Patience wins the race

Here’s a video of a pretty close match from Round 1 of a Dark Ascension 8-4 draft.  All three games had some pretty interesting situations where I wasn’t quite sure what to do; Game 1 was a strange situation where giving up a small material advantage for damage led to an earlier win than if I had played what appears to be more optimally and held back, Game 2 was a game where the line of play that led to the faster win ended up being very risky and costing me the game, and Game 3 was a game where I chose to play around a known trick in his deck that could have killed me if he had it.  Here’s a link to the deck for reference.

Game 1

Coffee is for closers only

I left Seattle feeling pretty good about the level of Magic I was playing compared to the beginning of the year, about when I started writing again.  I fired up Magic Online on Saturday night to draft some DKA-INN-INN, and got three drafts in.  I made the finals of my first two drafts, and I probably should have made the finals of my last draft too, if I had taken the opportunity to close Game in multiple spots.

Limited lessons learned in Seattle

It had been a while since I had prepared and participated in a big Magic tournament, and my return to my former home base of Seattle for the Grand Prix didn’t disappoint me.  My preparation consisted of an entire day of drafting at Card Kingdom (while reuniting with old friends), a few Magic Online sealed release queues, and a couple late night MODO drafts as well.  I wasn’t winning a whole lot on Magic Online, so I didn’t feel super good going into the weekend, but was hoping to figure it out and learn some things during the trials.

The Friday of the Grand Prix Trial grinders for three-round byes were, on paper, a rousing failure.  -$90 and an overall record of 2-3.  Fortunately, I did learn a lot about where I want to be positioned in the format.  The matches I lost were the ones where I was on the back foot tempo-wise and I was simply trying to stabilize against aggressive starts.  One of my pools presented two different decks: an aggressive GW decks, and a slower UW deck with Drogskol Captain and lots of fliers to take advantage of it.  (Both were going to feature Geist-Honored Monk.)  I went with the UW because I thought it was more powerful, and it had some card draw.  After failing to grind it out against another UW deck and after multiple friends looked at my pool, I saw the error of my ways.  The way I saw it, you had two options in the format: 1) B-E aggressive, or 2) Effectively neutralize the aggressive decks with cheap removal and tempo spells.

The deck I played in the main event on Saturday ended up being an aggressive GW deck with Travel Preparations, splashing Blue for Geist of Saint Traft and for flashing back Feeling of Dread and Tracker’s Instinct.  The deck wasn’t super exciting if it didn’t curve out, and there were quite a few games where I lost to my mana.  But everyone I showed the deck too thought it was the best build, if a little unexciting.

GP Round 8

I’m playing against a RB deck.  I made two interesting decisions: I had a Thraben Heretic and a Selfless Cathar against his Pyreheart Wolf.  I decided to make a pretty cute play of battling trading my Selfless Cathar with his Pyreheart Wolf by removing it from the game with the Heretic with Undying on the stack.  I guess this play was okay because I wouldn’t have to worry about it becoming a 2/2 if I do it now, which leaves me free to battle with my 2/2, but it’s possible I could have actually gotten value out of Selfless Cathar later in the game.  Looking back on the play, it was probably a fine trade.

The critical play was after that: I played a Turn 3 Butcher’s Cleaver.  The next turn I played a fourth land and had a Thraben Sentry and a Hunger of the Wolfpack.  I chose to go for the Butcher’s Cleaver equip, hoping that he had Fires of Undeath and that I would get to blow him out with the Hunger of the Wolfpack.  He instead had a Victim of Night and Time Walked my Turn 4, but it could have been a Tribute to Hunger or Brimstone Volley instead.  All I saw was the one situation that I could cover and how sweet I thought it would be to get him again.

The rest of the game, he had removal for every creature I had and I ran out of gas and couldn’t deal with his threats.  It was an embarrassing play and I can’t believe I didn’t evaluate the risks properly and only saw the situation where the trick in my hand had value.  It may have partly been due to me thinking my opponent was weaker and that, since he was weaker, he would walk into my trick.  This reasoning is absurd, and no good Magic player should ever think like this.

