Every week, usually on Monday or Tuesday, I start my usual line of questioning to many of my friends. What should I write about? Is there a new deck I should know about? This week, one of them pointed out that I had "painted myself into a corner" by calling my column Peebles Primers. The title implied that I would write about a deck every week, and some weeks there just wouldn’t be anything interesting to talk about.
I have found myself in the middle of one of these weeks. Another friend, though, came to the rescue. He pointed out that I am fairly well networked, and he said that he’s always been interested in hearing about how that came to happen. Behind this thought is an idea that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a long time, and something that many people have already realized: The best way to become a better player is to surround yourself with talent.
I feel like I’ve done this pretty well, and so today I’ll tell the story of how I did it. I guess it’s really two stories, since I learned Limited at CMU and Constructed on Magic Online, but the lesson is the same.
Limited
I showed up to CMU in the fall of 2003, and it’s pretty safe to say that I was atrocious at Magic at the time. Still, the first thing that I did after I had unpacked into my dorm room was find a place to play. CMU’s gaming club was having a sort of open-house orientation event, and I showed up with Astral Slide to fight. I had a really good time, and ended up meeting someone who would become a very good friend there, but it was clear that the gaming group was more interested in LARP and board games than in Magic. We did find out, however, that a group of people ran drafts every Tuesday night at The O.
When my buddy and I showed up the next Tuesday, we run into people that we’d only ever read about: Gary Wise, Eugene Harvey, Andrew Cuneo, Mike Turian, Josh Rider, Nick Eisel, and a host of other people who were clearly regulars at these meetings. We purchased draft sets for seven bucks, and sat down to draft. My deck was fine, maybe even good, and I ended up making the finals on the back of Sparksmith, Deftblade Elite, and a fifth-pick Eternal Dragon. Even so, every round I got ridiculed for playing like a donkey, and I have no doubt that they were dead right.
I kept showing up every Tuesday, and I kept getting better. The people who had berated me that first week turned into close friends, and I started going to tournaments with them. Things started out fairly low-key, as we would just go to FNM and Prereleases, but I was getting better and I was getting involved. One Tuesday, I was listening to people talk about the PTQ that they had just been to, and I got curious. Back at my store in Boston, just making the Top 8 of a PTQ made you an amazing player, but these guys were talking like PTQs were nothing. I heard from them that they were making the trip across Pennsylvania to a PTQ in Baltimore, and that they had a place for us to crash if my friends and I wanted to come along.
I just missed the Top 8 of my first-ever PTQ after losing the last round to my friend from that first day, and he went on to win the whole thing. I made it to the semifinals at the next PTQ, and realized that I had a legitimate shot at making it all the way to the Pro Tour. The last PTQ season of that year ended with three people (Mike Patnik, Jason Martel, and myself) making a double-header trip to Columbus and Cleveland. Patnik and I Top-8ed the Saturday PTQ, with Mike eventually beating EDT in the finals. Martel and I Top-8ed the Sunday PTQ, and Martel sold the slot to a despairing EDT in the finals of that one.
Constructed
The winter of my Sophomore year at CMU, I started playing serious Constructed Magic too. At this point, I was considering it a failure every time I didn’t make the Top 8 at a Limited PTQ, but I didn’t really have any idea how to play sixty-card decks without Jackal Pup, Lightning Bolt, and Fireblast. Luckily for me, the season at the time was pre-rotation Extended, so I could fight all I wanted with Red Deck Wins. I played the deck that I knew and I played it pretty well, so I consistently put up Top 8 finishes, but I never really came close to winning any of these tournaments. People who knew far more about the metagame and how to choose decks kept knocking me out in the quarters or the semis.
As soon as the Extended season ended, I decided that I wanted to start playing Constructed on Magic Online. I had read a tournament report by Rachel Reynolds a while before this that said that you would make a profit if you won even one round of the then-5/4/2/2 queues, so "going infinite" seemed reasonably feasible. The problem with this was that I didn’t really have the resources I needed to get started, both in terms of collection size and in terms of other MTGO players. Luckily, though, I randomly discovered that my Mirrodin Platinum Angel avatar was worth over a hundred tickets, so I sold it off to buy Jittes and the rest of the cards I needed to start playing Champions Block Constructed.
I kept running into a White Weenie deck with Tallowisp, Eight-and-a-Half Tails, and other assorted White dorks, and found out from a CMU friend that you could trace that deck back to a Magic humor forum called MiseTings. I read the forum for a while, and discovered the names of the people who had built this version of WW. Armed with this new information, I started bugging these people on Magic Online, trying to get the list for the deck that kept beating me. I didn’t know it at the time, but the reason that they wouldn’t give it to me was that they were sending a team of players to the PT in Philadelphia with that deck, and they put Ryan Cimera in 5th (who names Black?) and Wilson Freeman in 19th.
