I get asked a lot of questions by Magic players I meet. Some of them are pretty typical — “What would you play in Standard? ” “What’s your opinion on this card in the new set?” “Do you take X card over Y card in draft?” I hear these all the time. But at Grand Prix Portland this past weekend, I was asked a question on Saturday afternoon that was both out of the ordinary — and strangely prophetic, given how my weekend went:
“How do you deal with losing?”
It’s an interesting question. Almost every question I get about Magic is about winning, and specifically about how someone can win more than they do. A lot of Pro Tour hopefuls have this glorified view of the names they read about online, and find the idea that some person they’ve never heard of could take down Kai or Jon or LSV or me is an affront to their sensibilities.
The truth of the matter is, Pro players lose. All the time, in fact. The very best players in history at the top of their game have winning percentages between sixty and seventy percent. Magic isn’t chess — and no matter how much better one player is than another, luck may simply not be on their side that day. Losing is a part of playing Magic, Pro or not, and learning how to handle losing is an essential part of becoming a successful tournament Magic player.
This past weekend at Grand Prix Portland I started the tournament 9-0, posting an undefeated day one record once again. I’m not quite sure why I’ve gone undefeated on the first day of so many tournaments since I began playing again. Portland marked the fifth time in about fifteen tournaments, which means that about a third of the time since I’ve starting playing Magic again, I have been all but unstoppable on the first day of the event. I’ve joked that it must be some kind of super power — I’m like Superman, and day one of an event is like my yellow sun.
Unfortunately, in Portland, day two was my kryptonite.
I felt like I’d been pretty fortunate to go undefeated on the first day with my Sealed deck, as it was average to slightly above average at best… but I got good draws and played well enough to eke out six wins in a row after my byes. I wasn’t at all surprised to run into a deck that was simply more powerful than mine during the first round of day two, which was the last round we played our sealed decks. My deck stopped serving up the goods quite as it had the day before, and I took my first loss of the tournament to Nick Lynn and his four-color green deck sporting Baneslayer Angel, among other goodies.
I wasn’t at all upset, though, because that meant it was time to draft! If you had told me a few months ago that I’d be even the slightest bit upset when a Core set Limited format came to an end, I would have thought you were bonkers — but I’ve come to really appreciate M11 as a Limited format. It reminds me a lot of Rise of the Eldrazi in that the specific card valuations change a tremendous amount depending on what other cards you have. Another way to say it is that in both Rise and M11, it’s more important to draft
a deck
than it is to draft
cards
.
Of course, that’s always been true in Limited formats to some degree, but the most recent formats have really brought it into much sharper focus. You’ve always needed to pay attention to things like your mana curve and what cards go best together (as opposed to a sample, “what the best cards are in a vacuum”) — but that need for a big-picture draft strategy has never been so prevalent as in Rise, and
certainly
never so needed in a Core set.
I felt as confident in my abilities in M11 Draft as I have in any Limited format since I returned to Magic. Despite a rocky start in the format that saw me winning literally zero matches in my first half-dozen drafts on Magic Online, I’d grown comfortable with the format and developed a strategy forged from my own experiences and from talking to other players whose opinions I respect.
The deck that I most want to draft in M11 is the white beatdown deck. In general, M11 is drastically faster than previous core sets — but not everyone has gotten the memo about just how big the difference is. Aggressive decks can best punish both anyone with a good deck that gets a slow start, or anyone with an M10-style deck who’s thrilled when they play a Crystal Ball on the third turn. White is the color with the best array of cheap aggressive creatures, as well as ways to keep those creatures attacking even after your opponent has set up his defenses.
One of the best features of the white aggro deck is how you’re rarely fighting with other players for the cards you want unless they’re in the exact same archetype. Sure, any white deck will want Pacifism, Blinding Mage, or Stormfront Pegasus — but outside of those, you have very different priorities than a typical U/W style deck. While other decks prioritize evasion, you prioritize speed and cards that can help your fast creatures push through.
Infantry Veteran is the best-kept secret of this archetype, letting you attack with an army of 2/2s into a Giant Spider that would otherwise stop your offense cold, or just making it impossible for your opponent to ever trade if he has 2/2s of his own. Silvercoat Lion (and its uncommon equivalents War Priest of Thune and Ajani’s Pridemage) are filler cards for other decks, but central to yours. Excommunicate is marginal at best in traditional U/W, but fantastic to help force your little white men through for more damage. Other people will take rares like Vengeful Archon, which is cumbersomely expensive and slow, and leave you with Honor of the Pure, which is an outright bomb if you have ten or more quality white creatures to go with it, and simply outrageous if you have multiple Squadron Hawks.
In general, my pick order for white beatdown looks something like this:
Blinding Mage
Pacifism
Infantry Veteran
Stormfront Pegasus
Squadron Hawk
Wild Griffin
Silvercoat Lion/War Priest/Pridemate
Excommunicate
Assault Griffin
Cloud Crusader
The exact positions shift based on what you already have and what pack you’re in, along with what cards you’ve seen that you expect might come back. If I’ve already seen a Squadron Hawk that I expect will come back, I’d take another Hawk over Stormfront Pegasus in pack one — but I’d take a Wild Griffin over my first Squadron Hawk in pack three. Similarly, if I already have four Infantry Veterans but a hole in my curve at three mana, I’d take a Wild Griffin to fill that hole rather than a fifth Veteran.
