Sullivan Library - The Symptoms of Error

This season was a run of near-misses for me.

I lost in the finals to Owen Turtenwald, with my Ponza list versus Wizards.

I lost in the semi-finals to DJ Kastner, with my Stompy list versus Wizards.

I barely missed Top 8 of several events, with losses to Bant Aggro-Control, Affinity, and Saito Zoo. Not going to Honolulu is going to be deeply disappointing.

In times like this, what you really need to do is engage in honest, thoughtful reflection. It does us no good to look outwards and blame the world. Growth comes from within.

One onlooker at an event I played in Indianapolis, the Sunday after the StarCityGames.com $5000 Standard Open, asked me why it was that I played the decks that I did, and why I didn’t just play the best deck. I responded, “I play the deck that I think is going to give me the best chance to win.”

At that same event, Patrick Chapin called me a “contrarian.” I was insistent on playing something different, he said, rather than simply playing what was “best.” While I have a semantic disagreement with him on this (I think he doesn’t mean “contrarian,” which seems to say to me, “one who disagrees for the sake of disagreeing” — I think instead he wants to be calling me “someone who is being different for the sake of being different,” a subtle but important difference), he also backed down from the point after asking me what deck I played in various formats. “What did you play in Kobe?” “Affinity.” “Okay, in Hollywood?” “Red Burn” “Hmm… Okay, in Valencia?” “Rock.”

I play what I think is going to help me win. If there is an innovation in a deck, it is one that I play out of empirical evidence. Dropping Garruk from the Elves I gave to Sam Black was based on having my ass handed to me again and again by Owen Turtenwald Elves list in preparation for Pro Tour: Hollywood. If I’m playing an entirely new deck, I’m generally playing it because I think it is the choice that is best going to have me win. I like fun, but I definitely prioritize winning. In some cases, playing even a slightly substandard deck can be the choice because of how it is positioned in a metagame, or because its rogue status can give you a +5-10% in every round, or more, because people simple don’t know what to do; I know that playing my Stompy deck, I absolutely destroyed people who simply didn’t realize that an O-Naginata would take them out, or that didn’t realize just how much damage I could put on them, or that didn’t expect a Dryad Arbor to come out when I sacked a Windswept Heath.

What it all really comes down to isn’t “being different.” My failure actually can be laid down to something else.

Owen Turtenwald sought me out after a lost round. “What happened?” he asked. “I let him search for Mirror Entity with Summoner’s Pact, and we’d already signed the slip by the time a judge came around,” I replied.

“You know, Adrian, every time that I’ve talked to you this season after you’ve lost, you’ve told me that it was because of a mistake. I know you like spending time working on new decks, but you also need to actual work on your games. Taking stuff back, using proxies, all kinds of things — these are costing you matches.”

I think he expected me to fight him on this. But I know he’s right. I was at my peak on the Pro Tour about ten years ago, when I devoted so much time to the game that a lot of things were simply automatic. Putting in the time is a huge part of getting good at Magic.

When you’re playing games of Magic, there can be any number of goals. Maybe you’re trying to figure out how to make a deck better. Maybe you’re simply trying to discover how a matchup plays out. Maybe you’re trying to get good, with your deck or just in general. There are ways to playtest for each of these goals, and they aren’t the same.

I think about one match, versus my friend Ben Rasmussen, in the Swiss of a qualifier. I made a small army of errors. I failed to drop a sack-land early (which would pump up my Knight). I attacked with creatures, and his Vendilion Clique blocked a Treetop Village; I had marked the life loss, so when Ben pointed out my Village had trample, I could only sigh and say, “Yeah, but, I clearly didn’t assign trample there…” Despite these errors, the matchup (my Stompy deck versus the John Treviranus build of NLU that Gaudenis Vidugiris took to the finals of GP recently) was deeply favorable, and I still was in good shape. My 6/6 Knight of the Reliquary (should have been 7/7, oops) was equipped with a Lightning Greaves, and he was at 12 (should have been 10, or 9), and I dropped a Nacatl, equipped it with Greaves, and promptly lost my Knight to Path to Exile. He stabilized shortly thereafter with a Meloku, which would have been forced to chump the Knight if I hadn’t gotten greedy.

Why did this error happen? There are a lot of reasons. Certainly I was being greedy. But, most importantly, I hadn’t done the proper amount of practice. Yes, yes, it was greedy. But why on earth did I even do it?

What I should have known is that there was literally nothing Ben could have done if I had just kept the Greaves on the Knight… or rather, nothing credible. Yes, he could have had a sequence of plays that would have gotten him out of it, but his outs were incredibly few. I opened up Path to Exile, and I should have recognized that the EV wasn’t worth it on my play. I failed to make this play because of a lack of testing, ultimately.

What about the other plays? Failing to make the Knight bigger. A lack of testing (or at least, a lack of rigorous testing). Failing to do the trample from Treetop Village (even if he offered the damage to me)? That kind of sloppy play comes from a combination of a lack of rigorous testing, and perhaps mental fatigue, most likely from a lack of sleep.

People harp on these things all of the time. Heck, I’ve written a whole article on playtesting for various purposes. People talk about the importance of sleep all of the time. But knowing what is good isn’t enough.

I know that my losses to Owen and DJ were completely based on foolish errors I made. I’m certainly in the school of thought that feels that no one is likely to have ever played a perfect game. Richard Feldman amazing article, “One Game” goes into this concept quite wonderfully. The thing about this philosophy is that you have to be careful with it; you can’t tell yourself, “Oh, well, everyone makes errors,” shrug about it and let it go. If you’re not careful, you can use the excuse of errors to mask any number of other things as well.

