I have been offered a weekly column at StarCityGames.com. Due to my first deadline’s imminence, it’s unlikely that I’ll get another piece up on here for a couple of days. In the meantime, check Star City on Tuesday!
In other news, my cube list has been updated. The cube grew to 720 cards this time, and each color has its own list page now because the huge list was getting unwieldy. I’ll eventually get around to talking about the changes, but I’m not sure when that will be. In the meantime, happy cubing.
Magic players worry a lot about their deck. Whenever things get shaken up by a new format becoming important, the results from a major tournament, or a set release, suddenly no one really knows what decks are the best and people start looking for guidance. Conveniently, tons of articles appear about what deck are good, what decks are bad, and what deck you should play. A casual observer of Magic would have the impression that your deck choice is by far the most important thing you do when you play. I’m here to tell you the opposite. Your deck choice doesn’t matter.
This is an obviously hyperbolic statement; of course your deck choice matters, since it is the cards you play with. However, I think your deck matters in a very different way than most people think it does. It’s tempting to begin exploring of a format by searching for what Adam Prosak calls a “seventy-five card Jesus”- that one specific pile of cards that will take a player to fame, glory, and prizes. However, that deck does not exist. There are reasonable decks, and there are bad decks, but most of the time there is no one deck that will solve all of your problems.
Think of a deck as you would a weapon. Even if you spent years building a perfect sword, you would not walk up to an enemy, show him your perfect sword, and expect him to simply agree that your sword was better and then let you kill him with it. You still have to use that sword to defeat him using his weapon. Magic works the same way. You and your opponent both bring a deck, and then you fight with them. It is true that you will have no chance to win if your deck is hopelessly bad; even the most expert swordsman is drawing dead against a gun. However, the rewards for having the best deck as opposed to a good deck are often very small, and quite regularly they are not nearly as great as the rewards for being an expert with the deck you choose.
When you choose a deck for a constructed tournament, you should be looking for a “reasonable” deck. This means that you aren’t looking for the “best” deck. You’re looking for a deck that is “good enough” to win a tournament with. It may be hard to to tell if something is good enough, but it’s easy to tell if it isn’t. If a deck is markedly underpowered compared to the rest of the field, has an unwinnable matchup against a deck that is very popular, is completely hated out by sideboard cards that people are already playing, or loses to itself too often, it’s not good enough. You’re only looking for problems that would cause you to have no shot at winning the tournament. Don’t climb for the peak of the mountain; just make sure you don’t fall into any holes.
When I approach constructed formats, I try to go through all of the available decks and identify problems with each deck. If I can’t find a glaring problem with a deck, then I see it as being reasonable. This may leave you with only one deck, or it may leave you with a ton. If there’s only one deck left, play that one, but be aware that you’re probably wrong that there’s only one reasonable deck. If there are a lot, pick your favorite and that’s fine. Formats almost always have four or five reasonable decks, so you won’t be limited in your choices most of the time. If a format is completely new, you’ll have no choice but to figure this out on your own. If it’s not new and you don’t want to put in the work yourself, look at tournament results, find something that has top eighted a lot, and just play it. If a lot of people are winning with it, it’s probably good enough to win with.
I would go so far as to say that at this moment, your deck matters less than it ever has in Magic’s history. This is because Wizards now designs sets with flatter card power curves. In Mirrodin and Kamigawa, the cards that were good were overwhelmingly better than the cards that were bad. If you didn’t show up to a Mirrodin block tournament with an affinity deck, you were drawing close to dead. If you brought something other than Gifts to a Kamigawa block tournament, you weren’t drawing dead but you were at a definite disadvantage. On the other hand, Ravnica and Time Spiral block have comparably flat card power curves. Pro Tour Charleston showed that Ravnica block constructed had something on the order of a hundred reasonable decks, if you could even distinguish between them all. Time Spiral block had at least four in Teachings, Pickles, Predator, and blue-green. I would argue that by the end of the season Teachings and blue-green were obviously better than the other two, but you could argue back at me that all four of those decks won PTQs and top eighted Grand Prixes and you’d be right. Any of those four decks gave you a shot at winning any given Time Spiral block tournament, so as long as you brought one of them you weren’t dead in the water.
The flatter the card power curve is, the less your deck matters. Since there are a large number of reasonable decks in any modern format, you can just bring one of them and be secure in the knowledge that you won’t be too far behind anyone on deck. Similarly, the closer together all the good decks are in power level, the more your skill level with a deck matters when you are choosing decks. It’s not hard to imagine that you might be so good with one of a format’s reasonable decks that even if you know it isn’t the best one, you still should play it because your increased skill level with the worse deck makes up for more than the deck power difference.
Going even further with this logic, if the decks in a format are close enough in power, it could actually be wrong to try to pick the best one. In that case, it might be better to just pick one and practice a ton with it so that you gain on skill with your deck. I think that Time Spiral Block constructed was this kind of format. With one exception, every reasonable PTQ player I know and can think of who just picked a deck and sat on it eventually qualified, while not everyone who bounced around did. I chose to ally myself with Teachings. I played in three PTQs; I X-2′d the first, top eighted the second, and won the third. I don’t really think of myself as being an exceptionally skilled player, but the combination of me, my deck, and a month of practice with that combination meant that by the time I won the PTQ it was close to inevitable that I would win one eventually.
