This is the reason why Magic sucks.

Fellow PNG writer Logan Persons shot me an email about 30 minutes ago with the following content:

whose dick do i have to suck to get some MTG posts?  Just point me in the right direction.

Since I’m married and I don’t want it to have to get to that, here’s a small update with my thoughts about Magic in its current incarnation: It sucks.

Sorry, but those are my feelings about it. I’ll get around to it after I explain what I’ve been doing for the past few months since my last update.

In May, I prepared for Grand Prix: Seattle, where I placed 49th and won $200 and a pro point for my troubles. Here’s my list of opponents and the decklist I played:

Day One:
R1-R3: Byes due to a GPT win.
R4: David Dobis – U/W Reveillark w/ Borderposts. Win 2-1.
R5: Steve Sadin – Jund Aggro. Loss 1-2.
R6: Tom Martell – Swans Cascade. Loss 0-2.
R7: Joseph Peters – Bloom Tender Reveillark. Win 2-1.
R8: Kevin Rand – 5cc Planeswalkers. Win 2-1.
R9: Doug Potter – Faeries. Win 2-0.

Day Two:
R10: Brandon Willis – B/W Tokens. Win 2-0.
R11: Stan Bessey – 5cBloodbraid. Loss 1-2.
R12: Mauricio Blanco – B/W Tokens. Win 2-1.
R13: Cristian Calcaro – Faeries. Loss 0-2.
R14: Gabriel Nassif – Jund Aggro. Win 2-1.
R15: Thomas Huteson – Faeries. Win 2-1.

Final record: 11-4 (8-4 in matches).

Decklist follows after the cut…

4 Tattermunge Maniac
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Jund Hackblade
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Boggart Ram-Gang
3 Anathemancer

4 Magma Spray
4 Flame Javelin
3 Terminate
3 Volcanic Fallout

3 Ghitu Encampment
4 Auntie’s Hovel
4 Sulfurous Springs
4 Graven Cairnes
8 Mountain

Sideboard:
3 Chaotic Backlash
3 Everlasting Torment
3 Pithing Needle
3 Deathmark
1 Banefire
1 Anathemancer
1 Volcanic Fallout

Unsurprisingly, I decided to play a red/black “Sligh” variant that I’ve had success with in the past.

After the Grand Prix, I got a job as a PHP/Java programmer and business analyst, and I’ve moved to a new place as well. Additionally, my car is completely broken down, so getting to Magic tournaments in the first place is a bit of a difficulty. Add to the fact that one of my main playtesting partners went back to Portland for the summer (he’s a UW student), and it’s not hard to see why Magic’s lost its luster.

Lest I let Wizards off the hook here, I want to say that the new Core Set (M10) is a piece of dogshit. The new rules don’t impact the Constructed game all that much, but it does make some substantial changes to Limited. I have no problem with the rule changes themselves, but the cards they released aren’t particularly exciting; maybe they’re not supposed to be, since it’s a Core Set, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it. The creatures are either bland and boring or absurdly overpowered (see Baneslayer Angel above). For Christ’s sake, compare Serra Angel to Baneslayer Angel:

NOT GOOD ENOUGH

This is what pisses me off the most – Wizards of the Coast prints two cards at the EXACT same mana cost and the EXACT same creature type yet one is wildly better than the other.

M10 is just boring. I preferred Shards of Alara block for all my moneydrafting purposes, and I hope Zendikar (prerelease date: September 26th) changes things. Right now, Standard is full of Five-Color Control decks and Anti-Five Color Control decks (and some Faeries with Lightning Bolt, I guess) due to the idiotic decision to print Vivid lands and Reflecting Pool simultaneously. As further evidence that Magic sucks, I played in a Pro Tour Qualifier last week with red/black and went 2-2 drop. That definitely counts for something.

Anyway, I hope Zendikar greatly improves the Constructed format and that M10 is soon forgotten about, because right now, Magic sucks.

