In a forum response for a previous article, I alluded that an individual’s play style significantly effects how a game is played. Somebody commented on how play style is seldom mentioned strategically, which jogged my memory. I had, long ago, intended on writing on the topic. It was brought to my attention after a feature match in Prague, when Ervin Tormos said that my style was drastically different from the player whom he had learnt from – Antonino De Rosa. Later, an airplane flight sat next to Dutch teen model Wessel Oomens brought the topic to the fore again, this time focusing on what aspects of the game we each found more important and how this difference affected the game. Since then it has kept rearing its head, from watching over the shoulders of two masters – Tiago Chan and Kenji Tsumara. I aim to bring all of these opposing strategies to light, investigating what each brings positively to the game, and trying to see which works best. I have a feeling it will be whichever suits you the best.
How do I play Limited? For me, the defining factor is card advantage. Much like a rookie chess player concerned only with who has taken more pawns, or whether his captured rook equates to his rival’s pawn and knight, I try to stay ahead. This isn’t the sole purpose of my game, but it is certainly the most influencing factor. If I have more cards than my opponent, then given that I drafted my deck well so it has enough threats and answers, I will win the game. The more cards I draw, the more likely I will draw an answer to my opponent’s bombs, and the higher the probability I will draw my own.
My take on Limited affects both how I play and how I build my deck. I play cards that generate advantage, but I often need time to let that advantage take effect. Wessel advocates tempo’s importance over card advantage. He uses tempo to generate his own advantage, forcing double blocks so he can two for one, reducing the importance of an opponent’s bomb to just another mathematical blocker because it is too late to assert its true impact upon the game. He can also afford to sacrifice his own card advantage because he won’t need it as much, because his games end before those additional cards come into effect. Cards like Snapback effectively become straight up removal spells because your opponent doesn’t have the time to relay the bounced guy, or rather when he does it is in place of another creature.
To combat both tempo players and tempo decks – like Boros – I draft and build my decks differently. In Ravnica block, my sideboards were always filled with Torpid Molochs and Golgari Brownscales. I deliberately drafted them to be in my sideboard so when I played people like Wessel I could bring them in to stodge up the game. The same can be said about Jedit’s Dragoons nowadays. These cards slow down the game – they might have hit their golden turn 2 Watchwolf, but your normally far inferior Moloch takes the wind out of their sails. Thallid Shell-Dwellers and Aetherflame Walls serve the same purpose – low quality cards gain in value when all they have to do is keep you alive long enough for your real game to kick in. You disrupt their plan, ruin their tempo, and make them play on your terms; and you will win. By making trades, even bad ones for you that will keep you alive until your late game, you ensure that you will be in good shape when you get there. If you have a Careful Consideration in your hand, you can afford to let your opponent two for one you early in the game if it means that you can afford to tap out and take a hit, because that Consideration will almost certainly win you the game. It’s like the old rule from Mirari’s Wake decks – if you untap with a Wake in play, you win. If you can find yourself the time to safely resolve your big advantage spell, you will win.
Another beneficial side effect of trading in the early game is that it enables you to play heavier cards than average. It’s an old Magic law that states “cards that cost more are better.” By trading the early game, you ensure a fairly safe late game. It might come down to a top deck war – one I will almost certainly win, because my decks have more fatties and more card advantage than my opponent’s.
Another way I slow my opponents down is my making them use a combat trick or unmorph a guy in the early game. Imagine it is turn 4 and they are attacking their morph into your Thallid Germinator. Most people fear to block here because it does not seem advantageous – their morph might flip up and kill my guy, or they might have a combat trick and I’ll be a man down. More often than not, I will block. I want my opponent to cast his trick or use his morph. If he does he will almost certainly not play another spell this turn. I will have traded my third turn creature for his fourth turn. I will have gained myself a huge amount of time and saved a lot of damage. It is likely that my third turn drop is inferior in card quality to whatever trick he has, meaning that if I don’t trade now, he can use it to a more devastating effect later on, and I will then have to continue to play around his trick even if he doesn’t have one. If he has nothing and our men trade – great! I’m on more life, the board is less complex, I will take less damage next turn, and I have made a one-for-one trade… so using my card advantage, I will probably have one more pawn in my captured pile at the end of the day.
How does my style differ from Antonino’s? I like to trade things off and stay alive so that my heavier cards and card advantage win the game. I like to keep the board simple so that game-effecting spells my opponent might have, like Desolation Giant and Sudden Spoiling, have less impact. Antonino likes to clog up the board. It is a miracle to see me in the midst of a huge creature standoff where all that is happening is a glacial one damage a turn from the currently board-dominating Prodigal Sorcerer. Antonino will engineer the board position like this so he can outplay his opponent. There are more factors to juggle, more things to enter into the equation. Things take longer to think through; in short, there is more opportunity to screw up. Antonino’s tactic might work well against inferior players, but I think it backfires against better players. However, I’m sure Antonino drafts and constructs his decks differently, to align with his strategy. One way he might do this would be to draft fewer random dorks, whose value on a clogged board is almost worthless, drafting instead random tricks and reusable effects that might tip the balance in his favor.
