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Building off Mistakes

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Introduction

I'd like to open today by talking about the most embarrassing win that I've ever seen. This was about five years ago when the line between Vintage and Legacy was a lot more blurry; my local store held alternating Vintage and Legacy events every week. A friend of mine had just invested in a set of Bazaar of Baghdad and had sleeved up a full, unproxied Dragon deck (Worldgorger Dragon + Animate Dead combo) for the very first time. He had a couple of pieces of power and was really excited about it. There were four rounds of swiss that night and he had gone 2-1 into the final round of swiss where he was playing against Goblins, a pretty easy match up. The goblins player was able to rob game one by landing Lackey into Siege-Gang and Piledriver. Game two went according to plan and the Goblins player was never able to get any footing in the game. Game three, the Dragon player took a mulligan to five and kept a hand that was somewhat shaky against a control deck but is fine against Goblins. Goblins opened with Lackey and Dragon with Bazaar of Baghdad, discarding Worldgorger Dragon. Goblins attacked but only got a Warchief on the Table, then a Goblin Matron for Ringleader. On the Dragon player's turn he went for Dark Ritual into Dance of the Dead, targeting Worldgorger Dragon, and he reached for the win. However, just then his opponent interrupted, "Force of Will, Removing Force of Will." Now, sometimes people will do this just to be a jerk and Disrupt the flow of your thinking, however, this was simply not the case this time. This mono-red Goblins deck was, in fact removing a Force of Will with another on the stack, much to everyone's surprise. Goblins won two turns later all because of Force of Will.

The amount of a blow-out that this was is likely unchartable, it was something that shook my friend for some time and is clearly something that I've never forgotten forgotten. No one could have possibly seen this coming and it got the Goblins player into the top eight. It was pretty obvious that all of Goblin's bad match-ups could be solved by playing Force of Will, as was demonstrated in this match. So, this means that Goblins should really be playing Force of Will, right? Well, where do you find the space for them? Goblins only has about three flex slots in the main for most splash colors, and every other card in the deck is an auto-include. That is hardly enough for Force of Will, considering that you generally need 16 total blue cards to consistently Remove a card to it, and of course a Goblins deck sans Volcanic Island is going to be hard pressed to find the UU required to hard cast the Force of Will. And thats not even to mention the unlikelihood of getting a Force of Will to pitch to your Force of Will, which was the only way of executing this plan that he had access to.

I guess it doesn't seem all that good when you look at it that way.

In a related story, a few months ago I lost to an Emrakul attacking me on turn two in the top eight of a local event. It didn't come into play on turn one, not at all. What happened was that my opponent, playing some sort of Stax variant, played Lotus Petal and Ancient Tomb on turn one with an end of turn Thirst For Knowledge, discarding Dragon's Breath and another card. With an audible sigh of relief my opponent played the card he had drawn, another Lotus Petal. Using it and his Ancient Tomb he played Show and Tell, putting Emrakul, the Aeons Torn onto the battlefield and Dragon's Breath attached to it, giving it haste. I wasn't upset because I had lost, but at how frail and silly the combo was, because the fact is that both of these cards were one-ofs. It felt terrible to lose solely to that level of luck when he built his deck to work against it.

The major Misstep of deck building can be broken down into three categories: Misguided Concept, Poor Card Quality, and Anti-Synergies. Being able to clearly identify which, if any, of these apply to your own deck building endeavors is going to greatly impact your ability to approach not only the design but playing of the game. When you have a more solid deck to work with, you should be winning more games. Winning more games puts you into brackets with players who are also doing that and lets you learn from them. With time, identifying threats should become second nature and resource management makes a lot more sense, and in turn improves your approach to deck building.

