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Since Gathering Magic is now providing excellent content regarding kitchen table Magic, we have to work to make sure that no one gets left out of this exciting movement in Magical enjoyment. Competitive players are constantly getting the short end of the stick from everyone, especially from strategy websites and tournament organizers, so we’re going to do our best to reach out to them and make casual Magic accessible to everyone. The format has gained a reputation for not being skill-intensive, when the reality is just the opposite: Having fun is just as difficult as winning tournaments, if not more so. This shift in goals is often the biggest hurdle for competitive players attempting to play casually.
The first step in learning a new game is knowing how to win. In this case, to win at kitchen table Magic, one has to cause the other players to have more net fun than anyone else at the table.1 Under no circumstances should players attempt to win the individual games of Magic, as this will almost certainly lead to a lost opportunity at earning more net fun (due to shortened experiential time).
Basic Strategy
Kitchen table strategies generally break down into aggro and control roles. An aggro player will immediately begin quoting recent video games and Internet memes in an attempt to win players’ hearts and minds right off the bat, forcing them to leave the player in the game longer. The player will then attempt to cast as many fun-maximizing spells in as short a period of time as possible. Ideally, the other players won’t be able to race that vast amount of fun, and they will be drowned out of the conversation entirely.
A control player, on the other hand, seeks foremost to minimize the fun that other players’ spells create. Typically, this will rely on eye-rolls and knowing smirks at certain cards, commenting on “how it seems a bit powerful” and “didn’t that just win a Pro Tour.” This usually works to embarrass the spellcaster away from fun-efficient spells later in the game, leaving room for the control player to come from behind with Scrambleverse and a bunch of other cards that sound entirely made up.
Midrange, too, is a time-honored, fun-creation strategy. A midrange player will play fun cards at a reasonable pace while joking around at the expense of others. Any two-for-one, such as a single comment that both demoralizes one player while provoking a laugh from another, is going to be efficient in this strategy.
Anyone attempting combo will be immediately reported.
Controlling Casual Game Flow
After the early game (comprised of complaining about lands and casting 10-mana Dragons), players will attempt a number of moves, countermoves, and feints in order to convince other players to destroy their permanents. Since removal is so wildly unfun, players will attempt to stick cumulative fun-generating permanents that give other players the unfortunate decision of taking a penalty to remove it or be slowly buried under a mountain of fun. Thus, we arrive at a variant of the multiplayer-iterated prisoner’s dilemma, wherein players must play a certain amount of removal to avoid having too much fun caused by the wrong person, yet work to play less than everyone else in the group in order to have more room for cards that directly cause fun themselves. Playing no removal at all is a high-risk, high-reward proposition—if everyone else is playing it, the extra cards should win it handily . . . but if no one does and you’re not the player who plays Psychic Battle, the game is essentially done.
The late game consists of players attempting not to be the one to end the game. Most high-level, kitchen table games will come down to a blistering assault of Donate effects, especially Bazaar Trader,2 attempting to stick one player with an overwhelming number of high-powered but fun-inefficient cards, combined with a high-mana-cost option to cause creatures to attack.
The Mental Game
Competitive players experienced with bluffing and so-called “Jedi mind tricks” will feel right at home in casual Magic. One pro player once famously opened with Cabal Therapy on an opponent, convincing the entire table that he brought a completely unoptimized-for-casual “tournament deck” to the table . . . only to follow it up eleven turns later with Relentless Rats! Truly a cunning play for the ages.3
Normally, the main goal of a bluff in kitchen table Magic is to convince opponents that the fun they’re having is due entirely to you. Someone plays a cool card? Quickly look up a pun involving that card’s name. It’ll be like you invented the card yourself!
If you’re not the punning type, you can go against the conventional wisdom of how you can stay in the game longer by being really nice. Instead, be kind of a jerk and get eliminated. Then, act really sad and mopey when they kill you. They’ll feel really bad and won’t have a good time without you, which should do wonders for your statistics.
Alternatively, if you ask someone about a card in his hand, he might make an accidental snapping sound as he flips to it. He’ll probably be exiled for that.
