I’ve talked a lot over the last couple of weeks about focus. About how I think I’ve been able to keep my mind in the right place, and as a consequence how my results have been improving. But there haven’t been many articles written about how exactly to improve focus, what the causes and consequences are, and what may detract from your ability to maintain that focus in an in-game setting. Today I want to tackle some of those issues.
A number of people told me that it’s time for me to Level 3, no excuses, and to that end I’m going to step up the game next year and do what my heart’s been telling me to do for awhile: become invested enough in Magic that I force myself to achieve the maximum of my ability. It’s been a long time coming, but I love this game, and anything you love you have to take as seriously as you can. This article, though, is going to talk about what you should do when that’s just not possible.
Can’t make this stuff up, folks. Get a message from Dan Ackroyd – okay, Danny Ackroyd-Isales, but story value, people, story value – asking about Rock and Nail. Never really got a chance to write about that deck, but accusations of self-flattery and the reality of an irrelevant format made me think it’d stay that way. Come to find out Extended season’s almost here. Cute.
I want to caution y’all not to be too concerned with issues of tempo in Sealed Deck. This extends far beyond the fact that drawing first is better in this format the overwhelming majority of the time. In Draft, mana curve is one of the first things I look at. In Sealed, though, it’s just not all that important…
As of late I’ve notice myself slipping into a bad habit, and I don’t like it. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s a habit I see a lot of people doing from the early stages of a tournament up until the very final round, and for several years I successfully ridded its pernicious presence from my mind. Over the past couple of months, though, it’s crept back, whispering into my ear in the middle of a game, pulling at my concentration in between rounds, lurking. What is it?
My boy Kevin McCormack recently jumped the “casual player†hurdle and is hurling himself headlong into the realm of competitive events. We’ve got a PTQ this very week in St. Louis, in fact, and I’m expecting him to make a decent showing. But one of the questions he asked me when he first decided he wanted to “get good†was: what articles do I need to read?
I’ve really got to try this “talking about Standard” thing more often. It’s a welcome relief, for example, when people actually read my articles. Now, personally I have no idea why anyone would rather look at a deck they can point at, build, and play when they could be discussing the minutiae of polar gradient theory over tea and crumpets, but that’s why there are red bicycles and blue bicycles.
In a States field, I want to be doing abjectly powerful things. My deck contains Mind Stone, Shriekmaw, Cryptic Command, Damnation, and Scrying Sheets – all cards that I consider to be among the most powerful in the format right now. Moreover, not only do I want to be doing powerful things, I want to be doing powerful things against the broad spectrum of decks that you can expect to see at a tournament like States.
Sure, the tournament went well, from a certain point of view. Covered my costs, picked up a decent amount of Pro Points, designed a great deck. That’s for another time. We’ll talk matchups and why it’s a great choice for the PTQ season, deal with all of that. Now, though, my mind’s on the Magic experience. Put the academia aside and indulge me, just for this column. “Playing the game” is only half of it. For right now, it’s time to see the world.
I love everything about this set. It was odd at first, because I hated Onslaught. The misapplication of the Morph mechanic made games too swingy, and I hate formats where you have to play eighteen or nineteen lands without too much to do with a flood. Then there was the fun “Commando-Craghorn-Zombie Cutthroat” debate which left you all-too-eager to slit your own jugular and drain into blissful oblivion, and all told I drafted a whole lot of Eighth Edition during that time period.
If you can successfully stop the fastest deck in the format from killing you while simultaneously not packing to the optimally-positioned control deck’s late game, chances are you can handle a less streamlined version of either strategy. This doesn’t necessarily mean, either, that every deck that isn’t positioned along the poles is “sub-optimal” to take to a tournament strictly speaking; it just means it’s less unilateral.
I don’t think I’d cause too much of an uproar if I referred to Gabriel Nassif as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Constructed players of all time. He was recently voted into the Invitational as a “Constructed Master” despite a lack of big finishes this year mostly on legacy alone, and I think that serves as a testament to his masterful reputation. If I was to find out what made a good deck, I thought, surely I could look to him…
For those of you unlucky enough to have experienced the wonderment of Magic’s best format, it’s basically the most enjoyable vehicle for card-slinging ever conceived. The rules are simple. Infinite mana of each color. One spell per turn. One additional spell a turn with an alternate cost. One land. You start with an opening hand of four cards, and a carefully-crafted deck of the most powerful cards in Magic. Awesomeness ensues.
While it may shock people to hear this, Wizards’ employees do not sit enraptured at the edges of their chairs paralyzed in sheer ecstasy at the thought of handing out company dollars to random people they’ve never met before. It’s not as if being good at a card game automatically entitles you to a plethora of $40,000 checks hand-delivered to your doorstep with a smile.
I love casual players. I was one for five years before I played in my first tournament. But I want to swear up and down for as long as it takes to get my point across that the Pro community is not composed of a bunch of evil, selfish bastards lurking in the wings to steal casual players’ lunch money. By and large they’re tolerant, nice, fun, good people who love the game every bit as much as any kitchen table squad I’ve ever seen. Don’t let the one rules-lawyer you always run into at PTQs ruin your taste of tournament players more broadly. There’s a reason he’s still playing at PTQs and trying to win his games unfairly, believe me
