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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An Easy Way to Play Faster
Tim Aten on Winning PTQs
How to Play a Spell
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.
Related Articles:
Tim Aten on Winning PTQs
How to Play a Spell
Why Standard Operating Procedure Matters in Magic
About a month ago, Kyle Sanchez wrote an article about winning a PTQ. He asked a bunch of good players what it took to win one, and they all said some things that were useful. Tim Aten’s answer, however, was really interesting:
Basically, there are two ways to win a PTQ:
1) It’s just “your day”… you’re an at least reasonable player and you just happen to bring you’re A-Game that day, little bit of luck, etc.
2) You just outpower the field by so much between your playskill and deck choice that it’d be hard for you to lose.
You could replace “PTQ” with “tournament”, and this would still work. It’s really hard to play horribly and still win a tournament of any reasonably large size. Obviously it is possible, but it’s very unlikely. Therefore, someone who wins a tournament probably deserved it. However, Tim has just told us that there are two ways to deserve it. You can either be “reasonable”, or you can “outpower” everyone. Let’s call these category 1 and category 2 wins.
I can think of tournaments that I have won that that were these different types of wins. At Pro Tour Las Angeles, I scrubbed out of day one. I was depressed, but there was a PTQ the next day, so I stole Ben Peebles-Mundy’s list, changed the mana base and added Dark Confidants five minutes before the player meeting, and then somehow managed to 10-0-2 a 200-player tournament to qualify for Honolulu. As far as I can remember I played very well all day, and I won from some unreal situations that included beating a red-white-green Astral Slide deck that had Renewed Faith, Loxodon Hierarch, and sideboarded Circle of Protection: Red and winning game three on the draw against affinity after mulliganing to a hand of 3 Mountain, 3 Pillage. It took some nice draws and some lucky opponent mistakes to get out of those situations. I would put this tournament win squarely in category 1. I was a reasonable player with a reasonable deck, and I got a little lucky in the top eight to have Rasmus Sibast and Yann Hamon, both playing Heartbeat of Spring combo, lose in the top eight before I had to play them. That matchup would have been near-unwinnable, but I dodged them and I got to go to Hawaii anyway. Lucky me.
Contrast this with the PTQ I won for Valencia. That tournament had only sixty players, and almost everyone who I consider to be a threat at a PTQ was off at US Nationals that weekend. My deck was also two weeks ahead of the rest of the room; I was playing a Teachings deck I had gotten from Gerry Thompson that included Gaea’s Blessing, which is just amazing in that deck but no one else had it at the time. I won quasi-mirrors with Blessings easily, and everyone else in the room had bad versions of reasonable decks or just plain bad decks. The only time that I was in danger of not winning was the third game against Eric Taylor, where he overextended to try to kill me immediately when I had nothing and I topdecked a Damnation. If he hadn’t played out his hand, I still would have had to Damnation and then I would have died two turns later. My other matches weren’t close. Between my deck being awesome and my skill level compared to the rest of the room, I think that it would have been hard for me to not win that tournament. This win was category two.
These categories can guide you as you prepare for a tournament. Assuming that you will win the tournament, figure out what it would take for you to have considered it a category two win. Then, do those things. Even at a Pro Tour, you might think to yourself that it takes a lot of luck to outright win, but I don’t think this is entirely true. A few examples of players whose decks were just miles beyond those of the rest of the field are Gadiel Szleifer from Pro Tour Philadelphia and Tommi Hovi at Pro Tour Rome. If you asked Gadiel or Tommi about those tournaments, I don’t think they would attribute many of their wins at those tournaments to just having a reasonable deck and being lucky, and you probably shouldn’t either. You’ll win a lot more often if you don’t need luck’s help to do it, so get out there and make it hard for you to not win tournaments. You’ll win them more often that way.