I drew Nezumi Graverobber. I cast it and passed the turn. I was instantly punished for not playing my land when my opponent topdecked Ronin Cliffrider. I didn’t realize what I had done until I removed some of his graveyard, untapped, and drew another land.
Sitting there, I realized that I had an even number of lands in play (I think eight). If I had played the land last turn, I could have played my newly-drawn land this turn, and removed the last five cards in his graveyard from the game, flipping my Graverobber and saving it from his Cliffrider. Because I had not played my land, though, I could only remove all but one card in his graveyard, and I lost my only bit of gas when he swung on his next turn. The game went on for a while from there, but I wound up losing instead winning just because I didn’t have my Nighteyes in play.
This was the first time that I realized that I needed to actually stop using some default shortcuts that we all make when playing. The one that almost everyone knows is that when the last card in your hand is a land, you should not play it. After all, if you draw a spell next turn that requires that land to be in play, you can always just play it then, and if you don’t, you gain value by bluffing that your hand is not (functionally) empty. There are two problems with this shortcut.
First, you cannot (usually) play two lands in one turn. This means that if you draw a second land, you can’t get them both into play unless you had played the land you held on the previous turn. This doesn’t seem like it should be relevant, because you won’t be drawing both a land and a spell that needs two more mana than you have, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t effects sitting on the board that might be able to make use of the extra mana. In this case, I didn’t realize that my two-mana effect would want me to play a ninth land, but I should have noticed that playing it would let me topdeck a tenth land and immediately flip my Graverobber.
Second, your efforts to bluff action by holding just a single land in your hand will be pretty transparent to any Magic player really worth worrying about, or even some less-powerful opponents that you might play against regularly. You can, though, buy future bluffing value by sometimes playing the land that you’re sandbagging, to let your opponent know that you are quite capable of playing a land if it’s the last card in your hand. If they know that you sometimes play out your whole hand, then when you later slowroll that land they’ll have more reason to believe your bluff.
Mistake #3 – My Easiest PTQ
After three years of slogging my way through college, I decided that I’d had enough and disappeared from CMU’s campus in the middle of the first semester of my senior year. I reappeared in the southwest, living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After getting on my feet, I managed to convince two friends to mail me the cards for an Aggro Loam deck to play in the Extended PTQ.
This was, in fact, the softest PTQ I can remember. There were a small handful of people in the room who were competent at all, and I would wager that I was somehow actually the best player there. This is both amazing and terrible (I’ll get to the terrible part in a second).
However, in round 4 I’m up against either the #2 or #1 player in the room, and he’s playing Scepter-Chant. I’m up a game because I definitely know how to win the matchup more than he does, but he manages to take down game 2 with just two Scepters and two spells. With single-digit minutes left on the clock, the match ends in a draw. The mistake was that I lost the race to Scepter + Helix by a scant two points, using all of my mana on the last turn and ending with a Firebolt in my hand.
There were at least five turns earlier in the game in which I could have cast that Firebolt. I hadn’t cast it on turn 1 because I was slowrolling it to solve a Meddling Mage, but once I had Seismic Assault in play, there was no reason for the card to be in my hand. I was thinking, throughout the game, that it would be better to continue to slowroll it because my opponent would “feel safer” if he didn’t know he was effectively at two less life. The problem, of course, is that he really wasn’t; the game ended and he still had those two points.
It should have been easy for me to see that there were only two reasons to keep Firebolt in my hand, and that both of them were no longer relevant. It should also have been easy for me to count my lands and determine how much damage I could deal (three mana equals four damage, assuming I Loam back three lands and then cycle one to Dredge up my Loam). Regardless, I sat there with my Firebolt thinking that I was playing correctly by not tipping my hand to my opponent.
Again, I was too focused on running a valueless bluff. If I have Life from the Loam and Seismic Assault working, then my opponent is already not comfortable with his life total. Two points are not going to wake him up and get him to disrupt my combo; that is his goal as soon as my combo is assembled. Instead of being cute, I should have just cast my Firebolt and gone on from there. As it played out, the unintentional draw put me in the same bracket as an Urzatron deck that knocked me out of the tournament in the last round.
Life Lessons
After sharing three embarrassing mistakes with you, I’d like to part with something that I’ve learned that is applicable to both Magic and actual life: you have to want it.
I wound up taking a year off college, even though I had already invested three, because I needed to figure out how much I wanted a degree. The degree was just something intangible that I felt like I should have; I’d never had trouble getting a summer internship and I didn’t expect to have trouble getting my career started if I didn’t graduate. But I was sitting in Computer Science classes that I loathed just because I was “supposed” to go to college.
As it turns out, in my year off I realized that I truly did want to finish college for my own reasons, and I have since returned and been both more successful and happier.
I also have won exactly one PTQ in my career. I have qualified for tournaments on rating, through Grand Prixes, and through finishes at Pro Tours, but I have only ever actually won a single PTQ. It was also the only PTQ I brought my checkbook to. I woke up that morning and decided that I wanted to buy the slot if I had the chance to in the finals (back when you received money from WotC instead of a plane ticket), and then I found myself writing a check at the end of the day.
This past summer I attended two Shards Block PTQs. I practiced hard for one, and played every round like I wanted to win. I made it as far as the semifinals before my perseverance wore out. In the next one, I really just wanted to spend the day at the beach with my girlfriend and her college buddies, and I wound up 1-2 after playing like a complete moron.
The lesson here is that the desire to succeed will actually translate into success. The converse is also true: if you don’t really care whether you do well or not, you will tend to do poorly, no matter what it is you are doing.
And, in the end, that’s why I’m stepping down. I now want to go be an adult. Three years ago, I wanted to be a professional Magic player. It’s not really any surprise that three years ago I played in multiple consecutive Pro Tours while this year I am unqualified but sitting on a permanent job offer.
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me in the forums, via email, or on AIM.
Benjamin Peebles-Mundy
ben at mundy dot net
SlickPeebles on AIM