Misguided Concept

Goblins desperately wanted and still today wants access to some form of disruption or removal, but I don't think that the player really addressed this problem properly. One of the major issues with Goblins is that it doesn't have ample access to hate for combo strategies that come online in time to truly Disrupt the opponent, especially in the case of Storm. In hindsight, it's clear that Force of Will is actually a poor call for Goblins, especially as the only blue cards. Boarding in four Force of Will in hopes of drawing two of them to counter an early card from a problematic deck is an easy example of how an approach can go so wrong. In fact, this is likely the easiest flaw in deck building to identify, as the problems from it identify themselves so clearly. In casual circles, this is seen quite clearly, often in EDH, where you just combine a lot of cards that you like to play. I can admit that there is a great attraction to hanging out with some friends and kicking back with some of your favorite cards. It can really be a lot of fun to get to play with cards like Future Sight that you seldom are able to use anymore.

Sadly, there is always someone who values winning far above the enjoyment and excitement of the game and it tends to ruin it for people. Most of the time in casual circles, I tend to be that person. My idea of fun is a deck with Future Sight, Helm of Awakening, Sensei's Divining Top and I really like to cram Zuran Orb, Balance and Land Tax in there. Someone isn't going to be having fun that day.

When you enter a tournament, you're going to be playing with a lot of people that are there perhaps to hang out with friends, but primarily to win; they wouldn't have met you at this central location and paid a tournament entry otherwise. As such, it is unreasonable to think that you're going to be able to play a deck with Elvish Herder, Hand of Emrakul and Pulse of Llanowar, and expect to get very far because these people want to kill you in the most efficient way possible.

This problem can also appear in competitive circles, from time to time. Pet decks often cause people to fall into this trap, myself included, from time to time. For a short time there were experimentations with Planeswalker-based comb/control decks that used only Planeswalker spells. These decks took it steps beyond Landstill and the Ultimate Walker (a Landstillesque deck that ran a heavy Planeswalker count.) Players theorized that because Planeswalkers were so good in Legacy as it was, that a deck full of them had to be amazing. The problem with the deck is that there were sluggish and lacked many answers that traitional decks had access to. The reason you've probably never heard of such a deck is because decks really need to make plays before turn three, which this deck wasn't a fan of.

The issue is generally that the fundamental plan the deck is designed to Execute is broken (and not in the good way.) This broken concept is often built around cards that don't do anything constructive to a viable strategy. Prime examples are Megrim/Liliana's Caress/The Rack and even competitively with decks like Counter-Top Thopters. The problem with a discard based deck is that the cards that actually kill your opponent, (Megrim, Caress and the like) are only effective prior to discard spells being played. Because these cards can only really come down on two or three (or first turn with a Dark Ritual) and need a turn to really become active through your playing more spells, they are inherently broken because discard effects are most effective during the first three turns of the game. If you take a turn out to dedicate to a card that only allows your discard spells to gain another, unrelated ability, then that is effectively doing nothing to win the game for that turn. Similarly, these proactive cards can never save you from the threats that make their way on to the table over the first few turns nor do they protect you from the top card of your opponent's library.

The problem with a deck like Counter-Top Thopters is that it is trying to assemble in the battlefield that it doesn't actually have time to play the control role in. As all the cards that would normally be in the control player's hand are being lost to card disadvantage and assembling soft-locks on the table, the opponent is given a lot of time and leeway to consider how to approach and combat this deck. The resulting mess is a spiral in game states getting out of hand, especially in a format that has been hardened to the Counter-Top soft-lock.

Poor Card Quality

The abstract of card quality is that you want to have access to the best cards that fill a specific task. When you're looking at fulfilling a function in your deck, such as drawing cards or killing a creature, there are cards that stand out as the most efficient cards for the job; for me those cards are Contract from Below and Swords to Plowshares, respectively. To have the cheapest cards with the highest level of power is what we're looking for. Why would you want to play Rain of Tears when you have Sinkhole available? Are the bonus modes of Cryptic Command worth its restrictive and high cost? Sometimes a question of card quality will be obvious, "While with others, there will be more pressing concerns"

