Piercing the Mind Games

Piercing the Mind Games
Zvi Mowshowitz

The correct answer is “C” but partial credit can be given to anybody who writes “It depends” in the margin of the test or simply blames the whole stupid thing on “Marketing.”

• Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

It’s time to see why partial credit is available for engineers but mandatory for Magic players trying to qualify for Osaka.

There’s a whole ton of guessing games going on in Extended right now. Not only is it a huge disadvantage to give away how your deck will be sideboarding, but giving away even small details about your decklist or game plan can often be the kiss of death. An opponent who knows his deck and matchups well enough can take that information and turn it against you by adjusting his play and his sideboarding, in much the same way he could change his decklist if he saw what everyone else was playing before the tournament. Even when there’s a standard strategy that is used almost all the time in this particular situation it can still apply. As a source of examples, I’m going to use Seth Burn’s article as a jumping off point.

Seth did a great job of showing one way to build Donate and giving one way to sideboard it in each matchup. The problem is that in Extended, it’s not sufficient to give the best or most likely build and the best or most likely way of sideboarding against an opponent who’s doing his job as well. When a Sapphire Medallion comes out and the opponent’s deck is registered in your mind as “Donate” then it’s important to keep in mind what the range of possible builds and strategies is. Both players have to engage in these guessing games the entire match. As a thought experiment, instead of arguing what I think is the “best” Donate build, I’m going to examine a situation, with a variety of possible deck types. Keep in mind that anything I say about a deck other than TurboLand has not been confirmed with playtesting by anyone, so if you actually plan to use these specific strategies I would advise changing that.

Anything you say can and will be used against you, and knowing even the little things can make a big difference.

It’s round four of the Qualifier, and you’re both 3-0. Your opponent’s name is Sticky McStickerson, as Scott McCord would put it, and you manage to get him to tell you after seeing him play a Merchant Scroll that he copied his deck from Seth’s article, and learned how to play it from the same source. He’s a solid local player, but highly unoriginal. Before I go on, a word of warning: Don’t let this happen to you! It’s amazing the number of people who give away this kind of information when an opponent just asks. At least make the sly individual with an ugly face trick you. Anything you say can and will be used against you, and knowing even the little things can make a big difference. When you’re mana screwed and the opponent asks how many lands you’re playing, do NOT tell him! Or better yet, savagely lie.

Back to Seth’s article, he specifically says sideboarding is fluid for this deck, and that’s advice to keep strongly in mind. A good Extended player will read the article, note that others will read it, and decide which pieces of advice to use. But that sure isn’t Sticky, who thanked his lucky stars the moment a player as good a builder as Seth gave him + and - signs next to card names for sideboarding.

To go in order, suppose you’re playing Sligh. Sorry about that. The problem here is that Sticky has a plan that works no matter what Sligh does, and it works very well. It’s just a bad matchup, and a large part of that reason is that you don’t have any options either. Pyroblast comes in, and now what? The best case scenario is having access to some Bottle Gnomes, which force him to either counter them (which is easy) or go off twice, which is also easy. The only advantage you have is the knowledge that after sideboarding he will have to win with Illusions and won’t even have a Capsize. In other words, second turn Plateau and Seal of Cleansing could be highly annoying, as in “game”. If you’re lucky, the white land wasn’t too obvious in game one, and of course it’s completely impractical if for no other reason than he just sideboards the Capsize or even Morphling back in for game three and wins laughing at himself for how he lost game two.

Next up is Three Deuce. He’s going with just a Morphling kill, so all the enchantment hate can be thrown out the window. That makes Three Deuce into a bad aggressive deck, but he’s in Morphling mode when he should be in Donate mode. The standard sideboard is all wrong here, because what it really should have after Pyroblast are some more attackers or Boil. Again, we’re still in the aggression part of Extended, so there isn’t as much gain from the maneuvering as you could get otherwise. The Trix deck is too strong, and it’ll win anyway. Three-deuce, like Sligh, is a deck of times gone by.

Now for the fun part ... that was just an introduction. Here comes the Donate mirror. The bad news is you don’t know how he’s going to play game one. Seth didn’t get into the tactics of things like when to start casting Accumulated Knowledge. His build requires an adjustment in strategy, because it includes exactly two maindeck Morphlings. In other words, he cannot access them directly with Intuition (and through it, with just about everything, since Merchant Scroll counts too) and if he uses one Donate there’s only two left. However, he has a Mystical Tutor, so he can still find the second Donate pretty easily ... he just can’t do it again if he casts Intuition for it. Leaving exactly the right amount of mana open is less dangerous than it would normally be, because he only has one Fire/Ice instead of three. The other change is that he’s missing Brainstorm but that’s hard to take advantage of beyond his inability to cast Brainstorm. Also, he has Arcane Denial over Counterspell.

With a build that doesn’t maindeck Morphling, the matchup isn’t actually all that symmetrical game one. He has two time bombs in his deck, and they get better with every land, but he’s in worse shape in a counter war or a fight over an Illusions. That advantage however won’t have you if you lose the Accumulated Knowledge war. In other words, it’s best to force fights as best as possible without risking the one over Accumulated Knowledge before you’re ready. On the other hand, he has an extra land and can’t use Brainstorm to hide it, and he has Arcane Denial so he needs less land (assuming a meddalion in play) to operate, so it may be best to wait given this is where the biggest advantage lies.

