02 - get better at magic

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the game usually plays itself out, but knowing when and how to mulligan, both when you know your

opponent's deck and when you don’t, is very hard. And quite frankly, most people don’t give it much

credit. I have a very different opinion on which hands to mulligan and which to keep than most people.

The only one who seems to agree with me on almost everything is Paulo Vitor and it seems like the rest of

the world is against us. I’ll give you a few examples:

This is a hand from GP Minneapolis, which resulted in a very long discussion. Here is your decklist:

This hand looks fine, but in my opinion, it’s a mulligan

on the play and even on the draw. Even though you have

a lot of cheap drops, you don’t really have anything going

besides some useless enchantments. You can’t play turn

1 Steppe Lynx nor the Gatekeeper of Malakir on turn 3.

Your deck is very powerful and I don’t think there is any

reason why you should be gambling with this kind of

hand. If your deck was bad, then maybe I would keep

this, hoping to draw into 2 Swamps and have a great

advantage with the Gatekeeper that I can return and play

again with the Soul Stair Expedition, but given all the

information, I take a mulligan. After asking others, so

does PV, but LSV, Olivier Ruel and pretty much every other player I asked, all keep.

From an article by David Ochoa:

"Game 1: I won the roll and stared at my hand ( Mountain, Goblin Guide, Plated Geopede, Adventuring

Gear, Slaughter Cry , Molten Ravager, and Spire Barrage ). This hand was perfect except for one problem:

it needed land. Well, I had nineteen lands left in the deck along with an Expedition Map. I kept and drew

three Mountains in a row."

I would never ever ever ever keep this hand. Adventuring Gear is a dead card, so you are pretty much on 6

to Get Better at Magic — www.blackborder.com — Readability http://www.readability.com/articles/

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cards already. If you don’t draw your land right away, you lose 99% of the time. Why would you possibly

want to gamble like that? And even if you draw let’s say 2 lands in the first 4 draws, it’s still nothing

special.

From one of Nico Bohny's draft walkthroughs:

"Schnauf wins the roll and I keep a rather shaky hand of Ior Ruin Expedition, Into the Roil, Oran-Rief

Survivalist, Oran-Rief Recluse, Vastwood Gorger and 2 Forests."

Not in a million years! This is a mulligan to 5 already.

From a GP a very long time ago:

"Levy kept a one Mountain, Pyrite Spellbomb, Leonin Skyhunter, Alpha Myr, Sun Droplet, Clockwork

Condor, Krark-Clan Grunt hand, on the play."

Seriously?

From Cedric Phillips' Worlds report:

"Game 3, I kept a double White hand on the play with two Knight of the Reliquary ; Elspeth, Knight-

Errant; Emeria Angel; and some other stuff. I was discarding by turn 4 and getting my brains beaten in

by two Putrid Leeches. Annoying!"

Annoying? How about: “Maybe I should have mulliganed ?” You can’t cast any of your spells and if you get

lucky and draw a green source, then you still play your first spell on turn 3. And it's going to be either a2/2 or a 3/3. This is not sealed deck. Even on the draw this hand is just terrible!

All of the above examples aren’t meant in any way as an offense against the players, just something that

caught my eye while reading some coverage and articles and how I feel about it.

If you keep, always have a plan. If you keep a bad hand, be ready to lose (most of the time!) and don’t

complain that you got unlucky. Think about how the game is going to play out (I suggest you watch

Masashi Oiso deciding whether or not to mulligan sometimes) and what you need to win. Not to cast your

spells, TO WIN. It may sound a little harsh, but if you keep terrible hands, you deserve to lose.

Think Harder

You play Faeries against Zoo, you each have 2 life, the board is Kird Ape against nothing and you have a

Venser, Shaper Savant in your hand as the only card. Kird Ape attacks, you bounce it with Venser, and he

replays it. You draw a land, chumpblock, draw another land and die. You pack up your things, leave the

table and start complaining to your friends that you drew so many lands, literally anything would have

been enough, there is no justice and so on. Then your friend points out that you could have bounced the


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Temple Garden instead, because it was your opponent’s only Forest, block the Kird Ape (1/1), kill it and

attack for the win.

