Gifts Ungiven

Rich Hagon and Zac Hill have written a number of good articles recently on competitive psychology in Magic. They generalize well to pretty much any competitive venue, and are only loosely focused on Magic. A good read, no matter what you do.

Focus - Zac Hill talks about staying present and involved in the competitive endeavor you're involved in right now, rather than drifting.

The Right Way to Lose - Zac Hill talks about how one must leaven taking personal responsibility for your performance with the knowledge that some things are actually out of your control.

A Very Big Secret - Rich Hagon talks about giving yourself permission to win at an event. "For almost everyone, our Comfort Zone is rooted in Failure. When we are removed from our Comfort Zone, usually due to the 'threat' of Success, we subconsciously do all in our power to return there."

Permission to Win 101 - Rich Hagon looks at the psychological bits and pieces that people employ on their way to a win -- and that's more than just at the event itself, but in the days, weeks, and months leading up to it.

I've been meaning, for a while, to excerpt a clip of my favorite high-level competitive play ever and post it. Here it is, straight from the finals of Pro Tour Charleston 2006 -- Tomohiro Kaji deducing the contents of Celso Zampere's hand during the process of playing a Mimeofacture:

This is a definite "don't try this at home" moment -- or, more specifically, don't try this in a timed round (and even Kaji picked up a Slow Play warning from the judge, despite the untimed nature of Pro Tour top eight games). It is also peculiar to the top eight of an event, as your opponent's exact decklist is not otherwise going to be public knowledge. Regardless, it's my favorite moment of high-level play because it was, when I first saw it, such a clever and unexpected approach to perfectly determining hidden information based on public information.

And don't forget that he memorized his opponent's decklist during lunch.

One of the things that surprised me a little when I returned to Magic after my long hiatus was the inclusion of foil cards. I pretty quickly decided I didn't like them. They're not as pliable as normal cards, they tend to warp like crazy, and the foiling effect makes the art hard to see. I also subscribe to the idea that all the copies of a given card in your deck should be the same art, same language, same edition, so that you don't give away information about your hand or deck during a game.

That said, I support the inclusion of foil chase cards in Magic, because some people like them, and that drives up purchasing of Magic boosters, which keeps Wizards in business and keeps my favorite game around. A win all around.

In this deck tech from this year's German nationals, Thomas Jungmann talks about one bit of essential tech for his tournament deck:

"I de-foiled the deck before the tournament to avoid game losses."

Wizards has been shifting things around to make their prerelease and release bonus cards be some of the more exciting rares from the set. Thus, our foils this time around included Demigod of Revenge and Figure of Destiny, both staples of the kind of mono-red deck (sometimes "Demigod Red") that Jungmann brought to his nationals, and both staples of similar mono-red decks in the Berlin 2008 PTQ season.

Unfortunately, if your only foils are, say, four Demigods, then a judge may be able to cut to them consistently, yielding a game loss for marked cards. That's been happening, and it really sucks. One solution is to pepper your deck with other foils -- but the other, cheaper solution is to just do what Thomas did, and play without foils.

Not an issue for me, except that I have two prerelease Demigods just hanging out in my collection at this point. Maybe they should go on the auction block, to be played with and loved by folks who like the chase.

Magic came out when I was a high school student, so there really hadn't been a lot of time for teachers to know what we were doing in between classes or to be able to usefully talk to us about how the game works. These days, however, gamers my age are the teachers, and games are an excellent way for them to connect with students.

Over at Mana Nation, Dan Eckstein recently started writing Magic: the Classroom, a column about teaching his students how to play the game, and seeing where they go with the ideas and tools he gives them. So far, the first two columns have been excellent introductions to key concepts in making a competitive, structurally sound deck. They are:

In The Rule of Nine, Dan tells us that "When you design a deck all you really need is nine cards." It's a great piece that will inform you if you're at the stage of just throwing a pile of good cards that you like together, and you're wondering why you don't win all that much with them.

In The Curve, Dan discusses the eponymous game concept, taking us from the basics of making a coherent deck into the somewhat more advanced realm of making sure we have actual plays when we need them.

I recommend both articles, especially as primers for newer players.

