Archive for B Smith
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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The new year has arrived. It's a time for new beginnings. So let's talk about the easiest way to get a new beginning in a game of Magic: mulligans.
Actually, the real reason I want to talk about mulligans is because over the past year, I've been training myself to mulligan more and more aggressively. Now I'm starting to feel the pendulum in my brain start to pull back in the other direction. That tells me it's time to write down my thoughts and get them organized in my head.
What I'm writing here is general advice for Sealed Deck games. It's probably useful for Booster Drafts too, but you may have higher or more focused expectations considering that you presumably have a more focused deck. It may or may not be useful for Constructed formats, where hyper-focused decks may have very detailed mulligan considerations.
There are three big questions I try to keep in mind when I decide whether or not to mulligan.
What will the board look like after turn three?
Often people will boil this down to more specific questions about the number and types of lands in hand, having creatures you can cast, and so on. Those are all important factors to consider in this question, but I also try to look at the board state holistically—sometimes strengths in one area might outweigh a weakness in another, or clever play can fix what looks like a problem at first glance.
At the end of turn three, I ideally want to have access to all of my main colors (as opposed to colors I'm splashing—I should be able to do without those for a while). I can stand to be missing a color, but that makes it more important that I can cast the spells I have with the land that I have. Any spells that I draw in the missing color will be dead weight, and I really don't want to have a hand full of spells I can't cast.
I also ideally want to have a couple of creatures on the board. One creature and another useful permanent is usually acceptable. The further I dip below that benchmark, the more I have to be able to play control for a while: without creatures, I need to have spells that can hold off my opponent early, and a plan to overpower them later.
This means that, after game one, I need to consider what my opponent's side of the board can look like too. If one deck's fast while the other one's slow, the early game deserves more consideration—that's when the fast deck works to establish an early edge that it can ride to victory. The closer the decks are matched in speed, the harder it is to outpace your opponent. Finding other ways to dominate the game is more likely to bear fruit.
If I mulligan, is that hand likely to be better?
If your hand is wanting for some reason, next consider some of the objective reasons for that. What are the odds that you would draw a new hand with the same misfeatures as this one? The higher they are, the less likely it is that a mulligan will solve your problems.
This is one of those parts of Magic where a working knowledge of statistics comes in handy. Walking through the math would be a post in its own right, so I'm not going to do that here. For now, I'll just point out that the quick numbers people compile about decks—average mana cost, mana symbol counts, creature counts, land counts, on and on—are all reference points we use, in part, to help us make these decisions quickly. If you draw a hand where the average mana cost of the spells is 4, a mulligan is more likely to help you in a deck with an average mana cost of 2 than one of 3. Drawing a hand with no creatures is a lot more likely in a deck with ten creatures than one with fifteen.
Since you typically only have thirty minutes to build a deck in Sealed Deck, you probably won't have time to compile all these numbers for your reference. Fortunately, we're often building decks that are designed to hit common basic guidelines: seventeen lands, fifteen creatures, an average mana cost around 3, and so on. These numbers pull double duty by giving you a reference point in your mulligan decisions. You just have to remember if you've deviated from them in some significant way.
If a mulligan isn't statistically likely to help you, it's probably not worthwhile. That's not to say that you don't have a problem, but it's a problem that needs to be solved by fixing your deck more than any individual hand.
Does the potential reward justify the risk?
If a mulligan can help you, now you have to decide whether or not to plunge into the unknowable. If you shuffle up and deal again, your chances of drawing a bad hand are worse than they were before, since you'll be down a card. Do you stand to gain enough to justify the risk of losing a card to no benefit?
I don't think this question is fundamentally answerable. Sure, there are specific situations where we all agree: if your first hand doesn't have any land in it, go ahead and mulligan. But as the potential rewards shrink, the answers split more and more. This is why mulligans are an evergreen topic for strategy discussion, and why Luis Scott-Vargas can always spark discussion by putting mulligan puzzles at the bottom of his articles. Nobody can answer this question for you. You'll have to bring all your experience with the game to bear to make the best judgment you can.
While I think I've improved my ability to answer all these questions, probably the single biggest reason I'm trying to mulligan less these days is because I have more respect for the risk it entails. As I learned to care about the makeup of my hand beyond the land count, I would be quick to throw away borderline hands. This almost guaranteed I would be starting with five cards or fewer at least once per tournament—sometimes twice. That was more than I was willing to take, so now I'm more likely to keep hands that might make for a bad early game, as long as they let me survive and set me up to cast what I draw later.
As I play even more, I'm sure I'll gain even more experience about how to evaluate the value of a hand and the risk of pitching it. Maybe in another year the pendulum will swing again and I'll need to write down all my newfound wisdom in another blog post. If you want to speed up that process, please share your own Limited mulligan considerations in the comments. For now, I think this covers the fundamentals of what I know.