People are often able to agree on what the best cards for a very specific task are, but if you were to ask someone what the best way to win the game in Legacy is right now, then you're going to have to look at a variety of answers. Because Legacy is such a diverse format, you not only want to get the most effective creature at the lowest possible cost, but that creature must also be able to fulfill some form of utility, such as Qasali Pridemage as a 3/3 attacker and Disenchant or Knight of the Reliquary as an X/X attacker and with the ability to find lands that do something extra. You want access to cards like these so that you have a chance against the greatest number of decks. This is why cards like Cunning Wish and Jace the Mindsculptor are so strong in control decks and why catchalls such as Wasteland, Engineered Explosives and Pernicious Deed will always be popular.

There are instances where a card is applicable in every match-up but never really shines in any. This exactly what we saw with the use of Stifle in many different decks. Against every deck you could hit a fetchland: Storm decks had storm triggers, Goblins had Wasteland and AEther Vial, Landstill had Decree of Justice, and it could always be a blow out, as long as your opponent's hand was weak anyway. Stifle was great at doing a lot of things, but one of the things it could seldom do was get you back in a game, and it took people an exceptionally long time to figure this out. A very similar thing happened with Vendillion Clique, where the role for the card has never been clear and now we're at a point where all of the decks that had traditionally been using the card have cut it for something more consistent.

Another of the major causes of poor card quality in a deck is cost. The best cards tend to be rare [or Mythic] and those cards often have the highest price tags. Even when a deck with a relatively low price tag becomes popular and powerful, the cost of those cards tends to steadily raise, as is the case with Merfolk and Goblins, which both primarily operate on uncommons. It may sound cold, but there was a great piece of advice that I read about video games back a few years ago and it went something like, if you can't make a free-form action game that can compare to Grand Theft Auto, just don't bother. The same goes for fighting games and Street Fighter and racing games and whatever popular game there is. The same applies to Magic, if you can't build a Merfolk deck that can compare in card quality to similar Merfolk decks, then you probably should be looking at building a different type of deck.

Anti-Synergy

Anti-Synergy is very likely the most common form of deck building error that we see on the large scale. Just as it's easy to tell when someone is drunk, clear anti-synergies such as playing Howling Mine in a deck where your win condition is The Rack or playing a very high mana curve in a deck with Counterbalance are going to stick out. The severity of these can range from relatively minor, such as playing Nevinrral's Disk in a deck with several creatures, to major, such as severely undercutting your ability to win with sub-par cards, for example, playing Gamekeeper in a deck that features creatures it has no positive interactions with.

In the case of playing a board sweeper such as Disk or Pernicious Deed in a deck with cards that you want to put on the table, it's important to keep in mind that you are always going to have control over both when you play those cards and when you activate them. The anti-synergies are only going to occur if you allow them to, and even when they do you will be able to have a grasp on how severe they end up being. However, with something such as Gamekeeper, you will only be able to control the level of luck that is involved when you trigger it during the deck building process. If you play a variety of trash creatures and then an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, it shouldn't be a surprise when you reveal Birds of Paradise when Gamekeeper dies.

Ever since Phyrexian Dreadnought's Oracle text has been changed, there have been some players in the area that are very fixated on putting down a 12/12 as soon as possible. There have been a few successful strategies at accomplishing this, from Dreadstill to Aeon Bridge, and even to some fringe builds of Merfolk playing Stifle. However, some people decided to go the fastest possible route and play Lotus Petal and Enlightened Tutor. While it is true that they would occasionally win games by dropping a Phyrexian Dreadnought and Stifle on turn one, the number of times that they were baffled by drawing nothing but blanks far outnumbered this.

The most common culprits for anti-synergy are trading speed for card advantage, such as using Dark Ritual to play something that isn't going to gain you substantial ground, or Lotus Petal to play anything that isn't Storm related. This extends further to using Mox Diamond in a deck that where it's upper end mana costs is three, in many cases where a deck isn't using Life from the Loam. We also see issues where players are choosing to run higher and higher mana curves for overall better card quality, but trying to find a way to keep Counterbalance in the deck effectively.

