Hello, everyone. The end of the semester brings me back to you, with a story about a funny thing that happened before the start of Grand Prix: New Jersey. See, Mike Flores was… man, this is gonna be tough. I’ll try again a little later. First, the background.
Like every other GP, Day 1 since the dawn of time, Jersey was delayed. So I was wandering around, watching money drafts, talking to people, whatever I could do to pass the time. Eventually, I found the top8magic.com crew, and I was talking to Flores about our respective chances in the tournament. Mike and I are friends, but one of the things you need to know about Mike is that he can be harsh even with his friends.
For that reason, he wasn’t too optimistic about my chances in the event. He said, “You play like a scared chicken, mm_young, true or false?”
I was about to argue with Mike, remonstrate with him, engage him in a bout of verbal aikido that would make a Steven Seagal movie look like a Saturday morning cartoon. Then it occurred to me: Every time I had been to New York City for Magic — the only times Mike had ever seen me play — I had played like a scared chicken. Every PTQ, scrubbed out of in frustration. Every team draft, an unceremonious 0-3 and a free trip to the land of tilt. My play at the Deckade book-signing event had been subpar. I hadn’t even acquitted myself very well in the playtest games for States. I realized that from his point of view, Mike Flores was… urrrgghh… Mike was… just can’t do it.
I had always thought that I had decent mental discipline. I’m a veritable Buddha compared to the poker game I frequent, where tilt is so common that there ought to be a special kind of soap in the restroom to wash it off. Mike’s comment turned my belief inside out, and for a horrific Lovecraftian moment, I realized how fragile my own discipline really was. It felt as though there was a giant, unthinkable Beast in the dark corners of my mind, and only now did I see the extent to which it had wrapped its slimy tentacles around my game.
I had no byes for Jersey, and more than a few people had told me that my deck was good, but not great. I was under no illusion that I faced a pretty tough task if I wanted to make Day 2. As I sat down for my first round match, though, I had decided that the even tougher task would be to straighten out my head, vanquish the Beast, and discipline myself correctly. If I could do that, then hopefully the wins would follow.
I went 7-2 and made my first-ever Day 2. That was nice, but I was even prouder of my own discipline. I thought that my mental game was better than it had ever been that day, and before leaving the site I thanked Mike for saying what he said, because the simple fact is that…
Mike Flores was right.
There, I said it.
I had started this article a while ago, hoping to share with readers the rules of discipline that I try to govern my own game with. However, I had kept the article on the shelf, because I was not sure if my own discipline was solid enough for me to write this without seeming like a hypocrite. Mike’s comment, and the tournament that followed, was the final push I needed. I hope it helps you in some small way, the same way Mike’s casual harshness helped me.
1. Trust yourself.
Don’t worry, we’re not headed off on some kind of After-School Special “Believe in yourself and everything will be okay!” theme. Fact is, self-confidence is not always a good thing to have: there are plenty of terrible players who believe in themselves too much, and plenty of good players who seem like eternal pessimists.
However, as long as you’re not playing a team event (and sometimes even when you are playing a team event), Magic is a solitary endeavor. There is no safety to cover the deep route; no goalie to stop the breakaway if you should turn the puck over; no seven-foot center to swoop in from the weak side and block the shot. If you get beat one-on-one, then you just got beat, end of story.
For that reason, self-doubt can be disastrous. No matter how bad your deck might be, or how much it seems like the Magic Online shuffler is out to get you, you need a firm belief that your own ability can win games for you. It’s not surprising that someone who leads off his matches by telling his opponent, “I’m sure you’ll beat me, I suck,” will end up sucking. Distrust is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you don’t trust yourself going into a match, chances are you’ll do something during that match to prove yourself right.
This means that for every decision you make during a game, you ought to feel at that moment that it was the correct one. Your reads are correct, your mulligan decisions are necessary, your plays are the best available. Of course you could be wrong; I’ll get to that in a minute. However, constantly asking yourself “what if I’m wrong?” is usually a recipe for disaster, and following an obvious mistake with admonishments like, “God, that was the worst. I am so terrible” accomplishes nothing.
