Magic the Gathering

Strategy

Preaching to the Choir

By Lee Steht ⋅ June 30, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Ok so I’m a bit tired of preach­ing in gen­er­al­ized state­ments. So this time I’m going to be a bit more specific.

You’re in your FIRST Pro Tour Qual­i­fier for Austin and you’re sit­ting across from a per­son your first round that doesn’t look at you nor do they acknowl­edge you. They, in fact, don’t even say hello. You roll your die and you win the die roll, you opt to go first and the oppo­nent just grum­bles. You’re play­ing your favorite deck, you lay your land and pass your turn. Oppo­nent plays an ISLAND! At this point, no mat­ter what you’re play­ing, you should have an idea of the pos­si­bil­i­ties. Faeries, Reveil­lark?

Let’s change that a bit, what if your oppo­nent plays a For­est. Do you have any idea what deck they may be playing?

Unlike chess or check­ers, Magic is NOT played on a lin­ear field. ALL of the pos­si­ble out­comes are NOT within the bat­tle­field, just a pre­cur­sor to M10 rules, If you don’t have any idea what could be next, you’re prob­a­bly going to lose. With this gen­eral state­ment, I’m say­ing that vic­tory is based on your col­lec­tion of facts and the exe­cu­tion of play after­wards. Let’s say the oppo­nent laid an island and your 2nd turn has you faced with lay­ing an island or a vivid land. Your hand has Bro­ken Ambi­tion and ran­dom 3 drop. Now, on this play, I’m fore­shad­ow­ing the right play and that is to set up for a Bro­ken Ambi­tion for 1. Now if you’re oppo­nent laid a for­est, you might not con­cern your­self with what might be a turn 2 crea­ture or spell and lay the vivid land for the effi­cient turn 3 play.

Remem­ber, Magic is the sum of plays to which par­ity is com­pletely on your side for the inevitable vic­tory. Very few decks have a knock­out play, and nor­mally those are combo decks and very few of them exist in the cur­rent Stan­dard envi­ron­ment. So you must lay like you’re work­ing towards some­thing, not just tap­ping and cast­ing. Antic­i­pat­ing your oppo­nent is a skill that is nec­es­sary for suc­cess­ful com­bat, not just magic but in vir­tu­ally all aspects of life.

New sce­nario, your oppo­nent is play­ing Jund/Cascade and you’re play­ing with Tokens. He has one card in hand, you have four (Plains, Cave of Koi­los, Path to Exile and Kitchen Finks) and 4 lands in play. With noth­ing on either side but lands, the obvi­ous play is the Finks. My ques­tion to you is, do you play the land? While the typ­i­cal token deck does play the HUGE 5cc Cloud­goat Ranger, the Jund deck can play (and does) Blight­ning. Now this is an exam­ple of a NO-Wrong sce­nario. Play 1 — lay the land, leav­ing you with 2 cards in hand and pos­si­ble loss of active card if said Blight­ning is cast or Play 2 — don’t lay the land and have 2 lands you can dis­card while keep­ing an action card in hand if needed. My Co-Host Patrick has a quote from the great Jon Finkel: “If you have a good play and a bet­ter play, then the good play is actu­ally bad.” This motto is very much a FACT indeed true no mat­ter what point of the game you’re in.

Let’s go a bit fur­ther, say your oppo­nent has already played a Blight­ning ear­lier and you have 5 lands in play and 1 land in hand. I would bet that 90% of play­ers would lay the land and say,“If my oppo­nent is going to make me dis­card it any­way, why not play it.” The rea­son why you would NOT is to pull another Blight­ning out of their hand! Espe­cially early, in the game, you’ve got your nec­es­sary land base. At this point, you’re liv­ing off of the top of your deck and you do NOT want to lose valu­able cards. Even if you lose the use­less land, it means the oppo­nent has one less Blight­ning to ruin your day with. Then when you ARE hold­ing some­thing of impor­tance you’re all the better.

This is how my mind works:
In Alara Block Con­structed, I had an open­ing hand of Sav­age Land, Sav­age Land, Moun­tain, Rup­ture Spire, Blight­ning, Ajani Vengeant, Brood­mate Dragon. Even before my oppo­nent makes a play, I’m think­ing T1 Sav­age Land, T2 Rup­ture Spire, T3 Moun­tain + Blight­ning, T4 Sav­age­land, T5 Ajani, choco­late pud­ding. Now this is an exam­ple of how it works for ME. I antic­i­pate, play and think of french fries. If the oppo­nent does some­thing to lead me to believe I should play dif­fer­ently, I do that. If I feel they’re cut on lands, I might work for a quicker Ajani (T4) to keep a land tapped, THEN I think of fried chicken. My oppo­nent played a t2 Tide­hol­low Sculler, tak­ing my Blight­ning. I changed my plan to T3 Sav­age Land, T4 Moun­tain + Ajani = Kill Sculler. If you have a plan, it helps you move your game along. This also informed me, that he was play­ing Robots. So I tried to hold my removal for Mas­ter of Etherium and Ether­sworn Canon­ist. Remem­ber, it’s the plan and not the absolute MUST.

If you don’t get my mes­sage at this point, you’ll need to mes­sage me directly through the forums. I’ll send you a response that will included a punch in your grill!

Any­whoo, I’m a bit hun­gry. So I’m going to end this now and grab some Taco Bell. If this helps or if you want to hear more, let me know.

Thanks!