Craig Wescoe
7/26/2012 10:25:00 AM
One of the terms often used by pros when discussing in-game strategy is the idea of “playing around” a particular card or cards. Whenever I'm asked why I made a particular play, my response often involves an analysis of hidden and known information and making the play that minimizes the range of cards the opponent can potentially have to Thwart my line of play. In other words, it usually comes down to “playing around” the most number of cards that can be played around.


The opposite of playing around a card is to “walk into” the card, a mistake resulting from taking a line that loses to a particular card when a different line could have been taken that avoids losing to the card. Sometimes you have no choice but to risk the opponent having a particular card, whereas other times you can if you look hard enough and in the right places.

In this article I will attempt to show you how to approach complex board states with the mindset of playing around as many cards as possible. I will walk through seven examples I've recently encountered on Magic Online, each with different Modern decks. In order to get the most out of this article, I recommend examining the board state (along with the deck list you're playing in each example, as I've provided both for you), and then asking yourself first, “What is the play?” And secondly, “In making this play, what am I playing around and why?” Once you've come to a decision as to what you believe the correct play is and why, then read the discussion provided for that example.

Example 1: Modern, Soul Sisters vs. RG Tron

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Your opponent starts on the play with Urza's Mine + Chromatic Sphere, followed on turn 2 by Forest + Explore + Urza's Mine + Chromatic Star (sacrificing the sphere in the process). Your first turn play was Plains + Soul Warden and you have just drawn your card for the turn.

What is the play? What are you playing around and why?

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It's evident that the opponent does not have either of the other two tron pieces since he opted to play the second Urza's Mine, a play that would not make sense if he had Urza's Tower or Urza's Power Plant in hand (assuming he did not misclick). So while our general plan against RG Tron is to apply pressure before they can cast Karn Liberated, Wurmcoil Engine, and eventually Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, this specific board state means we probably have at least a couple turns before seeing a haymaker. It's possible he plays Explore + Tower + Power Plant and then Karn Liberated next turn, but it's unlikely since it would require him drawing runner Tower + Power Plant while having Explore + Karn in hand.

The more likely scenario, however, is him having Pyroclasm ready to go next turn (getting red mana off Chromatic Star). So the most important card to play around right now is Pyroclasm. Fortunately we have a line that allows us to do that. We play Ajani's Pridemate, gaining a life off Soul Warden's Trigger, and therewith adding a +1/+1 counter to the Pridemate. This way if he casts Pyroclasm he is only killing the Soul Warden, and we will follow it up with Spectral Procession next turn and then Honor of the Pure + Tectonic Edge the following turn to try and take him off tron while threatening lethal. And if he opts not to cast Pyroclasm (or doesn't have it), then we can gain 3 life off the Soul Warden from the Spectral Procession tokens entering the battlefield, which will allow us to attack with Soul Warden and a 6/6 Pridemate, forcing him to deal with a large creature and our 4 smaller creatures, a feat very difficult for RG Tron.

So by playing the Pridemate instead of Honor of the Pure, we play around Pyroclasm, and we set up our board to pressure him enough that he has to make plays to deal with our board, which gives us time to setup Honor of the Pure + Tectonic Edge for turn 4, just in time to take him off tron and thus force him to have to have more answers as well as more set up pieces, all in addition to something large (Wurmcoil or Karn) to cast off of Tron. By taking this line, we play around all the combinations of cards that do not contain all of these pieces. By forcing the opponent to have particular answers, you limit the range of possible hands he could have that beat you.

Example 2: Modern, BW Tokens vs. Merfolk

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The opponent is down to one (unknown) card in hand, though his board is filled with merfolk (2x Merfolk Reejery, level 4 Coralhelm Commander, and Spellskite, all untapped, and AEther Vial on 2, 2x Mutavult, and 2x Island all tapped). It is currently our pre-combat main phase and we have 4x Spirit Tokens, a Tidehollow Sculler (exiling Lightning Bolt), Intangible Virtue, 2x Plains, Swamp, Godless Shrine, and 3 cards in hand: Tidehollow Sculler and 2x Lingering Souls. Opponent is at 16 and we're at 17.

What is the play? What are you playing around and why?

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The most threatening play the opponent can make on his next turn is Spreading Seas + vial into play Lord of Atlantis, activate Mutavault, and islandwalk us for lethal. Since there is absolutely nothing we can do to not die if he has that, the best we can do is to minimize the number of draw steps he gets to draw them.

In addition to minimizing his number of draw steps, we also have to Fend Off his quite threatening board. He's threatening 24 power worth of attack next turn and we're only at 17, so even without anything changing, we are in a position where we will have to do some blocking on our turn in order to stay alive. Since we can't kill him this turn, let's consider our options.

We can attack our (vigilance) spirit tokens into his Coralhelm Commander, effectively sacrificing one of them to deal 6 damage to the opponent, putting him to 10. Then we can play another Lingering Souls and have 5 spirit tokens and a Tidehollow Sculler. This line still doesn't Threaten lethal next turn though because we would have to block with at least two of our creatures to stay alive, which would leave us with only 8 power worth of creatures to attack with. So we are not in a position to race, regardless of what is in his hand and on top of his library.

Since we're behind in the race, let's consider how we can potentially match up in the attrition battle. If we cast Lingering Souls and pass and he attacks with everything but Spellskite, we can triple block Coralhelm Commander and double block each of the Merfolk Reejerey (and take 10 from the Mutavaults). These blocks, however, would make it such that if he has Lord of Atlantis or Master of the Pearl Trident, then we lose all our creatures and he loses nothing.