]]> http://pixelsandgrids.com/2009/08/19/the-lazy-magic-writer-magic-sucks-at-the-moment/feed/ 2 kyleb Baneslayer Angel Serra Angel http://pixelsandgrids.com/2009/03/16/magic-the-gathering-eliminating-small-mistakes/ http://pixelsandgrids.com/2009/03/16/magic-the-gathering-eliminating-small-mistakes/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:30:15 +0000 Kyle Boddy http://pixelsandgrids.com/?p=845 Continue reading →]]>

The four years I’ve taken off of competitive Magic have been interesting ones. When I stopped playing competitive Magic, I was working as a server at a local Italian chain restaurant and flunking out of undergraduate school. Since then, I’ve co-founded a wildly successful finance company (which I ran into the ground), worked for an Internet poker site as a data analyst, worked for Microsoft, and have developed a much, much stronger understanding of statistics, mathematics, and gaming theory (as well as traditional economics-based Game Theory).

Now, I’m not going to say that the experiences that I’ve had in the past are the reason that I’ve done well in the last two big tournaments I’ve played (outright winning the Standard Mox tournament and T8′ing the Extended PTQ), because I’ve gotten lucky in both and have made numerous simple play errors that could have cost me games. However, what I’ve always known but only recently fully appreciated is that Magic (like any other game) is a series of interactions that start well before the first card is drawn in the game. The game is full of small edges and decisions that are so minute that even top players simply ignore them. For example, see Gabriel Nassif’s 2009 PT: Kyoto deck. It contains 61 cards because he had no idea what to cut! The rationale behind such a move was simply “I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to cut,” and the implied reasoning behind it is “It’s not a big deal anyway.”

The lack of real statistical analysis of the game of Magic – despite the long history and the big payouts – continues to amaze me. People will justify playing 17 or 18 land in a limited deck just by glancing at the casting costs, or they’ll play 3 of a card instead of 4, or they’ll play a “miser’s” Loxodon Warhammer in the sideboard. All of these decisions make small, but significant impacts on the game in general!

For example, do you know what the probability of drawing Kataki, War’s Wage + two land (one of which is a white source) in game two vs. Affinity? What is the combinatorial possibility that the Affinity player will draw Path to Exile + a white source and have it open on your turn? What is the impact of the game if you play Kataki? What about when he Paths it?

People assume that if you play Kataki that you win vs. Affinity. Okay? Is that good enough? Why not maindeck it? What’s the difference between Kataki and a random zoo card, like Sulfuric Vortex? What is the estimated metagame, and what will the best players be playing? What is the likely spread of matches?

Very few people consider these advanced variables – and I’m not one of them! I don’t yet know how to account for all these variables, but I do think about them conceptually.

In-game play skill is something that we all focus on – not missing on board kills, not tapping our lands incorrectly, and maximizing damage per turn are all things that most players need to get better at. These are the things we focus on because they have immediate and sudden impact on our games – but no one really remembers siding out Thoughtcast for Thoughtseize against TEPS and understanding what the real difference is.

Humans tend to overrate dramatic (and recent) events in their lives. Did you lose because you couldn’t draw Myr Enforcers and you lost games to Spell Snares? The answer is clearly playing more card drawing spells to mitigate the effects of counterspells! We are not built to think about small edges – what about always shuffling your opponent’s deck between activations of fetchlands? What if they “innocuously” put an Ancient Grudge in the middle of their deck, hoping that you’ll cut to it? Assuming that they have 47 cards left in their deck and you cut to that card 1/10 times rather than sufficiently randomizing the deck, what’s the impact on your game? If they draw it, it’s huge. If not, you will likely forget about it – yet that’s the type of results-oriented analysis that we must ignore if we want to become better players.

I see this line of thinking on SCG forums all the time – they discount the concepts of the Sligh mana curve and diss cards like Tattermunge Maniac because they suck. Well, of course it does – but that’s not the point. There were few better players in the game than Mike Pustilnik at playing cards on turns one through five in limited, and though the cards he played were often inferior, that wasn’t necessarily the point. Magic is a game of developing a plan and executing it – not drawing the best cards.

When you playtest 100 games, are you sure that’s enough? A good baseball analogy would be to watch a team that has a .300 hitter and a .280 hitter and to watch 100 random at-bats of theirs. Without seeing the scoreboard, could you possibly tell which one was which? It’s very unlikely – the .280 hitter will have MORE hits than the .300 hitter in many situations (too lazy to actually do the math, but you can do it if you like – Google “Standard Deviation”). All it takes is one or two games where you draw your Kataki and your opponent does not draw Path to Exile to form ideas that are not necessarily based on reality.

