I was hanging out at a TCGPlayer $5K in New York last year—no, not the one I won, a different one, the one Tim Landale won—because I actually scrubbed out kind of early. I was ho hum sitting around taking test draws with my Summoning Trap / Iona deck and just ended up playing whoever wanted to sit down and battle. I played against all different kinds of decks that were viable back then, from Boros to U/W Control to Red Decks (but I refused to play against other Primeval Titan decks because that wouldn’t have been fun at all, no, not at all).
The fun thing about playing for fun (especially with a deck you know isn’t good enough but is the only one you have handy) is that you don’t really have to pay attention, and I could just chat with whomever, shoot the breeze while pondering how I could best set up my Joraga Treespeaker / Lotus Cobra opening hands. A recent PTQ winner, who had been a serious player many years before, then came back (and was clearly capable of competing [again]), asked me a kind of weird question.
“Really, who is the best?”
Snap “Jon Finkel” of course. Who else am I going to say?
“I knew you were going to say that. But come on. We all know you just say stuff like that. Jon. Kai. Bob. Whatever. Most of us have never seen them play… and I’m from New Jersey! Can you really say Jon is better than someone who has won as much as like… Olivier Ruel?”
Olivier Ruel?!?
I mean maybe this guy had the lead on Planeswalker Points a year or two ahead of schedule, knew somehow that Oli was going to be at the head of that there pyramid… but this was kind of inexplicable to me.
“Respectfully, I don’t think Oli is as good as Jon or Kai. I have watched him play a lot, and to me, his in-game decisions are not as impressive. That he has so many strong finishes is as much a product more of persistence and devoting time as anything else.”
“Come on, he has won so many more…”
Argh! This is going all the wrong direction.
“You realize he’s been suspended, right? Twice.”
“No way! That’s not in his Wikipedia entry!”
Nope. No serious mention of Oli’s suspensions in his Wikipedia entry.
Honestly, I have no interest in vilifying any player today. I wrote something about the Saito suspension last year, and my always level-headed Righteous Babe teammate Brian Kowal had a typically level-headed response… which is more-or-less how I feel about cheating:
“This is how I feel about cheating. I don’t hate people for cheating. I don’t believe in applying my own moral code to anybody else. At the same time I have a hard time appreciating anybody’s accomplishments if they are a cheater. Like Mori wins Japanese Nationals. So what? He might as well have not even been playing Magic. He might not have even cheated, but there is doubt due to his past so I really can never respect a single accomplishment he ever makes in the game. It’s unfortunate for him, but the only way I’ll really give a [spit]Â about his Magic career is if I knew him personally well enough to know that he isn’t cheating anymore. And I will still resent him for lessening other players’ enjoyment of the game and accomplishments. There is no reason to recognize these players’ accomplishments in our game.”
-Brian Kowal
The thing that bugged me was that someone could laud a player’s many Grand Prix Top 8s, despite the fact that there were very substantial black marks on his resume.
“Okay, fine. Maybe he was suspended… but he still made those twenty-odd Grand Prix Top 8s and five PT Top 8s!”
I re-posted the Saito thing earlier this week, and LSV said this:
Let me make this perfectly clear:
Let’s assume that there are some very small edges that you can gain in a game of Magic: The Gathering. Their effect is relatively small. I am not going to go into what any of those things might be… but let’s say that all they do is either:
- Reduce your likelihood of having to declare a mulligan, or
- “Ensure” that you always hit your third land drop (or let’s go crazy here, and say something like “fifth”
So no outlandish free Reinforcements (there is a well-known story about a onetime Northeast Regional Champion and multiple PT Top 8 competitor who beat Jon Finkel in the Top 8 of a tournament with White Weenie by magically putting three threat creatures on top of his deck); no exotic combination pieces hiding in one’s lap; no perching in a chair so as to be able to see over the horizons of some shorter players’ hands (“Really judge, I have to ‘sit’ like this—I have back problems!”) … Not even the amazing displays of sleight of hand or sleight of mouth, like surviving a Duress with fourteen expertly held cards in grip (The Matrix of cheating, according to Seth Burn) or getting your dad to have a DCI ejection [for cheating] reversed so that you could contend for Top 8 of a Pro Tour… while simultaneously fleecing DI judges for all their spare change (all the same cheater).