Your opponent has an unblockable creature and you are hoping to draw one of your X removal spells. You

did your best trying to buy as much time as you could, while removing 5 lands from your deck at the end

of each of your opponent’s turns with Frontier Guide, but no luck. Well, if you had been using your

Frontier Guide in your upkeep, you would have slightly improved your chances every turn and maybegotten there. (If my math is correct, assuming you have 3 removal spells in a deck of 25 cards and we start

this scenario in your upkeep, over 5 turns you are going to improve your chances by about 2%).

You have a Gomozoa in play against your opponent's Vampire Nighthawk which he doesn’t want to trade.

Then he draws a Journey to Nowhere, plays it and targets your Gomozoa. You return it to your hand with

Into the Roil and replay it again next turn. After some time, he draws another removal spell and you die.

What you should have done is play the Into the Roil on your guy with the Journey to Nowhere still on the

stack, then your opponent would be forced to remove his own Vampire Nighthawk as the only creature in

play.

Recently, Patrick Chapin wrote about a very good example of this. His opponent plays a precombat

Garruk Wildspeaker, and then attacks with Putrid Leech. Patrick has the Lightning Bolt, but his opponent

doesnt pump the Leech. After that, he makes a token with Garruk, which Patrick shot with the Bolt,

hoping to draw something good but only drew a Wall of Denial. After the match he realized he could have

killed the Garruk in combat after receiving damage from Putrid Leech, which would result in the board

being stalled with Wall against Leech next turn and he would still be in the game. I’m not sure I would

have done it either, but by reading about it I’m pretty sure I will make the right play next time.

Things like that happen all the time, you had the win or a way to survive longer, you just didn’t see it.

Sometimes it’s much more complicated, but the more you play and the more you practice, the easier you

are able to see things like that.

nalyze

Look back and think what you are doing wrong, maybe there is a simple solution to why you are not

winning as much as you would like to.

GP Chicago, Legacy (Dredge) 0-3 drop

GP Barcelona, Standard (Sanity Grinding) 0-3 drop

GP Sao Paulo, Standard (Elementals) 0-3 drop

This year, I went 0-3 drop in 3 Constructed GPs. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the entire Magic

world with this achievement. Was it because I’m a bad player? Maybe. Because I suck at Constructed?

Maybe. I have a different explanation though. Look at the decks I played. I have never played Legacy

before but going to Chicago was convenient, so I gave it a try. I have also never played Dredge before, but


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it usually kills on turn 3, so how hard can it be, right? Turns out it can be pretty hard. I was probably

mulliganing too aggressively, I had no idea which cards to expect from which deck (at that time, Fish

often played Relic of Progenitus maindeck, who knew? I learned it the hard way), I didn’t bother to check

more than one decklist of each of the most played archetypes. I didn’t even win a single game 1. Actually I

didn’t even get to play my turn 1 in one match and faced game 1 turn 1 Relic of Progenitus from the Fish

player, but you get the point.

Barcelona was all about 5 Color Control, Tokens, and so on. I thought Sanity Grinding was a good choice

because it was very hard to lose against those decks and I would happily start with 4 cards if I was

guaranteed to play against 5CC. The bad matchups were decks that had no chance against the tier 1 decks

and once you get to the top, you should get paired against a good matchup pretty much every round. It

was a gamble and unfortunately I played against Burn, GB Elves and some kind of Bant hate deck and

went 0-3. I was laughed at by many and I probably deserved it.

Sao Paulo was a different story. I was going to play something else, but then Manuel Bucher came up with

an Elemental deck that nobody was expecting and it was fun to play. But just because something is funand new doesn’t mean you should switch to it from a deck you have been testing for a month.

Likewise, where did your good results come from?

Right after Zendikar came out, there were 3 high level tournaments. I spent some time before the first one

in Japan at Shuuhei's place, practicing drafts with the Japanese players at a local card store.

