Reading Magic articles online to excess will make you a worse player. Forget for a moment that you’re, well, reading a Magic article; you’ll feel better in a minute and that was hyperbole anyway. What I really mean is this: there exist many Magic articles on the internet that will at best keep you from getting better and at worst actively make you worse. There are a few that will genuinely help you, but most will not. Recognizing what of value is contained in each article you read will make sure that you are not fooled by bad information or made lazy by reliance on others for your ideas.
There is an old proverb that goes something like this: give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a day; teach him to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime. When the majority of Magic players go to the internet for Magic strategy, they are just looking for fish. They want the hot new decklist from the last big tournament or the hot new deck idea from a high-profile player. They will mindlessly copy it, maybe change a few cards, and then take it to a tournament without worrying too much about it. These things will not make them better players, and will probably make them lazy. Why would they need to come up with their own deck ideas or learn to tune existing decks if they can just copy things? This can also apply to strategies as well. Reading an article about a draft archetype and then using it at your next draft may make you feel like you have gotten better at limited, but that only helps you until the next set comes out. If you’re focused on executing a strategy you read on the internet, you won’t think creatively in ways that will let you find things people haven’t written about.
Because most Magic players only want fish, Magic content sites are happy to run lots of articles every week that present you with lots of them. Sometimes you might get a whole basket of fried cod with a lemon and tartar sauce when someone writes a comprehensive format overview. A pro player fresh off of a big successful constructed tournament could give you a delicious dinner of blackened mahi mahi. However, most of the time you’re getting a raw and unprocessed fish.
If you want to legitimately get better at Magic, you need to find, read, and treasure articles that teach you how to fish. Most players have no interest in learning how to fish, so these are relatively rare. Very early Mike Flores and Eric Taylor articles on The Dojo had incredible idea density, but Eric has stopped writing and Mike has degenerated into a veritable fish vending machine. The majority of Zvi Mowshowitz’s body of work is solid gold exactly because refused to simply hand out fish. If he had to give out a fish, he tried really hard to get readers thinking about how it was caught and prepared. I still learn things when I read Zvi’s Star City articles from 2005. These days, I look forward to reading Zac Hill and Richard Feldman every week on Star City, but most other articles I read don’t teach me anything. This isn’t because I’m especially good at Magic; it’s because there is nothing I can learn by reading them.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t read things that don’t teach you anything of long-term value. The first reason you might do that is that you enjoy it. I do too, and that’s what keeps me reading. If I sense that I don’t have anything to learn from an article, I turn off the Magic strategy part of my brain and just enjoy the ride instead. The second reason is to learn what the unwashed masses are reading and copying. When Mike Flores posts a deck, people do listen and copy it. It behooves you to know what is getting copied by the world. There are no other good reasons to read these articles.
If you use Magic strategy articles to gather fish instead of to learn fishing techniques, you will hit a plateau. Depending on the internet for your decks means that you won’t move past what the rest of the world has, and that means you can’t get an advantage with your deck. The best constructed players are always a week or two ahead of the rest of the world, and that is why they win tournaments. Those players don’t get their information from articles; they just make better decks, or make decks better. A good example of this was Gerry Thompson in Time Spiral block season. He was the first person to put Coalition Relics in teachings, and he won a trip to Spain with a Teachings deck that had Take Possessions in the maindeck to beat up on other Teachings decks. The next weekend, he gave his friends a Teachings deck that was prepared for opposing Take Possessions. The next weekend, his deck had lost the Take Possessions and gained a maindeck Venser and Gaea’s Blessings to win long games against other Teachings decks. I won my PTQ for Spain with that iteration of the deck. Every weekend, his Teachings deck was one step ahead of everyone else’s and it kept winning PTQs for people. He could never have gotten those lists from an article. It’s also unlikely that he learned how to make them from reading articles.
The only way to learn to make good decks without a net is to try it yourself. You’ll learn something even if your idea is bad as long as you can identify exactly why it was bad. Another way to learn is to look at decks played by players you respect. You can learn a ton about what someone thinks about certain cards just by looking at their decklist. The second part of my Valencia Post-Mortem is an example of this. I didn’t understand why Enduring Ideal was the right combination deck for Extended until I saw Andre Mueller’s three Forms of the Dragon and Solitary Confinements, and that taught me that just drawing and playing enchantments was actually a valid plan for him. Someone who just looked at the decklist and shrugged would probably not have seen that.
