Christopher Morris-Lent
6/29/2012 10:55:00 AM
The Sound of Music

As I write this, my brain is feuding with itself - part of it wants to form sentences that are round, rich, and, who knows, maybe even Magic-related; and part of it wants to cycle continuously through the chorus of "Call Me Maybe." The ear-worm has infected me ever since, on a drive from Austin to Houston ("hot night, wind was blowin'"), the song popped up on the radio; it is annoying, catchy, and brilliant; I cannot get it out of my head; I can only imagine that the rest of humanity is similarly afflicted.

I mention this because some things are, well, inexorable; death, taxes, Delver, Carly Rae Jepsen (the Delver of pop music). To this list, we can add complacency and Narcissism. What I mean is: it is very hard to think constructively, coherently, abstractly, adding thoughts to thoughts in a way that they progress and corroborate one another. It is so much easier to just think about food, oneself, or nothing at all (with "Call Me Maybe" in the background).

The Magic corollary is this. It is hard to map out a decision tree, envision your opponent's hand, or even do simple combat math, in comparison to just "doing what feels right." With the glut of psychology articles that have appeared recently, on this site and others, this is my main contribution: most people are emotional decision-makers. We do things primarily because we feel like it, not because it makes the most sense (if we even get that far in our thought process).

Emotional decision-making has its place in life - it would be a shame not to indulge ourselves, every once in a while; and the President could have pushed through more of his agenda, had he not been so damn thoughtful about it - but it is not so valuable in games. In basketball, Scott Brooks "feels like" using his big, clunky lineup, thereby punting away a chance at winning the NBA finals. In poker, one often "feels like" trying to win every pot; I am lucky that this tendency only cost me a small five-figure sum throughout my bygone career; it has cost others millions. In Magic, we always "feel like" going for the win by attacking with an unflipped Huntmaster into 3W, or slamming a Titan into 1U - and then they get, respectively, eaten by an Angel or Mana Leaked into ignominy.

This explains a lot about Standard; in particular, it tells us why Delver is such a strong deck. People just don't want to believe you "have it," when, in fact, you often do. There are so many things to play around that to play around X would be to play into Y. Delver psychologically grates at the opponent, "tilting" them into making irrational, inappropriate decisions; it is so hard to maintain the proper level of mental composure against that deck.

On the other hand, the Delver pilot has a number of ways to keep her cool. She has answers to everything: answers that always cost one mana, and are always pretty good. The deck's cantripping capabilities reduce variance by finding these answers, further soothing the Blue mage. One of these cantrips is particularly pacifying for her, and infuriating for her opponent. The reason Gitaxian Probe is such an excellent card is not that it necessarily gives us a ton more information; much more important is its ability to force us to play thoughtfully, and "come to terms" with the information we should have already had.

In sum, this is why people love playing Delver, and hate playing against it - the former is such a power trip, putting the "control" in "control freak;" the latter is just the opposite. As the Delver player, you are the one calling the shots; things merely happen to your opponent. And even if this sentiment of shot-calling is partially a placebo effect - maybe you can't beat a Naya Pod nut draw - that placebo effect does make you feel better. Because you feel better, you play better; you make less emotional decisions, because you don't need to.

This is the true power of Delver: not the cards, which are, taken together or separately, not all that broken: and this is why so many pundits were arguing for a ban, not because they couldn't win, but because they felt so powerless. Our thoughts were not fresh and creative, but stale and recursive. We were complacent and narcissistic, in a way that made the complacency and Narcissism of not banning Delver seem trivial in comparison.


Wanna Get Away?

Now that we've established that the dominance of Delver is psychological, not statistical or abstract, it's time to come to terms with the implications of its not getting banned. The first thing to realize is obvious: this was a business decision by Wizards. With a clarity and purpose you seldom see in law students, Matt Sperling argued that this has certain positives and negatives. Wizards should view itself as a business, or a subsidiary of one. But when this is taken to its logical conclusion, you get absurdities like MaRo on Tumblr, citing the commercial success of Avacyn Restored as a reason that the set "must be good." Such statements are chilling: it's OK to design sets that suck for Limited and add little "interesting" to constructed, as long as they sell well; their selling well obliterates the other considerations; it's disturbing that MaRo, whatever his virtues, is so divorced from the realities of competitive play. I know I was incensed when I read that post.

