I hear a lot of players who are on the cusp of success talk a lot about “The Pro Play” – the idea that there’s always a much slicker, much flashier way of doing everything. They think it’s about always making the unintuitive play that the layperson would never think of: Attacking their 2/2 into an opponent’s 3/3 with no pump spell because there’s no way he’d block. Not blocking a lethal Shade because you know your opponent won’t pump it all the way for fear of getting blown out by a bounce spell. Holding back a lethal attack to play around Dispense Justice. In an overwhelming number of instances for the above examples, the “Pro Play” either stretches the game out longer than it needs to go, or flat-out ends up losing the game. They don’t realize that you can’t bluff someone with a removal spell if they don’t know to play around it.
People make these plays because they either saw someone very good make the same play, or they read about it in coverage. They don’t properly understand that great plays don’t happen in a vacuum. They assume these plays are universally good, and that if they make the same play, it will turn out just as well. I can’t blame them – after all, these are the plays that you consistently read about. For some reason, people love the big plays. I suppose there’s good reason for that. If the movies are to be believed, every game of basketball is won at the buzzer with a half-court shot (or a free throw), and the only important passes are the 58-year Hail Mary’s. Nobody goes, “Did you see the way Craig Jones blocked on turn 5? He totally mitigated getting 2-for-1ed if his opponent had the removal spell.” Instead, we just want to talk about the Lightning Helix. We love home runs. We like slam dunks. We don’t care about assists.
The legendary stories we tell about Magic – it’s always the flashy play. This has led a disconcertingly large number of players to believe that getting better involves a long series of bluffs, Jedi mind tricks, and epic reads. Somehow all of the work you do on the fundamentals doesn’t matter when you get to the next level. It’s like you can’t play professional Magic unless you’ve studied under Miss Cleo. While these kinds of plays do win games, they don’t win most of them, and the ones they do tend to be at a certain level. When two players at the top of their game face each other, you can assume that there won’t be too many cards thrown away in the name of not doing the math. There won’t be too many missed triggers or accidently running into onboard tricks. The players know what their roles are, and rarely mis-assess them. Because neither player would be at a natural advantage if they played the game out in the standard way, they both have to work at throwing some kind of monkey wrench into the works so the game isn’t just a glorified version of War. These kinds of tricks will define these games because they’re one of the few ways to get a huge advantage. At lower levels of play, there’s still a huge amount of ground to be gained by playing a tighter game of Magic than your opponent.
Part of the problem is our own natural bias to credit everything to the dramatic. It’s much easier to see where a great bluff won a game. It’s also very easy to see when a giant mistake on the last turn of the game cost you a match. What’s hard to see is all the gray area in between. Like the time you mis-tapped on turn 5 and didn’t leave a red open, so you had to Galvanic Blast their creature on your own turn and weren’t able to cast Golem Artisan and equip that Darksteel Axe. So, you missed out on two points of damage. And how the next turn, when you did equip it, it didn’t leave you the mana open to both jump and pump your Myr to kill their flyer, so you took an extra two points. Without you realizing it, a small mistake can cascade and take a game that you could have won into one where you just barely lose. Or worse yet, it takes a game that you should’ve won handily to one that you need to get lucky to win – but because you won it, you ignore the problem and don’t learn anything from it.
Far more games are decided at the PTQ level by bad plays than by good ones. Incorrectly doing math is going to cost you ten times the games than figuring out how to trick your opponent into not blocking your 2/2 will win you. Most players would probably finish an entire match better in tournaments if they spent twenty extra seconds contemplating each of their mulligans. If you’re struggling at that level, and you’re working on anything other than improving your fundamentals and slowly eliminating as many holes in your game as possible, then you’re wasting your time.
Too many people don’t respect the fundamentals. They think they’ve moved beyond having to work on that. You never move beyond that – it’s a constant struggle to keep them in tune. They neglect them to focus on becoming a Jedi, as if the only thing keeping them from the Hall of Fame is getting their opponent to not pay for a Mana Leak. And that’s when their game starts to die. They start seeing their Top 8 performances drop off, and then they’re back to regularly going 5-2, then 4-2, and on down.
Just because you don’t see yourself making 10-15 mistakes a game doesn’t mean that you aren’t. Even if you’ve won a few Pro Tours in the last year, if you think you can go through a tournament, let alone a match, without making a few mistakes, then you need to start playing with better players, or at least someone who will ask you why you made certain plays. And “I don’t know” isn’t an answer. Any play that you can’t justify in detail is one that you didn’t make correctly – whether or not it ended up working out.
It’s important to not get ahead of yourself in your own development as a player. The truth about Magic is that when you’re faced with two decisions, the obvious play and a “Pro Play,” chances are that the obvious play is correct 9 out of 10 times. If you make the obvious play ten out of ten times, you’ll probably do all right. If you make the “Pro Play” ten out of ten times, you’re probably going to lose a lot of these games. The reason why the Pros do so well with these big plays is that they’re good at figuring out the one out of ten times that holding back an attack, or sending a creature to his or her possible doom is worth the risk. You can’t watch a Pro make a smart read, then immediately try it out on all of your friends or at the next tournament you’re playing in. These things are based on everything from who you’re playing to what’s left in your deck to how the earlier game or match played out.
To make an analogy to poker (because nobody’s done that before), Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu are two big-name pros who are well known for playing a lot of really trashy hands aggressively. While a conservative player would throw away a 9/10 unsuited, they’ll raise with it and try to catch someone off guard. Their strategy works for them because they already know all of the math involved in poker inside and out. When playing with eight other people of a similar skill level, they aren’t going to be able to get an edge just by doing the math better. Instead, they use their unorthodox range of hands that are playable to keep their opponent off a solid read. It works wonders at the professional level.
