Learning from Mistakes

I'm sure this is a topic that's been written about several times. There are probably some classic articles that I should be familiar with if I'm going to attempt to tackle such an endeavor. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. This is my reaction to a PTQ I played in this weekend. I'm not going to focus on my build of my pool because first of all, it wasn't really that interesting: I had only 2 nonbasic lands, so I couldn't play too many colors. I didn't have enough playables in any 2 colors to make a deck. My only good 3 color combination was Grixis. From there I just had to decide which one of Cunning Lethemancer, Call to Heel, and Hell's Thunder I played. I went with Cunning Lethemancer, and it's reasonably likely that it should have been Hell's Thunder, but I only had 5 or 6 red sources in the deck, so I didn't want to push it. The reason I probably should have anyway is that I had 2 Corpse Connoisseurs. Second, I'm not really that good at building sealed pools. I've done a lot of it, and I know how Magic works, but I don't know, I just can't get the hang of it. I plan to put in a lot of work in the next few days to try t address that issue. It's one of my weak points as a player, and it's important to recognize that.

Anyway, that's not what this is about. This is about my losses. I play a lot of games of Magic. I bet there's something to learn from most of them. It's hard to focus that much on every game, and really learn everything you can. It's almost always easier to learn from the games you lost. I mean, you must have played right if you won, right? Well, no, not at all. See the game in the top 8 of US Nationals that I won despite throwing all my creatures away in one of the worst attacks ever made because I didn't realize my opponent had two Treetop Villages (there is no justice).

When you lose though, the obvious thing to do is pause, sit back, and reflect. Besides, you have to figure out the story you're going to tell your friends when they ask how you lost. Most people stick with, “Got mana screwed,” “He's such a sack,” or “He had 5 bombs.” I personally prefer to start with something more like, “It was my fault; I should have ____.” After each game then, I have to figure out what that was.

I kind of think none of this is about learning. It's all about coping. These aren't different approaches to how to get better at the game, and I don't study the game purely to get better. We say it to comfort ourselves after losing a game we care about. Most people seem to want to play the victim. They don't want their loss to be their fault. They've already lost; they shouldn't have to admit that they screwed up too.

Personally, I need Magic to be a game of skill, and I need to know that I can get better. I need to feel like putting time and effort into learning can still do something for me, because it's what I care about doing. So when I say a loss is out of my control, I feel like all of my effort to learn has been meaningless. If it's my fault, I may not be as good as I'd like, but at least I can still hope that it's possible for me to get to be as good as I'd like.

So the narrative I tell myself for this weekend is that I went 2-2, and if I was just a little bit better, I'd have been 4-0.

I learn much more from PTQs and other competitive events than I do from casual drafts. This is unfortunate, but it's the way of things, and I'm pretty sure it's true for a lot of people. The reason is as I said above: I learn as a coping method. If I don't care about the game, I don't have that moment where I'm forced to reflect and figure out why I lost. Note to self: Try to take a moment to figure out why I lost whenever I lose. As I continue this article, I'll try to consider exactly what I should be thinking about after each game to try to find what went wrong. This weekend's PTQ went badly for me, but I hope I can learn from it.

So here's what happened:

In the first round, yeah, spoiler, I lost in the first round, I keep a hand with 3 lands that give me red and blue mana, but not black. Most of my spells are black, and I have more sources of black than any other color (I believe I'm 8-7-6 for sources). I'm on the draw. I don't hit my black mana until turn 6. It seems like for a lot of players, the story of why they lost basically ends there. This was a forgiving game though, as my opponent wasn't putting me on any pressure, just building up his mana base. Somewhere in there he played some creature, and I killed it with some removal spell, I think. On his turn 6, he plays a Carrion Thrash, and I want to kill it before he has 2 mana up. Also, I draw my swamp this turn. I play Kederekt Creeper and Soul's Fire his Carrion Thrash off the Creeper to kill it with Deathtouch. Over the next few turns I get some damage in and I play a Tidehollow Strix and he plays a Court Archers and a Flameblast Dragon and I Bone Splinters his dragon sacrificing my Creeper, and somewhere in there there's a turn where he has an Executioner's Capsule and the Court Archers and I have the Tidehollow Strix and the spells I can cast this turn are basically Bloodpyre Elemental or Cloudheath Drake. I decide to attack with the Strix first, and be blocks with the Archer, and then I run the Drake into the Capsule.

This is where the mistake came in. I decided that it was important to save my removal spell because I didn't know what kind of creature he might play, and I didn't want to be out of answers. Here's the problem: He's red/black/green. In all likelihood, the kind of creature he's going to play is some random giant monster. Tidehollow Strix will probably be a reasonably serviceable answer to it. More importantly, my deck has a reasonable number of fliers and an Unearth package of 2 Corpse Connoisseurs and 2 Kathari Screechers. I also have a few burn spells like another copy of Soul's Fire. I have evasion and he doesn't. Yes, I got off to a slow start, but he did too. I should still be trying to race even in this game that feels something like a game of Attrition. After all, I know that my deck doesn't have any bombs, and I should assume he probably does, and I don't want to give him more time to draw them than I have to.