But then I thought about it more, and I saw that the positives outweigh the negatives: it was a good decision. This kind of analysis is at first daunting, even boring; but it is always worthwhile. It's what makes us better readers and writers than MaRo, when he glibly exalted Avacyn Restored. It requires getting outside of yourself, it requires logical thought, and it requires empathy, which is what makes us better people and Magic players. I don't know if the ban-hammer was restrained after hours of sweaty deliberations, or on an employee's caprice, but it doesn't matter - it's the best thing that could have happened to us. I am proud to admit that I was wrong.

So! How do we break the habit of thinking in familiar, solipsistic patterns? Society offers a number of terrible suggestions, the worst of which is "get a job" (the second-worst being "go to college" and the third-worst being "travel.") Magic writers do a little better, but they produce the same bromides again and again, namely, "sleep more," "eat better," "drink/smoke less." I'd like to touch on the first two of these.

As I mentioned in my last column, I underwent a nightmarish period of two years where I was unable to sleep through the night. Sleep deprivation led to exhaustion, exhaustion led to depression, depression led to madness, and madness led to psychiatric wards and other lurid stuff I can't really describe on a family website. Sleeping often and well, as far as I can tell, is at the center of nearly every happy person's life: and for the lucky few who don't need a lot of sleep, being able to pass out on command, during those rare spells of Fatigue, must be indispensable. This is obvious to me now, but I'm not sure it would be had I not so acutely felt the effects of relentless sleep deprivation, for such a long time. The supposedly "smart" people with whom I went to college had no idea: they'd cavalierly pull an all-nighter, then wonder why they felt so terrible the rest of the week. One cannot play well, think well, live well, unless one has slept well: it is the foundation for every virtue in life. It is tragic that American society doesn't teach us that, from the torturously early start times of secondary school, to the hegemony of the alarm clock in adult life. But we're Magic players, so we think analytically about these things; we exercise a bit of self-awareness, being careful to see that it doesn't turn into the unhealthy kind of Narcissism, and realize that sleeping better makes us feel better, which makes us play better.

On to eating. My sleeping problems were caused by chronic gastric Distress. My chronic gastric Distress was caused by a horrible college diet. Manhattan is a "food desert" for all but the loaded, and it was just much easier to wake up at ten, skip breakfast, get a half-pound burger at noon, and eat it during class before repeating the burger ritual six hours later. Against this disgusting diet, my stomach revolted, leading to the problems described in the above paragraph. Now I seldom skip breakfast and maintain a varied diet: I feel much better. Again, this is obvious to me now, but I don't think it would be had I not been forced to see it. It's so hard to learn from books, etc. as opposed to experience.

When I ran into Billy Moreno at GP Sea-Tac, he told me that the average age of Magic players was now 25. I just turned 24, so I'm pretty close to the target demographic. In order to celebrate my birthday, or dull the pain of it, I went to Texas for a week, where I stayed with a couple of old friends who are roughly the same age. Their sleeping and eating habits had not really progressed beyond college. I'm guessing that most people my age are the same way. In high school, while the rest of us somnambulated, indifferently, from class to class, a certain fellow was known for being perpetually cheerful. I asked him what his secret was. "Sleep!" he said, his eyes lighting up. "Copious amounts of … sleep!" I suspect that the same is true for successful Magic players: they can manage themselves in a way that makes them feel optimal, or as close to it as possible, as often as possible. The word "adulthood" in America has facile connotations of employment, self-sufficiency, and so on, but a better definition is someone who knows what makes them feel best, and then does it. In this way, emotional decision-making becomes subordinate to logical thinking.

