This past Monday saw Nick Eisel talking about the subconcious decisions that every Magic player makes. He mentioned attacking and blocking, lands you leave untapped, and a handful of other small details. It was his section on leaving up lands to bluff that got me thinking, since I’ve been doing the same thing since I learned to draft like someone who didn’t have a log where their brain should be (which took a while).
A teammate of mine once brought up the idea of subconcious decisions in terms of the lands we play. The context of this was a forum post trying to show that his aggro deck of choice at the time (Ghost Dad) had at least as much complexity as the control decks that most people thought of as harder to play. He argued that the reason that everyone thought that aggro decks were so easy to play was that they were simply missing plays due to a shortcut that they were using when dropping their lands on the table: take as little damage as possible.
A two-color aggro deck in the post-Ravnica world usually contains four Ravnica duals (Sacred Foundry), four Core Set painlands (Battlefield Forge), and a smattering of basic lands. If your opening hand includes a Plains, a Foundry, and a Forge, the rest of your hand will dictate how you play your lands. A Savannah Lions and no other actions means that you will likely play the Plains on turn 1, the Foundry on turn 2 (tapped), and the Forge on turn 3. If you have a Knight of the Holy Nimbus to go with your Lions, then you will likely play the Forge on turn 2, taking one damage, rather than play the Foundry untapped and taking two damage.
If you remove the basic Plains from this example, then having only a Lions means that you would lead with the Forge, take one damage, and then play the Foundry tapped next turn. Adding the Knight means that you would lead with the Foundry, since both the Forge and the Foundry would deal you two damage over the first two turns, but playing the Forge first means that your lands will deal you four damage in the first two turns while playing the Foundry first would only deal you three damage.
Essentially, we will try to sneak our duals into play tapped when we can, we will play our basics first when we have spells to cast, and painlands get played only when we’re out of other options. As my teammate said, if someone leads with a turn 1 painland and no play, then chances are good that they are holding at most one more land, and it is likely a painland too.
This is a shortcut that nearly everyone who plays Standard in a competitive setting uses, even if they aren’t aware of it. The reason for the shortcut is very straightforward: being at twenty life is almost always better than being at eighteen. Still, the very fact that the shortcut is so universal means that you can manipulate it for your own benefit.
Let us say that you are playing the Boros deck mentioned above (and we’ll say it has no Demonfire). You have mulliganed twice on the draw, after winning game 1 against a Dralnu-style deck with Giant Solifuge. You kept a Plains, two Sacred Foundries, and two Savannah Lions, and you drew a third Foundry for your turn. You decide that, due to your relatively action-light hand, you are going to milk game 1’s Giant Solifuge for all it is worth. You play a Foundry untapped on turn 1, and drop a Lions. Your opponent plays a land, and you play your Plains and drop the second Lions. On turn 3 you just play a tapped Foundry and say go (after swinging) with three cards in your hand.
From your opponent’s view of the table, there is no way that you had that Plains in your hand on turn 1. If you did, you would have played it then and then played the Foundry tapped on turn 2, buying you two extra life. He will also assume that you topdecked the second Foundry, since you had a chance to play it for no damage on your second turn. In other words, he’ll think that you kept a one-land hand and "got lucky" to draw two lands off the top of your deck. He’ll also think about the fact that you didn’t play any spells on turn 3, despite the fact that your opening hand included four of them. He might put you on a large amount of burn. He might put you on the card that just beat him in game 1.
With your opponent believing that you have a grip filled with burn and Solifuges, there’s a decent chance that he’ll decide to sit on his counterspells until he can cast the Damnation he’s holding with Mana Leak backup for the Solifuge that is "obviously" in your hand. If you had played your Plains on turn 1, and two tapped Foundries on turns 2 and 3, there is a very good chance that he would decide that you had kept a threat-light hand and gotten manaflooded. With this in mind, he might decide that you’re holding nothing he cares about and wipe your board with his Wrath.