That summer, I decided that I was going to try my hardest to get into whatever group had come up with this Tallowisp White Weenie deck, so I started posting on MiseTings. It was clear that a core group of posters on that board had quite a Magic Online presence, and that was exactly what I was looking for. Preparations for Regionals brought us all to the same topic, and I soon became friends with many of the right people. After a question-and-answer session and a private vote, I was added to Cymbrogi. With loans of digital cards and serious discussion about Constructed flying around, I won a Block Constructed PTQ as soon as I returned to Pittsburgh with a U/G/r Legends deck.
I did most of my testing for LA with my clan as well, and decided early on that I would be playing an updated version of RDW with Genju of the Spires and Violent Eruption. I did the tuning with CMU, trying out various splashes for cards such as Wild Mongrel, Dark Confidant, and Lightning Helix. We eventually settled on White for Helix, Goblin Legionnaire, and sideboarded Disenchants. On the plane flight over, I convinced my friend-at-the-time Ervin Tormos to run the deck, and he registered 74 of my 75 cards. We ended up playing for Top 8 in the sixteenth round, and he beat me before punting to Billy Moreno in the quarterfinals. I handed the physical deck over to another (and still) friend, Tom LaPille, who cut some of the less exciting cards for Dark Confidants (in addition to the white splash), and he immediately won the PTQ on Sunday.
The Lesson
Three years ago, I was very, very bad at Magic. It is hard to describe just how bad I was, but I will try: At the Champions Prerelease, I ran a deck with 16 lands and Myojin of Infinite Rage, while Hanabi Blast sat on the sidelines because it seemed "too random." Approximately one year later, I qualified for four PTs in a row and finished in the Top 16 of both a PT and GP. In between being awful and flying to Prague, I met and befriended approximately one million Magic players.
It began with my roommates and classmates at CMU. In the middle of my freshman year, many of us were just starting on the road to playing seriously. We made the trip to Grand Prix: Columbus, but none of us really expected to do well. We all walked in with zero byes, and none of us made Day 2. Still, that group of people soon merged with the PT regulars at CMU when we started PTQing seriously.
At the PTQs, we met more people. Professional Events Services runs tournaments in Western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, and those tournaments were an amazing place to introduce myself to more and more people. CMU would take trips out into Ohio, and the Ohioans would ride over to Pittsburgh, so we started talking to other serious players at every PTQ and GPT, and my CMU network grew to include Columbus, Cleveland, West Virginia, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
At GPs and PTs, I had my friends get me into team drafts with still more people. It’s easy to see where this is headed, but the fact of the matter is that meeting more people becomes easier the more people you know, so the most important thing is to get the ball rolling. Talk to people at your store. Talk to people at your PTQs. Talk to anyone and everyone who will listen, because I can promise that they know someone that you should know.
Luckily for Magic players everywhere, there is a tool that makes this already-simple task even easier: Magic Online. MTGO is the most valuable tool that anyone who wants to qualify for the Pro Tour can get. For ten dollars, you can watch the metagame evolve as it’s happening. At World’s a year ago, the coverage staff lauded the Japanese for blowing everyone away with their never-before-seen Ghazi-Glare deck. I’m sure that if you didn’t have MTGO, then it was as spectacular as the reporters made it seem, but anyone who played or watched the Standard Premiere Events leading up to Worlds knew about Ghazi-Glare a month before Mori won the whole thing.
In addition to the wealth of anonymous information available to anyone with a Magic Online account, there’s the actual practice that you can get at any time. Want to test for a PTQ? Join a queue. Want to test a new deck in private? Fire up a hidden game and test against a friend that lives a thousand miles away. This is all old news, but the fact of the matter is that few people realize just how valuable this tool is. The metagame on Magic Online is an accurate predictor of the real-life metagame, and is often even a month or two ahead of the curve. If the Ghazi-Glare story doesn’t convince you, consider that Iori.dec, a Red-Green Assault/Loam deck, was tearing up MTGO PEs last summer, and that Aggro Loam was the consensus "deck to beat" at the end of this past Extended PTQ season.
As if all this was not enough of a reason to install Magic Online, I haven’t even talked about Clans. A good clan isn’t just a collection of people who have talked a few times on the Internet, it’s a collection of friends who actively trust each other. Clan members should be ready and willing to loan cards for tournaments and distribute ideas about how to break formats. With twenty heads collectively using and analyzing all of the data that MTGO spits out, it’s almost impossible to not put up impressive results. Twenty heads got together on Magic Online, and they put Ervin Tormos into the Top 8 of his first Pro Tour. Twenty heads got together on Magic Online, and they put four out of five members into Day 2 at Honolulu.
Internet forums and message boards are other great communication tools that will let you stay ahead of the curve. Many regions have a free forum set up for anyone who wants to come discuss how to win the next PTQ or what the next big deck is about to be. It’s no coincidence that Cymbrogi grew directly out of MiseTings; Tings let everyone get to know each other, and it demonstrated that people had similar senses of humor, attitudes towards the game, and compatible personalities.
The short version of this story is that if you aren’t talking to everyone that you could be, you are doing something wrong. Your store, your school, Magic Online, and the Internet in general all provide networks of Magic players that you should be a part of. Any time you can plug yourself into a think tank, the quality of your play and the consistency of your results will jump up another level.
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