Here’s another reality check. The great majority of Magic players don’t play in tournaments that are more competitive than PTQ’s. I would guess that most players don’t even regularly play at that level. This means that most of the time your average tournament player plays tournament Magic, they’re at a local event. To be frank, the competition at that level is not very sophisticated. Some people will bring pet decks and homebrews, others will think their deck is reasonable and be wrong, and still others play a deck that they know is bad with a smile expecting to lose. Those who do bring reasonable decks will probably have outdated versions. There will be card access problems. If you bring a reasonable deck into such a world, you’re already ahead, so it doesn’t really matter which one you bring. Just bring one of them, and play well enough that you don’t give up the hopefully large advantage you’ll have from your deck.
There is one caveat: really high levels of play can make your deck matter. At Grand Prixes, your deck kind of matters. If you’re winning, you’re going to play at least ten to twelve rounds, and the last of them are going to be against the world’s top players. Your skill advantage against those players is going to be either reduced or nonexistent, so your deck becomes a much more important way to differentiate yourself from the rest of the field. At a Pro Tour, your deck is very important because those conditions begin in round one. By the end of the tournament if you’re winning, you’re playing against the best players in the world bar none. Even if you are one of them, you’re going to need an exceptionally good deck to be competitive because everyone else is as good as you and everyone else got to the top tables at least partially because of their deck and not their play skill.
I think that most Magic players worry too much about the deck they bring and not enough about knowing how to play it. Your deck obviously matters somewhat, but as long as you bring a reasonable deck you won’t have a hopeless matchup against anyone. Because there usually isn’t a big difference between the power levels of a format’s reasonable decks, you’re probably better served by learning to play one of them well than figuring out which of them is best. Choose your weapon, practice, and go to the tournament confident that you know how to wield it.
Mike Flores’ article last week on Star City about how to win a PTQ (It’s premium (which you should already have!)) was absolutely spectacular. You should go read it. He riffed off the same Tim Aten quote that I riffed off of here, but his take on it was a little different than mine.
One of the things that he obviously felt the strongest about was that to win a PTQ, you had to feel like nothing in the world could possibly stop you. If you don’t believe that the tournament is yours before it starts, you won’t do as well. I initially disagreed with that, because there are always things that are not under your control. I thought it was more accurate and reasonable to think that there wasn’t anyone in the room that you could imagine yourself losing to. However, I remembered something that made me reconsider what the most useful thing to believe actually is.
The last PTQ I played in was in Cleveland, Ohio during the same weekend as US Nationals. When I sat down for the player meeting, I looked around at all the other players in the room and decided that there was no one there I could possibly imagine losing to. I wanted to do something to express that externally, so I changed the deck name on my deck list to “Shotgun” and showed it to a friend, who was seated next to me. He was a bit miffed, saying that that was arrogant. I asked him to look around the room and tell me who I should be worried about, and then told him that I was winning the tournament.
Everything went smoothly during the swiss, and I was paired against Eric Taylor in the quarterfinals. Before we started the match, we chatted about life, Magic, and eventually winning PTQs. Eric told me that his view was that you just have to make a lot of top eights and then eventually get lucky. I immediately thought to myself “you’re dead wrong. The right person usually wins the PTQ top eight too, and that is why I’m about to crush you.” Of course, I didn’t say that- I think I said something like “I’d have to think about that for a while.” However, I didn’t want him to think about it any more; I was quite happy to have him thinking that he needed to get lucky.
I was playing Teachings control, while Eric was playing blue-green pickles. We split games one and two. On the pivotal turn of game three, he attacked me with a Mystic Snake and a Riftwing Cloudskate to put me to eight. I had two lands in my hand and six lands in play, and a single Mystical Teachings in my graveyard. Eric had two cards in hand, and after a long think played them both- a morph and another Riftwing Cloudskate. This meant that I had to topdeck or I was dead. Happily, I drew the Damnation, he didn’t draw threats for a while, and I had time to dig for gas with Mystical Teachings for Careful Consideration, so I eventually won.
Who was right during the before-match discussion? From Eric’s perspective, he was right. If I don’t draw the Damnation, I die and he moves on. If I do, he is left with nothing. There’s nothing he can do about that, so for him this was just one of the top eights he wasn’t destined to win.
However, I think Eric should not have played out the two extra creatures. If he plays nothing, he still has me on a two turn clock, and I still have to topdeck to win. I could flash back the Teachings to get a Slaughter Pact to kill one of his two guys, but then half of my mana is locked down next turn and he can just play more guys after that before I have to pay the upkeep. If he plays one additional creature immediately, then I’m on a two turn clock still, but it’s harder for me to topdeck my way out other than a Damnation. If he had held his two creatures, he would have won that game. It took me three turns after the Damnation to find more action, but I had enough time for that because he didn’t have any threats. Therefore, from my end, it looks like I was right- Eric misplayed, so I won.
In the end, we were both right, but only for ourselves. One might guess that Eric’s fatalistic view about what it takes to win the top eight was what led him to settle for playing out his extra creatures. If he had to get lucky to win, that was just about as good a situation to roll the dice as any that ever happens in a game. I had three Damnations left in about forty cards, so he wins most of the time. However, were roles reversed, my perspective would have encouraged me to figure out how to leave as little to chance as possible. Because of that, I’m certain that I would not have played the two creatures; I think he wins nearly all the time if he keeps them in reserve.
I did in fact end up winning the tournament. After all, that’s how shotgunning works, right?
The point here isn’t really that Eric or I are fundamentally correct; we were both right for ourselves. The important thing is that it is more useful to convince yourself that nothing can stop you from winning. People who believe that it is their divine right to win a tournament will work a lot harder to make it happen, and that makes it happen more often. Even if that’s never the case, any edge you can get is worth taking. Believe that you are indestructible; you’ll be wrong, but you’ll be more motivated to do what it takes to win.
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