Two personal stories that may or may not have any relevance to the situation follow:

#1

One of the playtesting games that sticks out in my mind was during the Odyssey/Onslaught block Regionals where Psychatog was going to run rampant. I played mono-black control, and one day at the Gamekeeper, I was playing a series of games vs. an unknown player from across town who was fielding U/G Madness. At the time, I fancied myself a fairly decent player, having recently run my Extended rating up to and over 2050 with mono-blue Forbiddian in weekly tournaments. There was a turn in the mid-late game when my opponent had Arrogant Wurm and Wild Mongrel with two cards in hand and no lands untapped. I drew my card and had the following relevant cards in hand:

Smother
Chainer’s Edict
Mind Sludge
Haunting Echoes

I was going to simply cast Mind Sludge, wipe my opponent’s hand, and pass the turn with no creature in play. He’d attack me to 7 life, and I’d kill his guys and take over with Haunting Echoes on the consecutive turn. However, my friend Steve Landen (no longer Landen these days) said over my shoulder: “Kill that, kill that, say go.” That seemed like a better plan for some reason, and I Smothered his Mongrel and Edicted his Wurm and passed the turn. What could possibly happen with an Edict in the graveyard?

My opponent untapped and cast Upheaval and played a Basking Rootwalla.

Now, Upheaval was not very common in U/G Madness (at least maindeck), but my opponent included it in his decklist to help fight vs. the “unwinnable” mono-black matchup. He would go on to play Upheaval in every decklist he could possibly cram it into, including Wake, which ended up being very, very good.

I lost this matchup because I failed to consider the only way I could lose, and that would be an Upheaval or some other crazy effect in his hand. Mind Sludge would have been the overwhelmingly correct play, but I let the irrational fear of taking damage get into my head.

My opponent, Cedric Phillips, would go on to better and bigger things, but I have no doubts that you are aware of them.

#2

Since moving to Seattle, I was afraid that I wouldn’t find a playtesting group to seriously work with. I was surprised to find a lot of quality players who had an open mind to letting me play with them, which is a stark contrast to the cliques I knew in the Midwest. Of course, I had known some of them from the GP circuits (Noah Weil and I played a match at GP: Oakland, and I slopped him in a SCG article of mine because he complained of mana flood – I hope he forgives me for that!), but none of them were really my “friend.”

You can tell a lot about a Magic player by the way he carries himself, taps his lands, and thinks about his options. While playing in Cleveland, I could tell that Tim Aten was the best player in our area just by the way he thought about the game and the way he played his games through. While it took some time for him to acheive the success I always knew he would attain, he eventually did get there. He inspired me to think about the game in a different way and got me playing on a better level as a result. I never put in the work to get to the levels that he did, and while it’s not clear that I ever could be that good, his mind plus his work ethic was clearly rewarded in the long run.

I feel much the same way when I watch Charles Dupont (Aceman) play Magic here, with the exception of course being that everyone knows who he is already – he’s a MODO superstar. The way he theorizes about the game and simply considers his options in friendly games like Cube drafts for no money amazes me. We have discussions about small edges, and he sees things on levels that I haven’t ever considered. The thing that we both have in common is that we know our limitations – he doesn’t spend much time on Constructed because he knows the marginal increase in winning a PTQ (that he doesn’t have to pay for due to States) isn’t worth his time, and I don’t spend all that much time on Limited because I am aware that I will probably never be a great Limited player. My expertise (however small it may be) has always been in analyzing Constructed formats and being good at ad hoc formats – the few times I’ve had success in Limited formats (GP: Oakland) have been the times when the set is new and people have not had the time to work with it on MODO over and over again.

As I begin my new leg of this competitive Magic journey, I hope to learn a lot from my playtesting partners and friends in the Seattle area. I can honestly say that I’ve played better than I was while playing in Cleveland in just two short months, and I can see many, many ways that I can improve my in-game skills and my approach to the game in general. For once, I feel quite optimistic about improving as a player and a theorist in general.