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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I usually try to center my tournament report posts around the theme of a particular lesson about the game. It gives the post some structure and helps make the lesson more memorable for myself. That structure won't work for this report, because here I see a lot of recent themes coming together. This is the tournament that inspired my recent post about the importance of play skill. It also touches on important issues in deckbuilding, about how to weigh consistency against raw power level. So I'm going to try something a little different, and tell the story chronologically—starting with opening cards.
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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Recent events have me thinking that, while my deckbuilding can always use critique and improvement, right now I might do better to focus on how I actually play.
It all got started when I read this Limited Information column with stories from Grand Prix Santiago. The last section ("What Are You Representing?") tells a story about how a game went horribly wrong for Martin Juza when he played a second Island instead of a Forest for his third land. His opponent sees two blue mana open and holds back a bomb for fear of playing into Dissipate—but Martin's actually holding Frightful Delusion. Had Martin held back the second Island, his opponent might have felt confident playing the bomb right away, when Frightful Delusion could counter it.
In the past, I've tried to avoid sweating exactly when and in what order I play my lands. I recognized that it could influence the game in a small way, but fretting too much sometimes led me to make worse mistakes like skipping a land drop, and I didn't understand how it could be enough to single-handedly swing a game. This simple story immediately changed my attitude about that. The signals being sent are unambiguous, and it all happens early enough that you can't wave it away with more rewinding ("But if he played the Forest, his opponent might've...").
More recently, a friend joined me for one of the tournaments. This guy has traveled a lot to play at professional-level events, and even did well enough at this year's Worlds to win prize money, so compared to me he's a master. Here he coasted to a 4-0 victory, and at the end of the tournament, he had plenty of suggestions for me—some of them about my deck, but more of them about my play.
Some of it I expected. He was watching one game I completely blew it: I saw my opponent mill a Silent Departure into his own graveyard, thought to myself, "I need to make sure I don't invest too much in one creature and get blown out"—and then went on to put Elder Cathar's +1/+1 counters and a Bonds of Faith on my only remaining creature, a Homicidal Brute.
But my friend remembered way more than that one obvious incident. Where I could only remember the most basic outline of most of my games, in every one he watched he remembered what me and my opponents both played, when we did and didn't attack, what threats were being represented when, and even turns where I spent a long time thinking. All this in addition to winning his own games.
It's easy to go back and reexamine the decks I build because the cards are a record of all of my choices. I think my deckbuilding has improved a little because of that—I still have a long way to go, but I'm already a little embarrassed about some of the lists on this blog. But I can't focus on the deckbuilding just because it's easy. I'd like to improve all of my Magic skills, including my actual play, and to do that I'm going to need to remember and reexamine those decisions too. It'll take some effort, but now I'm sure it'll pay off.
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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Sometimes when I look at a sealed pool, I see at least two strategies that seem equally viable. They both have reasonable curves, creature counts, mana bases, and other solid fundamentals. When this happens, the decision to maindeck one strategy over another seems to be less about choosing a superior deck in isolation, and more about considering the metagame.
While I think there's a metagame at all levels of Magic, I think it's difficult to say what the metagame is at the sort of small local tournaments where I play. With only about twenty people in attendance any given week, the metagame can depend on factors as simple as who shows up. I think the best metagame clues you can get at tournaments like these come from the people who like to chat about what they opened while they're deckbuilding.
Still, whatever happens in the local metagame, it's always true that when you're in this sort of situation, it's often worthwhile to switch to plan B if you end up struggling with a bad matchup. That's what I did in this tournament, and it served me very well; I went 2-1 with a bye, only facing a tough loss in the tournament finals. Two decklists—and the story of their evolution—below.
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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People talk about "synergy" a lot in the context of Limited strategy. Put roughly, a deck has synergy when its individual pieces work well together. Obvious card combinations, like playing Burning Vengeance with a bunch of flashback cards, are the clearest example of this, but there are other kinds of synergy. A synergistic deck might ways to turn downsides on specific cards into advantages, or have multiple ways to consistently execute one of its endgame plans. It might be easier to describe synergy from the opponent's perspective: when your opponent has a synergistic deck, you can sometimes feel like you're doomed no matter what you do.
Synergy in a deck is desirable, but it's not the be-all, end-all of Limited deck construction. It's just one more factor to weigh against others like raw power level of the cards and mana base considerations. In this tournament, I made a red-green werewolves deck that, I think, compromised a little raw power for a lot of synergy—and I was richly rewarded, with a 3-1 finish. My decklist and postmortem is below.
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Sun Nov 27, 2011 12:25 am
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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Limited Magic formats are unique enough that they're worth practicing on their own if you want to get better. You can learn a lot by playing other Constructed formats, but they won't teach you the lessons that are unique to Limited.
