The only way to get better at Magic is to practice a lot. The best players are the ones who play a lot, and that’s not a coincidence. However, not practicing carefully can trick you into having the wrong impressions or keep you from learning new things once you hit a certain point. Adjusting the practice that you do based on what you already know will make sure that you get the right ideas and keep learning even after you know a lot.
One important kind of practice is when you don’t know anything at all, and you have to build knowledge from the ground up. This will happen when something big changes in a format, or you are just new to it. If you have to ask what decks are good, what deck to play, or what colors to draft, then you don’t have a clue, and that’s important to know. In this case, you should play a lot of games while making sure that you see all the angles of a format. If you’re practicing limited, try to draft different colors and archetypes every time you draft. If you’re practicing constructed, don’t play one matchup for twenty games; play ten matchups for two games each. Your goal isn’t to get deep knowledge of any one thing; it’s to build a complete picture of the format that allows you to tell what is generally important.
During this process, you want to be as open-minded as possible so you don’t miss anything that is generally important. For this reason, I tend to start my explorations of any format on Magic Online. If I pull a few friends together to draft or test, I’ll get insights from me and those few people. If I play in Magic Online 8-man queues, I’ll learn things from a random sample of people who play tournaments on Magic Online, who tend to be in the top echelon of players worldwide. Another problem is that when you “test”, there’s nothing on the line, so people don’t try as hard. When you have to pay to play and there are prizes on the line, everyone works harder because there is an actual reward to be had. Because of that, you get to see what your opponents really think is good, which is a great way to learn about what really is good. If you have to do early-stage constructed exploration in real life, make sure you have a ton of different decks around and don’t play one deck for more than a few games at once so that you keep a broad perspective.
Your goal in the early exploration phase is to develop a general idea about what is good. You’ll know that you’re done with this phase when you are thinking things like “Okay, I want to go back to playing with the good deck,” or “Why would he ever draft that card?” You don’t need to know everything, but you want a skeleton that will allow you to ask the right specific questions. You might also figure out that you know enough when you aren’t learning a lot from random games in tournaments. Playing too much of one deck, matchup, or draft strategy will cloud your thinking if you don’t have a big picture first.
The second kind of practice is when you want to answer specific questions. The more of a big picture you have, the more targeted the things you want to know will become, and the way you practice should change in response to that. As you learn more and more, you’ll find questions that you would have to be lucky to learn the answer to in a random game against a random deck. If you want to know which of two decks beats each other, you should just build those two decks and throw them against each other. If you want to know how to play a matchup with a deck, then play that matchup a lot. If you need to know how good a certain card is in some draft archetype, draft that archetype. The more you know, the more you’ll need to work to set up situations where you can keep learning, so be aware of when you stop learning from something and move on. You’ll never know everything there is to know about a format, but you can tell that you know a lot if your questions can get more and more specific to the point where you are obsessing over minute details like your last sideboard slot.
It’s important to be doing the right kind of practice because wrong practice can hold you back or trick you into making bad decisions. If you start testing a format by playing long sets of the same matchups, you’ll overrate cards and decks that are good against the matchups you played and you won’t learn much about what other strategies are possible. On the other hand, if you know what deck you want to play or draft but you just play a lot of games against random opponents, you might not learn how to beat your bad matchup or how to play properly against some fringe draft strategy that isn’t well known. Adjusting your practice methods based on what you know already will make sure that you use your practice time most efficiently.
