In the forums from my last article, Lynxcat left a comment that ended: “Is a mistake still a mistake if it makes the game more fun than it would be with the ‘optimal’ play?”
I wanted to answer straight away that a mistake is always a mistake, irrelevant of the reason for your mistake. I mean, if I’m the guy writing about multiplayer strategy — I have to say that or there’s no point to what I write! If making the fun play or setting up the crazy interaction is the right play in a casual game, then why would anyone care about threat assessment and general multiplayer tactics? Why would diplomacy and which cards to include in your decks be relevant? I have to say that a mistake is a mistake.
But then I thought about the last time I played my Polymorph deck. The decklist is irrelevant for now. Just know that I was running token creatures, some ramp, several counterspells, and Polymorph. The deck was going nowhere. I drew a Raise the Alarm and played a Nuisance Engine early on. I countered a few things that would’ve crushed me, but I wasn’t drawing into Polymorph or anything that would let me search for the Polymorphs. My board had six or seven token creatures, with Pest tokens dying to handle most of the attacks against me. Then I drew my single foil copy of Day of the Dragons. The Conqueror’s Pledge in my hand became very interesting. I played the Pledge, with kicker of course, and then dropped Day of the Dragons on the next turn, giving me more than fifteen Dragons.
This was a mistake, and I knew it. I knew that Day of the Dragons is a fun card, but it has no business in a deck with mostly token creatures. I’m sitting at a table with four other people, and all it would take is for any one of them to have any way to kill an enchantment, and I’d lose everything. The Dragons would be gone, and the tokens they replaced wouldn’t come back. I knew that the correct play was to continue to sit and handle the threats as they came onto the board. I knew that Day of the Dragons belonged in a deck full of creatures with “enters the battlefield” abilities, not token producers whose tokens would disappear into the Nevernever zone where tokens go after they disappear from a graveyard or get exiled. I knew the correct play was to wait for the Polymorph to come and find Emrakul or Progenitus or the other oversized monstrosity of a creature I keep switching out since I’m never happy with the one that’s there (and still not).
I also knew that I put Day of the Dragons in this deck just for this purpose, and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to play it out!
In the end, it worked out for me. I managed to kill two players in each of my next two turns, and no one had the enchantment removal. That doesn’t make the play correct; it was still very wrong. But I’d do it again every time.
How can I say that a mistake is a mistake when even I, the guy writing about multiplayer tactics, didn’t follow the set of plays that would maximize my chances for victory in that game?
I can say that because the optimal play, the correct play in multiplayer Magic, isn’t what most people think it is.
Almost everything written on the internet about Magic strategy is for the tournament player. For a tournament player, the only game is the current one. The goal is to win the match. How you get there is irrelevant (assuming you aren’t cheating), but the goal is to win that match. Once that’s done, you want to win the next match. And the next and the next and the next.
For a casual player, that’s not the goal. The casual player is playing with the same group of friends every week/month/random time they get together. Dream crushing game after game will give you an excellent win percentage over a short number of games, but you won’t likely be invited back. Winning regularly, but not every time, is the goal for casual players. For casual multiplayer Magic, winning five of six games is not as good as winning 40% of innumerable games.
If you’re looking to win every one of your casual games, try to build the fastest combo possible, and take everyone out that way. There are enough decks out there that can win reliably before your buddies can possibly stop you. The end result of winning every time will be either: you stop getting invited to play; or everyone in your group plays a similar combo. Ask Sheldon Menery what he thinks of decks like that in EDH. I share a similar stance.
When you start to look at things, taking into consideration that the optimal play is to win regularly (as opposed to winning every time), many of the mistakes that are made because someone went for the Day of the Dragons play instead of the optimal play to win that particular game, no longer appear to be mistakes.
My play style tends to involve sitting quietly without being the strongest or weakest player. I try to build up my options and let others do most of the dirty work. That style of play has worked well for me, but I can’t be that way all of the time. My group would start targeting me every game if they believed I had good cards in hand all the time. So instead sometimes I come out gangbusters. Or I make the big, dramatic play (a la Day of the Dragons). These alterations to my regular play style aren’t usually the optimal play for that game. I become the target for everyone in the game, or leave myself vulnerable. Those games are what allow me to be the quiet, unobtrusive player in other games. Those out of character games are what allow me to have a good win percentage. Those games are part of the optimal play for casual, multiplayer Magic.
The optimal play in casual groups can also be seen as the play that most benefits the health of the group. I’m not saying that you should be throwing games, or that you should be bringing your game down a level. Your friends in your group will improve if you continue to show up with decks that challenge them and show them how to improve their decks. If your play style is tight and careful, you’ll see improvement in their games as well. What I’m saying is that playing the optimal deck to win each and every game isn’t the optimal play for casual.
So, where does multiplayer tactics fit into all of this? I’m trying to show you how to win as many games as possible, without playing the deck designed to win every single game. There are times when I’m going to describe a play in a game and tell you it was a mistake. I’ll lay out the best ways to manipulate your group to do your bidding for you. I’ll look at card advantage in multiplayer games. I’ll explain that there was a poor threat analysis or that the deck should not include Day of the Dragons.
I’ll also tell you that there are times when you should make a play that, in the abstract, is a poor play. There are times when you want to be the target. I’ll suggest that being the puppet, rather than the puppet master in a particular game is actually the correct play. There are times when your Lobster deck is the right play. There are times when making all the creatures on the board 0/1 Mutant Ninja Turtles is the right play (I’m still not sure when this makes the most sense, but you see where I’m going here).
The joy for me and many others is that all of these things share one place. I love the email banter my playgroup has when we set up our weekly games as much as I love using the group’s metagame to determine what decks to build. I love that we can sit around my dining room table in chairs that are starting to come apart and laugh about the week and what we’ve been doing, as much as I love determining who the primary threat is. I like big crazy plays and wild decks as much as I like the diplomatic aspects as we each try to point the big attack somewhere else.
Lynxcat said, “I think an article exploring where the use of optimal strategy and fun-seeking can intersect could be helpful to players like me.” I hope that shifting optimal strategy from winning this game, to winning many games, will provide the intersection that Lynxcat and players like him are looking for to make casual games fun.
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Bruce Richard