A friend of mine, Sam Stoddard, made a post on his blog detailing what he called his “Fearless Magical Inventory.” He took this idea and brought it to our common ground, MiseTings, where various posters both listed their own Inventories and helped people out with theirs.
The idea behind a Fearless Magical Inventory is that there must be something holding you back from making it to the next level in Magic. The only way to progress, once you’ve found yourself at a plateau, is to identify your weaknesses and then specifically try to improve upon them. It is not enough to say that you aren’t as good as you could be; you must discover the specific facets of your game that are holding you back. As my friend said, once everything is out in the open, you can work on fixing your problems with no pretense of pride.
I think that this is a brilliant idea. I know that other people agree with me; many of my friends have been working on their own Inventories, and others have had very productive discussions about certain issues that appear to be common to many people.
Today I’m going to present the biggest items in my own Fearless Magical Inventory.
I Am A Slow Player
For a long time, I mostly thought of this as a joke. We would draft on Tuesdays, and friends would ask me if they could take a bathroom break while I was thinking. We would draft on Fridays, and everyone would bemoan the fact that they were waiting for my matches to finish. I brushed off the first one because I felt that it was okay to think for a long time once or twice in a game, because getting that thinking out of the way would allow me to play the rest of the game much faster. I brushed off the second one because I didn’t think it was unreasonable for the Blue/White Control deck to take a long time finishing its opponent off after locking the game down for twenty turns.
Then I played in a sealed PTQ at Charleston. I was aiming for a 3-0 drop so that I could get a ratings invite. Even a 3-0-1 would get me there. I started off at 2-0, and then took an unintentional draw. It “wasn’t my fault,” since I’d spent most of the game trying to find a way to stop his Simic Sky Swallower from killing me, when my only out was Stinkweed Imp. I was able to slow the game way down with Palliation Accord, but it didn’t matter that I’d eventually found a way to beat his Sky Swallower, because his next big threat got me. And suddenly we had five minutes to play game 3. I took an unintentional draw in the next match, too, under very similar circumstances. I was up a game, and I was way behind in game 2. I came up with a way to win, and I executed it. It worked, and I got out from under what was killing me, only to die to the next big problem.
When I bemoaned the fact that I’d missed my easy shot at an invite, my friends told me that I was a slow player, and that I couldn’t really say that I wasn’t, given that I’d just taken two unintentional draws in a row. I said they didn’t understand, and that there wasn’t any way for me to play any faster.
But the problem is that it’s very difficult to realize that you’re slow because you aren’t “wasting” time. You’re spending that time thinking, and you’re spending that time advancing your game plan. You’re not just sitting there singing the ABCs in your head, you’re trying to win. But you don’t realize that you’re taking two minutes to make decisions that you can’t afford to spend that kind of time on. You don’t realize that some decisions don’t deserve a deep level of thought. You don’t realize that you have to manage how fast the whole match progresses, and not just your own side of it. I know I didn’t.
Eventually it clicked. I was a slow player. I still am a slow player, but I’m working hard to speed up how I play. I’m not trying to finish matches in ten minutes every time, but I’m trying to make sure that the round clock doesn’t stop me from getting any more invites. Part of this, for me, relates to deck choice. When I go into a Standard tournament these days, I refuse to bring Pickles with me. The deck is very good, yes, but it is also very complex and relatively slow. I would easily time out matches with it. I’ve experienced success with other slow decks in this format (Wu Snow, Guile, and Mannequin), but each of those has a plan that I can execute quickly. The Snow deck asked me to live until turn 8 and then win off of a Purity, Crovax, or Sacred Mesa. The Guile deck asked me to keep my head above water until I could end the game with Teferi or Urza’s Factory, or to bring out a Guile and hijack my opponent’s big threats. The Mannequin deck asked me to optimize comes-into-play triggers to get to the point where winning with all of my incidental creatures was academic. Pickles has a similar plan, but I know that any time I found myself in a mirror match, I would be unable to figure out how to win in the time allotted.
The other part relates to how I think. Tom LaPille wrote his first article for this site about how to buy yourself more thinking time, and his points were all valid. The one that I see most often is that people do not think about their own plays during their opponent’s turn. They sit there looking at their surroundings (or their own game), but they aren’t thinking about anything. They’re just waiting to see what happens. One of the reasons that it took me so long to come to terms with my own slowness is that I have thought about what I’m going to do on my opponent’s turns for as long as I can remember. On the other hand, I’ve found that I most need to work on evaluating which decisions deserve ten seconds and which ones deserve three minutes. And I’ve found that when I can’t come to a good conclusion in three minutes, I probably won’t get there in five or ten minutes.