There were other games where I made mistakes: Round 3 I misevaluated the line I went down, and Round 4 I played pretty loosely and only got away with the match because of Feeling of Dread in both of the games I won.  I ended up dying in Round 8 and finishing the tournament at 6-3.

—

On Sunday, I played in the Cardhaus $3K Challenge, which was also Sealed.  I played a similar deck: a UW deck splashing Black for two Tragic Slips and a Dead Weight and a similar mana split to my Grand Prix deck.  The deck was slightly slower than my Grand Prix deck, but I had tempo spells like Silent Departure and Chant of the Skifsang to let me cast my card draw spells and win with fliers or Thraben Doomsayer.

Cardhaus Round 6

I was 5-0, making this a win-and-in for me.  In Game 1, I had been bashing my BR opponent down with a lone 1/1 Spirit token, and had some 1/1 Human tokens and other dorks on the ground.  He built his board up with some bigger threats but could not efficiently attack.  When he was at 1, I still had my flier, a creature for each blocker he had, and two extra creatures.  My line was that he might have one removal spell, so I’ll attack with one extra guy.  He could have two removal spells, but it’s unlikely since he wouldn’t have taken 1 from my token all this time.  I make my attack.

He then plays Geistflame.  And flashes it back of course.  I lost my entire team except the 1/1 token I left back, with no gas behind me.  I lost the game from 20 life after that.

I forgot that Geistflame was a card.  The lesson?  Know the ‘ledge.  Be cognizant of every card in the format.  I don’t know what I could have done except be able to run a checklist of what the tricks are in the format as opposed to just generalize that, for instance, every removal spell is a 1-for-1.

I did find a pretty sweet interaction with Griptide in the second game.  My opponent had a flipped Kruin Outlaw.  On my turn 5 he had an Evolving Wilds up, and I had the choice of using all my mana for Murder of Crows, or I could Griptide his guy in response to his Evolving Wilds.  I tanked a little bit and said go.  He twiddled his land a little bit and I was afraid I somehow gave away my play, but he did crack it, and my line was paid off.  To the judges reading: could he have chosen not to search and not shuffle if he wanted to Strip Mine himself but draw his guy back?

Cardhaus Round 8

In Game 3 of the last round, I mulliganed and was facing down an Olivia.  I had a window where I had a Murder of Crows on the table, and an Abbey Griffin and Spare from Evil in hand.  The Murder of Crows had already been pinged, so Olivia could steal it for five mana, so I knew I could block with it.  Then I thought about the Abbey Griffin in my hand, and made the jump that I could block with Abbey Griffin.  So obviously I should attack with Murder of Crows to get damage in!  Down comes Abbey Griffin, and on his end step he shoots Abbey Griffin twice.  Oops, I mixed up the plans I was considering!  I was way behind that game, but it still upset me that I failed to execute the better of the plans I was considering.  I was already tanking a lot, but maybe before I do anything, I need to walkthrough exactly what I will do and what my opponent will do so that I don’t mess it up.  I guess this just takes practice.

After starting 5-0 in the tournament, I ended at 6-2 and outside of the Top 16.  Somehow my tiebreakers were still quite bad, which might explain why I was able to win so many matches with another mediocre deck.

I felt good about the weekend because there were moments where I was playing good Magic, and the moments where I wasn’t I was able to identify what went wrong and how I can fix it.  I’m also glad that after Friday I was able to evaluate what I wanted to do in the Sealed format and was able to apply it when I opened two mediocre decks.  I’ve got an itch to keep playing Magic, but I can’t decide if I want to jump into preparing for an upcoming PTQ, or if I want to keep putting my head down on Magic Online and working on my game on my own.  At the risk of sounding a little results-oriented, I left Seattle liking and feeling better about Magic than I did heading up there.

