I’d like to say that some interesting things happened at the PTQ last weekend, but not really. Well, okay, Julian Levin and I tried to find food away from the convention center and ending up in a diner whose refrigerators were filled with 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. And it rained so hard that I considered finding two of each animal. And I may have been violating federal law just by getting into the car for the trip. And we almost got eaten by werewolves.
Not much of interest happened once we actually started playing Magic, though. Thus, I’d like to talk to you about a subject I’ve been kicking around for some time: reading your opponent’s tells.
Of course, I have a little problem here. The whole issue of reading one’s opponents comes from playing poker. The word “tell” was coined specifically by poker players. The problems is that after the extended poker story at the beginning of The Limits of Math, our Fearless Leader asked me not to do poker stories in my articles anymore – and judging from the response to that article, he was completely right to do so. Thus, I can’t use poker stories to convince you that I actually know a few things about reading people. It’s all right, though; I’m used to overcoming bad beats such unfortunate circumstances.
Untying the Logic Knot
The first, and most important, aspect of reading your opponent is simply to ask yourself, “What could he be holding that would cause him to do what he is doing?”
At Ohio Regionals, Cedric Phillips was playing Solar Flare, a deck that has a well-publicized vulnerability to Blood Moon and Magus of the Moon. In his tournament report, Phillips notes that he had made some deckbuilding moves to overcome this problem, cutting Akroma, Angel of Wrath because she is nigh-impossible to hard cast under a Blood Moon effect. However, Cedric also used some tells on the parts of his opponents to his advantage in this area.
In his round 8 match against a Gruul opponent, Cedric reports that his opponent quickly kept his hand on the play in game 2. Very few hands warrant an instant call for Gruul against Solar Flare other than one that contains Blood Moon; maybe a turn 2 Call of the Herd or a quick Giant Solifuge, but not much else. So Cedric decided it was necessary to mulligan a hand containing two nonbasic lands and a signet, in order to find at least one basic land.
Cedric’s read did in fact prove correct; his opponent had a turn 2 Blood Moon off an Elf. Thanks to keeping a hand with a Plains and Swamp, Phillips Castigated a Solifuge on turn 2, which shut down most of his opponent’s offense. Circle of Protection: Red came down shortly thereafter and Cedric locked up the right to draw into the Top 8. He later qualified for Nationals.
As with almost every method described in this article, though, it’s possible to out-think yourself or allow your opponent to play you by giving off a tell on purpose. In this particular case, there are lots of stories of control mirrors where Player A decides to keep seven-land opening hands, with the intention of preventing early-game counter wars by making the opponent think, “oh, he must have kept a hand with counterspells in it…”
The key to using logic to read your opponent is to think like your opponent thinks. Now, that may seem really obvious, but if you’ve played poker or Magic for any extended amount of time you know that even quite talented players don’t do it. Instead, they think like they think their opponents ought to think…
Man. That sentence doesn’t make a lick of sense, and it was only going to get worse from there. It’s actually pretty hard for me to explain this without resorting to a poker story, but let’s try this: Good Player A thinks that he’ll just crush Player B unless B plays as well as A does. So, A reads B for something, assuming that he’s Good Player B. However, it turns out that he’s actually Bad Player B, and as such B is trying to do something completely different, something that no good player would be caught dead doing. A is caught by surprise and loses.
It happens all the time; I’ve played the roles of both A and B, depending on the story and who won the game. You have to keep in mind that your opponent could be crazy, or terrible, or that he may just have different theories than you about how to play Magic. Never assign a certain logic to them without acknowledging that you could be wrong.
Real-World Tells
Just as in poker, the majority of tells are picked up when playing with real-world cards as opposed to virtual ones. Some of these are subtle, so much so that I don’t even know how I would spot them.
Tapping tells. How one handles one’s mana means a lot, although not always in the ways that you might think. Sure, against a beginner you might be able to easily deduce that he’s holding Cancel because he untaps and re-taps his mana to make sure that of his remaining three untapped lands, UU is available. Or, you can often assume that an opponent who leaves 6G up during a Time Spiral Limited match is sitting on a Havenwood Wurm. At the higher levels, though, mana tells are a little more subtle.
The next level that you usually encounter is when someone simply does one of the aforementioned beginner’s mana tells as a bluff. I’ll do this one all the time if I’m playing against someone on whom it might work – untap and re-tap as though I actually have that instant which my opponent might fear most. I seem to recall that Mike Flores like to do a slightly more sophisticated version, by always leaving an Island open with his U/G Threshold deck … which didn’t even run Circular Logic.
Anyway, the “tell” here is that if your opponent taps like a beginner, but you think he’s a little too smart to mess up his taps, he’ll often be trying to bluff you in this way. For example, last weekend at the PTQ I was playing a Mishra deck designed by Flores. In game 1 I resolved turn 3 Phyrexian Totem on the play and smashed with it on the following turn while my opponent played a motley crew of nonbasics that piggybacked off my Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth.
