Sometimes you lose in Magic because you get manascrewed, sometimes you lose because you get land-flooded, sometimes you lose because you’re playing the wrong deck, and sometimes you lose because you misplayed.
Unfortunately, while we are quite good at recognizing when we got screwed, we are far less adept at recognizing when we lost because we messed up – so a lot of the time, our mistakes go unnoticed and unrecorded. This can make it seem like the majority of our losses have come from bad beats, when in reality we have lost countless matches to our own errors.
As intuitive as this concept might be to some, I’m not sure how clear it is what the impact of just one misplay can have on the outcome of your tournament.
Let’s say you just went to a tournament of some sort, and you won the whole thing. You lost one match in the Swiss, then intentionally drew into the Top Eight, and then cruised through the single elimination bracket to victory.
Nice work!
Now let’s back up and say you made a mistake in the finals. You were playing Boros against a Red control deck of some sort; in game 3 you played out all your men and lost them to a Pyroclasm. Had you left one back in your hand, you would have still had some on-table pressure, and since your opponent ended the game at two life, that alone would have been enough to win you the game.
Since it was game three, you would have won the match as well. Since it was the finals, you would have won the tournament. That one minor misplay was the difference between winning the tournament and second place. You hear stories like this all the time: “All I needed to do was [some minor thing] to win, but that one tiny detail cost me the match.”
Unless we’re talking about a Pro Tour Qualifier, or a Last Chance Qualifier, you’re probably not too upset when you lose in the finals; all you missed out on was a title and a larger chunk of the prize pool.
Now let’s modify the scenario just slightly: instead of this Pyroclasm situation coming up in game 3 of the finals, let’s suppose it came up in game 3 of round 4 of the Swiss.
Let’s say you were 2-1 going into round 4, and in the original version of the story, your victory in this round advanced you to 3-1, from which point you kept winning until you could draw into the Top 8.
This time, though, you made the mistake here, in round 4, instead of in the finals. You played out one too many guys into Pyroclasm, lost the game because of it – you would have won if you hadn’t done it, too – and then lost the match because of the error.
You went 2-2 drop because of this misplay. Damn!
To recap:
Scenario 1: You play strongly enough to go X-1-1 in the Swiss, but misplay into Pyroclasm in the finals and lose. You get second place and a bunch of prizes.
Scenario 2: You play strongly enough to remain in contention until round 4, where you misplay into Pyroclasm and lose. You go 2-2 drop and hang your head in shame.
The problem you had in this tournament was that you did not know how to correctly play out the specific scenario of having a limited number of guys in hand when your opponent might have been playing Pyroclasm. Maybe you forgot he might have had it in his board, maybe you just weren’t thinking about mass removal at all, maybe you mistakenly thought you could get more damage by playing out more guys immediately… in any case, it was your inability to handle this specific situation that caused you the match loss.
Assuming you were capable of correctly playing all the other scenarios that came up over the course of the tournament, the time at which this particular scenario came up was the difference between second place and 2-2 drop.
Had you not made the blunder in round 4, you might very well have played perfectly for the rest of the tournament – but you’ll never know, because that one misplay knocked you out before you had the chance to find out.
So let’s suppose that, at any given tournament, there’s some collection of scenarios like this – situations that you don’t know how to play out correctly. Let’s call this collection the Screw-Up Locker. Your Screw-Up Locker might contain the Pyroclasm play, plus, say, the choice of whether or not to mulligan a specific hand that never came up in testing… things of that sort. In any case, if you happen to encounter one of the plays in your Screw-Up Locker at this tournament, you’re doomed to make the wrong decision about how to handle it. That’s the definition of something that goes in the Screw-Up Locker.
Sometimes the misplay that results from encountering one of these scenarios will cost you the game; other times you’ll win it anyway. Sometimes it will lose you the game, and that game loss will cost you the match; other times you’ll pull out the remaining two games. But sometimes the misplay will cost you the game, and that second game loss will translate into a match loss, and once you’ve accumulated your second match loss…sorry, fella – you’re probably not making Top 8.
So if one tiny misplay can knock you out of the entire tournament, how is it that you sometimes see “bad” players you know making Top 8 at several different tournaments while you keep getting knocked out in the Swiss?
Because, although these “bad” players have a much larger Screw-Up Locker than yourself (after all, that’s why you consider them worse than you), they might not be encountering any of the scenarios contained in it over the course of the tournament.
If bad players only ever run into easy decisions that they can figure out despite their badness, then why does it even matter that they’re bad? A player’s propensity to misplay only translates into poorer tournament results when he is presented the opportunity to misplay; if he never runs into any difficult choices and can autopilot his way straight to the finish line, then his badness never even has a chance to inhibit his success.