Let me give you an example. Champs 2006 was not a great experience for me, but that’s not to say interesting things didn’t happen; I faced a very interesting situation during the very first round in Richmond, Virginia. I played a Blue/Red deck intending to combine the best aspects of Shouta Yasooka’s Snow Control and Pat Chapin’s Flag Burner:
Creatures (6)
Lands (24)
Spells (30)
Sideboard
If you wanted to try this yourself, I would at a minimum change the sideboard Hammers into Deserts; it might also be correct to have four Psionic Blasts and two Char instead of the other way around. Of course, my 2-2 match record at States gives you no good reason why you would want to try this yourself.
In the first round, I faced an opponent playing Budget Boros — and I do mean budget Boros, since he was running cards like Frenzied Goblin and Viashino Sandstalker. When he beat me with two Soltari Priests in game one my heart sank, as I realized that the Hammers in my sideboard would not do much good. I came back and won game 2 by drawing all four Ironfeet while my opponent did not draw any Priests. My opponent boarded in four cards before game 2, and four more cards before game 3.
The rubber game seemed to turn in my favor when I used an Electrolyze to kill two one-toughness creatures and draw a Psionic Blast to kill the Priest that had been beating me down. The self-damage from that Blast left me at eight. My opponent had a Seal of Fire and six untapped lands on board, and three cards in hand. He was at seven from his Sacred Foundries and my extraneous burn, and I had a Stuffy Doll and seven mana on the table. I untapped with an Electrolyze and an Island in hand, and drew Demonfire.
So I can just play Demonfire for the win, derf… except just about every single White/X decklist I had seen over the previous few weeks had started its sideboard with “4 Honorable Passage.” His other out was Lightning Helix, which while bad, could be survived; a Passage would result in instant loss (puns, derf). While I joked above about some of his cheap cards, obviously he had obtained Sacred Foundry, Char, and Soltari Priest, so Passage was an obvious possibility. I also was not sure what else he would bring in against me.
Additionally, I had to consider the contents of his hand. Throughout the match he had been playing land immediately after drawing it off the top — not much of a bluffer, this one — and he hadn’t played a land last turn, thus I was about 85-90% confident that he had three spells in hand. If they were all burn spells, he would have already killed me on the turn I tapped out for Stuffy Doll, since any combination of burn spells in his deck could deal six and put me in range of the Seal. So he had either some number of Sandstalkers that he was afraid to attack my Stuffy Doll with, or he had drawn some combination of burn and sideboard cards.
All of this led me to put him on Honorable Passage — I will discuss the faults in this read later in the article, so don’t ream me in the forums just yet — and thus I decided to wait, use the Electrolyze and Stuffy Doll in his end step, and hope to empty my hand for a hellbent Demonfire (because Passage only deals damage if it also prevented damage). My opponent then topdecked a Volcanic Hammer, which together with a Volcanic Hammer he had been holding in his hand, killed me.
I was telling my friend Rick about this situation later; there was some debate about how I could have passed on taking a shot at the victory. Finally, I just shrugged. “I made a read, and I trusted it,” I said. “That’s the discipline.”
However…
2. Question Yourself.
… That’s not to say that you should have blind trust in yourself. Rarely do any of us play perfectly, and it’s part of the discipline to be able to detect and analyze those faults in your play.
Let’s return to the Honorable Passage game. The reality is that my opponent could have sideboarded in any number of cards against me, and none of them necessarily had to be Honorable Passage. Since it was clear I was on a “block with artifact creatures” strategy against him, he might have brought in Disenchant, Shatter, Pacifism, or Temporal Isolation. Seeing how well the Priests had performed against me, he might have brought in Paladin En-Vec or Tivadar of Thorn. Just because I personally would not have brought in many of these cards does not mean my opponent did not.
Plus, he had already had multiple opportunities to Passage me and didn’t take them, such as my three-for-one Electrolyze. Since he killed me with Priests in game 1, he might have Honorable Passaged my Psionic Blast against his Priest, if he was sitting on a Passage.
(Of course many players incapable of bluffing could still make very sophisticated plays “by accident.” In this case, he might have been so tempted by the idea of sending a burn spell back to my face that he would not use Passage against a Psi-blast, even though that play would have protected a key creature. Just as bad poker players occasionally make great moves for the wrong reasons, the opponent may not have even realized he was employing a very sophisticated psychological trick, trying to lead me to think he didn’t have a Passage when in fact he did. It’s a good idea to at least be aware of these issues, but don’t paralyze yourself with analysis by thinking about all of the bluffs and counter-bluffs and accidental bluffs that are possible.)
