How many of the following statements could you truthfully make about your upcoming tournament? What can you do to make more of them true?
Logistics:
- I will get a good night’s sleep before the tournament.
- I know how I am getting to the tournament.
- I will give myself ample time to travel to the tournament.
- I will eat a balanced breakfast.
- I will pack snacks and drinks, or do what it takes to eat and drink enough during the tournament.
Cards
- I have all the cards I need for my deck.
- My deck contains no marked cards.
- My deck contains no foils, because foils can become marked during the course of a tournament.
- Every copy of each different card in my deck is from the same set and printed in the same language so that my opponents cannot figure out how many copies of a card I am playing by noticing differences between different copies.
Sleeves
- My deck has sleeves.
- My sleeves are not marked.
- My sleeves are brand new.
- My sleeves are brand new and have solid-color backs with no pictures.
Accounting
- I will have a pen and paper to keep track of my life.
- I will have a pen and paper, as well as a randomization device.
- I will have a pen and paper, plus any dice and counters I need to play cards in my deck.
Deck
- My deck is legal.
- My deck is good.
- I have the best deck in the room.
- I have the best deck in the format.
Sideboard
- My sideboard has useful cards in it.
- My sideboard is aimed at solving problem matchups and fixing specific holes.
- I know exactly how I will sideboard against all my opponents.
Preparation
- I know how to play my deck.
- I know how all the other decks in the format play.
- I know how to beat all the other decks with my deck.
Confidence
- I think I can win some matches.
- I think I am going to do well.
- I have a real shot to win the tournament.
- I have no idea who in the room could possibly beat me.
It is very rare that I win a tournament of more then twenty players without being able to truthfully make almost all of the above statements. Have fun and good luck.
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The mana cards that are available in a constructed format define it in a lot of important ways. The number and quality of mana fixing cards determines how many colors you can justifiably play, and the nonbasic lands that act like spells determine the rewards for not straying into a ton of colors. The mana cards we have to work with in Lorwyn Standard have changed dramatically with the rotation of Ravnica, so it’s worth it to think for a bit about what is left and what is new before we start building mana for States. This is intended to help you see the big mana picture, make sure you aren’t missing any good nonbasics, and get you thinking about how the mana in a format warps decks.
Ravnica’s dual lands, bouncelands, and signets enabled people to get very ambitious with colors; without them, our options are much more limited. We are left with only the following lands to fix our mana:
- Pain lands (Adarkar Wastes and friends)
- Future Sight rare lands
- Lorwyn tribe-aligned rare lands
- Coldsnap tapduals
- Gemstone Mine
- Terramorphic Expanse
These are not going to let us do what we could do in Ravnica block, but it’s also plenty to work with. The question that you will have to answer before you build any mana base in this format is how quickly you need your mana. The most common drawback on nonbasic lands in this format is coming into play tapped, and assessing how much of this you can handle will dictate how crazy you can get with colors. Your life is going to be easiest if you are a Lorwyn tribal deck or you are playing an allied color combination. In this case, you have four painlands and four future sight lands or tribal lands that make both your colors all of which come into play untapped. If you are playing Goblins, Faeries or Merfolk, your life is even better, with a full twelve good fixing lands. These decks can probably stop here. If you need more than this, you are going to have to take a hard look at slower lands. If you can handle a lot of lands that come into play tapped, then you have more than enough tools to choose from between Coldsnap dual lands, Terramorphic Expanse, and Lorwyn lands. Gemstone mine will work if you are desperate for colors and don’t need a lot of lands.
The odd thing about this selection of lands is that because of the irregular cycles in Lorwyn and Future Sight a few color combinations are left in the lurch. Nimbus Maze is great when you can play a lot of basic lands, but now that we are outside of block and have real lands like Adarkar Wastes and don’t have dual lands it gets a lot worse. Grove of the Burnwillows is fine, but it is unplayable in a deck that wants to attack and burn the face. There is actually zero support past the painlands and Terramorphic Expanse for any kind of blue-green, black-white, or red-blue deck. Keep this in mind if you are considering one of these combinations. Your opponents will have better mana than you not because they get their colors more often, but because their better mana fixing lands allow them to fit in more lands that do interesting things and act like spells. You’ll be at a disadvantage because all your lands have to be dedicated to finding the right colors while your opponents are doing more interesting things with their mana bases.