I Am Bad At Evaluating New Things
This is one of my biggest weaknesses, as far as I can tell. It is very difficult for me to come across a decklist and tell whether or not it is any good. Similarly, when a new set comes out, it takes a lot of discussion and playtime before I can be confident in my evaluation of cards.
In terms of Constructed Magic, this meant that I used to find a reasonable deck and stick with it for the entire season. I did it with Red Deck Wins, I did it with Aggro Loam, and I did it with Dredge. Essentially, I would pick a deck at the start and never look back. I was helped by the fact that I was selecting (usually) from a pool of proven choices, so I never really got stuck with something that was bad, but I was often playing a deck that was not the right choice. My first big PTQ season was pre-Ravnica Extended, and I battled my way to a ton of Top 8s playing with Jackal Pup and Cursed Scroll. However, I just kept losing to the decks that I should be playing; three of my friends beat me in those Top 8s and went on to qualify. One was playing Mind’s Desire and two were playing a Scepter Chant deck with Solitary Confinement and Humility. My deck was good enough to get me to the elimination rounds, but it wasn’t good enough to finish the job. Despite this, I stuck to my guns, and I have a bunch of pins to show for it.
For Limited play, this means that I tend to completely misbuild my early sealed decks, and draft poorly for the first few weeks. There have been many times when I’ve seen a card previewed, and immediately misevaluated it. The first incidence of this that I can recall was when Spiritual Visit was previewed for Saviors. I started to think about how great it would be to “go off” and start firing out multiple Spirit tokens every turn. Of course, when you’re considering splicing a spell three or four times a turn, something is obviously wrong. Even if you could cast three spells a turn, every turn, you probably don’t need a Spiritual Visit tagging along to win that game. A more recent example lies in Peppersmoke. At the Prerelease, I was playing Black/Green, and I had two copies of the Smoke in my sideboard, while much worse cards like Hunter of Eyeblights spent the day beefing up my opponent’s creatures and then dying. In our first couple of drafts, I wasn’t playing it even when I knew I could cycle it.
This is a much harder problem for me to solve than the previous one. Luckily, though, it’s relatively easy to patch up. As I mentioned before, this season I’m playing a variety of Standard decks, just because I do not know which ones are good and which ones are bad. By playing a given deck in our weekly tournaments, I can run it through a strong gauntlet and find both its strengths and its weaknesses. I’m not sure that this process makes me better at evaluating a decklist without playing it, but it does make me better at evaluating a deck. For Limited, I work to surround myself with people who are better than I am at card evaluation. I got knocked off of my Spiritual Visit dream pretty quickly when I AIM’d Jason Martel and he told me I was being braindead. He pointed out the difficulties in getting more than a handful of uses out of the card. He pointed out the fact that it was in a poor color for Splice shenanigans. In essence, he could see much more accurately than I could what was wrong with the card, and so I had the right evaluation of the card, even if it wasn’t my own.
I Have Tunnel Vision
This one is hard to explain. I am trying to say that I don’t see every play without sounding stupid, because there are so many plays that it’s probably impossible to see every one of them. I am just saying that I don’t see awkward plays that are outside the usual realm of a game of Magic. For instance, I was watching two roommates of mine play a draft, and one of them cast Utopia Vow on his own Ridged Kusite so that he could get up to four mana, after being stuck on three for quite a long time. My other roommate bounced the Kusite with his Venser, and then used his own Utopia Vow on it on his next turn. This line of play essentially wasted his opponent’s turn, and allowed him to get the win with a Leaden Fists for the last three damage. When I looked at the board, I thought that he was just going to put Leaden Fists on the Kusite, since it was already tapped, and then have Venser and Vow in-hand to handle whatever came next. Instead, he just won the game.
This is a problem that I don’t really know how to approach. With slower play, I could try to find ways to give myself more time and to limit how much time I spent on decisions. With evaluations, I could force myself to go out on a limb and also surround myself with people who had better evaluation skills. With this, I can only practice. Unfortunately, practice is exactly what tends to get you into the grooves that limit the plays you see. Practice allows you to call on previous experience to evaluate a similar situation, and the problem is exactly that I’m not seeing the new line of thought. I would truly appreciate it if people had suggestions on how to improve in this aspect, because I am at a wall on my own.
My friend was probably not the first person to come up with the idea of a Fearless Magical Inventory, but he was the first person who relayed the idea to me. I think that it is a good one, and his results after detailing his own Inventory have spoken well for him. These are not the only items in my Inventory, but they are the most broad ones, and they are the ones that I think might help a lot of people out there. Hopefully this look at some of my limitations, and what I’m doing to improve on them, can help you out with your own.
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