:wq! fourouttheforty

Mastery

Have you ever thought you were really good at something, or even just competent, and then you talk to other people and realize that you’re nowhere close to the level you thought you were or the level you want to be at?

I watched the Pro Tour Dark Ascension Top 8 with my draft group in New York.  They were talking and discussing lines during Jon Finkel’s games so quickly, that I could hardly process what was going on fast enough to say anything meaningful.  By the time I could form what I thought the play should be, it had already been dismissed by the group.  I generally have this problem when people talk strategy (tactics I’m generally okay).  It’s no surprise that I am the worst player in my group.

Every time I have played with Cedric Philips, he’ll sit behind me and tell me how a decision I made or a line I went down was wrong in every way possible.  He’ll ask me questions about what I was trying to do, and I either can’t answer him (because I didn’t have a plan and was just trying to play for immediate value), or my plan was infinitely worse than his line.  I feel like an absolute scrub whenever he critiques me (critique that I value, make no mistake).  Cedric takes down PTQ’s when he supposedly “quits” Magic.

At dinner recently, my old friend Zaiem Beg discussed what he thought “knowing the format” was: knowing what every deck’s plan was, what they cared about, what they could do against you.  Others have simply called being at that level “knowing what your opponent was going to do before he did it”.  He relayed to me all his PTQ and Regionals results when he had put the work in to get to that point: nothing less than an X-2, including four or five Top 8′s, and two PTQ wins.  I honestly have never felt that way, I only have formats where I had a deck I liked and knew close to inside-out.  I used to think we were the same level skill-wise.

The 10,000 hour rule (it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something) only applies when you are doing deep, meaningful practice.  You could play 10,000 hours of Magic, but if you’re not working at getting better, it’s possible to just get really good at rules lawyering, or tapping and handling your cards, or many things that are irrelevant to winning.  I have met people who have played for a very long time, carry themselves like veterans, but are awful.  I feel like I have wasted my early years of playing Magic concentrating on acquiring cardboard, or learning rules and angle-shooting.  I tried testing Constructed by myself, but it was only successful when there wasn’t much interaction between the decks, and even then it was a more of learning “if card X, then card Y” learning by rote type thing and not at an abstract level that I could apply in other formats (hence me being pretty bad at Limited starting out).

Now that I am an adult with other responsibilities, the possibility of getting to PTQ-winning level may have gone by.  If only I had focused on what mattered from the beginning…

Drafting in Seattle, Day 1

First full day back in Seattle, the place of the first three years of my adult life, and what do we do?  Draft!  Here’s a quick recap of how our 3 vs. 3 team draft went.

I started out in Dark Ascension taking the 2/2 Blue flyer with undying and the guy that removes guys from graveyard to make zombies in Dark Ascension and then a Scorned Villager.  This plan went south when not only did the player feeding me take a Soul Seizer that would have gotten to me fifth, but the player that was feeding him took a Scorned Villager.  I needed to find a different combination.  I had just shipped a Tragic Slip fourth, so I wanted to avoid Black, and I hadn’t seen any solid White cards, and the player three from me was representing Red, snatching up Hinterland Hermits. It seemed reasonable to make that my second color and see what happens with the rest.  Turns out I managed to get back an Immerwolf to go with my Young Wolf and Scorned Villager, so I was going to cross my fingers and hope RG was open.

Packs two and three I started snatching up Werewolves for the rest of the table to see, so RG was going to happen.  My only concern was that the Green might dry up in the third pack, but that player two to my right focused on taking more White cards.  A few people after the draft seemed grumpy about their decks, and they pointed out that I was the one who wasn’t because I decided not to fight for colors.  Here’s the deck, with a Kessig Wolf Run not pictured:

Last cut was a Somberweld Spider over a Furor of the Bitten.  The deck has lots of creatures, and just wants to attack, so it seemed reasonable.

I ended up going 2-1.  I didn’t think I played well in my first match, messing up counting up P/T and making trades that I thought were two-for-ones.  I also messed up with Kessig Wolf Run, not doing it for the max.  It was three damage I missed, and he stabilized at four life with a Geistflame in my graveyard.  He nearly pulled it out because of my misplay.

