The Seattle Extended PTQ in March was going to be my last shot at qualifying for the Pro Tour in Nagoya, so I wanted to put a lot of preparation into this tournament. My effort consisted of reading aggregations of MODO decklists (a future blog post) and bashing them against each other on MWS by myself. My testing and my prediction of the metagame led me to believe that the deck I had played the previous two PTQ’s (Faeries) was poorly positioned in the metagame, and the Thursday before the PTQ I decide to sleeve up the little Green men. The end result was going 5-3, losing to the breakout Mono White Control deck in Round 3, the Elves mirror in Round 6, and Boros in Round 8.

The hilarious part? I played the decks that I thought would be at least 50-60% of the room according to Magic Online (Faeries, Bant, and UW Sword) and that I spent my entire week focusing on a grand total of zero times. Bant and Mirran Crusader (and misreading/overreacting to the metagame) had scared me from playing the deck I was probably most familiar with and drawn me to a deck that didn’t really let me leverage my play skill (or, alternatively, let me punish my opponent for playing suboptimally).

The week after that, I was over Constructed, and very nearly done with competitive Magic. I thought I had prepared the best that I could on my own. I didn’t know a better way to test for it besides MWS. Many of my friends would probably rather 2-man queue on MODO than grind out games on a weekday evening, and even if I had a deck on MODO, I don’t have the luxury of testing a matchup I want 20 times in a row if I don’t know someone with the deck.

The more frustrating part was that, while solo MWS is somewhat efficient at testing cards and configurations, it wasn’t very efficient at getting me better at Magic. Do I want to get lots of data points and jam 10-15 games of a matchup in an hour, or do I want to take my time and make the right plays, but not get to tune my deck?

I thought my whole process was inefficient in terms of getting better and winning more in the long run. I needed to play more Magic than just testing Constructed by myself. I considered even going to the extreme of staying away from Constructed PTQ’s until I felt I was good enough to destroy them (if that were ever to happen).

I found myself at a paper draft the next weekend (Games & Gizmos in Redmond). I hadn’t drafted MSS much at all, and there are enough good players there that I could learn some things about the format, but I still thought I would be better than enough players there to be to come out ahead. I had a pretty decent UG deck with some Gust Skimmers and some pretty good late game cards, but in the deciding game of Round 1 I was staring down an Inkmoth Nexus and Tempered Steel. I was able to ramp into some fatties and make the game a race, but I ended up dying one turn short. I started looking for where I possibly could have missed damage since I had him down to 2.

A player who is never going to get better would just say that he got unlucky/the opponent got lucky with his draw immediately and claim that that’s Magic. But I found something: the first turn Inkmoth attacked for 3 I immediately chump-blocked with a Gust Skimmer, but had I attacked with Gust Skimmer and waited until later to chump (like when it would kill me), he would be at 0 instead of 2 at the end of the game.

A year ago, I probably would have told myself “I suck” and that I need to tighten up and think harder. But I went a level deeper: WHY did I think I should chump block? I remember exactly what I was thinking when Tempered Steel came down. “This Inkmoth Nexus is going to get in for three a turn. I’m going to have to chump this guy, so I’d better do it now while I can.”

I found the flaw in my thinking this particular time: I thought I would only get value from that guy by chumping. I didn’t even consider whether I could still get damage in. I think now if I were to go through this situation again, I’d think something more like “This Inkmoth Nexus is going to get in for three a turn. I’m going to have to chump this guy, but do I have to do it now or can I get value out of my guys first?”

The great part about this kind of correction is that it translates over to any game of Magic much better than “I should race better/smarter against a 3/3 Inkmoth Nexus” or “I suck… I should think harder next time.” I have a new thing to think about every time chump-blocking is an option.

Now, this is probably pretty basic Magic tactics for good players, but the actual tactical advice is not the point of this post. The more groundbreaking part (for me) is that I don’t think I had ever thought about mistakes in this way. I could examine what my mistakes are, and I could take critique from other players as to what I did wrong, but I had never thought about WHY I make my mistakes. I felt like I had just uncovered a missing key to my game. My fire had been rekindled, with this new approach to improving my game.