Yes, that’s right – your favorite PNG Magic: The Gathering writer has won a Standard tournament for an Unlimited Mox Sapphire (retailing for about $550 these days), beating 92 players to do so. Through seven rounds of swiss, he piloted the following black/red Sligh deck to victory.  Find out how after the break!

4 Tattermunge Maniac
4 Figure of Destiny
3 Mogg Fanatic
4 Goblin Outlander
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Boggart Ram-Gang

4 Tarfire
4 Magma Spray
4 Flame Javelin
3 Volcanic Fallout

6 Mountain
4 Ghitu Encampment
4 Auntie’s Hovel
4 Graven Cairnes
4 Sulfurous Springs

Sideboard:

4 Bitterblossom
3 Deathmark
3 Infest
2 Guttural Response
2 Wild Ricochet
1 Volcanic Fallout

I reworked the Blightning Aggro decks from Worlds to give it a quicker kill and more efficient spells (Tarfire over Incinerate, for example), and it worked wonders. I only lost a single match throughout the day vs. a Five-Color Control deck, but defeated a Mono-White Kithkin and R/W Reveillark deck in the Top Eight before splitting in the finals.

Great success!

Hello, everyone! You may remember me from various sources – my articles at StarCityGames.com in 2005 about U/W Mind’s Desire that eventually became the standardized combo deck during the PTQ season for Philadelphia, my articles about the R/G “Freshmaker” deck during Mirrodin block, or my articles about mono-blue in Standard when we ran cards like Chrome Mox, Relic Barrier, and Annul.

But if you don’t, I can’t say I blame you. I’m a never-was – I made three or four PTQ top eights in my past, never getting past the first round. I lost in the last round of GP: Oakland (Mirrodin-Mirrodin-Darksteel limited) to Ben Rubin where a win would have locked up a Top Eight slot and a draw would have ensured a Top Sixteen finish – and an invitation to PT: San Diego. I needed to win one of three matches at GP: Columbus (Mirrodin-Darksteel-Fifth Dawn limited) to make Day Two; I drew one and lost two.

I prepared exhaustively for GP: Boston (Extended), grinded at the local stores to get my rating above 1900 for two byes, and promptly went 0-2 because I didn’t test against Aluren and I kept bad hands against Reanimator.

My sole claim to Magic excellence was a 2025+ rating in Extended back when the ratings were separate. Most of you can’t even remember that, I’m sure – but rest assured, few players could pilot Thieving Magpies, Morphlings, and Faerie Conclaves to wins like me.

While I was at dinner at Morels in Las Vegas with my wife a month ago, my friend Cedric Phillips called me. I picked up, and he said plainly into the phone: “Your brother won a PTQ. Call him and congratulate him or you’re an idiot.” So, I did. After that, I wrote it off and had a good time in Vegas, but I laid to bed every night thinking about Magic and how my brother reached the promised land (with the deck I vowed to crush in Mirrodin Block Constructed, no less!) while I never did. Certainly I was excited for him, but as a result, I got the itch to play some magical cards. The last three weeks of drafting Shards-Shards-Shards or Shards-Shards-Conflux at First Pick Games and MODO has been a lot of fun.

Never the limited master, I turned to sixty-card decks and checked out Standard, thinking that with Conflux coming in, it would be a great time to enter the metagame with a new twist on an old deck. I proxied Patrick Chapin’s five-color control deck, Tsuyoshi Ikeda’s Blightning Aggro deck, and Kenji Tsumura’s Faeries deck. With willing friends at work, I tested these decks against themselves and against their own creations. I quickly realized that I liked the Blighting Aggro deck the best, but that something overall wasn’t right – it was trying to be a midrange deck, and I thought Faeries was a better aggro-control deck overall. It wasn’t fast enough to be the beatdown deck, but it had elements from both camps.

I bought a subscription to SCG Premium and spent hours poring over the articles – past and present. I read Brainburst articles, I read MTG.com’s archives, I reviewed decks from deckcheck.com – I became obsessed and attempted to understand the metagame of today’s Standard format and how Conflux could change it all. The question that I kept asking myself was:

How do these decks deal with Hellspark Elemental?