Not talking about any of that stuff (though it is all real, and if you ask the right players, they will be able to point at which Top 8 competitors have which undocumented offenses next to their names). I am not even talking about non-mechanic (highly reliable) shuffles that fool opponents into keeping marginal hands… but just don’t get there (ever) (every round)… that no judge can ever detect or reproduce. [Seriously: Wake the eff up.]
Again, not talking about that. Not talking about playing extra lands on an early turn… nothing so explosive or flamboyant or headline-making as that. Nothing like prophecy (from “I think your opening hand will look fine, but you will never have enough mana to operate comfortably” to a general “how lucky!”) that has nothing magical about it going on at all.
Maybe I know how to shuffle a certain way that increases the chances of my having a second-turn Sapphire Medallion in my opening hand. Not always: But a little bit more likely. Something like that. Or something so small as that I just don’t “have” to mulligan quite as often as other Mages (or like, not ever); or I always hit my third (or fifth) land drop; seems normal… No one goes around complaining about “never seeing so-and-so miss his third land drop” … that kind of stuff simply never registers. Something small that is hard to detect and not so exciting that anyone would ever notice.
When I wrote How to Win a PTQÂ [one of the all-time greatest Magic articles ever; you should read it if you haven’t, by the way], I claimed to win 1/9 PTQs I enter. I think I have probably played in nine PTQs in the last four years, and despite some Nationals Qs, some Top 8s, a $5K win, &c., I don’t know that I have won one since, so that average must be down. Anyway, some ten or so years ago, I was a rabid PTQ competitor. If I hadn’t acquired a wife and family and taken other aspects of my life so much more seriously, I probably would be chasing Opens every weekend or grinding PWPs like a madman now; I still harbor much of the passion of that younger me and relish the friendships that I forged via that never-ending succession of weekend road trips.
As such, I can summon up eleven-year-old game states in scary, almost photorealistic, detail. I can remember missing Top 8s back in 1996 to a seventh-round mana screw or stalling on five in the decider against Eric Ziegler. I can recall—the dawn of my relationship with Paul Jordan and Josh Ravitz—the PTQ where I lost the first round, won nine consecutive rounds, then faltered in the finals against a deck I had beaten five other times on the day, for the slot, when my Hickory Woodlots finally caught up to me.
It is dizzying how many more PTQs I would have won—the me from that back-then era, anyway—if I had the “never mulligan” or “always hit your third land” superpower. I was on a tear for a couple of years when I made PTQ Top 8s well over 50% of the time. Obviously I didn’t win 50% of the time. But what if? From a career PTs perspective, the difference would have been massive.
Here is a real-life profile of a “kind” of cheat: Imagine you have a player who grinds every GP. Maybe he is good; sure, he is good. Maybe he “only” invokes his superpowers against scrubs who are not as good as he is. He has a moral code like that.
Well guess what? At some point you look down at your long list of accomplishments and decide that yes, you really are that good; at that point, isn’t “everybody” the scrubs who are not as good as you? I mean if you are counting things like that?
That, in the end, is why cheating sucks.
To me—the enthusiast in me, the chronicler in me—the power of the Pro Tour is the glory of Antoine Ruel juking Kenji Tsumura with that Force Spike setup; that is a story for the ages. Or Jon Finkel staring down an opponent with a fist full of relevant and synergistic Elves with a lone Sparksmith (Jon had few if any Goblins to pair with it and would have been overrun). It is an unknown Jan Moritz Merkel stealing the table from the well-established Pro Willy Edel, physically pushing him into a corner despite being out-gunned on the cards and starting on a double mulligan. It is the triumph of LSV making the break from Hammer-wielding Elephants to take his place among—some say at the head of today’s—pantheon. Magic—tournament Magic at its best—is the audible snap of Brad Nelson cards as they smack against the table, the long shadow cast by his massive stature lowering a pall over the confidence of his hapless opponent like the mystical gloom of the land of Mordor.