I eventually decided that I probably should have gone for the winning Demonfire, Honorable Passage be damned. Assuming he had even one burn spell of the three cards in his hand, he simply had too many outs: Char, Volcanic Hammer, and Lightning Helix are all draws that beat me on the spot, plus Shock and Priest probably put me in a losing position depending upon the cards in his hand. By contrast I had very few outs: since Electrolyze draws a card, emptying my hand and still having enough mana left over for a lethal Demonfire would be tough. It’s entirely possible that I have a flaw in my reading ability, always thinking my opponent has a monster when in fact he does not. Searching through my game for such blind spots is part of good discipline.
Obviously, it seems like rules 1 and 2 are in conflict; trusting yourself and questioning yourself at the same time sounds like a recipe for schizophrenia. However, it’s not so. One of the keys to proper discipline is to find the right times to question yourself and the right times to trust yourself. For example, when I looked at the pairing sheet before Round 4 of GP: New Jersey and saw that I was playing Antoine Ruel, I felt nothing but confidence that I could take the match down. After the match, I was telling everyone who would listen that I only won because Ruel was mana screwed and that I could have played much better (which is absolutely true, and I think Ruel would tell you the same thing). In fact, although many people congratulated me on the victory, I didn’t think it was that big a deal, because…
3. Winning is Nothing.
This is probably the most important thing I have learned playing poker. Most sources I have seen define “tilt” as “the state where one’s negative emotions start influencing one’s play.” However, the correct definition would cut that word “negative” right out. Many people don’t know this (or, knowing it, don’t want to admit it), but any emotional response to a game, positive or negative, has a bad influence on your play.
The guy who leaps up after a hand and celebrates as though he just won the Super Bowl is equally on tilt as the guy who throws his cards and curses the dealer. The reason for this is that game results in games with a random element are not always related to play skill. The victory or defeat, by itself, has only short-term meaning regarding the current tournament. The real key, with respect to becoming a better Magic player in the long run, is the quality of your play in your games.
Let’s say that I did play badly against Ruel, but I had nonetheless celebrated the match win as though I had just won the GP itself. Would I be able to analyze my play in that match with the critical eye demanded by rule 2? Doubtful. Would I think that I had played really well in that match regardless of what an objective viewer might think? Probably. Would that same behavior be called “tilt” if I had lost the match and flown into a rage? Of course. That’s why winning means nothing… because ascribing the incorrect meaning to your wins can be even worse.
I imagine the casual player reading this article might find this rule pretty depressing. Winning means nothing? He must be the unhappiest Magic player in the world. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. When I won the match that clinched Day 2 at Jersey, I was overjoyed, but I had to temper that joy with the realization that it meant nothing with respect to the next seven matches. I knew that if I let that joy get the better of me, my accomplishments to that point would be undone. In fact, if you let the joy of winning affect you too much, you might break discipline in a different way…
4. The Rules Enable Discipline.
At the end of the day, if you think the majority of this article is bunk, I’m okay with that. I’m not trying to say that you should discipline yourselves exactly like I discipline myself; I’m just trying to illustrate the importance of discipline on your game, using myself as an example. Set whatever rules for yourself that you like, as long as you’re realizing how important it is just to have them. When we play Magic, there is only one set of rules which affects all of our disciplines equally, so in that vein, there is only one cardinal sin: cheating.
Again using myself as an example, in a side event at U.S. Nationals I forgot to de-sideboard during rounds 3 and 4, leading me to call a judge on myself at the start of round 4 and receive a game loss (I wasn’t winning anyway due to a poor decklist and an awful matchup, but let’s set that aside for the sake of this discussion). The interesting part is that I was playing Solar Flare, and the sideboard card in question was Condemn.
Thus, it would not have been difficult for me to pass the illegal deck off as the real thing; a lot of Solar Flare builds maindecked Condemn. The probability of being caught was quite low, and I would have averted a sure game loss. The problem with that reasoning is simple: discipline is all about not bending your own rules and morals like this. If I’m willing to push aside the rules of the game so casually, what’s to stop me from pushing aside my own reads as though rule 1 never existed? What’s to stop me from letting positive emotion into my game at the worst possible times? If I can’t limit myself to the minimum level of discipline that the DCI requests of everyone, how am I to apply the much higher levels of discipline that help me become a better player?