Similarly, the best way to get better at limited is to just draft a lot and try things. There are even fewer realistically helpful limited articles out there on the internet than there are constructed articles, which is to say that there are almost none. Nick Eisel is good for opening your mind to new ideas, but many players I know think that he is just crazy. Since there isn’t any good information, the only way you’re going to learn anything that will give you an advantage is to get out there and draft for yourself and be aware while doing it. You might not win a lot at first, but if you keep your eyes wide open and try to figure out why you win and lose, then you’ll learn more than anyone can from reading. One exception to this is the “Drafting With X” series that Star City runs sporadically. These give you crystal-clear windows into the minds of the best drafters in the world, and you’ll learn a lot by following along with their drafts and then trying to understand where and why they differ from you. When that happens, they’re usually right. Don’t fight it; just learn from them.
It is true that stock ideas can take you part of the way if you are not good enough to catch your own fish or you don’t have time to go fishing. For example, Sam Stoddard, Adam Yurchick and I copied a full 225 cards from a previous PTQ winning squad for a team standard Pro Tour Qualifier. We were arguably the team with the highest skill level in the room, so our decks were good enough to win that PTQ without much competition. That only worked because we had such a skill advantage. At a Pro Tour, we probably wouldn’t have won a single match with our stock decks because no one would have been punting matches to us by playing badly and having terrible decks. I would never have been able to win a constructed PTQ with an average deck in 2004, since I wasn’t that good of a player. It took a huge deck advantage in the form of Vial Affinity to put me in striking distance of Mirrodin block PTQ wins. If you aren’t good enough to make your own ideas, copying an obviously good deck may be the best move you can make. Being able to admit that is not a sign of weakness, but you will never become exceptional if you don’t move past this phase.
In order to get better at Magic by reading articles, you need to be constantly conscious of what each article has to offer you and be careful to take away as many big ideas as you can from each one. If you read articles just to gather fish, you’ll get lazy and you’ll never explore the deepest waters where the best fish can be caught. If you know that you can’t fish well enough on your own, don’t be afraid to take fish from those who can, but always be aware of where and how they caught that fish. If you want to succeed at Magic on a grand scale, you’re going to have to catch your own fish eventually, so just keep trying to learn and maybe someday I’ll be copying your deck for a PTQ when I don’t have time to get my own boat out of the garage.
Related Articles:
The Pre-Tournament Constructed Checklist
An Easy Way to Play Faster
Tim Aten on Winning PTQs
I thought that it was too late to finish the set review out, but I’m going to keep going because I’ve had a couple of requests. I’ve had a lot more experience with the cards before writing this than I did for blue and white, so my thoughts should be a little bit clearer. As before, I am only going to comment on things that I find comment-worthy.
Dread - 3BBB
Creature - Elemental Incarnation (Rare)
Fear
Whenever a creature deals damage to you, destroy it.
When Dread is put into a graveyard from anywhere, shuffle it into its owner’s library.
6/6
This is a really nice card. It’s very close to being a dragon with evasion and that body, but this is way more than just a dragon. Solar Flare decks in the past two standard formats were built around exactly this kind of creature. When Kamigawa was around, they used Kokusho and Yosei, who have big effects on the game even if they just die. After those rotated they featured Angel of Despair, Skeletal Vampire, and sometimes Akroma, who both play both offense and defense at the same time. This card comes from the latter school of good big creature. The built-in No Mercy means that racing a Dread is difficult if you have any kind of life total, and it’s big and evasive enough that a lot of people are going to have no choice but to try. The combination of its offensive and defensive strength is very reminiscent of Skeletal Vampire, and because of that I think this card is going places. This is one of the first places I’ll be looking if I build a black deck that wants to tap out for big stuff.
Dreamspoiler Witches - 3B
Creature - Faerie Wizard (Common)
Flying
Whenever you play a spell during an opponent’s turn, you may have target creature get -1/-1 until end of turn.
2/2
This card is a very nice subtle design. I think the best cards in terms of making for good Magic games are ones that are more interesting than bluntly powerful, and this card is very interesting. It’s obvious that you can just eat little guys with it, but then you might have occasion to use a Peppersmoke to eat a 2/2 or perhaps just play another Faerie and trade your 3/3 for your opponent’s 4/4. I also love that this card is a much more subtle implementation of the tribal theme. This is obviously a faerie card because of how many faeries have Flash, but it the lack of an explicit keying makes it feel a little less embarrassing to have it without friends and easier to make work with non-tribe aligned cards.
Exiled Boggart - 1B
Creature - Goblin Rogue (Common)
When Exiled Boggart is put into a graveyard from play, discard a card.