In other words, by taking advantage of this shortcut, you may have bought yourself an extra four damage from your Lions by dealing yourself an extra two damage with your lands. How you play out your lands gives your opponents information, and if you play them in a strange way you can feed them misinformation.
One of the most publicly famous cases of a player using their lands to sell a bluff was the semifinal match between Kenji Tsumura and Antoine Ruel. On the draw, Antoine played a second-turn Duress and did not Force Spike Kenji’s Mana Leak. Instead of getting a Mana Leak for his Spike, he got Kenji’s third-turn Psychatog. That alone was a very strong play, and one that the reporters talked about for a long time after the fact, but something about this play often goes unsaid. Ruel Played a Watery Grave on turn 1, and he played it tapped.
There are things that you should consider when playing your lands that many people would completely overlook, and they aren’t just whether or not to take damage from your manabase. Earlier in that same Top 8, Antoine was playing against Tsuyoshi Fujita. Fujita played a Goblin Legionnaire on turn 2, while Antoine just passed with two Blue up. Fujita dropped his third fetchland of the game and then played a Kataki, which Ruel countered. Ruel again simply played a land and passed the turn, and Fujita didn’t crack his fetchland until his upkeep on his third turn.
Mike Flores and Randy Buehler were covering the match from the booth, and they were astounded that Fujita would make such a mistake. After all, the land that he fetched up was a Sacred Foundry, so why not do it on Ruel’s endstep and get it for free? It wasn’t until another pro in the spectator area (I believe it was Frank Karsten) wrote "SMOTHER" on a piece of paper and held it up to the webcast booth window that Flores and Buehler understood that cracking the fetchland on Ruel’s endstep could have lost Fujita two damage if Ruel had been holding a removal spell for the Legionnaire.
Again, the idea here is that shortcuts are something that are great in 99% of the situations that you’ll find yourself in, but you must pay attention to them. Ultimately that extra two damage didn’t win Fujita the game, but it got him one-tenth of the way there. Becoming more aware of them when you play will certainly let you find more opportunities to outplay, or outthink, your opponents.
Something (Not Quite) Completely Unrelated
I also want to take this moment to talk about tournament preparation. I don’t remember how many times I’ve read that one of the most important things that you can do to prepare for a PTQ is to get a good night’s sleep before you head out in the morning. Why, then, do I stay at FNM, drafting until two in the morning, when I know I have to get up at five to leave for the next state over? The answer is my subconscious. Recently, there have been a few articles on this site about the danger of going on auto-pilot. You know your deck, you know the field, and you know what to do in every situation so you just cruise along until realizing that this game is slightly different and that to win this game you had to make a slightly different play.
When I get nine hours of sleep before I play Magic, I go on autopilot. When I get three, I don’t trust myself to make any decision without thinking it through first. I’ve looked back at all of the major tournaments that I’ve played in, from PTQs to the PTs they’ve sent me to, and for every one that I did well in I barely had any sleep at all. There have been one or two tournaments that I don’t remember, but I honestly cannot recall a single tournament that I did well at where I woke up before my alarm went off. As an example, I’ll relate my experiences for the first two PTs I ever attended.
PT Los Angeles: Preparation for LA was a nightmare in every possible way. I was traveling the day before the PT, and I was doing it with someone I barely knew. We got to the site and met more people I barely knew. We eventually found a floor to sleep on (in the room of people I completely did not know), and ended up getting some Pizza Hut stuffed-crust pizza that, while delicious, made me feel like I had a brick in my stomach. I fell asleep at two or three in the morning on the bare floor. Underneath a table. In a room that smelled like grease and cigarettes. I rolled off of the floor into the tournament hall the next morning in a complete daze. Clearly I made Top 16.
PT: Honolulu: Honolulu, on the other hand, was a great trip. I left for the site relatively early, checked in to "the room with all the Bens," unpacked, and got a shower. I went to the player meeting and met up with friends and teammates before going out to dinner at a cheap but very good restaurant. We drafted to get the juices flowing, and then went to bed before midnight. In the morning, we had plenty of time to grab showers and eat some breakfast in the player’s lounge. My final record? 8-8.
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