Play Magic With Tom LaPille

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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