This dovetails right into my next point: playing a lot of mana-only lands when you don’t have to is a good way to throw away effective spell slots in a constructed deck, and right now we are blessed with a proliferation of lands that don’t fix colors but do interesting things. Generally, you should be trying to play as many of these cards as you can. I’ve listed all the reasonable ones here to make sure you don’t miss anything. Note that some of these lands come with entourages. There’s very little reason to play those lands if you aren’t willing to let them dictate a few spell slots so you get maximum value.
- White- Flagstones of Trokair is probably terrible now that it doesn’t fix colors with Edge of Autumn, but you might still want this. Playing one of this can’t hurt as protection against Boom/Bust I guess.
- Blue- Academy Ruins can give you a long game with Triskelavus, Ironfoot, Razormane Masticore, or whatever other artifacts you like. Tolaria West lets you build really wonky manabases with tutorable one-ofs including Pacts. Faerie Conclave is worth thinking about but probably worse than Tolaria West in most decks, and coming into play tapped is a problem.
- Black- Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth fixes all of your black mana problems for the rest of the game. It also turns on Korlash and Tendrils of Corruption if that interests you.
- Red- I guess Ghitu Encampment? Just splash Treetop and Tarmogoyf instead.
- Green- Treetop Village is amazing. If you are playing green and do not have four of this card in your deck you are probably wrong not to. Pendelhaven is a nice free way to get a quasi-spell out of a Forest, but don’t bother if you don’t have any 1/1’s since every other green deck is doing that and there’s no reason to get Wastelanded unneccesarily. Llanowar Reborn is fine if you decide you can handle more tapped lands than four Treetops, but I don’t think you can.
There are plenty of colorless nonbasics that are interesting. These are the important ones:
- Desert is a dream come true for a mono-colored deck that plans on having untapped lands during other people’s untap steps. Basically that means blue, unless there’s something I don’t know about.
- Quicksand is worse than Desert because it kills itself. I don’t know who would want this, but it’s out there if you decide you want more than four Deserts.
- Urza’s Factory gives you a long game if you can handle two colorless lands. This card doesn’t look that impressive but it is a great free way to have a long game plan. It remains to be seen how long “long games” in this format are, so this may be outclassed now.
- Vesuva is an awkward Wasteland for legendary lands. One of these goes in any deck with a Tolaria West engine.
Perhaps the best way to get effective spells out of your land slots is to utilize Coldsnap’s snow theme. This lets you play incredibly efficient cards like Skred and Phyrexian Ironfoot. Obviously this also involves Coldsteel Heart, snow basic lands, and snow duals. The relevant non-mana lands are:
- Mouth of Ronom is amazing if you can spare the colorless land slots. At least one of these goes in any deck with Tolaria West and snow, and I like playing this card randomly if you can make a reasonable amount of snow mana.
- Scrying Sheets is there for those who really want to play a lot of snow. This really only works if you have upwards of twenty or more snow cards to find, but for those people this card is spectacular.
One strange quirk of the current mix of lands is that so many good lands come into play tapped. All the Future Sight uncommon lands, all the Coldsnap dual lands, all the Lorwyn Hideaway lands, and all the manlands come into play tapped every time. For those who are not using the appropriate tribe, the Lorwyn tribal lands suffer the same fate. No deck can handle very much of this. I have eight comes-into-play-tapped lands in my teachings deck, but that’s the slowest deck I can think of in the format and I don’t know if any other deck can handle that many. This forms a bottleneck that forces you to make some hard decisions. If you are green, you are pretty much trapped into playing Treetop Village, and you probably can’t play any more tapped lands. If you are blue, Tolaria West is an engine that makes a lot of sense. Other decks will have to decide how many tapped lands they can handle and build accordingly.
Tolaria West deserves a little bit of its discussion. The more Tolaria Wests you play, the more you should have in the way of interesting targets. A Teachings deck with four of them should probably play one each of blue and black pact, an Academy Ruins, an Urborg, a Mouth of Ronom, an Urza’s Factory, and a Vesuva at minimum to get the maximum value. A pickles deck with only two might have a blue pact, a Factory, and a Mouth. However, the more interesting one-ofs you can fit, the better off you will be.
The final piece of the mana equation is mana artifacts. The good ones are Prismatic Lens, Mind Stone, Coldsteel Heart, and Coalition Relic. If you are snow, you will play Coldsteel Heart. For those who don’t need to fix colors but want to accelerate, Mind Stone is incredible and allows you to play “too much” mana acceleration with the knowledge that you can just trade mana sources for cards later on. For people who want to play a ton of colors, we have Prismatic Lens and Coalition Relic. Block constructed teachings decks were very reliant on these to make colors, and they were vulnerable to random artifact destruction cards like Ancient Grudge. Don’t rely too much on these for your mana, or you may find them pulled out from under you.