On my opponent’s turn 4, he started to tap for something and appeared to think better of it, leaving exactly enough mana for Tendrils of Corruption to be cast on my faux-Negator. However, he had come off as intelligent player during our pre-match conversation, so I figured that he was a decent chance that he was trying to play me. I activated the Totem and got in there, and he took the damage without incident. He later told his friends that he “couldn’t draw Tendrils for the life of me” that game. Putting him at 10 life was pretty key; I was able to play whatever I wanted later in the game without fear of possible countermagic, because if he ever tapped low he’d have to face a token smash. In fact the token finished him off later on, when he tapped low for Take Possession.
Obviously, my opponent could actually have had the Tendrils, and just goofed while tapping. That’s a risk of trying to make this read; your opponent might not be as smart as you’re giving him credit for. For this reason, under the Mamet Rule, I always make a plan just in case he does have the card that I’m reading him for not having. In this particular example, I had two Chromatic Stars in play that I could sacrifice for extra cards, lessening the blow of the Tendrils.
Mana Tells. Some players count their mana all the time; it’s useful to know what you have available even if you don’t have any gas in hand at the time you do the counting. Many more players, however, only count their mana when they have a big-mana plan. Clearly, there’s a tell to be read there.
Back in the Ravnica Block days, I made it to the finals of a Friday Night Magic draft against a very young child. I had sent a Razia, Boros Archangel to my left during the first pack, and even though the kid was a couple of seats away from me, as soon as he counted the six lands on the table in front of him in game 1 I knew that the legendary angel had made it into his deck. It was almost comical; he counted each turn, whether he had played a land or not, and his frustration grew each time he reached a number less than eight. Finally, with the game well in hand – I had a Wrecking Ball or something similar in hand with Razia’s name on it – I just had to say, “Can’t get that last land for Razia, huh?” He turned even redder than my own hair and shrugged. I won on the following turn.
Your reads won’t always be that easy, but you can still make them. After all, even the most stone-faced opponent won’t hit seven lands in a row every time. You can usually figure out that if your opponent makes no play, despite the fact that you have the advantage on board and he has infinite land in front of him, that there’s some kind of trick afoot (or he’s bluffing you with a hand full of land, but in that case you’re likely to win anyway). In this case you’re not reading tells so much as deducing your opponent’s hand with logical reasoning; sometimes you can even read your opponents for rares or uncommons that it is not probable they would have.
The Overacting Tells. As Flores persuaded me to play his deck last weekend at the PTQ, he told me that I really needed to convince my opponents that Stuffy Doll was a bad card when in fact it was the key card in many matchups. “Whenever you play Stuffy Doll, just throw it down in disgust and say, ‘Nice card, Flores!’” he suggested.
The problem with this kind of acting is not that it’s a bad idea, it’s that most people always overdo it. As fans of actors like Robert De Niro and Edward Norton will tell you, the hardest part of acting is not being loud and expressive; it’s underplaying your performance. For this reason, my poker buddy good friend Jeffage and I disdain such “Hollywoods,” because they almost always achieve the opposite result.
Magic is the same, and again I return to my first match with Flores’s deck with a pretty good example. I decided to set aside my disdain and try Mike’s suggested acting job as I played the first Stuffy Doll. My opponent wasn’t even remotely fooled. Despite the fact that I had a Phyrexian Totem in play that already had hit him for ten damage, he wasted no time in dropping Sudden Death on the Doll, and I was forced to waste a lot more time constructing a turn where the Totem was able to attack around Tendrils of Corruption instead.
Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes acting works. Witness Geordie Tait epic GP: Toronto report. During the Grand Prix Trial where he earned three byes, Geordie managed to beat a Freewind Equenaut that was wearing both Strands of Undeath and Flickerform, simply by acting frustrated at his poor luck and thus persuading his opponent to tap out on a Flickerform activation. As Geordie says, “I did everything but send out a telegram that I was screwed, and yeah, maybe I hammed it up a little too much… but honestly, it seemed to me that seeming confident wasn’t the right play.” In my experience, though, my own overacting doesn’t pay me off nearly as often as my opponent’s overacting saves my bacon.
Online Tells
Obviously the online tells are quite a bit tougher, since you can’t see your opponent at all. In fact I have never been much better than mediocre at online poker for this reason. However, there are nonetheless a few indicators that you can read, such as:
*Yielding pauses. If you play a spell, Magic Online will automatically resolve it if your opponent has nothing he can do. Otherwise, there’s a pause while the server waits for the opponent to either do something or press OK. So the pause (or lack thereof) can be a key tell – not always, depending upon your opponent’s settings, but many times.
For example, back in the Onslaught-Legions-Scourge days, Zombie Cutthroat had such a tell because you can unmorph it at any time you have priority (I didn’t have MTGO at that time, but this Tait article describes the situation in full detail). Or, more currently, if you opponent has to pass priority on your Sudden Death even if he’s tapped out, then his morph is likely to be Fathom Seer or Gathan Raiders.
*F6’ing the turn. If you hit F6, the interface automatically passes priority whenever you receive it for the rest of the current turn. It’s pretty clear when your opponent has done this, since no human can yield that many stops that quickly. It’s often used if the opponent doesn’t have anything, and in rare cases you can deduce what kind of draw your opponent has if he does it.
Until next time, here’s hoping that all your reads are right and all your pots are monsters.
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