You will notice that WotC, and here on Star City, know all this too. We writers and commentators and pundits make a big deal about these amazing stories, and the men (and sometimes women) who do the deeds, these larger-than-life colossi of the cards… because the stories, the personalities, the artistry, in some cases the perfection of certainty are what makes this game worth talking about. Pete and Evan put some of them on TV (JustinTV, anyway), each and every week.
Half a decade after Merkel’s win, I am still making sure you know about his double mulligan to start; how much less interesting would the story have been if he had the “never mulligan” superpower?
Recently we touched on harnessing the value of certainty in negotiating a game that can go either way. How much less is required of a would-be great if he is already certain of the identity of his ninth card down? Would he ever have to develop the strategic mulligan skills or learn a drop of math?
Yes, cheating is stealing.
Yes, some other guy spent such-and-such to fly to so-and-so tournament and gave up his time and yadda yadda yadda.
Yes, Magic is supposed to be fun—we all started for the fun of it—and cheating, as BK noted, picks the pocket of the opponent not just financially, but in terms of his enjoyment of this game…
Yes, we all have this queasy taste in the backs of our mouths, something oily and awful because—for most of us—someone said there was something unfair about cheating [I would separately argue that the whole point of reading Magic strategy articles is the long-term avoidance of any semblance of “fair,” but this is not the forum].
But really, the reason cheating sucks, especially small and hard-to-notice cheating that commentators miss and judges can probably never detect, is that it crumples away the one thing that makes tournament Magic—spectator Magic—worth anything and tosses it in the ashcan. Because if someone really does have a superpower (even a small one), given sufficient n, his stat line will become completely overblown. Again, no one thinks of me as an elite executor at the actual tables, but I am good enough that if I always hit my land drops, I might look like a minor league Greek god. Exploitation of such abilities removes the necessity to learn important skills, like how to mulligan, evaluate hands correctly, or win from four cards to start.
And thus, it erases our everything.
If there is one saving grace, it seems to me that many of the players most under the microscope tend towards consistent, uncontroversial, medium-to-slightly-negative-EV decks. As the formation of Magic glory and long-term rewards goes hand-in-hand with not just tournament success (Spike) but creativity of strategies (Jonny) (and in fact tend to be massively +EV in the short term)… well… that is something, at least.
Okay, enough about that.
Here are a couple of works-in-progress. Clearly they are not perfect; however they both do things that are a little bit different from what is already out there, and I think they give us opportunities for future technology development.
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (6)
Lands (23)
Spells (17)
Sideboard
This deck started via some suggestions from Brian David-Marshall around Mulch, Spider Spawning, and Gnaw to the Bone. BDM was playing a U/G version with more creatures, but I didn’t see much reason to deviate from Green’s core strengths of Primeval Titan and getting out Kessig Wolf Run.
Progressively it got to be less and less about Gnaw to the Bone in particular (and I realize there aren’t a huge amount of creatures in the deck), to the point where we only have the one maindeck and none in the side.
Spider Spawning has actually proved quite ferocious in this deck, despite the shorter creature count. The tokens have reach so they end up being pretty good against white tokens and can even chump big flyers. Or, you can trade, Trade, TRADE for several turns (while building up with Mulch of course) until you can hit Spider Spawning and then just hide behind the tokens while beefing up Karn. I realize some of you may be scratching your heads over this, but I would guess that comes with a preference for certain types of immediate gratification or a lack of appreciation for constructing a long, progressive con over a dozen turns. Really, Spider Spawning can be, if not a backbreaker, quite the hidey-hole.
While the creature count is a little low, you typically have plenty of potential attackers due to the planeswalkers, tokens, and so forth. In fact, the mana acceleration and ability to hide (and recoup threats with Praetor’s Counsel) make this one of the most impressive Karn decks I have ever tried. So that’s why I have the, you know, one copy main :)
I love Love LOVE Praetor’s Counsel in this deck. You can spend tons of turns playing Mulch and hiding behind Solemn Simulacrum, setting up, until BOOM, you have a 25-card hand. You can basically never lose if you untap having resolved this card.