The match I lost I was in a situation where he had Severed the Bloodline one of my guys and I didn’t know whether I should just run out the guys off the top of my deck or wait for a second guy.  This was made more complicated when he matched a Kessig Wolf I finally decided to play with his own Kessig Wolf.  I held back a guy while he built his board up, and then blew me out with a Forge Devil.  Turns out there was no advantage to me holding back a man so that he couldn’t Sever, at least that’s what my friends watching told me.  Derf.

Tomorrow I arranged for all day drafting at Card Kingdom/Cafe Mox/”the Magic bar”, and I think we will be flooding the crap out of the store.  More decks tomorrow!

You Make The Play: Dark Ascension prerelease edition!

DISCLAIMER - PLEASE comment or let me know if my analysis of the lines is bad.  This kind of stuff is one of the worst things I do, and the only way I know how to get better at it is to buckle down and try to analyze what the best technical play is, until 1) I can do it correctly, and 2) I can do it quickly/easily.  This blog (and my interest in Magic) is about improvement, so I’ll accept any critique.

I played in some Dark Ascension prereleases this weekend because I’m an addict and really want to get some Sealed practice in with the new cards for Grand Prix Seattle.  Sorry Ted Knutson, but I’m aware I am eating the negative EV.  Cocaine’s a hell of a drug, though.

I was going through the videos of my games and came across this situation where I thought me made a weird play, and then going back over I realized that I should have deliberated way more than I did when I played the game.  I’m presenting this combat situation that might be trivial to people better than me, but certainly wasn’t when I thought about it afterwards.

Here’s the deck:

And here’s the board after my draw step:

What’s my line here?

A game of inches

In my favorite Magic article ever (required reading for anyone who wants to start getting better at Magic, and a worthy exercise), Sam Stoddard attributes a quote to Bill Stark: “Magic is a game of inches. I want to inch forward.”  Here’s a video of a the finals of an 8-4 that looked pretty hopeless, but I’m pretty sure there are some inches to be gained from it.

Here’s the deck.

And here’s the video.  I’m just going to talk about the points that I saw where I could have played a little differently, so you’ll have to watch the games to figure out what I’m talking about.

Game 1

After he transforms, I think I should have chumped with Test Subject.  I had to make it three more turns so my Stalker could get there, and if I don’t draw a White source with the line I took, I wouldn’t have gotten there.  If he had a two drop in hand, I probably lose unless I draw a White source (and it’s probably grimmer than before).  However, I think chumping gives me the only way to win if I don’t draw that white.

Regardless, I don’t know if I would have beaten Bloodline Keeper the next turn, though.

Game 2

After Curse of Death’s Hold, I had no idea how I was going to win this game.   I could have attacked, and I don’t know if he would have double blocked with a Vampire token and Lantern Spirit.  He would have gone to 8 if he did, and it’s possible I could blow him out with a removal or pump spell.  He also has four cards in hand, so presumably lots of gas behind him.  If he does call my bluff, I don’t think I can come back with no gas in my hand.

I Alchemy’d digging for one of my two Harvest Pyres or Fiend Hunter but I whiffed.  I don’t think I can win if I don’t deal with the Bloodline Keeper, and I had to bounce Bloodline Keeper so that it didn’t go ultimate and blow me out.  I did however pick up the wrong land for no particular reason, so I couldn’t flashback Alchemy with Shimmering Grotto.

I think I had to make the bluff with Militia to make the game tougher for him.  But I never wanted to attack because he could trade with my guys at no cost because of Bloodline Keeper, and still crack back at me with his 5/5 and other fliers.  I just kept playing conservatively, and I guess I didn’t evaluate that I really was out of the game and needed to take a risk.  This game was really tough, and I think I gave away some inches and could have put him in a much tougher position.

So what do you think?  Leave a comment here or on Facebook and help me out!

:wq! fourouttheforty!