All of us win Magic games all of the time because our opponent has made a mistake. Simply treating our in-game gaffes as the thing we shouldn’t have done might be missing the actual problem. John Shuler called this a “symptoms-cause” error. Perhaps your mistake came out of something else entirely.

If you didn’t get enough sleep, you could find yourself making actual gaffes or more subtle optimization errors that compound throughout a game. If you aren’t bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, you can absolutely give yourself losses. Focusing on the gaffe is far less useful than focusing on the real problem: lack of sleep.

It’s also important to not look at in-game mistakes as a kind of excuse for other non-game mistakes. If we say, again and again, “Oh, I would have won if I hadn’t done X,” it is worth noting that maybe you would have won if you had simply played a more appropriate deck. Choosing the wrong deck is a real mistake. “I lost because I made an error” can be a method for obscuring this mistake. I know that my States deck two years ago, a Locket of Yesterdays combo-control deck, was exactly this kind of error. I was a match out of Top 8, sure, but the deck wasn’t fully up to snuff, either, and I should have realized it.

Everyone may make errors, but you don’t want to take the defeatist approach to mistakes where you give up on improving your play. While you don’t want to harp on your mistakes from now until the end of time (a kind of going-on-tilt, if you ask me), you do want to fight the good fight, and work on your game. I know, for example, that I could have done better if I’d just prepared more. This is obvious on its face, of course, but I need to own up to that. I probably didn’t qualify because I wasn’t playing enough Magic.

Magic is getting progressively harder. How many PTQs did Patrick Chapin play in this season before winning one? I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t one. Chapin is one of the more talented players to have ever played the game, and even so, he was not a shoe-in. Zac Hill also qualified this last weekend. He’s been trying hard to re-qualify, as most of us StarCityGames.com readers well know, but it hadn’t happened, up until the very last weekend. Iâ€˜m willing to bet that in many of the events that they attended, they were probably the best player in the room. But they didn’t win.

At my last PTQ, the eventual winner and I were easily the two most experienced players in the room. The Top 8 had, I believe, five players with Pro Tour experience in it. Winning takes skill, it takes a deck, and it takes luck. If I lost matches because I wasn’t playing enough in preparation, I have to own up to the fact that I can only blame myself.

I wanted it. But ultimately, this season, I have to realize I didn’t deserve it.

I feel comfortable, in this season, with the decks that I played, in every tournament. In some cases, my deck choice was incorrect, but it was still a choice I felt was good given the information I had at the time I was registering my deck for the day. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many days in the week, and there are all of the other constraints — I won’t be flying to GP: Kobe, for example, for that last try — but within our constraints we have to not only put in the effort, but when things don’t work out, look to ourselves and see what it was that we did wrong. For me, it was the details. I didn’t playtest enough. I didn’t sleep enough. Playing in the very last PTQ of the season, the simple sleep question was made all the more clear to me; I got a good night’s sleep for, really, the first time this PTQ season. The next day, my play was so much markedly stronger than it had been all the rest of the season, I have to imagine that I must have cost myself even more success by not getting the rest in I needed.

Identifying why we lose matters. Working on this is a skill in its own right. Owen put it to me well when he challenged the kind of playtesting I was doing. He was right; I wasn’t doing what it took.

Work on this in your own game. If you are losing, try to figure out why, and be honest about it. Sometimes our own egos will get in the way of answering these questions well. If you want to win, understanding why you lose is the key to winning more. Don’t tell yourself you lost for the wrong reason. It takes vigilance against your own bruised ego, and a real interest in getting the answer right. You can win without doing this, but you won’t win as much as you could.

Adrian Sullivan

Postscript — The Minnesota Top 8

The event was brilliantly run, as always, by Legion Events, with Magic Cruise organizer Steve Port manning the computer and making everything run ridiculously smoothly. I finished the Swiss at 11th, with a 6-2 record. 6-1-1 went down to ninth. In the end, veteran Madison player Bob Allbright won. After a long retirement from the game, Honolulu will mark Bob’s first Pro Tour in many years. Congrats, Bob!

Here is the virtual Top 8 after all eight rounds:

1st: Storm
2nd: Affinity (the player who knocked me out of Top 8)
3rd: Reliquary-Geddon
4th: Storm
5th: Tezzerator
6th: Elves (with Mirror Entity)
7th: Ranger Zoo
8th: Ranger Zoo
9th: Naya Zoo

This made for the following quarterfinal matchups and results:

Zoo beats Storm
Tezzerator beats Storm
Elves beat Reliquary-Geddon
Affinity beat Zoo

For the Semis, you have the following:

Tezzerator beats Zoo
Elves beats Affinity

And in the finals, Elves beats Tezzerator.

Here are the full Top 8 (with thanks to Legion Events for the lists):

Bob Allbright
6th after Swiss
1st Final Standings

1 Regal Force
4 Glimpse of Nature
4 Wirewood Hivemaster
4 Heritage Druid
4 Elvish Visionary
1 Viridian Shaman
1 Thoughtseize
2 Mirror Entity
4 Chord of Calling
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Birchlore Rangers
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1 Summoner’s Pact
4 Wirewood Symbiote
3 Forest
1 Overgrown Tomb
3 Gilt-leaf Palace
3 Windswept Heath
3 Wooded Foothills
1 Temple Garden
1 Pendelhaven
2 City of Brass