Solutions

The primary means to solve any of these problems is actually to test, test and then test again. If you're trying to win more games, you should focus on what is working consistently and not what worked once, like attacking on turn two with an Emrakul that just entered the battlefield or having Phyrexian Dreadnought on the table on turn one. The Ferret actually wrote a very interesting article on this aspect of not only the game, but of personality as well, a while back. Aside form testing, you can make a conscious effort to always use the most effective cards in your decks. Generally, it isn't too hard to find those cards, most other competitive players are using those cards already. If you're working without a group of people, looking up decks on this here Internet is an excellent resource.

Now, I know that net-decking is something that comes highly frowned upon in some circles but let's talk about some of the benefits of playing a deck, card-for-card from the Internet. Firstly, you allow yourself to play with a list of cards that [probably] works well enough to navigate through a tournament, which will allow you the Opportunity to play against better players. When you're using these cards you may tumble upon interactions that you'd never considered in your own tinkering. Thirdly, you're going to experience what it is to be metagamed against if you're playing a popular archetype and put yourself into a position where you nee to out-think an opponent or a situation, when you do this with common deck archetypes you are going to be able to apply that knowledge to future situations with even fringe decks much more easily that that can work in the reverse. To work around Anti-Synergy, the best advice is to try to focus the attack of your deck so that everything is attempting to accomplish the same goal. This is a skill set that develops naturally over time in fairly intuitive.

Case Study Rev614

Rev614 was a very powerful deck that really showed how strong Mystical Tutor is. The deck looked to hybridize the strength of Doomsday with the raw power of the Show and Tell decks that were running around at the time. The deck did not have too many bad matches in the field and there were a lot of strong aspects to the deck, however the deck was littered with cards that didn't play nice with each other. First, you only wanted LED if you were going to storm, which is against any non-blue deck, but much of the time it would never be able to produce mana to assist in the Emrakul Plan. On the same token, Infernal Tutor was nearly always dead weight as it would seldom be able to find anything. The worst however was Show and Tell itself. In the main deck, there was exactly one card worth putting into play off Show and Tell, and that is a one-of Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. Things were a mess.

Despite all of this it was really possible to win a lot of game-ones and then focus the build into something that would be stronger against whichever specific deck that you were combating. For example, with any Blue deck you sided out all the storm cards and brought in more guys for Show and Tell and Doomsday plans, and Merfolk had some added cards that you would bring in to combat them. If you were against a non-blue deck you focused on the Storm plan and they likely could not beat it. However, I often wondered if the deck could be improved upon; I experimented with it a few ways, but by the time it would have been crunch time to work on the deck, Mystical Tutor was banned and it was clear that this wasn't going to be an easily workable strategy. For the most part, Storm decks have recovered and Doomsday is even an attractive route again, so I'm back to wondering if these can be hybridized. This is where I'm currently at, working to see if what was a rather clunky deck can really be retooled into something that I feel a lot more comfortable playing, and this is a new work in progress that I'll post status updates about periodically.

An Off-Topic Conclusion

This article was delayed again due to a lot of circumstances, but I finally got it finished and can move on to something else. I did learn an important lesson that I would really like to pass on to all of you out there on the Internet: keep liquids away from computers. Lucky, my laptop was not a total loss, but I will be needing to get a USB keyboard this up coming week so I don't need to hit CTRL + V every time I want to type the letter m (under-case because my clipboard only has a lower-case m copied.). I also learned that you don't go out grocery shopping at the midnight leading into Black Friday, there are lines and you can't get a pizza. I'm looking forward to picking the game back up after stepping away from it for a few weeks due to holiday nonsense, but we will of course be dealing with more holiday nonsense soon, December has always been bad for Magic, in my experience, however I learned a few years ago that bowling leagues really pick up during the winter.

~Christopher Walton

im00pi at Gmail for Electronic Mail

Master Shake on The Source

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