Piercing the Mind Games, the Next Step

Piercing the Mind Games, the Next Step
Zvi Mowshowitz

In my last article, I looked at a potential match against Sticky McStickerson. It was at the 3-0 table at a PTQ, and he carelessly revealed that he was playing a Donate based entirely off of Seth’s article. That article examined the matchups when you were playing against him with Sligh, Three-Deuce, and a more standard Donate deck as a starting off point. Of those, the mirror matchup was by far the most interesting and complex. Even more complex is the matchup against a control deck, and some aspects of that is what I’ll look at now. Some of this will be similar to issues already raised but from a different angle, and some of it will be new. Many of the same themes are still at work.

In some cases, the threat is stronger than its execution...

This is a classic battle. The control player will try to defend against what he considers Donate’s key cards while using card drawing to take control of the game, while the Donate player will try to draw out the control players’ counters while setting up his engine. It’s a battle of threats, in both the normally used sense and the sense that both decks are threatening to do things. Normally, Magic players think of a threat as a spell that has to be dealt with: That Morphling is a threat. In this case, what I mean isn’t just that kind of threat, it’s also the threat of casting Morphling later. When I cast Intuition at the end of your turn, I’m trying to cast Intuition but I also have the threat of untapping and trying to cast something else. In some cases, the threat is stronger than its execution.

This matchup is where the information you’ve gained gets even more use than it’s gotten in the previous three matchups. As the control player, you now know about the threat of Morphling and how common it will be, and that’s huge. Depending on the situation it can require a huge shift in strategy. For a simple example, suppose the control player has eight cards in his hand and has to discard, since he dares not cast a spell right now. Instead of casually tossing aside a Wrath of God or an Oath of Druids, he now knows to save them if he can. More than that, it has a huge impact on the importance of other threats.

One of the most common problems a Donate deck will have to face is Seal of Cleansing. Seal is played over Disenchant specifically because it is much worse for a Donate deck than Disenchant. The great strength of Donate is that it gains its card advantage off of Accumulated Knowledge and then turns around and wins with Donate and Illusions, so Disenchant would just get countered. Seal however has to be countered earlier or removed when the time comes. How effective Seal of Cleansing is depends on what the Donate player’s configuration is.

For the most effective case, take a copy of Donate that has sideboarded out its way to remove the Seal or pitched its answer to Force of Will earlier in the game, and that doesn’t currently have any copies of Morphling or Stroke of Genius. In this situation, which is the one I talked about in reference to the Sligh matchup in the first article, the Seal is fatal. There’s no way around it - this game is over unless Donate can somehow either deck you, get you to use the Seal on something else or get you to randomly not use the stack trick (look, a distraction!).

Now, suppose the Capsize is still in his deck. Since he has so many ways of finding the Capsize as needed using Merchant Scroll and other search, it’s fair to say that after drawing the cards off of Accumulated Knowledge he should be able to find it if he needs to. In that case, the Seal is forcing the Donate player to search for and resolve Capsize in order to later win. At this point, it clearly ‘counts’ because it will at worst trade off for the Capsize, but it won’t turn the entire game around. A second Seal of Cleansing however would seal the entire game away, just as the first one did when there was no Capsize.

In the later rounds of New Orleans, that knowledge was very useful to control players playing against Kai Budde and Benedict Klauser, who both made the top eight with just a Capsize as their defense in game one. Early on, having only Capsize wasn’t a problem, because opponents would think they had Rushing River and wouldn’t consider the second Seal of Cleansing important. However, by the later rounds of day two they had had enough feature matchups that it was clear they had just Capsize, so their opponents started aggressively going after the two Seals for a free win. They didn’t have Stroke maindeck, so it was an absolute lock.

This wasn’t a surprise to them. It was something they expected to happen, so much so that it was a consideration during deckbuilding. As experienced Pros, they knew that later in the tournament the details of their list would become public if they were doing well, and later in the top eight their decklists would be given out directly to their opponents. For the early rounds, this setup was just fine, but later on it would become vulnerable to those who knew the weakness was there. In the end, they decided the sacrifice was worth it. To back that up, Scott Johns escaped against two Seals because he started to Capsize lock his opponent, who became scared enough to use one of the Seals on a Medallion, not knowing that he couldn’t lose any other way.

The key question is what constitutes a victory condition for the control deck. A Seal won’t stop the Donate deck taking control of the game, especially since it can’t even be sacrificed to kill a Medallion if it’s going to be saved for Illusions. It won’t stop Accumulated Knowledge, it won’t stop Capsize on lands or creatures, it only stops Illusions. Two Seals won’t do any of that either. So can the control deck risk everything to get down two Seals? How about three? In this particular case, you know that doing so would be suicide, because Sticky would just cast a Morphling and that would be that. Even a Stroke of Genius would probably be enough. Given enough time and a Capsize, the Donate player could return all lands you control to your hand, play out twenty land and four Medallions and Stroke you for twenty or so, which should more than make up for the extra cards he drew while gaining control.

This is a common type of situation, where a player may be able to take control of the game but it’s unclear whether he can still win it once he does. A Stasis deck might have the lock permanently in place, but be without a way to remove an Oath of Druids and therefore unable to finish off the opponent. A White/Blue control deck from last year’s Standard might have lost all its Millstones. When it becomes possible, the players enter a guessing game. Is that the last Millstone, and should I treat it like one in the division of this Fact or Fiction? It can be a big advantage to know to go after the card, but if the version being played has an extra copy of the card such a strategy can massively backfire. In general, I really hate assuming my opponent can’t kill me, but it can be highly useful to play to stop them once it’s clear any other path to victory is hopeless.

