When I was younger, I used to play a lot of basketball, and it remains my favorite sport to this day. One of my coaches had a saying that he repeated ad nauseam: “Game spots, game shots!” This usually came into play early in practice, or even while warming up before practice, when people would be goofing around shooting threes or taking half-court shots. Similarly we’d hear it quite a bit during practice games whenever we weren’t running the offense correctly, leading to bad looks and people taking shots outside of their range. If you were spending your time in practice taking shots that you weren’t going to be taking during games, you were wasting everyone’s time, especially your own. The best way to improve your game is to treat practice as the real thing, and develop the skills you need to actually succeed come game time.
I often find myself coming back to this concept and how it relates to Magic when I watch people play-test before a tournament. The concept of playing sideboarded games has been beaten to death (even if many people continue to ignore it), but just as important is actually playing against decks that will help your tournament performance. The idea of testing a gauntlet is great, but in reality most of us don’t have the time to run through detailed pre- and post-sideboard gauntlet testing before every tournament. When you find yourself in this situation, your best bet is to have a plan against the decks you expect to face in the Top 8, and to have a plan against the decks you think you’re most likely to face in the Swiss.
Applications in Standard
A few months ago I wrote about the ways in which I was going to attempt to improve my tournament performance, and although my level of play skill still sits somewhere around that of a gorilla that has just learned sign language, focusing on a few specifics has in fact led to better results recently. Notably, I haven’t been able to play-test as much as I’d like, but when I have been able to test, I’ve made it count. For example, before Regionals, I tested B/G Elves almost exclusively against very competent players running updated B/W Tokens lists. I figured that if the deck was at least competitive against B/W Tokens, it was viable for Regionals; if it failed to win at least half of its games against B/W Tokens, then I needed a new deck. I also made sure to test pre- and post-sideboard, trying out different strategies (and noting that my two testing opponents also had different priorities when sideboarding). Although my results showed the decks were pretty evenly matched, I was confident that if I could hold my own against the guys I was testing with that I should have a slightly favorable match-up against my Regionals opponents. I also tested briefly against B/R Aggro to confirm my expectation that my match-up there was favorable (which it was, and is, although Demigod can absolutely steal games).
That’s all the testing I got in, actually. I’d tested previously, with the lists from pre-Alara Reborn, but they lacked the two cards that got me most excited about the deck, Maelstrom Pulse and Putrid Leech. I had to use my experience testing against the two decks I expected to see the most (B/W Tokens and B/R Aggro) to carry me through the other match-ups I might see that I was less familiar with (Sanity Grinding, G/W Tokens, Turbo-Fog, Five-Color Control, etc). It also helped that I had played similar decks (G/W Little Kid, Doran Aggro) throughout Lorwyn Block Constructed season and had some success there. In fact, I was more confident in my deck for this tournament than for any Standard event in quite some time, simply because I felt that I’d actually gotten in constructive testing against decks that would make up a significant portion of my day. I also had a sideboard with a specific (and tested) plan against B/W and B/R, and a plan I had used in the past for Faeries, Five-Color Control, and Reveillark. At Regionals, I ended up playing B/W Tokens 3 times, G/W Tokens once, and B/R Aggro once. Had I played better and made the Top 8, there was a very good chance that my opponent would’ve been running B/R Aggro or B/W Tokens.
I had another advantage at Regionals that is slightly more subtle: the deck I played had, for the most part, been popular overseas and online but had not been widely played in recent real-life Magic events. Furthermore, it featured a play-set of the chase rare from the newest expansion, as well as a common in Putrid Leech that many writers and certainly most players seemed to be overlooking at first. Although card availability becomes much less of an issue at high-level events, it is most definitely an issue for many players attending a tournament like Regionals. Even better, there were two buzz-worthy (or is that unworthy, at this point?) decks, Turbo-Fog and Bant Aggro, that would use up the play-testing time of my potential opponents. In other words, while I had the benefit of significant play-test time and practiced and memorized side-board strategies against my most common opponents, it was likely that many of them hadn’t played against my deck and weren’t even 100% sure what was, and was not, in my main-deck and sideboard.
This is an excellent position to occupy. The results of Grand Prix: Barcelona are further evidence supporting this idea. Although most many competitive Magic players had read about the crazy 41-land Swans deck from Regionals, and then subsequent analysis on different Magic sites including this one, many people probably wrote it off as gimmicky and didn’t devote testing against it to figure out how to beat it. Like most effective combo decks, the idea that you can just throw a few Pithing Needles into your sideboard to beat Swans isn’t remotely accurate.