Alternate Format of Note: Commander
Commander presents an interesting problem: In addition to requiring large singleton decks (so that no player gets the multiplier for using one when it isn’t required), it replaces the victory conditions with Sheldon Points (a system invented by Sheldon Menery to replace the traditional victory condition with a rotating group of bonuses and penalties for doing certain things in-game). While decks should obviously be constructed to maximize Sheldon Points, constructing decks to maximize Sheldon Points is penalized by a large deduction of Sheldon Points. To maximize Sheldon Points, therefore, it would seem to be the easiest to construct a deck that is incapable of acquiring any, but this would grant it a large compensatory bonus in Sheldon Points, ensuring that it’s penalized for its efficient production of Sheldon Points. Therefore, players should construct decks to maximize Sheldon Points, knowing that they’ll get a large penalty, therefore getting a large reward for finishing so low (that is, being noncompetitive) in Sheldon Points.
That’s all for this week. Keep reading GatheringMagic for all your casual, strategic needs!
Jesse Mason
1 While different playgroups will often have their own methods of calculating this, with the rise of Magic analytics, most groups have moved away from subjective fun measurement systems (often derided as “funpolling” by many) and toward formulas such as Fun Above Replacement Player (FAR). While most players could safely ignore the formulas and do reasonably well, knowing how to maximize fun can be crucial in certain marginal situations. First, the formula to calculate gross fun is as follows:
CMCC = Converted Mana Cost Cast
T = current Turn (calculated in similar fashion to a tournament’s “five extra turns”)
R = Randomosity. While originally created as a numerical descriptor of Krark's Thumb et al., its usage has been defined more broadly to include anything suitably wacky.
PRTGD = Permanent Rating, Destroyed. Permanent Rating is a metric laid out in Sargent’s excellent book, Kitchen Table Magic on Paper, and it cannot be adequately explained here. Suffice it to say that every permanent has its own rating, and destroying a permanent owned and originally controlled by any other player creates the PRTGD.
P = number of Players
While the formula seems simplistic, and it led to calls for its inventors to “move to Massachusetts and marry an Eldrazi,” it has proven itself an adequate model for fun. What it explicitly does not do, however, is give any sort of information as to how efficiently the player created fun for the rest of the table; by multiplying by number of players and not adjusting on a per-game basis, it is purely a bulk/gross statistic.
Dividing GF by total player minutes gets us closer to an efficiency model for players; however, this does not take into account set releases that may sway the sample toward a more or less fun environment—or overall player trends, such as decisions toward certain archetypes. It will also be heavily influenced by playgroup pace. With the trend away from per-game and per-minute evaluators came pace-neutral denominators such as turns, but keep in mind that turns are already used as an exponent in the GF formula, so dividing by turns would just be silly. Instead, we’ll divide by Used-Land-Drop Equivalent (ULDE), a turn substitute that counts the number of lands used to play spells or abilities (non-
-cost, of course). Therefore:
The 0.44 multiplier is to accommodate pseudo-land-drops, such as Moxen, Elves, and Alex Bertoncini.
Last year’s average Adj. Fun was 107.2, but after the Azami Slayings tragically occurred, this rose to 114.6. 100 was semi-arbitrarily chosen as “replacement level” fun, the idea being that nearly any player, with a small amount of effort and a promise not to hit on their girlfriend, could produce an Adj. Fun of 100. For simplicity’s sake in scorekeeping, points are totaled in the Adj. Fun a player produces over 100.
2 While PRTGD would not normally penalize players much for destroying a two-mana card, Bazaar Trader and its ilk fall under the But It’s A Utility Creature exception for cards with tap abilities and mana costs higher than their power. This is especially potent when combined with -X/-0 effects.
3 NB: players will often reveal their hand to such discard spells, attempting to make the caster choose a card in it. Naming something entirely unlikely with Cabal Therapy, such as "white-bordered card,” is advised, but this, too, can lead to sophisticated bluffs and counter-bluffs.