This was a classic failure of role assignment. As it turned out, he cast Gift of the Gargantuan on the next turn to find Kresh the Bloodbrained and then played it, invalidating my Bloodpyre Elemental (as using it would give Kresh +4/+4). I died to Kresh, but not before drawing enough reach in the form of Corpse Connoisseur and Soul's Fire to almost kill him from 10 while chumping Kresh. At the end of the game, I looked at my hand, which was a Bloodpyre Elemental, and tried to figure out what I could have done differently this game. Then I remembered the turn where I tried to decide if I wanted to kill his Archer or not. This seems like a noteworthy thing to look for. At the end of a game, check your hand: Was there ever a window where you could have played one of the spells you never got around to playing that you didn't take advantage of? Might playing it have won you the game? Was there any way to know that you should have played it at the time? Why didn't you play it then? Was that reasoning sound? Should you try to think that way in the future, or should you try to reverse your stance on that kind of play?

I won the next game and mulliganed and died to a Flameblast Dragon I couldn't kill in game 3. After that I won a few relatively uneventful rounds. (For all I know, they might have been quite eventful for my opponents, and they may have learned a lot and gotten some excellent stories about exactly how they punted or whatever, but I don't know them, and, I was unfortunate enough to win those rounds, so I don't have the benefit of the need to review and find out what I should have done differently.)

I picked up my second loss in round 4. I won the first game and felt pretty good about things. Game 2 is looking pretty good. I have a Kederekt Creeper that's going to finish him off, I have a Corpse Connoisseur in the graveyard (put there by its friend, which is hanging out in an Oblivion Ring), and my Kathari Screechers are still in my library. He's at 6 and just played and activated a Courier's Capsule. I have 6 lands and had an empty hand going into this turn where I drew Puppet Conjurer. He also has a Carrion Thrash in play. This turn I can attack him down to 4, and then next turn I can kill him if I can attack with my Creeper and a Screecher, but I only have 6 mana, so I can't Unearth both my Corpse and my Screecher. I decide to Unearth the Corpse even though it can't get any damage in to set up the Screecher so that it can kill him next turn (I could kill him with it next turn anyway if I draw a land, but I want to be sure), and I play the Conjurer.

On his turn he plays Infest and Unearths his Vithian Stinger and kills my Creeper, then he attacks for 2. I can do 2 damage with the Screecher to put him at 2, but I'm completely out of gas after that. I don't really draw anything and the Carrion Thrash kills me.

Now, this is not necessarily a game I could have won, but my play was pretty bad. If he has any removal spell for my Creeper, I can't kill him next turn. If he plays another blocker I can't kill him next turn, and I've completely telegraphed that that's the plan and that's where we are. If I don't Unearth here and he kills my guys and attacks and I draw a land, I kill him with the corpse and the screecher, and he might not even realize that that's going to happen. Even if he does realize, the threat stops him from attacking and buys me a lot of time do draw anything to finish him off. The more I think about it, the worse my play is.

I'm not entirely sure what the lesson is. I mean, I screwed up, clearly, but what's the category? How do I teach myself not to do that, whatever that is, again? I guess I was getting too excited about one specific plan. The end was in sight and I had it all scripted out, but my plan really wasn't something I could count on. I needed to not move all in, and leave my options open. I guess it's just, “don't get carried away,” or possibly, plan for the worst. When I expand it in that way, it actually starts to sound like something I know I need to work on. I lose too many games that I'm completely in control of because it seems like nothing can go wrong and I just screw around rather than killing my opponent. Then something unexpected happens, I give them the wrong window, and I lose.

Case in point: This last week, Tim Aten came over to visit and draft constantly, because apparently there aren't drafts to be found in Ohio, and in the morning, before we could arrange a draft, we played on the MTGO Beta server some. At one point we were thoroughly winning and played Tezzeret with Sanctum Gargoyle in hand. He wanted to bin Tezzeret to get Tower Gargoyle, figuring that between that and the Sanctum Gargoyle as backup, we'd win the game before the opponent, who was stumbling a bit on mana or something, I think, could really get off the ground. I decided to get a Courier's Capsule, break the Capsule, and Sanctum Gargoyle it back, keeping Tezzeret around to get a Tidehollow Strix or something. After I used it to get the Capsule, our opponent killed it with Resounding Thunder. We won the game, but my play was terrible. There was no reason to screw around getting a lot of card advantage when we could have just won. We weren't almost out of gas, and we had no way of knowing how powerful our opponent's hand was. I often get carried away with all the cool stuff I can do and forget to look to actually win.

Awkwardly, that's kind of the opposite of what happened with my loss in the PTQ, where I went for the win and didn't get it, but I feel like both resulted from not properly considering the most likely way that I'd lose that particular game.

I hope you've enjoyed this particular installment of “why I suck.” Ideally, next year or something, I won't have to write articles like this. In the meantime, I hope it helped you learn from my mistakes as I hope to learn from them myself.