It doesn’t seem good to me, though. Sure, if you are the better player it will probably help you – but if you’re the better player, you should be winning anyway. A clogged board position makes certain cards far more effective, whilst rendering others far weaker. In my games, a Havenwood Wurm is devastating because there are fewer guys around to oppose it. For Antonino, it poses less of a problem because there will probably be a few Hill Giants around to lessen the blow. Cards like Sulfurous Blast will work better for my adversaries if the board is heavily saturated; agreed, they work well for me if I have them too, but if you do it is easy to engineer the board so it is still advantageous. I prefer to minimize the threat potential of my opponent’s crucial cards, confident that on average my deck will be better. On a clogged board, random dorks like an unmorphed Coral Trickster can still affect the game. They can join in a double-block to take down a mightier foe. In a game where things are almost continually being traded, it will sit there redundantly whilst 3/3s attack past it. A clogged board takes away the importance that drawing an early drop can have, it becomes just another dude that can’t do anything and only gets you one step closer to critical mass… whereas its impact on a near-empty board is positive. This obviously works for your opponent too, but, again, your deck should be filled with more card advantage and fatties.
Kenji taught me a valuable lesson. Kenji plays Limited like it is Constructed, I do the opposite. There are lessons to be learned from both angles, the least of which being that both games have different skills that need to be focused on. Kenji always has a plan. I watched him play a game where two of the cards in his opening hand were Momentary Blink and Magus of the Mirror. He then spent the entire game holding them back and steadily taking damage in a way that wasn’t too obvious. He waited until turn ten to play the Magus when he finally had eight mana. His opponent had a Rift Bolt waiting for it, but the Blink kept it around. Kenji untapped, flipped the lives around and then attacked for exactly lethal. He’d painstakingly kept to his plan since turn 1, saving that Blink when it could have been used many times previously, and it worked.
Constructed is all about knowing what happens in a matchup. Once a deck’s plan A has been exhausted, plan B becomes important. Wheels within wheels. The same approach happens in Limited, especially when you know your opponent’s decklist. This is one of the reasons why I always write down every card my opponent plays, so that I have more information for the next games. It also helps me sideboard if I can see exactly how many one-toughness guys he has for my Subterranean Shambler, etc; and when your opponent makes a peculiar play, it is normally far easier to work out what he has. Often, when your opening hand contains a Sulfurous Blast, you will play the game to ensure its maximum effect, whilst simultaneously not revealing that you have the Blast. In a game I played recently, I had the option of using a Might of Krosa during my opponent’s attack step to save my blocker and kill his. I declined to do so, and my opponent commented that I had no pump in my hand – he had seen around five pump spells in game 1. My reason was that I actually had four pump spells in my grip, and I planned to devastate, if not kill, him in my turn. By not using the Might the turn before I had convinced him that I had no pumps. I killed him easily when his blocks left him dead to the Might in hand.
If you have a Draining Whelk in your deck, and your opponent, who is fairly competent, lost to it in the previous game, what do you do on turn 7 when your hand is Island, Forest and Wormwood Dryad? If you’re Tiago Chan, you pass the turn. By not making a land, you are showing that you don’t have any, therefore you are holding three spells with six mana open. If you lay a land, you might also have a Havenwood Wurm; there are some advantages to this representation, but for now we want to really convince them we have the Whelk. If you pass the turn with three spells in hand, you might as well stick the Whelk face up on your forehead, a mistake that poor players often make. Your opponent will now not play his best spell next turn, he might not play anything – either way, Tiago’s play is genius (assuming the Dryad had no great impact on the board). For the rest of the game, until he is called on it by a critical spell, Tiago can either represent the Whelk, or put up a show of agonizing with himself before playing other spells, either way he has added another element to the game for his opponent to think about. If Tiago draws another three-drop the following turn, the bluff is strengthened as he can lay both, revealing that he did indeed have a spell in his hand that he held back the previous turn for the assumed Whelk. The only way this backfires is if you draw the Whelk.
This is a high-level play, but before you make it, you have to assess what you are giving up to make it. Maybe the Dryad will have an effect; maybe you will draw Strength in Numbers the following turn and it will be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel. There is a much larger error being made though, and it is one I see many people make. People hold back their surplus land because they think they are bluffing with it. Any good player can soon figure out that you are not really holding anything. And then you lose the game because of it. Why? Because you will draw something that needed that land – be it a Disintegrate, an Akroma, an Urza’s Factory, the second regeneration shield of a Ghost Ship, the additional pump of a Viscerid Deepwalker, a Think Twice and you can’t cast the other spells you draw off it. The examples are endless, but there are lots of things in your deck that are mana intensive, like a Spell Burst with Buyback, that often go overlooked. Occasionally there are good reasons for holding the additional land back; you might have a Conflagrate in the ‘yard, or a Careful Consideration you could draw. It might even be wrong to hold back for the second land for the Consideration because you will almost always draw another land off it and you might need the additional mana to cast the spells you draw. In an extreme example, your deck’s heaviest White card is Knight of the Holy Nimbus, which is in your hand, and a Magus of the Disc, which is in play; it is still correct to play your third Plains in your grip, because your opponent might Snapback the Magus and you might draw another Plains. If that happens and you need to make both to stay alive and you hadn’t made the Plains – you’d feel pretty stupid.
I maximize my deck’s potential. I would rather never regret one of my own future plays than maybe bluff my opponent that I have something I don’t. Bluffs still have their place but, as in poker, they are calculated and correct, and, therefore, not really bluffs at all… but the correct play. Style affects every aspect of Magic, from how you draft, to deck construction, to what goes on at the table. The best style is the use of all of them at the right time, but that is rather a lofty goal. If you know which suits you better, or which style you would like to play, then you can better your game. Analyze your style, see how it is flawed and how it can be improved, and make those changes. Ask a better player who knows how you play to comment. I don’t know which is best, but I aim to find out more and allow what I find to improve my game. Try and do the same.
Success,
Q