Hellspark Elemental

I couldn’t come up with a clear answer, so I put the card into Blightning Aggro; it didn’t work. It fundamentally changed the deck’s construction, and while the card was powerful, it couldn’t take advantage of the speed and damage that the card offered. Shambling Remains showed a lot of promise in the Demigod/Siege-Gang B/R deck, but it competed with Blightning as the optimal three-drop. Both did their damage best against control decks, but neither was stellar against aggro or aggro-control.

Thoroughly confused, I sat down to contemplate how to best leverage this card in a new deck. I checked out every deck that finished 4-2 or better at Worlds and saw a few mono-red decks that ran Tattermunge Maniac and other aggressive cards. That was the first spark in my mind – I wanted to run Sligh. Not Boros Deck Wins, not Red Deck Wins, not Blightning Aggro – but Sligh.

Most of you have heard of Sligh and know it to be a red deck that burns them and plays cards like Ball Lightning. But this is not exactly what it is – Sligh was first conceptualized by Jay Schneider and played to infamy by Paul Sligh, winning a PTQ with ridiculous cards like Dwarven Trader and Orcish Librarian. Sligh is not defined by the cards it plays, but rather the mana curve it employs.

There is only one rule of Sligh: Choose the card for the mana slot, not the mana slot for the card. This principle is often ignored. Sligh is not Lightning Bolt, Jackal Pup, and Fireblast. Sligh is this:

1cc: 9-13
2cc: 6-8
3cc: 3-5
4cc: 1-3
X spell: 1-3
Removal/Burn: 8-10

The cards you choose conform to the mana curve above and not the other way around.

I looked at the metagame – full of aggro-control (Blightning Aggro, Faeries, Reveillark-based strategies), pure control decks (Five-color control), and a few beatdown decks (Kithkin). The time is right to play Sligh – Conflux gives it the final tools that it needs.

Agonizing on card choices for a whole two days, I sleeved up the following deck for FNM at Berserk Games in Seattle:

R/B Sligh by Kyle Boddy
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Tattermunge Maniac
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Goblin Outlander
3 Boggart Ram-Gang
3 Shambling Remains

4 Magma Spray
4 Flame Javelin
4 Incinerate

6 Mountain
4 Graven Cairnes
4 Auntie’s Hovel
4 Sulfurous Springs
4 Ghitu Encampment

SB:

4 Blightning
4 Volcanic Fallout
3 Everlasting Torment
3 Guttural Response
1 Terror

Let’s check it against our Sligh mana curve:
1cc: Figure of Destiny (4), Tattermunge Maniac (4), Mogg Fanatic (4) – 12 total
2cc: Goblin Outlander (4), Hellspark Elemental (4) – 8 total
3cc: Boggart Ram-Gang (3), Shambling Remains (3) – 6 total
4cc: None
X spell: None
Removal/Burn: Incinerate (4), Magma Spray (4), Flame Javelin (4) – 12 total

Pretty close! I would argue that Figure of Destiny, Shambling Remains, and Hellspark Elemental all push the theoretical mana curve up a bit, fulfilling the slots in the 4cc slot and perhaps one in the X spell slot.

The mana is pretty self-explanatory: All the lands must produce red mana because of Figure of Destiny, and Ghitu Encampment is necessary to beat control and add another attacker when no other options are available.

However, when I got there, I noticed everyone was playing Kithkin and R/W Reveillark. I audibled into the following changes:

Maindeck:
-3 Shambling Remains
+3 Volcanic Fallout

Sideboard:
-3 Volcanic Fallout
+3 Terror

Round one: I played against a slow, controlling Kithkin-based deck. I burned his creatures of importance (Knights of Meadowgrain, which is about it) and ran him over with Hellspark Elemental and Boggart Ram-Gang.

Round two: I played against an R/G aggro deck with Nettle Sentinel, Boggart Ram-Gang, and Flameblast Dragon. Like round one, I burned his creatures of importance (Nettle Sentinel and assorted 2/2s) and ran him over with Hellspark Elemental and Boggart Ram-Gang.

Round three: I beat a three-color control deck that was basically the five-color control deck without red or green. He played Kitchen Finks over Rhox War Monk, which was annoying, but Magma Spray handled it easily enough. He won game two by protecting a Kitchen Finks and drawing lots of cheap countermagic and lost game three because he stalled on three land and could not counter all the cheap threats I had.