(Un)fortunately (and, well, obviously) the cards were in Japanese and I have only played 1 release in

Europe, so I didn’t know any of the cards apart from a few. I took the visual spoiler and memorized all the

cards. I went through almost every set review from the top players to look for help, trying to evaluate thecards without actually playing them. Then we did about 12 drafts, compared our results with all the colors

and figured BR aggro was the best archetype by far. White was pretty good too, mostly because the good

aggressive cards were very underestimated and White as a color was thought of as the worst. My results?

GP Melbourne 9th

PT Austin Limited 6-0, which resulted in a top 8

GP Tampa top 8

Well, seems like the preparation paid off big time. I finished 9th in Melbourne on tiebreakers and gettinga sick RB deck in the draft portion seemed to be the easiest thing in the world. Most people just had no

idea how to draft yet. Then came Austin, my first deck featured 3 Plated Geopedes, 3 Burst Lightnings and

a lot of other powerful stuff like 2 Ob Nixilis, the Fallen and so on. In the second draft, black got cut off by

Kibler to my right, so I went with White instead. 4 Steppe Lynxes and 4 Kor Sanctifiers later and I was

6-0. In Tampa it seemed like people caught up with the whole RB thing, and every table had like 4-6 Black

drafters. At the GP after that, every sealed deck was RB and it was also the archetype everyone was going

for in draft. I failed to adapt and failed miserably on day 2, which brings me to my next point.


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If you are playing to win , don’t get too creative, don’t play a deck you have not played before and know

the metagame. If you are going to fly to a GP you might as well spend the extra hour looking at the

decklists. Prepare, practice and you are good to go.

djust

There are a lot of Extended PTQs taking place right now. What’s the best deck? Well, there is no clear

answer. You shouldn’t just be playing a single deck (unless you only know one and you aren’t sure you

would play the other decks correctly etc.), you should also be playing the metagame. After the first online

PTQ I noticed somewhere that the metagame was around 17% All in Red and 17% Burn. That’s about 1/3

of the entire field. Now take one of the top decks that crushes both (I’d say Affinity) and if you play an

online PTQ the next day (which usually is 9 rounds), you pretty much start with 3 byes. Obviously this

doesn’t work out if the next event is 2 weeks from the first one, because most of the players are going to

change their decks.

Read and analyze decklists from PTQ top8s and so on. Don’t just copy the winner's list from the previous

tournament, where he was battling in metagame X. Think about what you need to do to beat metagame Y.

This works in Limited too. After the whole RB thing, I should have just dedicated some time to find out

how to beat it. I didn’t, and my next 3 GPs saw me failing to make day 2 twice and making no money in

the third one.

Dont Think You Are Due

This part is very important. Many players reach a point where they think they are due to win or do better

ust because they are better than most of the other people. You don’t suddenly start winning just like that.

Being a good player doesn’t mean you just have to go to a tournament and expect to win.

Most of those players are the ones that say they got terribly unlucky when they lose. They never lose

because they got outplayed or made a mistake. The only way they ever lose is by getting unlucky. You have

to cross this point where you stop thinking about yourself as the best player in the world and start

thinking clearly. Sometimes a small break from Magic helps, maybe reading a good theory book about

being successful, talking to others. Once you stop thinking that you only lose when your opponent

topdecks 3 times in a row, you will start winning much more. Trust me. I played about 30 GPs before I

ever top8ed one. All the time I thought I was due. I was so good! I tested so much! This year I started

thinking more clearly, started doing things differently, practiced more, played more relaxed. Result? 3 GP

top8s. I no longer think I’m losing because of bad luck and I no longer think I’m the best player ever.

Right when I got to level 8. Isn’t it ironic?

So take your losses with respect, after all, you have to be prepared to lose some. Don’t keep your 2 lander

ust because you didn’t get there last time. Don’t keep 6 lands thinking you can’t get flooded 2 games in a

row.


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02 - get better at magic

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