I spend a lot of time thinking.
Someone could even argue that my geometry teacher, Mrs. Richards, from middle school was right. The quote that often goes through my mind is "Someday, someone will pay you to sit in a room and think." While I also spend a lot of time working (computer programming often requires a lot of thinking as well), I spend a lot of time thinking about Magic.
Playing Magic? Not so much. Also, my middle school geometry teacher may have been crazy. But I digress.
If it wasn't known, I had lost 'the fire' to qualify for the Pro Tour years before I had even met or heard of most of this blog's readers. What does that mean to people who play Legacy? Nothing. I have the desire to be a proficient player and deckbuilder for the formats that I care about (pretty much Legacy and sometimes Limited) and I have the desire to make and maintain the friends that I've made from playing the game - I just don't spend weekends at PTQs. What does this even mean?
Everything.
I know where to focus my attention. While there are a myriad of gamestates that you will be put through throughout your gaming lifetime, you can already formulate a plan for the majority of them.
Thinking about Thinking
Consider this, the day of a tournament, before you have even played the first round with your deck:
- How does my deck ideally win? I'm not talking about a generic "my opponent's life total is now 0, he loses to state based effects" remark about this. I'm talking about envisioning the actual board state, and rewinding yourself across the game.
- How much am I changing my game plan based on what my opponent could be doing?
- What can I not beat? Am I picking up the right deck for the metagame?
- How do I lose? How can I prevent this from happening?
I've already done my pre-tournament thinking for the majority of decks that I go to tournaments with. So now that you know what you can and cannot beat, and you know how you ideally win, let's go to the tournament, and let's write up that tournament report that I'm sure you want to send in to The Rusty Machete!
Round 1: Some Guy with Something Something
I win the die roll.
Game 1: I fan open a hand with Windswept Heath, Plains, Path to Exile, Qasali Pridemage, Tarmogoyf, Sylvan Library, Knight of the Reliquary. Not the strongest hand, but I keep it. My opponent mulligans, so I throw a mental fist pump, and I lead with Windswept Heath, and pass. My opponent plays a Misty Rainforest and passes.
Now, stop.
- What makes you lose from here?
- What makes you win from here?
- What do you think your opponent is thinking about?
- What do you want to make your opponent think about?
- What could you draw?
1. He can easily Stifle your fetchland and essentially end the game for you if you miss additional land drops. This could have easily been prevented.
2. You play your spells and attack a lot. You've got the removal and the creatures to end the game even without drawing additional cards.
3. Your opponent should be trying to distinguish you from other decks that play Windswept Heath: among them are Survival variants, Bant variants, the Rock, and Zoo. There are more, of course; this is Legacy.
4. What deck would you like your opponent to put you on? What would they be most unprepared for? What creates the largest problem for them?
5. What would you like to draw?
Don't dwell on these questions too long... you've got a game to play! While this information is all helpful and useful, you nearly zero ways of interacting with most of them at the point where we stopped, from a specifically in-game perspective. Some people like to consider what you can and cannot draw at this next point, but the only impact can be fetching out a land.
The following turn cycle is where you and your opponent should know what is going on with the game, what decks to put each other on, and how to win the game from there. In every tournament report they are vastly summararized, so for the sake of brevity I'll refrain from it.
The next time you're playing in a tournament, when you stop to think, consider what your opponent is thinking about your thinking.
Is what you're doing a tell? Maybe I can get someone else to write about that.
-G
2 comments:
With the given scenario, don't you just fetch out a forest? You can still play all the spells in your hand, and Path can find you a Mountain if you need it. It just seems like, after the Misty Rainforest, you could be screwed. If you fetch and they have Stifle, you are -1 land. If you don't fetch in fear of Stifle, you are still effectively -1 land. If you fetch a nonbasic, you are vulnerable to Wasteland, and you are not -1 land, but you must draw a land quickly. Immediately fetching the forest gets you around these problems.
Yeah, that's what you'd be looking to do, and that's how you can prevent the initial problem.
Turn 1, instead of passing with Windswept Heath, fetch out the Forest and pass. Basically, it was kind of a baited question about where in the game I stopped.
I *think* this slightly telegraphs that you're on a mana-light hand, but it also generally tells your opponent you're not playing Zoo (a little rare that Zoo would fetch out a forest on turn 1, and not have a 1-drop).
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