Round four: I beat a standard Kithkin deck that had Knight of Meadowgrain, Wizened Cenn, Spectral Procession, etc. Game three was super close; I resolved an Everlasting Torment and was about to scoop his board with Volcanic Fallout, but he had Rustic Clachan to protect one of his Wizened Cenns. I managed to stabilize due to the wither damage and got into a position where he attacked me down to 1 while I had a Goblin Outlander and no cards in hand with him at 6. I had three outs to win (Flame Javelin), and I managed to cash in my 7% equity and killed him with it.

You might be thinking the following questions:

“Tattermunge Maniac? Really?”
“Is Goblin Outlander good enough to play maindeck?”
“Where’s Banefire?”

The answers are:

“Yes. Do not focus on card choices; focus on the mana curve.”
“Yes. Do not focus on card choices; focus on the mana curve.”
“I don’t know.”

Sligh is all about efficiency, and as such, cards like Fulminator Mage aren’t worthy of (maindeck) consideration. It is a 2-power creature for three mana, and typically reads “1RR: Destroy target non-basic land.” Now that’s fine in various types of decks, but not this one. Sligh played Pillage to kill Masticore in addition to their lands – that’s efficiency!

Sligh will always lose to five-color control and Faeries if they draw their specific cards in combination to beat us – that is inevitable. However, that’s the beauty of Sligh – we have so many redundant threats that serve the same purpose that our deck is simply more consistent and can eke out random wins with burn spells. If the opposing deck does not draw their convoluted cards in combination with their shaky mana bases, they will lose. We are too fast and too consistent. That is that nature of Sligh.

There are a lot of complaints by writers and people in various forums who don’t like speculative articles about cards that don’t see much play, and I completely agree. Most of the writers on this site don’t play in FNM or weekly 16k random tournaments and pontificate about what they should play in the latest Grand Prix, PTQ, or Pro Tour. As I said at the beginning of this article – I’m a never-was: A player good enough to post a few PTQ Top eights and run his rating up to and around 1900, but not one who ever understood how to ultimately get to the next level. I never put the time in to understand the theoretical underlying concepts of Magic, and when I came close (Mind’s Desire in Extended season), I had a lot of bad runs in PTQs and quit shortly thereafter.

I know that there’s many of you out there – people who play at Friday Night Magic week in and week out; you prepare for PTQs but can’t quite hack it, your card choices are based on feel, and you don’t think you play as well as the pros that you face at the PTQs on Saturday mornings. You want someone who has been in the trenches and someone who is a tournament regular at both the PTQ/GP level and the local one. That’s me!

My articles going forward will focus on deck construction primers and how to prepare for your local tournaments in addition to the PTQs and GPs that you’ll compete in. However, I’m not perfect – if I was, I’d be in the Magic Hall of Fame by now, seeing as how I’ve been playing since Legends. I was playing the best Magic of my life when I was writing, and that’s why I want to pick up the keyboard and detail my thought processes along the way. Hopefully it will help me get to the next level, and who knows – maybe I’ll drag a few of you along the way.

As a parting gesture, here’s the version of Sligh that I will be testing over the next week:

4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Figure of Destiny
4 Tattermunge Maniac
4 Hellspark Elemental
4 Goblin Outlander
3 Boggart Ram-Gang
2 Shambling Remains

4 Magma Spray
4 Flame Javelin
3 Incinerate
2 Banefire

6 Mountain
4 Graven Cairnes
4 Auntie’s Hovel
4 Sulfurous Springs
4 Ghitu Encampment

SB:

4 Blightning
4 Infest
4 Bitterblossom
3 Deathmark

Debate about the cards – there’s so many wonderful cards to play that you might like. What about Cryoclasm? Reflecting Pool? More Shambling Remains? Blightning maindeck? Quenchable Fire or Nyxathid in the sideboard for the mirror? Unwilling Recruit? Where’s Guttural Response? How do you deal with Story Circle without Everlasting Torment?

As one of my favorite Magic writers (Chad Ellis) said: “Go rogue in the details.”

(Articles in the future will be shorter and less detailed; this was a pre-written article for consideration at StarCityGames.com.)