If you, however, were playing at your house with your friends, you’d do far better to focus on getting the math right 100% of the time. The chances are that most people you’re playing with are either guesstimating their chances or have no clue what kind of odds they’re getting. They may not even know what any of that means. You just can’t try to bluff someone out of a pot if they’re going to call every time.
The trick to succeeding with the flashy plays is to know when to make them. Nobody bluffs every turn – they’d lose if their opponent called almost any one of them. You can’t spend your entire match trying to trick your opponent into doing exactly what you want to – it will become obvious, and it will ruin any chance of it succeeding. The idea is to do what your opponent thinks is a rational play most of the time, so when they see the seemingly rational one, they won’t think it’s a bluff.
I don’t want it to sound like Magic isn’t skill intensive, or that you can do well without much practice since “it’s all obvious.” There’s a good deal of Magic that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer. Sometimes you make plays to maximize the value of your own cards; sometimes you make plays to minimize the value of your opponent’s cards. Ideally you find a happy medium where you can do both, but that takes a lot of practice. More than that, it takes a lot of reflection, thought, and delving into theory. I takes knowing the risk and reward of everything you do. There are times when a 1% play is your best chance of winning – but there’s no reason to make that play if you have better options.
It’s also important is to realize that you aren’t going to get everything right. In fact, you’ll probably get a good deal of things wrong. If you want to do better, it isn’t just a matter of finding new tricks to put up your sleeve. Most of getting better is learning the fundamentals so that you can make better decisions in the future. If you want a quick and easy trick to doing better, here it is – make sure everything you do has a reason. It’s much easier to see where you went wrong if you can vocalize your reasoning behind it. It will lead you to finding out where you went wrong in the big picture, and not just for one individual mistake.
Magic is incredibly complex, and it’s very rare for two games to play out in the exact same way. There aren’t a lot of shortcuts in learning Magic. Instead of trying to use other people’s “Pro Plays,” you need to find your own. Get into their head. Figure out why they did what they did, and reverse-engineer it. Figure out why it was the right time and place to make the play. If you can do that, you’ll be far better off as a player than just knowing a cheap trick.
Bonus Section: Jeopardy Mailbag
Apparently, mailbags are all the rage right now. I asked my Twitter followers to help me out with a project – a Jeopardy Mailbag. Instead of the usual format, I asked people to provide me with the answers, and I’d formulate the questions from them. I didn’t exactly take into account the 140-character limit for Twitter while I was doing this, so the answers were unusually curt.
As a result, I’ll be posting questions that are sometimes needlessly long to get to these answers. There will be some asides. If you have any other Jeopardy mailbag answers that you’d like me to get to in a future column, please leave them in the comments. The more absurd, the better.
Q: What is the most underrated card in Standard right now?
A: Spell Pierce (Jason Barnett)
Q: Twitter has become incredibly popular, and as a result, the true self promoters are becoming obnoxious and filling up my Twitter feed. Is there a way to stop them?
A: Right now the best removal spell is
@doom_blade_guy
(Jason Barnett)
Q: Assuming that you earn another 75 points in the next few years, how old will you be when you become Hall of Fame eligible?
A: 34 (Patrick Chapin)
Q: What ability from Scars of Mirrodin are you most disappointed with in Limited?
A: Proliferate (Patrick Chapin) [Aside: Really, the ability is cute, but it comes up so rarely. It’s just not on enough commons.]
Q: Who should people be following on Twitter if they aren’t already?
A: Tom Martell (Patrick Chapin) [
@semisober
]
Q: When you first met
A: Perfect 10 (Patrick Chapin)
Q: Do you own a copy of Next Level Magic?
A: Yes (Patrick Chapin)
Q: What is your biggest contribution to the Magic community?
A: Making a Fearless Magical Inventory (Patrick Chapin)
Q: I had a dream the other night my girlfriend was kidnapped by pirates. I had to fight those pirates and ended up defeating two in battle, and one using a Battle of Wits deck. I only ask because one of them was a giant that somewhat reminded me of you. Does this remind you of anything?
A: The Princess Bride (Patrick Chapin)
Q: What is the most insane thing you’ve seen someone do in a match of Magic that ended up making sense?
A: Mulligan to zero (Evan Erwin) [Aside: This was at US Nationals around 1998. If I remember correctly, the mulliganer in question was none other than Darwin Kastle. He was playing White Weenie and had thrown back two useless hands when he drew a third with no land. Rather than try and win from four, he mulliganed to zero. His opponent, who didn’t know what he was playing, played a Forest, a Swamp, then a Survival of the Fittest. The next turn, he cast a Duress, and Darwin scooped. With no knowledge of what Darwin was playing, his opponent couldn’t sideboard. He mulliganed to zero so that he could go at least seven turns without having to show what he was playing. That’s outside-of-the-box thinking.]
Q: Who do you most want to see win Worlds this year?
A: Pro Tour Hall of Famer
@bmkibler
(Evan Erwin)
Q: Brad Nelson is currently tearing up the tournament scene. What do you think his secret is?
A: His shoes. (Evan Erwin) [Aside:
Man, it’s gotta be the shoes!
]
Q: I understand that both you and Jon Medina are from Ohio. While he has popularized the Pack to Power concept, I’ve heard that you have a similar “Pack to” concept that you’ve been doing at recent tournaments. What is your end goal?
A: A toothpick, half a bologna sandwich, and a foil Abyssal Persecutor. (Milton Santiago)
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