Dead Drop by Greg Staples
I should begin by explaining my absence. As a new blogger, I got stuck on an idea for too long and spewed a ton of time thinking of how to reincorporate it. Then, yesterday, I realized that it was horribly wrong for me to think of that topic as a “blog post” when the bare minimum clearly has to be “e-book” or “low level online course”. So, for now, I have to scrap that idea and wait to stake out a stronger place in the Magic writing community before publishing. I do hope to have the audience to publish it some day, but the amount of work required to fully express everything would require a paywall of some kind.
Another topic I wanted to try was a weekend coverage type of post where I would try and put a narrower focus on specific games posted on weekends, but since I work on Saturdays and would never be able to turn those posts around quickly enough, I’ve decided not to make it a regular thing. I do want to point out that MTGCorner does have a weekend coverage notebook for quick, general thoughts on events from the weekend all in one easy-to-find location, and I highly recommend visiting them for easy-to-digest content on the fly. I also would prefer not to tread on AJ Sacher’s AJTV series as well, so I wanted to position myself as looking for certain, hidden motifs in multiple games from one event played on camera. I do want to revisit my idea one day, but I am not in the best position to do so at this time.
I was trying to crank out an article based on things I saw from Nerd Rage Gaming’s January $5K Championship Trial. The VODs are no longer available, so I can’t point out specific instances from coverage and then link you. But I kept going back to one specific game, from one specific match. The matchup was G/B Rock (played by PT Champion Wyatt Darby) against R/G Titanshift. The players were in game 2, with Rock winning game 1 in an upset. Titanshift gets into a topdecking situation and eventually wins the game.
But there was so much more to the story. And before I return to the game itself, I want to tell a short story about something that blew my fucking mind years ago.
Thoughtflare by David Rapoza
Before going to work for WotC, Adam Prosak had a great stream. Of course, there are plenty of other things to say about him but his stream, in particular, was gas. And if you knew where to be at a certain time of day, you had the privilege to watch the UW Flash deck develop in real time.
(You also received the knowledge to go out and buy Sphinx’s Revelations for a whopping four dollars, so it was also incredibly worth your time as well.)
The year was 2012. I was not playing Splinter Twin in Modern yet, therefore I was an unsalvageable, terrible Magic player at the time. And the thing I didn’t quite understand was how the Flash deck could beat Mono-Red. The enemy could threaten to go under you and then Hellrider and Thundermaw Hellkite were powerful top-end threats. And your defense? A bunch of mopey Augur of Bolas, Snapcasters, Unsummons, countermagic, Restoration Angels, and Azorius Charms. It turns out that the deck actually stomped Mono-Red and I was just a terrible Magic player. All you had to do from the Flash side was deploy some creatures, and… do nothing.
That’s all. Do nothing.
If the opponent could not pressure you, it was nearly effortless to hold up countermagic for super scary shit like Thundermaw Hellkite and Hellrider or cycle through your Think Twices. Anything that slipped through could be Unsummoned or Azorius Charmed. If you Charmed their creature, you could mill it with Thought Scour to get rid of it for good. Also, you could just draw Sphinx’s Revelation and run away with the game on a card advantage front. Restoration Angel obliterates the declare blockers step; Azorius Charm giving your team lifelink is always in the back of the opponent’s mind as well. If you needed to quickly close the game, Runechanter’s Pike had your back. But their attacks were almost never favorable for them so as long as you ended up drawing even slightly better than below average, you would win the game. I was so worried about how my own actions could shape the game that I forgot that choosing inaction is also taking a game action. The opponent could be casting some creatures but the vast majority of them did not actually affect the board. I could put my own cards and mana towards slowly improving my hand to plug up any holes and close the game out almost entirely at my leisure. As long as I had faith in my own abilities, I could take this magical trust fall.
Now I can finally segue back to the Rock vs Titanshift game. Titanshift is, at its core, what I would consider to be a trust fall deck. The goal, if not to outright win with cards available to you, is to create a game state where almost any card drawn can win the game for you. I need to specify that I am using the phrase “can win” instead of “wins” in the previous sentence. That is because creating these situations with the best possible outcomes is a skill, as well as playing the situations out after entering into them. In fact, while I am not really giving both of those skills the proper time of day here, they are separate skills and need to be treated as such. The Valakut player ended up in a squeeze because she did not get to create the trust fall she wanted (Specifically, Rock presented discard, threats, and removal to create a spot that was not optimized for the Valakut player.), yet she still won this game because she made sensible plays even in low agency scenarios.
On the second to last turn of the game, the hellbent Valakut player drew a Mountain. Her opponent was at nine life and had a Field of Ruin in play and access to Surgical Extraction because this game was post board. The Titanshift player literally could only make four plays in her spot: do nothing, play the Mountain, crack a fetchland, play the Mountain and crack the fetchland. She correctly made no play. Then she drew a Titan. Titan got two Valakuts. Since Valakuts entering do not add anything to the stack, she immediately got priority after searching for two Valakuts and could play a Mountain from hand for two Valakut triggers to win the game in conjunction with the fetchland activation (and, hilariously enough, casting Trophy or activating Field of Ruin actually kills Rock on the spot). Yes, with the amount of time she had available to her, she was probably favored to win that game (She had plenty of time to topdeck if I recall correctly; I only wrote about the final two turns here.). But she did not sabotage herself in the process. Four possible decisions for one turn in the lategame is about as stripped-down as Magic can get. If she made her play at random, she was 75% to lose the game.
It’s also very easy for players with insufficient mental game to start to lose their grip on things in these scenarios. How many times do you play against or watch someone who starts slowly unraveling when they draw irrelevant cards? It can be more painful to watch the player than to watch the deck generate whiff after whiff. I think the heart of the matter is that we put too much focus on some decks’ fail rate than the ability for a deck to repeatedly create a state of success. I played an event with KCI where Ancient Stirrings never found me what I wanted. As a result, I ended up going 1-3 and only comboed off in a single game. That event nearly tilted me off the deck entirely, but I believed the deck was too broken for me to justify switching decks at the time. I decided that I could continue playing after reflecting and realizing how none of my Ancient Stirrings from the evening actually did anything and it was just a bad fluke. After that one particularly awful event, I closed out my KCI career with a 15-3-2 record, where two of those three losses were punts and the third involved losing a die roll to Phoenix and taking ten damage on turn 3.
When Valakut loses a game, how often is it because the deck got into its desired situation and then choked? I’m sure a much larger percentage of games lost are happening pre-trust fall phase from quick combo decks that Valakut cannot interact with very well. Perhaps we should shift the focus from bad beats onto good beats. And, on top of that, we should shift strategy against trust fall decks towards combating the ability to take a desired trust fall. A particular example here: Shatterstorm is underplayed despite 4-color Whir being an incredibly powerful and increasingly popular deck. But sometimes the Whir pilot needs to accumulate resources to lock the game out and so they have to willingly sit behind Ensnaring Bridge plus Bottled Cloister, usually to draw Chalices of the Void, Spellskites, Tezzerets, Tolaria West, and Inventor’s Fair. Find and cast a Shatterstorm and shatter their brains out for success.
My memory is not exactly the sharpest here, but I think it was a chess book from GM Andy Soltis that once advised a player that “thou shalt not trade down into a king and pawn ending unless thou can safely bet their firstborn child on the result”. Of course, chess does not have variance. There are situations where one side is literally 100% to win the game with proper play. In Magic, the vast majority of games cannot be declared unloseable until you have won that game. The onus is on you to keep the spots where you are 85-90% to win at 85-90%.