Unfortunately, playing lots of Limited can get expensive fast. Unless you're aiming to go pro, you probably don't want to spend the money it would take to crack open new packs a few times a week. So what do you do instead?
MTGO is one popular option. I've heard that if you're good enough, you can expect that you'll win enough packs that it's not so expensive. This doesn't really work for me, though. For one, I doubt I'm that good yet. On top of that, I don't use Windows, so trying to run MTGO would probably be more hassle than it's worth.
I've heard of some people who practice with some combination of cards and proxies, using the collection to build fake packs. For example, you might buy a playset of all the set's commons and uncommons, and then proxy the rares and mythics and use them to build packs. But this option doesn't have much appeal for me either; the time spent proxying the rares and building new packs seems daunting.
Recently I've been practicing online using a program called Cockatrice. Think of Cockatrice as a virtual online kitchen table; it doesn't handle rules enforcement, so it won't stop you from using an illegal deck or missing your triggers, but it gives you the tools you need to take whatever actions the cards require. People use Cockatrice to play all kinds of Magic, from casual and Commander games to Standard playtesting and Draft practice.
Cockatrice doesn't handle the deckbuilding part of a Limited game. You'll have to use some external tool for that. CCGDecks.com is popular among Cockatrice users. If you log in, you can build and save decks; then, when you play in Cockatrice, your opponents can confirm you're playing fair and only using cards from your pool. Players can also get together to play a proper booster draft. When you're done building your deck on the site, the export features make it easy to load in Cockatrice.
If you don't want that much overhead, and just want to try the game with a friend, Magic Draft Simulator offers the same basic functionality without the overhead of account creation. When you're done building your deck, "Export Decklist" lets you copy it to your clipboard, and Cockatrice's deck builder can load it from there. (Personally, I've had trouble exporting any deck from the first pool I open; if I open a second pool with the "Open another deck" button, then it works fine.) If you use this site, there's nothing to protect you against cheaters; but if you trust your opponent, it's a quick way to get going.
I've already practiced several pools of Innistrad this way. It's actually easier to sneak into my schedule than I would've thought; once you're familiar with all the tools, you can fit a round of deckbuilding and a best-of-5 match in about 90 minutes. It's a great way to get more experience with a format and deckbuilding without breaking the bank. If you're looking for more practice, definitely look into it.
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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The introduction of Innistrad represents a funny time for me. I've learned a lot about the game over the last year, but it's not always obvious which lessons are universal, and which are specific to the Scars of Mirrodin block. Playing with new cards helps separate those out, but meanwhile my games could get chaotic.
This is my first report from an Innistrad tournament, and I don't really have a deck list to show you, because it was never the same deck for long. I started out BRG, then moved to BG, and finally to BR. None of it really worked: I ended up going 0-3-1 against a variety of archetypes.
So let me show you my pool and just share my thoughts and experiences.
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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Just like I planned, I had an opportunity to try out a booster draft while we were still playing with M12. So what did I think of it?
As Magic Eight Ball would say: reply hazy—try again later.
I went to the same store I usually go to for sealed deck games, but the atmosphere felt very different. The sealed deck events are social, with lots of conversation, commentary, and trading. The booster draft, by contrast, was buttoned-down; most of the talk was in-game communication. The players seemed more serious about the game in general, too. There's nothing wrong with that—it is a competitive event, after all—but it was a little intimidating as a newcomer.
I struggled to keep track of all the information that I knew was important: the signals I was receiving, the signals I was sending, my creature count, and my mana curve. I would worry about all these issues, but I'd bounce back and forth between them in isolation, unsure of how to balance them against each other.
I ended up with a black-red deck that wanted to be aggressive but couldn't quite make the cut. With ideal draws it could swing in for early hits and then close the game with a Lava Axe or two, but more typically it would fall behind in the midgame with no good way to stabilize the board or recover. The drafter to my left also went black-red, and his picks seemed more solid overall, so being cut out of the best picks from pack two probably hurt. I went 0-2 and then dropped.
Overall, booster draft was an interesting change of pace. It's something I'd be willing to try again—just not at that store. I think I'd be able to get a better grasp of the basics in an environment where I was more relaxed. Fortunately, there's another store across town that promises exactly that. If I get the opportunity to try it out, I'll let you know how it goes.
Mon Oct 10, 2011 10:45 pm
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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Eesh, it's been too long since I've posted. I know everybody's excited about Innistrad, including me, but before I move on to our new block I have a couple of last M12 stories I want to share. In this post, I have a couple of sealed deck tournament reports.