In fact, this has become something of an intentional strategy for me as of late. It isn’t so much about playing rogue decks per se, as Oath of Druids, Ichorid, and B/G Elves are all known and established decks, but rather playing decks I know to be strong and practicing my likely match-ups as much as possible. Oath of Druids is an interesting example, because while most Vintage players acknowledge it to be a solid strategy, almost no one play-tests against it because it makes up such a small part of the metagame; further, very few players dedicate specific sideboard slots to combating Oath of Druids (although locally this has changed to some extent as I’ve continued to play the deck). This gives me a very real advantage against many players. Although they know the way my deck works, they may not have ever actually played against it, or if they have, there’s a good chance it was against Tyrant Oath over a year ago. Compare this to my position with Oath if I’m paired against Tezzeret – unlikely, I know – a deck that I’ve played against repeatedly both in testing and in tournaments. I have a very solid grasp of how that deck works, as well as a specific sideboard plan, turning what should be an unfavorable to even match-up into one that I’ve been able to win almost twice as often as I’ve lost.
Remember, this has very little to do with play-skill but rather with practice and having a plan. If two players are playing at a similar level of skill, the one with a better understanding of both decks and a clearer vision of how the games will play post-sideboard has a significant advantage; again, I’ll refer you to Patrick Chapin comment about short-cuts, and how the player with better short-cuts tends to win.
Applications in Eternal Formats
Two of the decks I’ve discussed in Eternal formats, Belcher in Legacy and Ichorid in Vintage, fall into the category of decks people tend not to play-test against. Again, these are established and known decks, both being explosive combo decks that survive on the fringe (although Ichorid is clearly on the rise as a foil for Tezzeret) and are often only grudgingly thought of as “real” decks at all. Despite the fact that Ichorid is arguably the second-best deck in Vintage right now, there is a stigma attached to the deck, and most people don’t play-test against it because doing so isn’t “enjoyable” and many people think it doesn’t even add any value to their game. This idea is completely false. As discussed in my tournament report last week, Ichorid can and does win through hate with some regularity. In fact, the current build of the deck is almost alarmingly good at playing through hate. Because it generally wins game 1 against the entire field, assuming the deck does get blown out by hate in game 2, it still has a significant advantage in game 3 once the type of hate it has to face is revealed. In addition, Ichorid can use a combination of Chalice of the Void, Unmask, and Cabal Therapy to strip the hate from your hand before you have a chance to get it into play, to say nothing of the builds that are running Force of Will.
More than a few articles have been written about Ichorid and the play-skill, or lack thereof, involved in the deck. Most of these referred to the Extended version of the deck, usually called Dredge in that format. I won’t rehash those conversations, but there is some definite truth to the fact that Ichorid isn’t a deck that gives you massive opportunity to out-play your opponent. That isn’t to say that Ichorid doesn’t require a specific set of skills which improve through practice, because that isn’t true at all. Every game with Ichorid, especially game 1, revolves around finding a Bazaar of Baghdad. Thankfully Ichorid is a deck that is resilient to mulligans because it needs to have few, if any, cards in hand to win game one (although cards like Chalice of the Void, Unmask, and Cabal Therapy will help considerably against some match-ups). Running additional Dread Returns and Sadistic Hypnotists makes the list I ran even more consistent and resilient in the face of its own Serum Powders. Unquestionably though, Ichorid players have more decisions to make before the game starts than players of any other deck. This only becomes amplified once sideboarded games begin. Not only does the Ichorid player have to find Bazaar of Baghdad, but they also have to try to determine if their hand can defeat whatever hate they expect game two, and whatever hate they know about game 3. They also have some of the more difficult decisions when sideboarding, particularly in playing a guessing game when sideboarding for game 2. This decision-making all involves skills that can and should be practiced by both players – yet for the most part, only Ichorid players actually test games post-sideboard and even then many probably don’t play-test these types of games as often as they should.
Playing with Belcher is a similarly interesting exercise. My decision to play Belcher in last year’s Legacy Champs was swayed in no small part by the fact that a large number of pros ran the deck at Worlds in 2007 to solid records. It is possible that the availability of the cards involved and their relative low-cost, as well as the five-round format of the Legacy portion of Worlds, played some role in the deck‘s popularity in that tournament. Belcher is a deck that wins so quickly that it puts players who are unfamiliar with it at a huge disadvantage, and this may have influenced some people’s decisions. Whenever I ask someone to play-test against Belcher, they almost always say no, stating that it isn‘t fun and doesn‘t accomplish anything productive. Is Belcher fun to play against? No. Do people who play against you at tournaments particularly care whether or not you’re having fun? No. Further, to pretend that a deck can beat Belcher simply because it runs Force of Will is being purposefully ignorant. At Legacy Champs last year, I didn’t lose to Force of Will in rounds 5, 6, or the Quarterfinals. It wasn’t until the 4th consecutive opponent before a combination of Force of Will, early pressure, and hate cards finally ended my day.
While testing for GP: Chicago, I did find some people who were willing to test Belcher against my Painter deck, mostly local competitive Standard players that find playing Eternal formats to be a fun diversion. Remember that my Painter deck, in its final GP: Chicago configuration, ran Force of Will, Daze, and Stifle along with Engineered Explosives. Despite all of these powerful anti-Belcher cards, the match-up was extremely even and I’d say after 20 games the score was probably within a game of 10-10 either way. My point here isn’t to sell you on the idea that Belcher is a good deck – it is, although it will always have difficulty actually winning larger tournaments – but rather to show that playing a deck like Belcher, and actually testing with it against decks like Dreadtill, Threshold, Storm, and Goblins will give you an advantage against most of the players you’ll see in any given tournament. You’ll have a specific and practiced plan in pre- and post-sideboard games, while they’ll just have to rely on their impressions of the deck from whatever they’re read or seen of it.