Someone asked why we see Shizo and Okina in Doran/Junk decks these days, but not Eiganjo. I wrote a reply in the Wizards forums that I think is worth reprinting, so here it is:

Each nonbasic you add to your mana base increases your exposure to auto-losses from moon effects. So you're doing a cost-benefit analysis for each land slot to see if it should be a basic or something else. The Doran deck is going to naturally want to start with some combination of fetches and shocks to make sure you hit your turn one, two, and three mana marks, so much of the base is already spoken for. From there, you need to have a certain number of basics to (1) fetch, (2) reduce your damage from fetching later-game lands, and (3) increase your resiliency against the moons.

Eiganjo makes Doran a little tougher if he's running into big blockers, or if someone's trying to burn him out. Shizo actually solves that blockers problem, and Doran's going to be Smothered, Putrefied and Exiled way more often than he's going to be burned, so that's not an especially useful ability. It's almost certainly not worth the additional exposure.

The Moon effects force us to be more honest with our mana bases, an observation I've heard in the last few months from both Rich Hagon and Mike Flores (Mike in a top eight podcast, and Rich commenting on the fact that the Pro Tour floor at Berlin saw far more basics in play than the parallel Standard events). Each time you choose something other than a basic land, you must do a serious cost-benefit analysis to decide if that's worth the increased exposure.

I did a little testing of my Gifts build with friends yesterday and one thing became quite clear:

In other words, the value of a topdecked Thoughtseize drops precipitously as the game goes past the first couple turns. Facing down a kill-it-or-die creature? Thoughtseize is terrible. Just gained control, and looking to ice the game? Terrible. In one game, I died when almost any other non-land card in the deck would have been good. In another, I ended up with two Thoughtseizes in hand, just waiting slooowly for a real card to come up.

This is not to say that Thoughtseize isn't valuable, but I found it was such a depressingly poor topdeck that I'd prefer to just cede some turn-one value against certain decks (say, Storm) to increase the value of my deck in the late game, which is where i wanted to win anyway.

After Gab Nassif's topdeck to win game five of the quarterfinals at Kyoto, Randy Buehler commented that his breed of five-color control was built to have good topdecks. As I look at my upcoming PTQ opportunity next week, this is something I want to make sure I engineer into my main deck. That is, the ideal card, even one that's meant for the early game, should also be a solid late-game topdeck.

I never regretted seeing a Path, whether it was the first or the tenth turn, and that's the kind of thing I want in a card.

So, Thoughtseize, it's off to the sideboard for you.

At least, the article's tables remind me of those old THAC0 charts.

Over at ManaNation.com, Dan Eckstein kicks out another useful edition of Magic: the Classroom, this time exploring the probabilities involved in drawing the cards you need given a certain number of copies in your deck, with a special emphasis on making sure you have the mana you need.

If you keep getting mana screwed, go read.

Three interesting recent articles:

Gary Wise discusses how many poker pros started in Magic

Josh Silvestri talks about Jund Aggro in Standard, with a solid meditation on the mana base

The Ferrett talks about how damage on the stack, really, honestly is a problem for recruiting new players

Just as I was considering my more-than-occasional error of generating and using decks that don't close, Zac Hill writes an excellent article distilling the fundamental issue that underlies this problem.

How to Break a Format with Two Easy Questions, by Zac Hill.

When the cascade mechanic was revealed in full, I was initially most excited about Captured Sunlight. "Hey, it makes all your CMC 3 dudes into Loxodon Hierarchs!" Most of the cascade cards seemed unexciting, but that seemed good.

Except it's not.

Click through to the extended entry for more.

This seems to be my week to disagree with Anthony Palmerio. In addition to his normal episode of The Proffessors for the week, Anthony put together a Theory in Practice episode discussing Magic highlight videos, with the premise that they are "the greatest way to watch Magic games."

So yeah, I disagree.

I understand where Anthony is coming from when he says "I don't like to sit there watching ten minutes of shuffling, ten minutes of game play, and ten minutes of thinking," but I think there's an issue with the idea that highlight videos let you "see what happened in the game, and why."

Trying to actually understand a Magic match from a highlight video is a lot like trying to recreate the flow of a baseball game from a highlight reel, or understand how poker is played by watching the highly edited television coverage of poker. You're going to come away thinking that baseball is all about hits that are or aren't fielded properly, and that poker is about people going all-in all the time.