Getting back to the match at hand, it’s clear that while Seal is a useful card it is much weaker than it would normally be. Using Enlightened Tutor to find it would certainly be a waste, if this particular control deck uses them. If he didn’t know that you knew he had Morphling, which he does because he told you, then he could try and mislead you. If he manages to convince you through his play that he doesn’t have an alternative win condition, he could trick you into wasting your resources on Seals. One good way to do that is to try and fight against Seal of Cleansing, especially when he knows it will only result in a trade of counters, although obviously this is risky if the Seal isn’t backed up. There’s always the good old facial expression attack, and the muttering of various curses appropriate to what is doubtless a family fun center along with things like “how lucky!” Then there’s doing that when the Seal actually is bad, since no one in their right mind would be so obvious about revealing what was bad for him unless he was bluffing, and so on.

The second battle revolves around Accumulated Knowledge. It’s fair to assume that Donate has Accumulated Knowledge in it, because the deck depends on the card. For a control deck, it could easily be in the deck and could just as easily not be in the deck. The Donate deck has three distinct situations to deal with depending on whether AK is known to be in the enemy’s deck, known not to be in the enemy’s deck or the situation is unknown. I talked about AK battles before in the mirror matchup where both players knew that both players had it, and that’s one potential situation. At that point, Intuition for AK becomes suicidal and both players will try and hold their AKs until their opponent has no choice but to cast his first or the player is confident he can win the resulting counter war. If the opponent doesn’t have AK and the Donate player knows it, the card can work normally, with the only reason to hold it back being to insure that it won’t be countered. In the middle situation, the Donate player has to plan for two situations. Often, he knows he will lose if he tries to Accumulate and the opponent has his own copies ready. Other times, any other strategy is just hopeless.

There are three calculations going on here: What is the chance he is playing Accumulated Knowledge? What are my chances in each case if I try and cast them? What are my chances if I don’t? In short, he will have to read everything he can to try and figure out how likely his opponent will be playing AK. If you were basing things on New Orleans’ top decks, it would be likely that AK is in a deck that uses Enlightened Tutor because of Wild Research, but much less likely for it to be in a deck without them. That would make every card that’s in one deck but not the other a signal – “I am playing THIS type of control” and AK would be one thing that depended on that. It might also pay off to design the deck with this in mind. If everyone assumes your deck has Accumulated Knowledge, then it’s much less valuable, and if everyone assumes you don’t its value goes way up when the opponent has them.

Those are the two specific cards with the most issues involved in them, AK and Seal of Cleansing, along with Morphling being in this particular Donate deck. There’s also Arcane Denial. When calculating what the Donate deck can do, it’s very important that with a Medallion out counters cost one Island and not two. It’s also important to know the results of getting into a counter war. When both sides have Counterspell and Force of Will as their counters, a counter war is essentially neutral, because both sides are using the same cards. Depending on the situation, it may favor one player or the other.

When one side has only Arcane Denial and Force of Will, that means that he has no easy counters. Whenever he uses one of his counters, he’s sacrificing card economy, either by letting you draw two cards to his one or by pitching a card to Force of Will. Test spelling him is now much better, as is trading counters. With Arcane, the Donate deck is trying not to use his counters before he’s ready to win, unless the opponent doesn’t have the mana to use the cards just drawn before it’s over. That means it’s time to pick some fights. A very rude shock might be someone playing with a mix of the two, since most people prefer one to the other rather than using both, and space is too tight to fit in many more counters than eight plus the four Pyroblasts in the sideboard. Again this is an echo of something that came up during the mirror matchup discussion, because it’s a property of Arcane Denial.

In general, the change in strategy has to be a more aggressive attack on the Donate deck’s card drawing. With Morphling, the deck is not going to fail to win. Because Morphling is in the deck, there’s very little left to discard pain-free. All those possibly useless creature defenses become worthwhile, or at least interesting. Together with Arcane, however, they weaken the deck’s ability to fight for its card drawing. Even more than usual, this highlights the AK engine and Stroke as the weakest link. The matchup should be better than a normal Donate deck if it is seen coming. If it isn’t, then Morphling could be a very rude surprise.

Magic is very much a game of incomplete information...

To bring this back to what I said in the beginning, the threat can be stronger than its execution. The execution can also be a lot better if they don’t notice the threat. What makes this situation different from chess, which is where the expression comes from, is that Magic is very much a game of incomplete information. When players judge what has to be dealt with, what can be ignored and how much mana they can afford to tap, they’re thinking about what both decks can do in both the immediate and long term future. Much or sometimes even all of the effect of a card can often be gained if the opponent has to put cards in his deck and adjust his play in case the card comes out later. The more both players know their opponents’ deck and the matchup and start thinking ahead, the more a game of Magic starts turning into a chess match, and the players start thinking about the value of different pieces (cards), thinking about possible openings, middle games and endgames, thinking about threatening cards instead of just using cards as threats. As always, knowledge of any kind is all-important.

I could go on for a long time about other possibilities. Note that I haven’t even pinned down what type of control deck is being used - anything from Oath to Call of the Herd or anything else is a distinct possibility. Rather than hold myself to this particular situation however, I think it’s time to move beyond the launch point. I was happy to see such a positive response to the first article, and now I’d like to ask for suggestions of particularly worthwhile questions or situations to examine, which are probably best directed at our Editor, Scott Johns.

Until then,

• Zvi Mowshowitz