The other decks I like are more mainstream — B/U control and B/R Act of Treason. Basically, I feel like white is the best beatdown color and black is the best control color. The only way to get a real removal based control deck is to draft the Bloodthrone Vampire/Act of Treason deck, because you end up with both of the primary removal colors,
and
an extra common that other decks don’t want, but acts as removal for you. The B/R deck pretty much kills everything the opponent plays and wins with awful black and red creatures, while the B/U deck wins via attrition and card advantage from cards like Liliana’s Specter, Mind Rot, Gravedigger, and Foresee.
See? I had a plan! And things even went pretty much according to that plan. In the first draft, with Yuuya Watanabe to my right and Matt Nass to the right of him, I drafted a solid but unamazing U/B control deck. I was a bit light on removal, with only a pair of Quag Sicknesses, but heavy on card advantage elements with a trio of Liliana’s Specters to go with a Foresee. I felt like my deck could easily 2-1, though probably wouldn’t 3-0, since I’d probably lose if I played against a really good aggressive deck.
Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go that way. In the first round of the draft, I lost to a fairly clunky G/R/B creature deck. My draw just didn’t come together in the first game and I didn’t put up much of a fight… and then in game two, he played Chandra Nalaar on the fifth turn, making my Liliana’s Specter and sideboarded Phantom Beast look pretty silly.
I beat Yuuya pretty handily in the next round, since my card advantage matched up brutally against his slower U/W deck. In the third round, I lost to Matt Nass, who had a rather unexciting G/B deck, but I had no answer to Garruk Wildspeaker in the first game and got my only Island killed by Acidic Slime in the third, dying with four blue spells in my hand.
So I started the day at 9-0 — and by the end of the first draft I was 10-3, needing to win out to have any hope at the Top 8 that had seemed so close just the night before.
Once the second draft finished, I thought I could do just that. I ended up with an absolute monster of a white aggro deck, featuring four Infantry Veterans, five two drops including a Blinding Mage, and two Honor of the Pure to go with my twelve white creatures. I was literally giggling during deck construction —
that’s
how happy I was with my deck.
It was not to be, however, as I lost the first round in a rematch against Yuuya, in which I blew him out in the first game, narrowly lost the second, and flooded out in the third game to lose despite his double-mulligan. I lost the next round to AJ Sacher, after I smashed him in the first game, lost to Baneslayer Angel in the second, and once again flooded out in game three.
I was almost apologetic to my third-round opponent who had to play against me at 0-2 who I beat in two straight games, in both of which he suddenly died from a double-digit life total thanks to Act of Treason, Fling, or both.
So I started the day undefeated, with all the hope in the world, and ended the day 11-5, with pretty much every loss involving a Mythic rare, mana screw of some kind, or both. So the question comes up again: “How do you deal with losing?”
Well, when I put it that way, it sounds like I somehow suffered terribly at the hand of fortune. My opponents were so lucky!
I
was so unlucky! But that’s not true, of course. How many of my game wins on my spotless day one came from a mana-screwed opponent? How many times did I draw my best cards against them? It’s a matter of framing the results in a particular context that makes them look the way they do.
Against Matt Nass, I attacked in a situation where I should have held my creature back to block, letting him get in damage that I could have avoided in a game that I should have realized I wanted to go long. Against Yuuya, I missed at least a few points of damage by not attacking with my Infantry Veteran when he was in a position that he had to chump block my Juggernaut or die. Against Nick Lynn, I made an attack that literally left me dead on board if he played correctly, when I could have kept back a chump blocker to give myself another draw step to find an out.
Could I have won those games if I’d played differently? I don’t know. But I
do
know that complaining about how unlucky I was in the games that I lost isn’t going to do anything to make me more likely to win in the future. Looking at those games and trying to figure out where I went wrong and what else I might have done — that is what will help me win down the line.
But what about the games where I played perfectly and lost anyway? What about the games where I really did just get unlucky? This is actually the part
of my game that I think has come the longest way since I first played on the Pro Tour. It’s important to realize that sometimes, no matter what you do,
you just don’t win.
Do I want to win every game I play? Absolutely. But that’s just not realistic. Magic is a game of both luck and skill. Try as we might, we cannot control both of those elements.
I see so many players sign a match slip and walk off in a huff after they lose. Some players seem to simply feel entitled to win, feeling like every loss is somehow a personal affront. If you look at the most successful players, however, you’ll rarely see someone who gets angry and stomps off. If you’ve played the game long enough at the highest level, you simply come to understand how things work. Getting upset only serves to distract you in future matches.
Michael Jacob said not long ago that he felt like he was taking every match too seriously — taking every loss too personally — and that it was hurting his results. Lo and behold, at the next tournament after he had this change of heart, he goes and makes the Top 8, defeating yours truly in the quarterfinals.
As Bruce Wayne’s father says in Batman Begins “Why do we fall?” “So we might learn to pick ourselves up.”
Well, day two of Portland, I fell. A whole bunch of times. And, as much as it hurt to barely make the money after starting day two in first place, I got back up again.
If you want to win, you need to learn how to deal with losing.
Until next time,
bmk