2/2
I don’t get it. I don’t think I could be paid to play with this card. The tension here isn’t even fun. A vanilla 2/2 is not worth this kind of punishment. I know the rule says that only green and white can get a Grizzly Bear, but I think it might be a bad rule. At this point we’ve seen a decent amount of green and white Grizzly Bears with extra abilities, like Ashcoat Bear, Woodland Changeling, and Kjeldoran Outrider. I don’t understand why black and red can’t get a simple grizzly bear if white and green get to go above and beyond that for 1C. Either way, this drawback is just uncalled for. Perhaps it could deal one damage to me if it died instead? I refuse to give him a full card.
Eyeblight’s Ending - 2B
Tribal Instant - Elf (Common)
Destroy target non-Elf creature.
This is a great little card that recently graduated from the Rend Flesh School of Cards That Are Awesome Out Of Block Context. Keep this in the back of your mind for any constructed format that isn’t Lorwyn Block. I’ve seen people forget that they can play cards like this in constructed, but you can and you probably won’t mind if you can actually afford three mana to kill a creature.
I have flavor issues with this card and the changelings. Imagine the following scenario. An elf winnower sees an Avian Changeling. It’s flying through the air, so it’s certainly not a natural elf. He therefore decides that the flying thing must be killed. He climbs into a tree to get in archery range, but it flies closer to him and takes the form of an elf with wings that hovers in the air. The winnower thinks to himself “Oh well, guess it was an elf after all. Good beats!” and then lets the thing go. This does not work for me. I think any reasonable elvish assassin would recognize the flying elf-thing in front of him as, you know, not an elf, and go ahead and take it out. I guess Lorwyn elves are as stupid as they are obsessed with beauty?
I may also just be bitter that I lost at the prerelease to someone who had a Mirror Entity and three Harbingers, and my deck’s only removal spells were two of these. It still strikes me as incredibly odd though. Moving on….
Fodder Launch - 3B
Tribal Sorcery - Goblin (Uncommon)
As an additional cost to play Fodder Launch, sacrifice a Goblin.
Target creature gets -5/-5 until end of turn. Fodder Launch deals 5 damage to that creature’s controller.
A good reason to play goblins, perhaps even in constructed. I don’t really know what to say other than that this card is one of the hardest-pushed tribal cards in the set. Five damage is an awful lot. If you open this in a draft, you now have a path to walk down.
Footbottom Feast - 2B
Instant (Common)
Put any number of target creature cards from your graveyard on top of your library.
Draw a card.
This is the kind of card that you want exactly one of in a limited deck. It’s reasonable early and is overwhelming if the game goes long and you get to draw real cards for four or five turns. Try to get one if you are black.
Knucklebone Witch - B
Creature - Goblin Shaman (Rare)
Whenever a Goblin you control is put into a graveyard from play, you may put a +1/+1 counter on Knucklebone Witch.
1/1
Wizards has spoken volumes about this card by putting it at rare. Your constructed goblin decks start with four. I don’t know if that goes anywhere, but much like Militia’s Pride this card is not supposed to be seen very often in limited and that decision would not have been made without reason.
Liliana Vess - 3BB
Planeswalker - Liliana (Rare)
+1: Target player discards a card.
-2: Search your library for a card, then shuffle your library and put that card on top of it.
-8: Put all creature cards in all graveyards into play under your control.
5
After watching some games this weekend, I have grown to appreciate just how silly the planeswalkers are. There are very few ways to actually kill one other than attacking, and that is easy to defend against. The problem with this one for me is that she doesn’t really do one thing well. Jace and Garruk broke into constructed in a big way at States, but they are both singlemindedly strong at doing what they do. Jace is going to draw a lot of cards and might accidentally mill someone; Garruk is going to either make an army or power an existing one over any defenses. Liliana is more of an enabler than a path of her own, and she seemed to be somewhat without a home. She is obviously insane in limited and worth putting in your cube, but she probably can’t take a game down for you singlehandedly.
Mad Auntie - 2B
Creature - Goblin Shaman (Rare)
Other Goblin creatures you control get +1/+1.
{T}: Regenerate another target Goblin.
2/2
I wonder sometimes whether having eight Goblin Kings and eight Elvish Champions in a format at once was a bad idea. I guess we’ll find out soon. Otherwise, play this blah blah goblin deck blah blah.
Makeshift Mannequin - 3B
Instant (Uncommon)
Return target creature from your graveyard to play with a mannequin counter on it. As long as that creature has a mannequin counter on it, it has “When this creature becomes the target of a spell or ability, sacrifice it.”