Last week, I got to test my updated Oath of Druids sideboard against Ichorid, to see how Yixlid Jailer would function in a deck that relied on flipping up creatures via Oath to win games. Turns out effectively running a tutor for one of your best “hate” cards is, in fact, awesome. With a full 11 cards to bring in against the Ichorid menace (2 Tormod’s Crypt, 2 Yixlid Jailer, 2 Pithing Needle, 2 Echoing Truth, 1 Wasteland, 2 Empyrial Archangel), despite only having four cards specifically dedicated to that purpose, I feel much more confident about what would have been one of my worst match-ups a few weeks ago. The most interesting thing you’ve probably read so far should actually be this: I got to test my updated Oath of Druids sideboard against Ichorid.
I think it’s important to point out how ridiculously good Pithing Needle has become, not just in Standard (where it shuts down Planeswalkers, Man-lands, and Seismic Assault just to name a few), but also in Vintage and Legacy. Here’s a card that any deck can play for one mana that defeats Sensei’s Divining Top, Wasteland, Mishra’s Factory, Time Vault, Tezzeret, Grindstone, Bazaar of Baghdad, and so on. While trying to figure out what I should sideboard against Tezzeret, I started with Null Rod (which, amusingly, people would bring in against my Oath deck), but found that it wasn’t effective enough for my liking. Instead I started to run Pithing Needle, because that card was just so much more flexible, giving me an answer to Greater Gargadon, Time Vault, Wasteland, and Bazaar of Baghdad all at the same time. However, what confirmed for me that this was a good choice was actual play-testing against Tezzeret and Ichorid. Similarly I felt more confident replacing the Negates with a mana denial strategy and access to additional hand disruption because testing against Tezzeret showed that I could afford to do so. The fact that these strategies are also good against TPS is just an added bonus. I very rarely have an opportunity to test against decks like TPS or Stax, but these decks make up a small percentage of my local meta-game and I have a relatively positive match-up, so given limited testing time I prefer to test against various builds of Tezzeret and Ichorid.
One of the best ways to win a tournament is to choose the best deck and play it correctly – this is obvious. Often, the best deck is one that is both powerful and unexpected, such as Desire at GP: LA or Cascade Swans at GP: Barcelona. These decks had some specific benefits for their pilots. They are powerful, dedicated combo decks with positive match-ups against unprepared opponents that were plentiful and expected (such as Faeries and Zoo decks in Extended that didn’t have hate for Storm such as Stifle or Canonist, and Black/White tokens low on disruption in Standard). Once the field adapts, they give up their best advantage – surprise. Players actually test against the decks, and give up on decks that can’t adapt, and ramp up the hate in those that can. Even more importantly, they play test games to understand how those decks work.
If you play Vintage and choose not to play-test against Ichorid because it isn’t “fun”, you’re doing yourself an incredible disservice, just as you are handicapping your ability if you play Ichorid and don’t play-test games post-sideboard. When choosing a deck for a tournament, make sure that whatever you choose can actually beat the field you expect, especially the decks in the elimination rounds for a tournament like Nationals or Regionals. If your play-test time is limited, focus on those match-ups specifically, and remember that decks on the margins (such as B/G Elves, Five-Color Bloodbraid, or Bant Aggro in Standard, Merfolk, Belcher and Painter in Legacy, or Ichorid and Oath in Vintage) can give you an advantage provided you have tested the common match-ups and your opponents haven’t tested against your deck.
Finally, make sure you have a workable sideboard plan against the match-ups you expect to see. One of the most common mistakes I see people make is to over-load their sideboard with dedicated cards against one deck. Unless you’re running a transformation sideboard, the cards you bring in have to fit in without disrupting your deck’s ability to function correctly. For example, loading up on reactive sideboard cards in an aggro deck often just gives your opponent more time to defeat you. Oath of Druids needs to sideboard a considerable number of cards to beat Ichorid, but can’t really afford to dedicate 10 cards to that purpose; however, having flexible answers that apply in multiple match-ups can allow the deck to maintain its advantage against the field and still be able to seamlessly transition a large set of tools to let it beat Ichorid in games two and three.
If I were play-testing Standard this week, I would dedicate the majority of my testing to Cascade Swans, B/W Tokens, and Faeries. Next week: coverage on the Legacy tournament in Bethlehem, PA on 5/31 in preparation for the Boston Legacy $5K on 6/21. Until next time, remember to use your play-testing time wisely as you prepare for what has become an extremely interesting Standard PTQ season.
Matt Elias
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Voltron00x on Xbox Live and SCG forums