Common advice from pros for getting to the next level is to think about what you could have done differently in every game you play, and everyone knows that they should learn from their mistakes, but many equate this to “don’t make the same mistake again”. But let’s face it, how often are you going to see two identical situations show up? I can believe it when you consider a Constructed matchup and you’re learning what some of the key interactions are, but what are you going to do when the new Block rotates in, or what are you going to do when you transition to Limited? Why has no pro ever said to try and change the way you think in game to prevent mistakes from happening or to lead you more often to the optimal play?

I had played in a couple of events since that tournament, and looked at what went wrong in this new way.

In the last Extended PTQ in New Jersey (happened to be there on business), I caught myself throwing two games away: one where I planned out Cryptic Commanding the guy’s team with five lands and casting Disfigure to follow up with a Consume the Meek, but I forgot to cast Disfigure after he did stuff in his second main (I lost to a crackback when I could have bought another draw phase); and another where, with time running out in Game 3, I declined to Spell Pierce a Jace after he cast a bunch of other spells, which I had previously noted on my own turn that I should probably Spell Pierce anything that I can get. I chalked these mistakes to “mentally F6’ing”. The fix? At Regionals the next weekend, I wrote “NOF6” at the top of my scorepad every round. I didn’t make that kind of mistake all tournament, and it’s certainly a better fix than “Check to see if he’s tapped out when you have Spell Pierce.”

In Round 8 of 9 at Regionals, I was 5-2 and played Zaiem Beg in the RUG mirror. I had played okay up until that point where in Game 3 I make a blunder with holding the wrong counterspell* and saw myself behind on the board trying to dig for an answer. After casting some number of Explores and such, I found myself further behind when another threat came down and my Blue mana tapped sitting on those counterspells from the blunder before! The old me? “God I’m so bad at this game, I should pay more attention to my mana and tighten up, etc, etc.” Another possible response? “I was tired, it’s been a long day and my head is spinning. I should take better care of myself during the day. Besides, we’re out of Top 8 contention, so whatever… I suck.” The much more constructive fix? “I shouldn’t stay up ‘til 2am before a tournament, no matter how well you think you can take care of yourself during the day. Lack of sleep is lack of sleep.” To be fair, I don’t find myself playing meaningful Magic that late in the tournament often times, and I don’t always stay up late the night before a tournament (the movie Goodfellas was on TV, I couldn’t resist at the time). But finally the two coincided and I learned why everyone says to get a good night’s sleep before a tournament.

Long-term, my goal is to play more and more real Magic with other humans and to try and learn in this way from every game. Previously on MODO streaks I’ve kept videos of my games and went back to uncover mistakes, and I think I want to do this sooner after the games so that when I spot the mistake, I can more easily recall what my thought process was to make the fix at that level rather than just acknowledge that there was a mistake. I will try to use this kind of examination in the draft reports that I post on this blog in the future

In Constructed testing, I think I have to apply a level of concentration that I would in an 8-4 draft or in a tournament setting so that A) I can practice how I want to play in tournament, and B) so I can more easily recall and analyze what happens in a game. I can generally recall tournament matches, but can’t recall games from testing sessions as well. I’d rather learn from testing sessions than from tournaments I might have paid $25 and travelled three hours to get to. These two things are more difficult to do in solo MWS testing; A) is impossible because you play tournaments against real people, and B) is simply difficult for me. I guess I concentrate much more when there’s the shame of losing at risk. The amount of live testing I was able to do for Regionals made me feel much better about my play in the tournament (thanks to Kellen who was down to battle nearly every day of the week), and I noticed this also for the first Seattle PTQ when I was bringing decks and copies of decks to bars to battle with our Monday karaoke crew.

Having a full-time job and other interests prevents me from playing hours and hours of Magic that other people have the luxury (?) of playing. The key, I believe, is to not work harder, but to work smarter.

:wq! fourouttheforty

*The mistake I made was pretty bad. I showed a Mana Leak on top of my deck with an Oracle, and cast a Preordain. The second card was a Flashfreeze. I thought Flashfreeze would be as good as Mana Leak in the mirror at that point of the game, and I thought I could hide Flashfreeze by drawing it off of Preordain. Of course it doesn’t work like this, I reveal Flashfreeze, and he casts Frost Titan. Now I knew about Frost Titan because Zaiem suggested the card to me, so it probably just should have been Mana Leak to my hand to begin with, but I wonder if I had recalled the Oracle interaction correctly if I would have happened upon the tighter play of taking Mana Leak.