Magic the Gathering

Theory

How Do You Play Magic?

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ May 2, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

As you may have noticed, we’ve got not one, not two, no not even three, but FOUR arti­cles on one day! This is a sweet sweet day and it came about because two of my authors turned in their arti­cles out of sched­ule. So today we get a sweet surprise!

So on to today’s arti­cle: How do you play Magic?

I don’t mean do you play in MODO, in per­son, in Magic Work­sta­tion or some other way. I mean how do you play Magic as a player? Men­tally. In your head.

When I play Magic, I have a hard time look­ing out­wards into the aether and see­ing the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ties. It’s some­thing I actively work on, but it was the same with Chess, I just have a crappy focus and I often end up play­ing based on the board in front of me.

This is a MAJOR prob­lem for a com­pet­i­tive player. The fore­sight is a nec­es­sary and core func­tion for any good player. If you can’t pre­dict what is around the cor­ner, then you’ll never slow down and even­tu­ally you’ll slam into another per­son who isn’t pay­ing the atten­tion. Mean­ing that if you are a good enough player you can go on with this hin­drance and still win, but even­tu­ally it will bite you in the ass and that is usu­ally when you’re up against an equal or bet­ter player.

With such a crea­ture heavy for­mat, you also have to be able to sur­vey the bat­tle­field and look for the oppor­tu­ni­ties. Some com­plain that this makes Magic more like Chess, hav­ing to nego­ti­ate the field and find the most oppor­tune attack. I per­son­ally enjoy it this way, this puts a lot more in the imme­di­ate realm of my mind and thus is some­thing I can grab a hold of. Oth­ers though find this a weak­ness and frus­tra­tion. Even though I feel these oppor­tu­ni­ties end up being for the best for me, I do make mis­takes and unfor­tu­nately they’re usu­ally bad enough to cause a swing in momen­tum. So I then end up behind the eight ball.

The other thing I do is I try not to imme­di­ately make the “good play” that I come up with. Mean­ing I try not to be impul­sive. As Jon Finkel said in the audio episode of Man­a­Na­tion­Ra­dio a few weeks ago, “if you have a good play and a bet­ter play, then the good play is actu­ally a bad play.” So if I imme­di­ately make the play I feel is good, I stop and eval­u­ate try­ing to find a bet­ter play, thus seek­ing out the right play.

Play­ers get so into the game they are ner­vous and have their tics, they shuf­fle their hands, drum their fin­gers etc and they are prone to act impul­sively because that is how their mind is wired seek­ing to act fast with­out nec­es­sar­ily fully pro­cess­ing the sit­u­a­tion. An obvi­ous rookie mistake.

How about when you’re los­ing, how do you play the game? I get antsy, my blood pres­sure and heart rate rise, I can feel the adren­a­line hit my sys­tem as my brain kicks into over­drive look­ing for a solu­tion. And the absolute truth is that some of my favorite moments of the game are when I begin to lose a game and then some­how man­age to col­lect a W from the round.

Other play­ers though, and I still do some­times, get caught in the quick­sand. It’s when some­thing goes wrong and affects your men­tal state such that you begin mak­ing more mis­takes thus turn­ing a good tour­na­ment into a crappy per­for­mance. The only real solu­tion to this is to play more, get the con­fi­dence to get past it, and stay calm.

Play­ing the game is, and I don’t know if you know this or not, a very impor­tant part of play­ing Magic. The men­tal aspects abound and every player plays dif­fer­ently. Sol Malka, the cre­ator of the orig­i­nal Rock deck is an unusual player, he is very detail ori­ented and he touches every card on the board to arrange them into his men­tal grid, mak­ing sure they all line up and such. Where as other Pro play­ers are much more sloppy and they let their cards lay about, over­lap­ping and angled this and that way.

There is no one way to play the game, how­ever it is clear that to be a com­pet­i­tive player you MUST be aware of what your game play­ing process is.

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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