There are many viable ways to build a mana base in Lorwyn Standard. Being aware of all of the possibilities ensures that you aren’t missing something when you build yours. Make sure that you are getting your colors in the most painless way possible and try to get as many effective spells into your lands as you can. Your spells deserve as much help as you can give them.
In the swiss rounds of most Magic tournaments, you have 50 minutes to complete three full games, including shuffling and sideboarding. In early rounds, a draw isn’t a whole lot different from a loss, so the incentive is to do everything possible to avoid unintentional draws. One of the best ways to do this is to adjust your in-game mechanical habits in ways that allow you to do things like drawing cards and untapping lands as quickly as is possible without being sloppy. This will give you extra time in matches to do things like play turns and finish games, keeping you away from draws.
Many players have bad mechanical habits that eat up time. For example, there are many ways to draw a card. One obvious way is to simply take the top card of the deck and put it in your hand. This takes less than a second. Another way is to slide the top card of your deck face down onto the table, slide it toward you, and pick it up from the edge of the table; this might take a full two or three seconds. If you are only drawing a card once per turn, in a match that lasts 30 turns you might save a whole minute by moving from the second method to the first. However, imagine that you are playing a control deck with card drawing spells. What happens when you draw four cards at once with Careful Consideration? You might count four cards off the top and put them in your hand all at once, which would take about a second. However, you might also perform the slide-off maneuver for all four cards individually, which could take ten seconds. If you are casting six Careful Considerations in a match, doing this quickly instead of slowly might save you another minute in the match.
Another area that players often have bad mechanical habits in is managing their lands. Under no circumstances should untapping your lands needs take any more than one second. However, I have seen people pick up all of their lands and lay them untapped one by one, which can eat up a full five seconds if you have enough lands. If you are doing this every turn, you might spend a full three minutes of time untapping lands, which is a giant waste of time. It is also possible to waste time by needlessly moving your lands around while you could just be tapping them and playing a spell.
These may not seem like major issues on the surface. However, when you play decks that win very slowly like Time Spiral block constructed’s Mystical Teachings deck, every minute on the clock is precious because of how slowly you actually win games. It is also important when you have a mechanical action that your deck requires that you make a lot of times in any game you play. At Grand Prix Dallas 2007, I played a Counterbalance Psychatog deck. Early in the tournament when I activated Sensei’s Divining Top, I picked up the three cards one by one and rearranged them, but it usually took about 3 seconds becuase I did it quite ponderously. I didn’t think about it because it was only three seconds, but I was activating top probably about fifty times in a match, so that was a lot of time I was spending on it. When I played against Rich Hoean at the end of day one, he became frustrated with my topping and told me that I was going to need to find a faster way to resolve top or he was calling a judge. I initially didn’t understand the problem, and he said “Can you at least pick up all three cards at the same time?” All of a sudden, it clicked. That simple change in process probably saved me two or three minutes of time in each of my subsequent matches, which is a pretty big amount of time to get for a small change in mechanics. I thanked him for pointing this out to me, and I really did mean that even though i don’t think he believed me at the time.
These problems also become very obvious and glaring when pushed to the extreme. At a Pro Tour Qualifier over the summer, I watched my friend JR Wade end a match in an unintentional draw with a player whose mechanics were particularly terrible. He played every card with a dramatic sweep of the arm that took two seconds, and every time he untapped, he picked up all of his nonland permanents and laid them out one by one, and then repeated the process with his lands, even if only a few things were tapped. He did this very slowly, so it took him a full fifteen seconds in every untap step. As the clock ran down, he didn’t change how he did these things; instead he just tried to do them faster. Watching him rush to collect all of his lands and lay them out as quickly as possible in such a comically inefficient way was one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever watched at a tournament. He ended up drawing the match, and afterward complained loudly about it. I suggested that he untap his lands and play his spells faster, and he stood up and screamed at me that he was a fast player and he doesn’t normally draw matches, but his opponent was playing a CONTROL DECK, and CONTROL DECKS are STUPID because they TAKE A LONG TIME TO PLAY GAMES. People who had been watching the match just stared at him in disbelief. I chuckled as I walked away. I hope that guy never finishes another match in his life, unless it’s against me.
The next time you play Magic, pay attention to your mechanical habits. Be aware of how you draw cards, how you untap your lands, and how you play spells, and look for ways to do these things faster. This will give you extra time in tournament matches to do important things like finish three games and actually think about plays.
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