That whole "ten minutes of thinking" part of the game is, well, part of the game. If we're looking at it from a learning perspective, you will understand a lot more about the "why" portion of "what happened and why" if you watch the entire game play out. The idea that "important things weren't happening" in the rather slow Dreadstill versus Team America match at Worlds 2008 just shows that the viewer isn't following the dynamic of the match.

I do realize some people just kind of zone out during any game that slows down. I'm with Randy Buehler here, though - I like watching two control players try to decide when to act, when to break a (perhaps literal) standstill, and so forth. To me, this is not downtime - it's the part of the match that is very interesting, far more so than someone just swinging with a bunch of creatures.

One of my favorite top eights of all time is Worlds 2005, focusing on the quarters and semis in particular. I've actually stripped the audio portion out of this event and have it on my iPod (that's five hours of listening right there for the semis and quarters, by the way); I even have the semis on two CDs in my car music collection.

I do think it helps if you don't just try to sit and watch the matches with literally nothing else going on. As I'm always doing something else when I watch a movie or television program anyway, this isn't exactly a big problem for me.

Don't get me wrong - I do love a highlight reel, and the ChannelFireball crew did a brilliant job with their highlight coverage of the recent 5K top 32. I've also made my own highlight clip, featuring my absolute favorite PT match moment:

I just think that it's good to recall that highlight videos are just what they say on the tin. They're fun and excellent narrative experiences, but probably bad learning tools.

Here's Anthony's video:

This week's In Development follows up, in spirit, on some of my recent posts. This time around, it's all about how overly broad generalization about what you're playing and playing against will mean that you're (1) making bad play choices and (2) not sure why your game isn't working out the way you'd like it to.

You can read more here.

You can also follow me at twitter here.

This week's In Development talks about sequencing, and then applies it to a revised Stoneforge Mystic Junk list and a Stoneforge Mystic Bant list.

Clearly, I'm a fan of those Kor Artificers.

Click here for the article and click here to follow me on twitter.

This week's In Development bears the snappy title Seven Magic Moments, and is all about what we can learn from watching coverage of past events. The pitch is punctuated with my highlight reel of seven favorite Magic moments, and the lessons they contain.

Head on over there, and then hit me up on twitter and let me know what coverage moments are in your highlight reel.

It's In Development time this week, brought in under the wire by our crack editors, since I was forced to turn it in almost a full day behind schedule due to travel issues.

This time around, we're looking at how to push a deck design toward success, through our own risk aversion and other natural human limitations. In the process, I highlight two recent successful deck designs, and my own updated BRG Planeswalker Control deck.

I also made a mistake in putting together Consuming Vapors and Bituminous Blast, but about a million people corrected me, so that's fine. :)

Click here to read this week's article, and then find me on twitter and let me know what you think.

Let’s now imag­ine that it wasn’t you play­ing before the Cas­cade turn. Imag­ine instead you walked by the match, saw the Jund player’s hand (a sin­gle Putrid Leech) then and saw the UW player draw the Mar­tial Coup. That player then tags you in, and you get to play the rest of the match.

Over at ManaNation, Sam Stoddard wrote a great piece about moving forward instead of complaining during play. Go check it out.

This week's In Development is a meditation on how to make getting better at the game fun rather than painful, and why doing so may well make you a better player.

Click here to read the article, and then find me on twitter and let me know what you think.

It's that time again!

That's right, In Development time. This week, it's all tools, as I touch on the idea of using abstraction to understand a deck's spine and flow. Using a conceptual tool that I originally came up with to solve an experimental problem in my bio work, I talk about how you can put a little fuzz into your perspective to help you understand new decks, sideboard properly, and tinker without destroying.

Click here to read the article, and then find me on twitter to let me know what you think.

It's In Development time again, and this time around I'm talking about a novel concept - making an inventory of your strengths, and then building on those strengths.

We've all heard about how we're supposed to patch up our weaknesses, but empirical studies tell us that what we really want to do - what we need to do - is make our strong points stronger.

Click here to read the article, and then find me on twitter and let me know what you think.

Also, as a bonus, this ties into the late hubbub about "casual" and "competitive" play.

It's In Development time again after our brief hiatus, and this week's edition is all about the "rules" of Constructed seasons. Do they exist? Are they format dependent? What are they?

Click here to read my in-depth evaluation of six seasons (two Block, two Standard, and two Extended), and the conclusions I draw from them about the lore we've picked up from the community at large about how Constructed seasons work.

After you've read the article, find me on twitter and let me know what you think.