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Finishing Strong

So Magic helps guide us into adulthood (my definition), and adulthood makes us better at Magic. (As a result, there really are no prodigies at this game, which augurs well for its competitive future: I'd hate to see it become dull and obsolescent, like chess.) It's not just playing that improves through these kinds of thought, though; also, brewing. In my other articles, I've talked about the necessity of "throwing out your babies" and accepting manifold failure as prerequisites for successfully brewing, and I hope this piece, so far, illustrates those broader strokes in more minute detail.

Now for some strategy. With the exception of a few decks (OK, Delver), nobody in Standard is trying to interact with you much. (Interaction is a key way of maintaining a psychology of "control" over a game of Magic, and its wane in Standard must be another reason people feel frustration with the current format - they do their thing, you do yours; that isn't Magic.) There must be a consistent way to punish opponents for not interacting; maybe a fast goldfish. Though UG Poison has been putting up dismal numbers at pretty much every event, I feel that the deck is being built wrong. For reference, here's a typical list:

UG Defiant Infect by ability170146 (4-0) Main Deck Sideboard 4 Blighted Agent 4 Glistener Elf Creatures [8] 4 Apostle's Blessing 1 Artful Dodge 4 Gitaxian Probe 3 Gut Shot 4 Mutagenic Growth 4 Ponder 4 Ranger's Guile 4 Titanic Growth 4 Wild Defiance Spells [32] 7 Forest 4 Hinterland Harbor 4 Inkmoth Nexus 5 Island Lands [20] Deck Total [60] 1 Artful Dodge 2 Corrosive Gale 1 Disperse 1 Gut Shot 2 Mana Leak 2 Mental Misstep 2 Naturalize 4 Spellskite Sideboard [15] View a Sample Hand! Solitaire this Deck! Click for full deck stats & notes!

Some issues here. Glistener Elf is bad - really bad. In a format where half the creatures either make other creatures, or block twice, she's rarely going to get there. In the absence of Wild Defiance, trying to "burn" someone out with pump spells will often not work. As much as I would like it to be, twenty lands is not enough. Main-deck Spellskite is needed to protect the "combo pieces" (and, make no mistake, this is a combo deck).

The solution is to make the deck look more like Modern Splinter Twin: more lands, more redundancy. The part that needs to be more redundant is the "pump-pump" spells; we should be running Wild Defiances five through eight. Here's what I suggest:

MRSA by Christopher Morris-Lent Main Deck Sideboard 4 Blighted Agent 4 Spellskite Creatures [8] 2 Apostle's Blessing 2 Artful Dodge 4 Gitaxian Probe 2 Gut Shot 3 Livewire Lash 4 Mutagenic Growth 4 Ponder 4 Ranger's Guile 1 Runechanter's Pike 4 Wild Defiance Spells [30] 2 Evolving Wilds 6 Forest 4 Hinterland Harbor 4 Inkmoth Nexus 6 Island Lands [22] Deck Total [60] 2 Grafdigger's Cage 2 Gut Shot 2 Mana Leak 3 Mental Misstep 2 Negate 2 Ratchet Bomb 2 Silent Departure Sideboard [15] View a Sample Hand! Solitaire this Deck! Click for full deck stats & notes!

A few notes: Gut Shot is a very versatile spell in this archetype, so I'd like to figure out a way to move a third copy into the main; the Counterspells and Cages in the board are mainly to combat Elesh Norn, which is one card you can't really beat; I'm not sure that Runechanter's Pike is better than the fourth Livewire Lash, but that's what testing is for.

The votes are in, and Rancor is far and away the M13 reprint for which people are most excited. With poison still in the format, and hexproof (stupidly) becoming evergreen, it seems like a dangerous time to bring it back, but it is so charming, so retro, that I can't help but feel great about it. It will make the infect deck so, so much better; it will make Glistener Elf playable. Should infect become good, I'll be annoyed at the format, but happier still for the possibility of playing Standard, competitively, for less than a hundred bucks.

If you're in Seattle, I'll see you this weekend.

Thank you for reading!
CML