The plan then becomes to get into the position where you use Brainstorm, searching for it if necessary, to hide any extra copies of Illusions or Accumulated Knowledge and occasionally extra lands, and then wait for him to walk into the trap his decklist set for him. The deck wants exactly enough lands to cast its spells and not one more. He’ll be stuck with whatever he drew, making him more likely to have to break for Accumulated Knowledge or in his case Morphling, or just have to try and win with Illusions. In general, the maindeck situation should naturally favor you against this version over the long but not too long term. In the opposite situation, knowing the opponent doesn’t have Morphling in the maindeck but he does have Brainstorm, there are two potential plans besides the usual mirror tactics. One is to play Morphling ultra-aggressively, trying simply to provoke a counter. If they have only Arcane Denial and Force of Will, even better. If it stays out, that forces them to try and win prematurely, which is great too.

After sideboarding comes the standard mind game: Does the combo stay in or not? The natural play is to take it out, and in a fluid situation that’s almost certainly the right call. How else is the deck going to fit in Pyroblast and Stroke of Genius? That’s easy, you’re cutting one Illusions (since he will follow standard logic and not try and counter it) and Accumulated Knowledge. Of course, that leaves you at a horrible disadvantage, and is downright silly if he’s cut his as well, but he doesn’t know you’ve done it. The Donate plan trumps Morphling with any reasonable number of lands out, with the disadvantage that trying and failing loses the game outright and it requires two cards to even try.

The trade-off therefore becomes putting three dead cards in the deck (Illusions) in order to have four auto-win cards in the deck, Donate. Note that if they keep Donate in this all flies out the window because they can Donate it right back and it’s a big mess and I don’t want to deal with that. It would be even better if you knew your opponent was going to keep the combo in rather than take it out. Take out Illusions, leave in Donate, watch the sparks and don’t tell him afterwards. The key problem here is threat generation. The game has to end before Stroke of Genius becomes a powerhouse.

Has everyone forgotten Mana Short so quickly? That’s certainly one good way to do it. These decks don’t have Thwart, so there are only four Force of Will left to fight it. It forces a war, or even better might not, since they’re thinking ‘the worst he could do is Stroke or Morphling, since the combo isn’t in.’ Again, it moves to the next level: Not only can you take advantage of what he’s doing and the fact that you know he’s doing it, you can take advantage of his thinking you’re probably doing it too. Then comes the level beyond that, where all that is taken into account not only during the match but during deck construction. This plan is much better as a surprise and against this specific sideboard plan than it would be otherwise.

On rare occasions, people will build their sideboards depending on opponents sideboarding incorrectly against them. The most common example of this is the transformation sideboard, which is designed to catch the opponent off guard. It’s at its best when the opponent doesn’t know it’s there. With Donate, the problem is that the transformation was so good that it’s obvious. Opponents openly joked with Brainburst editor Scott Johns at Worlds about him bringing in creatures, even though that was the first tournament for the deck ... there was no good reason not to.

For other decks, transformations are less expected because they’re not as obviously good. The outright transformation is just one option. Another is making the opponent think the deck is something it isn’t, or bringing in cards that are not a transform but require the opponent to react to them. I lost a game with TurboLand in Grand Prix: Seattle I thought I had totally won, because it hadn’t crossed my mind that my opponent would have Arcane Laboratory. TurboLand still has this problem: Do I put in Emerald Charm pre-emptively against Choke, and if so how many? Do I bring in Powder Keg to guard against a possible Winter Orb? Sideboard in the ‘wrong’ kind of hate and many opponents will be caught off guard.

Back to the matchup, the second problem is game three. I don’t care how rigid the opponent is, he’s going to think about what to do if he dies to a Mana Short followed by Illusions in game two. Things are suddenly very different. A huge key here is what he does with his sideboard. If he makes it too obvious how many cards went in and out, that can be fatal. If he doesn’t sideboard at all, he’s sticking with the plan and the game two strategy works in game three. If he sideboards a few cards, there are things to consider like Donate going in without Illusions ... might want to get Capsize ready before Mana Shorting him this time. A lot of cards could mean the combo is back in, but it could mean he’s pretending to move cards around. Watch for telltale signs like grouping cards and moving things in and out of sleeves. And it often pays not to resideboard if the opponent doesn’t. In general, I won’t go to my sideboard first if I’m happy with the current setup of the two decks. If he doesn’t remember he can change his or at least pretend to, why should I remind him? Even in the top eight of New Orleans this mistake was made, and it gave Kai a substantial edge to know that his opponent wasn’t going back to his sideboard.

Stripping the principles involved away from the specific situations I’ve discussed, just about any hard information about the opponent’s deck, sideboard, sideboarding or strategic plan is a valuable asset that can be turned against him. Because of this, all of this information must be carefully guarded.

Once it is known, the opponent can tune his sideboarding and strategy to beat the specific situation he faces rather than the broad range of potential situations he might have been facing before. The best response to an opponent who will have eight enchantment removal after sideboarding may be completely different from one having none or one with an unknown amount of it. Even simple facts like knowing that the opponent doesn’t know you’re playing (or not playing) Accumulated Knowledge can radically change the face of a game. I hope I did a good job of explaining - these issues have never really been tackled before in an article that I know of. Let us know if you found it helpful or not, and if the feedback is positive, I'll use the next article to take what you've learned here to further in-depth.

Until then,

• Zvi Mowshowitz