I am not 100% on the flashback cards specifically (I very often side out the now-one Gnaw to the Bone and side down Spider Spawnings if I bring in other threats). However the Mulch engine is something that is going to pick up, I believe, as we play more Innistrad. Mulch is just fantastic. Sure, you mill some threats sometimes (but that is why you play flashback spells, even if they are medium-weak-seeming ones that are synergistic with binning creatures), but the games where you draw three cards with one are of course brutal. And then there is Praetor’s Counsel! I think that at the point that we can figure out how to regulate Mulch (or more easily if we had threats like Call of the Herd or Beast attack), this card will become staple, legitimately. This deck isn’t even that optimized (for it, or in general), and it has been very effective for me, personally, on MTGO.
Mulch is unbelievable side-by-side with Ancient Grudge obviously, and the deck can easily go to 4 Mulch, 4 Ancient Grudge, 4 Acidic Slime, 3 Green Sun’s Zenith and completely blow out most artifact-based decks.
Ultimately, I know this one looks a bit odd, but I have played somewhere between 20-40 matches against competent opponents and essentially all the decks in the format (known and rogue) and won the vast majority of them. Then again, regular old Wolf Run is pretty good, so I might have won most of those anyway, in spite of my changes and BDM’s suggestions, rather than because of them (gotta keep it real).
Spells (20)
- 4 Contagion Clasp
- 4 Strata Scythe
- 2 Sword of Feast and Famine
- 4 Corrupted Resolve
- 4 Gitaxian Probe
- 2 Tezzeret's Gambit
Sideboard
Here is another one that has been pretty consistently competitive against the known decks.
I wanted to play Strata Scythe from the start of the format, and here is a strategy where it is pretty devastating. If you ever actually tag someone with Blighted Agent + Strata Scythe, that is typically game boys.
These cards have been super good:
Blighted Agent, Contagion Clasp, Gitaxian Probe, Corrupted Resolve, Tezzeret’s Gambit, the equipment.
Corrupted Resolve needs to be turned on with a quick tag by Blighted Agent or Inkmoth Nexus, but once it is on, you can usually play Protect the Queen and win, looking for a spot to stick a big hit with equipment or just chip away at the opponent while stopping their Primeval Titan or whatever.
Contagion Clasp does everything, as always. I had a game where I drew a bunch, killed a Stromkirk Noble and two Delvers, came back from a massive deficit in life, then hid behind double Spellskite (which were also holding off a Stormblood Berserker) until he just scooped with six cards in hand.
These cards have been not that great:
Corpse Cur, most of the other creatures.
Blighted Agent and Inkmoth Nexus are great; everyone else is kind of there because you need some other guys to win with. Necropede obviously has some text against beatdown decks or token production; Ichorclaw Myr is a little hard to block; neither one of them is “bad”-bad; Corpse Cur is just a little expensive, so I have never really had the chance to use it in an attrition-battle-winning capacity (as was the original intent). I can see swapping the counts on Cur and Gambit or just adding more Islands.
As I’ve said, the Mono-Blue Infect has been surprisingly competitive with… most everything. The toughest competition (but still beatable) being Solar Flare with a ton of removal. Part of the problem there is that you can’t just tap for another attacker even when you have a creature back, as you might only have three lands in play, and the opponent could play like a Sun Titan or Consecrated Sphinx, and you need to leave back counterspell mana. I take that back a little, actually; it strikes me that I haven’t played against dedicated RDW yet, and that that might be a much different challenge from U/R Delver.
I can see Mono-Blue Infect evolving in a number of ways. Its main sin relative to Black Infect is a lack of a Blight Dragon / Lashwrithe big fatty boom boom. I am thinking more and more that Corrupted Conscience might be the card we want. Twelve-power Primeval Titan? I think I can get behind that. Also, the deck just might want more lands. Many of the games you win are about sitting patiently and chipping at the opponent until you can get Strata Scythe down, on, and in. Sometimes—especially when you are working with an Inkmoth Nexus—that can require quite a few lands. It’s possible—or even likely—that some evolution of this strategy can accommodate fewer creatures / more lands / maybe more card advantage or proliferate.
Ultimately, this is another one where the deck isn’t perfect, but as Zvi often says, getting one or two big things right can gloss over a bazillion small mistakes… And I think there might be something here, to both of them, actually.
Oh yeah, and cheating still sucks.
LOVE
MIKE