Sometimes this happens because the bad player gets lucky. Maybe he just happens to avoid all the deadly scenarios in his Screw-Up Locker until the Top 8, whereas you run into several different scenarios contained in your own Screw-Up Locker, despite the fact that yours is much smaller.
But this isn’t always the reason they seem to be doing better than you are. Let’s say you take Frank Karsten’s Greater Good Gifts list from Worlds to a tournament, and Awful Joe takes Boros.
Now let’s suppose that there are a whole big pile of scenarios in your Screw-Up Locker relating to Greater Good Gifts. Not because you’re a buffoon, or anything – it’s just a very complicated deck, which offers many opportunities to misplay. Maybe there’s one scenario involving what to fetch with Gifts Ungiven in the mirror-match, and another relating to whether or not to sideboard into Gifts Ungiven Control in certain matchups… in any case, there are a whole ton of them for a deck as complex as this one.
As many potential pitfalls as your bag contains relating to this Gifts deck, Awful Joe’s bag has twice as many. He doesn’t even know how to use his Divining Top properly, much less how to present the correct set of four cards for Gifts Ungiven.
But Awful Joe is playing Boros. It doesn’t matter how badly he’d punt with the Gifts deck, because he’s not playing it. He can’t possibly encounter any of those myriad Gifts-related scenarios in his Screw-Up Locker, because he’s not playing Gifts!
The portion of your Screw-Up Locker devoted to Boros-related mishaps is tiny compared to the mountain of potential misplays in your Gifts section, but, once again, it doesn’t matter…you’re not playing Boros! Awful Joe is, though, and even though the Boros section of his Screw-Up Locker is much larger than yours is, the Boros section of Awful Joe’s Screw-Up Locker is way smaller than the Gifts section of yours.
It’s not just luck that Awful Joe keeps cracking Top 8 and you don’t – you’re both racing to the same finish line, but your lane is filled with land mines and caltrops and his isn’t.
Even though you might be playing the better deck overall, and even though you might be the better player overall, Awful Joe – whether he realizes it or not – is giving him a much better chance of doing well at the average tournament, just by minimizing his chance of encountering a scenario he can’t play correctly.
Now, does this mean you should always play the easiest deck at every tournament?
Certainly not.
You’ll learn a lot more from most of your losses than Awful Joe will. When your buddy who was watching your match points out that you lost because you did a Gifts stack wrong, you will never make that Gifts stack wrong again. That scenario has now been removed from your Screw-Up Locker.
And, quite possibly, the lesson you learned from realizing this mistake might lead you to play many other, similar situations correctly in the future. All those situations will also disappear from your Screw-Up Locker.
Meanwhile Awful Joe, who made Top Eight by having a much smaller chance of running into a difficult scenario, also had a much smaller chance of losing to a misplay. When he finally got knocked out, there’s a much higher chance that it was from actual manascrew or the like, so he goes home toting a Screw-Up Locker just as large as it was when he walked in the door.
With time, your Screw-Up Locker will continue to shrink as you learn from your mistakes, and from playing more complicated decks. This is why we start to see a pattern of familiar names at the top of the standings at Grand Prix and Pro Tour events: those guys all have very small Screw-Up Lockers. The scenarios that they will play incorrectly are so few and far between, they can dodge match-costing misplays for nearly the entire tournament. Some of them can even figure out when a certain scenario might be a part of their opponent’s Screw-Up Locker, and will try to steer the game state into creating that scenario, resulting in a fatal misplay from the opponent.
To wrap up:
-Don’t beat yourself up over going X-2 drop once in awhile. You might very well have gone on to play the rest of the day perfectly, but you never got the chance to find out because the one scenario you couldn’t handle cropped up early in the Swiss instead of in the Top Eight as you might have preferred.
-Having said that, if you find yourself going X-2 drop a lot, you might be playing a deck that is too difficult for you. If your goal is to improve as a player, this might be a good thing in the long run… but if you really want that slot now, it might be in your best interest to switch to something that has a smaller set of potential misplays for you.
-Manascrew and land flood are much more easily visible than misplays are, but that doesn’t mean the misplays aren’t happening. Recognizing your misplays shrinks your Screw-Up Locker, giving you a better shot at doing well next time.
So look out for your own misplays, and do your friends the favor of (nicely) pointing out their misplays. You’ll all be better players for recognizing your mistakes, and in the long run, it’s these little incremental improvements in your game that transform you into a great player.
Anyway, hope you all enjoyed this Daily series. I’m off to the Pro Tour in a week; for better or for worse, you can certainly expect an article to follow.
Until then!
Richard Feldman
Team Check Minus
[email protected]