In both of these pools, I opened a planeswalker. I had never opened or played with a planeswalker before this, so it was exciting to get my first shot at it, and then later to watch lightning strike twice. I've played against planeswalkers a small handful of times, and won more of those games than I've lost, so I know they're not automatic bombs, and I made sure to keep that in mind while I built my decks. Still, in both pools, running the planeswalker seemed like the right choice.
My first tournament was headlined by Garruk, Primal Hunter, and backed up by great big green creatures like Cudgel Troll, Greater Basilisk, and Stingerfling Spider. I needed an early game plan to make sure I got the chance to bring those creatures out, though, and I was torn picking a second color to do that. White packed a real punch with cards like Angelic Destiny, Serra Angel, and Pacifism. Blue had a solid mix of classic control (Aether Adept, Cancel) and card filtering (Merfolk Looter, Divination), plus Djinn of Wishes on the high end. At first, I built the green-blue deck, thinking the control would do more to help me get to the late game, but several players around me said they thought my white was better overall, so I made the switch in the last ten minutes of deckbuilding.
I still think it's tough to say whether they were totally right, but they definitely didn't steer me wrong; I went 3-1 that night. None of the games were in question; I was absolutely crushed by an aggressive W/U fliers deck, and handily beat all my other opponents. I got to make all sorts of crazy plays: in just my first match, Garruk went ultimate in the first game, and in the second game I cast him and immediately used him to draw six cards, thanks to my Serra Angel enchanted with Trollhide. I was a little reluctant to let the planeswalker go so easily, but six cards for five mana is a fantastic deal, and gave me the gas I needed to end the game next turn.
In the second tournament, Jace, Memory Adept made an appearance, but the entire pool was much tougher to work with. Every color had something to recommend it, but at the same time they all felt really shallow. Ultimately I chose white to have its early game power buy me time for my blue controlling cards to work their magic, but I ended up having too few ways to end the game; I could tell by the way my Aven Fleetwing would have tons of pressure to perform whenever it came out. For my last round, with nothing at stake, I switched over to a B/R build, but got mana screwed and closed the night with a 1-3 record.
Afterward, at the kitchen table, I tried a U/G build, and that worked a lot better. The big green creatures kept me from getting run over mid-to-late game, and flying them over to my opponent's face with my Chasm Drake was a decent closing strategy. So I definitely know that I could've done a better job of deckbuilding at the event. Still, even now, I think I might have to build every pair of color to figure out which one's really best—and I might have been best off switching colors in and out between games based on specific matchups.
Despite my poor showing, the tournament was definitely not a wash. I had good incentive to play blue, which I rarely do, and I think that helped me learn a lot about how to pilot a control-oriented deck. And half my rares will fit great in my Kaalia Commander deck, so I can't complain too much. 
Lists for both pools follow.
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B Smith
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
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When I started playing Limited regularly, I eschewed Constructed formats for a while. Part of the reason I built a cube at home was so that I'd have even more opportunities to play Limited. It seemed like good strategies and card evaluations were usually very different between the formats, and I didn't want them mixed up in my head. Hearing someone call a card "Limited fodder" could leave an unfairly negative impression in your head.
More recently, Commander has been our format of choice at home, and after playing a couple dozen games I've come to realize that while those earlier impressions were all correct, there are other lessons you can learn from other formats that are still plenty valuable.
Commander is a format all about crazy board states. Once a good Commander game really gets going, the creatures will be facing off like a line of scrimmage in American football, there will be a handful of artifacts and enchantments interacting with each other, and you'll have all the mana you need to play whatever you like. It can be a real challenge to keep track of it all. I've learned little personal habits and tricks to help me remember what I need to know and boil down the complexity into a form I can manage in my head.
Those habits have already helped me at my Sealed Deck games. Compared to a typical Commander board, the most complicated Limited board is a cakewalk. I'm better about remembering triggers and abilities I want to take advantage of, and I only need a few seconds to do combat math that might've taken me half a minute before. I have Commander to thank for that.
Commander hasn't just helped me in the spellslinging part of the game. I'm also learning deckbuilding skills from it. Commander is a Highlander format: you build a hundred-card deck, and it can only include one copy of any given card except basic land. Commander decks are often very synergistic, aiming to consistently perform some action like creating tokens, attacking with huge creatures, or even just fetching basic land. Normal Constructed decks tend to achieve consistency by including four copies of their key cards, but Commander decks don't have that luxury. Instead they have to resort to other tricks: repeatable effects, tutors, and synergistic interactions. While I probably won't ever build something so consistent in Sealed Deck, these are tools that I can use to get more synergy in my decks when repetition isn't an option.
Different formats emphasize different parts of Magic. What's common in one format may be rare in another—but "rare" isn't the same thing as "nonexistent," so having lots of practice in a situation in one format can help you out when it strangely shows up in another. There's a lot to learn by playing all kinds of different formats; you just have to use a little care not to misapply the lessons where they aren't appropriate.
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