Magic the Gathering

Strategy

Magic Economics — Goal Setting in Magic

By Kelly Reid ⋅ October 21, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Dur­ing our dis­cus­sion on Trad­ing Ethics last week, we briefly touched upon the idea of Timmy, Johnny and Spike traders. Hope­fully that arti­cle got you think­ing about where you fall on that spec­trum. This week we’ll elab­o­rate on that topic, branch­ing out into the gen­eral con­cept of set­ting goals. While not nec­es­sar­ily finan­cial in nature, a goal you can imag­ine, visu­al­ize and plan towards is sig­nif­i­cantly eas­ier than a vague con­cept you keep in your head.

The eas­i­est way to set a goal — any goal — is to iden­tify some­thing in your life that you’re not sat­is­fied with. We’ll try to keep this within the scope of Magic for the pur­poses of this arti­cle, but these prin­ci­ples can be applied any­where that you desire improve­ment. Since this is a Magic site, and we’re all Magic play­ers here, let’s talk about what some goals within the game look like.

The most com­mon com­plaint about Magic as a game is the expense. Chas­ing down the cards for a deck can be tough, espe­cially if you don’t have a huge play group to sup­port you and lend you cards. Many Magic play­ers are younger, per­haps stu­dents or fresh out of col­lege, and haven’t got a great deal of dis­pos­able income. Sounds like a conun­drum, and a great start­ing point to set a goal.

We’ve iden­ti­fied a prob­lem — Cards are expen­sive and you don’t have a lot of money! There are a few ways to take this. The first direc­tion is to play cheap decks. If you have 20 dol­lars to spend on cards a month, then fig­ure out what the best deck you can build for 20 dol­lars looks like. If you’re a Spike type player, this will likely drive you insane because you can’t build any­thing for 20 dol­lars! But if you’re more of a casual player, but want to play a good deck at FNM, sit down with one of the Spike types at your store and ask for a lit­tle help. Let them know you’re on a lim­ited bud­get and they’ll likely be able to help.

An aside — when I was get­ting back into Magic after a few years off from the game, I had lim­ited funds and almost no cards. I cracked a box of Shards, which was silly because Shards had a really low EV, but I got lucky and opened an Elspeth, Knight-Errant. I did some research online and found that the major­ity of decks couldn’t be built on my bud­get at that time. Using my knowl­edge of the game, I drafted up a deck that only used one chase rare — Fig­ure of Des­tiny. I man­aged to trade the Elspeth and some other mis­cel­lany for my play-set and acquired the other com­mons and uncom­mons for it slowly. The deck was just a highly-tuned Mono Red deck using mostly Lor­wyn and Shad­ow­moor cards, but it was cheap to build and ran heinously fast. The “One Chase Rare” is a good rule to use when build­ing a bud­get deck. Chase rares are expen­sive for a good rea­son — they win games. Find a way to afford a play­set of the best rare for your deck and reap the rewards.

Back to busi­ness, and the 20 dol­lar bud­get exam­ple. You have another choice besides build­ing that cheap-o deck and get­ting curb-stomped at FNM. Invest. Don’t go out and buy half a share of Microsoft stock — invest in Magic the Gath­er­ing. Fig­ure out where your 20 dol­lars goes the far­thest, and put it there. Buy­ing into sleeper cards is risky, but it can pay off in a huge way. Quiet Spec­u­la­tion tries to focus on find­ing those cards in time for you to buy them, so keep an eye on the site. Had you spent your 20 dol­lars on 14 Groves of the Burn­wil­lows and ship­ping last Fri­day, you could have eas­ily tripled your 20 dol­lars. All of a sud­den, your Magic bud­get for the month is up closer to 60 or 75 dol­lars. Re-invest that cash next month, and your bud­get is in the hun­dreds. That’s enough to build a Tier 1 deck like Boros Bush­whacker, fetch lands and all.

To do all this trad­ing and deal­ing, you’d have needed a goal in mind. It’s fine to trade blindly and make a few bucks on each trade, but when you know that your deck can be bought for 200 dol­lars cash and you only have 20, you’ve set a goal. Think of set­ting a goal like you think of a combo deck. Every action you take needs to be work­ing towards your combo or you won’t get there. Think­ing about buy­ing a booster pack for 4 dol­lars? Well, if you do the math and see that the EV of a booster is lower than 4 dol­lars, and that vari­ance will prob­a­bly rear its ugly head, it becomes clear that the action of buy­ing a booster pack isn’t in line with your goal of “Get 200 Dol­lars”. You have to eval­u­ate each action against your goal, and then eval­u­ate whether the action in ques­tion would move you closer or far­ther away from your goal if repeated to infin­ity. Obvi­ously, buy­ing infi­nite boost­ers does NOT get you closer to 200 dol­lars, nor does it really even give you enough trade fod­der to reach that goal, since the EV of a Zendikar pack is some­where in the 3.50 range. Repeat that to infin­ity and you will be broke. If you start buy­ing buy the box, or the case, where the cost of a pack is well below the 3.50 EV, then you might have a strat­egy forming.

Magic play­ers are, if any­thing, obses­sive per­son­al­i­ties. How else can we spend entire week­ends in for­eign cities with strangers in win­dow­less rooms play­ing cards and spend­ing money? Use this to your advan­tage. The human brain is a pow­er­ful tool. Give your brain the kick-start it needs by keep­ing con­stant reminders of your goal around you at all times. If your goal is to build Boros Bush­whacker, proxy it up with full color print-outs and play it a lot. Keep a copy of the deck list open in Notepad on your com­puter and just look it over and think about tweak­ing it. Read arti­cles about it from other play­ers. This will keep your mind think­ing “Oh man, look at all this Bush­whacker stuff! I bet­ter get on board and get this deck built!” You’ll be amazed how quickly you meet that goal. This is true for any goal, Magic or not. If you want to lose weight and get in great shape, print out some pic­tures of other peo­ple who have done so and stick them to your bath­room mir­ror. If you’re try­ing to meet women, print out pic­tures of pretty girls and tape them above your dresser so they’re star­ing at you when you get ready in the morn­ing. Seems a lit­tle strange, and your room mates might won­der why “Ahh­nold” circa 1975 is pos­ing above the toi­let, but it will make a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in the way your brain sub­con­sciously attacks its goals.

Dis­cus­sions about goals and improve­ment often drift meta­phys­i­cal, so when you start get­ting par­a­lyzed by analy­sis, don’t fret. Take a break from plan­ning and strate­giz­ing and GO DO SOMETHING ELSE totally unre­lated. That will give your brain time to decom­press and work some stuff out. The mind will sub­con­sciously solve prob­lems when you’re actively think­ing about some­thing else, so don’t fret if you can’t crack an issue right off the bat.

Whether your goal is to be the best player at the kitchen table, make a liv­ing sell­ing cards, or to qual­ify for the Pro Tour, the path will be the same. It is said that a jour­ney of a thou­sand miles begins with a sin­gle step, but it truly begins at the des­ti­na­tion. After all, how will you know which way to begin walk­ing if you don’t know where you’re headed?

Kelly Reid, editor of financial news site http://www.quietspeculation.com, has been playing Magic the Gathering since 1994. With 15 years experience in the game, his goal is to teach others to fund their gaming through proactive speculation and intelligent trading.

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