Instant speed reanimation is something that we haven’t seen in a long time. This drawback is rough, but you lose that in exchange for getting the ability to ambush people. Ambushing people is fun, so I support this decision. Perhaps for 3BB we could get this as an instant at uncommon without strings attached, and man would that be cool. It’s not nearly as much fun when a Prodigal Pyromancer can breathe on a giant monster fresh from the grave and it just crumbles to the ground.
Oona’s Prowler - 1B
Creature - Faerie Rogue (Rare)
Flying
Discard a card: Oona’s Prowler gets -2/-0 until end of turn. Any player may play this ability.
3/1
Don’t play this card without a way to discard cards for fun and profit or a way to have fun or profit when your opponent discards cards. By this, I mean that you should either reanimate things or cast The Rack. Minus two hundred points to your house if you were thinking about Megrim. The stats on this are impressive, but it’s too easy for people to just discard extra useless cards to it until it can be otherwise dealt with.
Profane Command - XBB
Sorcery (Rare)
Choose two - Target player loses X life; or return target creature card with converted mana cost X or less from your graveyard to play; or target creature gets -X/-X until end of turn; or up to X target creatures gain fear until end of turn.
This is a nice big splashy card that asks a lot of questions before you put it in a deck. Every effect here is very expensive for the price. Cryptic Command compares very reasonably to Repulse and Dismiss, but this one does not compare particularly well to Zombify, Last Gasp or Dirge of Dread. Another issue is that the white and blue commands are very cohesive. Austere Command is actually just Wrath of God worded in a very complicated way with some bonuses, and Cryptic Command’s abilities that all encourage you to sit back and play control. Profane Command doesn’t know what it wants you to do, and tries to do everything. To put this card in a constructed deck, it seems to me that you have to know that there are multiple modes that will have applications in most of your potential matchups and I’m not sure how often that will happen. In the interest of fairness, I have had colleagues tell me that this card is incredible. I am waiting to see that for myself, but I do not believe yet.
Design-wise, this card is awesome. It gives people tons of options and is very fun to actually play. It’s also in my cube, but I don’t think it necessarily belongs in your next constructed deck.
Shriekmaw - 4B
Creature - Elemental (Uncommon)
Fear
When Shriekmaw comes into play, destroy target nonartifact, nonblack creature.
Evoke {1}{B} (You may play this spell for its evoke cost. If you do, it’s sacrificed when it comes into play.)
3/2
This card is awesome, and is quietly one of the best creatures in the set. One and a black for Terror is baseline, and a 3/2 with fear is surprisingly large. I’ve been gaining an appreciation for simple cards that play really well, and this is one of my favorites in Lorwyn.
Thoughtseize - B
Sorcery (Rare)
Target player reveals his or her hand. Choose a nonland card from it. That player discards that card. You lose 2 life.
This card could probably have been uncommon. It’s not very complicated and I think it would be kind of cool in limited. My assumption is that Wizards needed a chase rare that had nothing to do with the tribal theme, and this got promoted. It’s definitely on the edge of being rare with the life loss, but this would have still been a chase card at uncommon. Mike Turian said in an interview that Wizards doesn’t set out to make cards worth forty dollars when asked about Tarmogoyf, but it sure seems to me like they were trying to make Thoughtseize worth twenty.
This aside, I think this card actually sucks in a lot of ways. Two life is a lot if you start drawing multiples, so I think you would be hard pressed to maindeck more than three of this in a format that has legitimate aggressive threats. It also gets worse as your mana base gets more painful, especially in extended with tons of Ravnica dual lands and fetchlands. This is not a card like Duress that you can just put in any deck, and for that I appreciate its design. You’ll put this in a deck when you need its effect, but the life loss should scare you away if you don’t really need it. I don’t expect that this card will hold its $25 price tag for that much longer because its applications aren’t universal.
The cool thing about Lorwyn’s black cards is that other than the tribe-aligned cards, it’s not obvious what we should do with them. Knucklebone Witch and Mat Auntie actually say “goblin” on them, so we know where they belong. The rest of the cards I’ve talked about for constructed are all powerful and interesting, but don’t have obvious homes. If you can find the right place for them, they will do good work for you. I’m no longer worried about Lorwyn being bad for Magic now that I have played with the set some more. The cards in this post are representative of the reasons for that. Tribal or not, Lorwyn has brought us another bunch of interesting cards that will give us interesting games. We can’t ask for anything more.
If you want me to focus on other things instead of finishing this, please let me know and I will.
Related Articles
Lorwyn White Commentary
Lorwyn Blue Commentary
Lorwyn Cube Update