I hate talking about cheating, because I always think that I come off sounding preachy and holier-than-thou. However, this is an aspect of cheating that is much overlooked and shouldn’t be ignored. It’s bad enough that cheating screws you, your opponent, and / or the entire tournament field out of a fairly played match. The worst part is that you haven’t even gained anything via the cheats, since the loss of discipline always matters more in the long run.
The last lesson you learn is also the most important:
5. Imperfection is inevitable — and forgettable.
“You said ‘God is cruel’ the way a person who’s lived his whole life on Tahiti might say, ‘Snow is cold.’ You knew, but you didn’t understand…Do you know how cruel your God can be? How fantastically cruel?”
From Desperation, by Stephen King
The essence of this rule is that you will make mistakes, you will play badly, and that you will lose games you should have won. Of course everyone who’s even halfway decent at the game claims to know this, but most of them only know it in the same way they know snow is cold or God is cruel. Part of the discipline is learning it the hard way, and accepting it to the very deepest core of your being. Put simply: you have to acknowledge your human imperfections before you can overcome them.
I have to say writing has helped me immensely with that first part — there was a time would I would have been unwilling to turn the harsh light of criticism on my States deck, or my poor read in the first round, or my poor play against Ruel. However, when this site went Premium I realized that there was only one way to deal with my lack of Pro Tour credentials compared to the other Premium writers at this and other sites: I had to discipline my writing, as tightly as I would discipline my play if I were facing one of those people in a match.
One also needs to be disciplined against the inevitable imperfections of the game itself — bad luck, mana screw, mana flood, etc. In one of the last Ravnica Block Limited PTQs in my area, a young local player opened a nice little deck with Demonfire and other goodies. As he bemoaned his 2-2-drop performance loudly and at length, someone — it might have been one of the judges, or Rich “Cartman” Herbert, or perhaps Brad Taulbee — said, “Look,
I later had reason to recall those words myself. I was playing for the Top 8 in the final round of the Swiss. My U/W/B/g deck was quite the spicy number, with nine fliers and seven removal spells including Hour of Reckoning and Ribbons of Night. I had three bounce lands and two Signets, all of which were on-color as long as I was willing to splash Green for the left-hand side of Supply / Demand. I resolved Supply for X=8 in game 1, and my opponent mulliganed to five on the play in game 2.
Of course I lost both games: the Supply tokens were simply chump-blockers after I had already been blown out by Trophy Hunter, and in the second game my opponent curved out perfectly against my slow draw despite his double mulligan. That loss hurt, even more than most tough losses in important rounds, but it will be forgotten. That’s the discipline.
Conclusion: Practicing What You Preach
As I said before, I started this article a while ago, right after States. I thought long and hard about finishing it, because anyone who knows me knows that I have broken discipline a lot. When I make play mistakes it will often cause me to get angry at myself, or at people who criticize me. When I beat an obnoxious opponent, I’ll often talk some smack with him, as though the guy who just wrote rule 3 above had never inhabited my body.
The point is, I’m only human, as are we all — like I just said, our imperfections are inevitable. The important thing is that I have rules of discipline, as laid out to you in this article. I am constantly trying to live up to them, and when they are broken I understand what I lost in the breaking: not just a match, but a chance to win future matches, and indeed the ability to become the sort of Magic player that I want to be.
The name of my column doesn’t really come from anywhere; it’s just the name of a Talib Kweli CD that I was listening to around the time I was hired as a Featured Writer for StarCityGames.com. If I were a slightly more philosophical person, though, I might say that it’s reflective of how we all try to discipline ourselves. When it works, we win matches and tournaments, and that’s beautiful. The rest of the time, it’s a struggle.
Wow, that was really lame. But what else did you expect from a math guy? Philosophy is not my bag, baby.
This article written while watching “Doctor Who” on BBC America. Flores claims that the Tenth Doctor could take out “Bruce” (Wayne, a.k.a. Batman), but he’s definitely not right on that score: I first-pick Bruce in all formats.
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