We are, however, in a position to play around either of these two cards by blocking slightly differently. If we block Coralhelm with 4 spirit tokens, one of the Reejerey with two spirit tokens, and the other Reejerey with the Sculler (and taking 10 from Mutavaults), then even if he has the Lord of Atlantis, his Coralhelm will die, and so will the Reejerey that we double blocked. Then the following turn we can flashback Lingering Souls and play our second Sculler to take away his Lightning Bolt again (or whatever other card is in his hand). Once the Coralhelm Commander is gone, this will allow us to start attacking for free with spirit tokens while dwindling his team and his number of draw steps to find Spreading Seas and more creatures.

So although we cannot play around Seas + islandwalk lord, we can play around a single islandwalk lord and the rest of his board by casting Lingering Souls, not attacking, quadruple blocking Coralhelm Commander, and then using our final Lingering Souls to start taking over the game. And if he does not attack all out, then more power to us – we'd be in an even better position to fight on the attrition axis since our tokens keeping growing in number each turn. Sometimes racing is the best way to play around cards while other times not racing works better. Identifying which is most appropriate to the situation sometimes requires a bit of math, as we've seen.

Example 3: Modern, GWB Rock vs. Affinity

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It's our turn 3. The opponent has 1 card in hand and his board consists of Glimmervoid, Inkmoth Nexus, Springleaf Drum, Mox Opal, Ornithopter, Vault Skirge, and Etched Champion. He's at 19 and we're at 17 with Forest, Plains, and Birds of Paradise as our three permanents, though we have Treetop Village, Knight of the Reliquary, Temple Garden, and Creeping Corrosion in hand.

What is the play? What are you playing around and why?

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There are basically two options worth considering here. The first is to play Treetop Village and Knight of the Reliquary so that next turn we can play Creeping Corrosion for maximum value. The other option is to play Temple Garden and Creeping Corrosion and then next turn play Treetop Village and Knight of the Reliquary.

The Treetop + Knight line is suboptimal for a couple of reasons. First of all, we really need our Knight to live, and since we only have two lands in the graveyard, the opponent could kill the Knight with Galvanic Blast (due to metalcraft). But if we destroy all artifacts first, then he won't have metalcraft and our knight will live. So playing Creeping Corrosion first plays around Galvanic Blast.

The second reason it's better to play Creeping Corrosion first is that he could play land + Cranial Plating, activate Inkmoth Nexus, equip plating to it, and attack us for at least 8 points of poison damage. Then even if we play Creeping Corrosion, we're on a two turn infect clock from the nexus and are then in a position where we have exactly two draw steps to draw a removal spell for the nexus or we die.

So by playing the Creeping Corrosion first we play around Galvanic Blast and Cranial Plating. Doing so slows us down by a few turns and thus gives the opponent a couple extra draw steps, but this is a more advantageous position to be in because it would give us more draw steps to find an answer to Inkmoth Nexus (or Cranial Plating) and a more realistic window to race with knight and treetop. Sometimes playing around a card involves waiting to gain maximum value out of your cards while other times it requires you to play your cards sooner in order to keep them from being too little too late.

Example 4: Modern, Bant Pod vs. Naya Pod

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It's post-board, we started on the play, and it's our turn 3. The opponent has Birds of Paradise, Copperline Gorge, and Grove of the Burnwillows. We have Forest, Breeding Pool, and Wall of Roots. Our hand is Verdant Catacombs, Temple Garden, Kitchen Finks, Fauna Shaman, Harmonic Sliver, Birthing Pod, and Restoration Angel.

What is the play? What are you playing around and why?

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We could play Birthing Pod and turn Wall of Roots into a Kitchen Finks or a Vendilion Clique. If we go with Clique, we can see what he has in hand and potentially take away his Birthing Pod or his answer to ours.

Another line is to just play Kitchen Finks, Temple Garden tapped, and pass. This would set us up to get a more meaningful activation out of our Birthing Pod if the opponent has more than one answer to it in hand. We could then search out Restoration Angel or Glen Elendra Archmage. Since we already have an answer to an opposing Birthing Pod in the form of Harmonic Sliver, the Archmage could prevent the opponent from resolving Chord of Calling or another Birthing Pod (after we kill the first). We could then pod at our leisure, setting up the Kiki combo over the course of the next few turns without leaving any opportunity for the opponent to kill us. Right?

Actually no. While this line does a great job of playing around Chord of Calling and Birthing Pod, it leaves itself wide open to the opponent simply casting Restoration Angel, then untapping and playing Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. Remember that Glen Elendra Archmage cannot counter creature spells, so if we were to take this line, we're leaving ourselves vulnerable to a two-card combo that most naya pod players run four copies of each. So is there a better line?

If we reconsider our first line, we can get our Birthing Pod onto the table and turn our wall into a Vendilion Clique, letting us know what we're up against while potentially taking whatever answer the opponent has for our Birthing Pod. This line also plays around the opponent having both parts of the combo in hand because after we strip one half of it, we can play Restoration Angel on our Vendilion Clique the following turn to take the other half. Then we are set up to kill him the following turn by playing Fauna Shaman, turning it into Deceiver Exarch, untapping the Pod, and turning Angel into Kiki-Jiki (and copying Exarch a million times).

So our initial line proves better because it plays around more things. Unlike the Kitchen Finks line, the Birthing Pod into Vendilion Clique line is unable to play around multiple answers to our Birthing Pod, but in exchange for being able to play around Angel + Kiki-Jiki. Furthermore, even if the opponent has multiple answers to our Pod, Vendilion Clique + Restoration Angel beat down hard and fast while also disrupting the opponent significantly in the process. So in a sense, it can still “play around” two answers to pod by rendering the pod unnecessary for our flying beatdown game plan. Sometimes the abstractly less powerful line plays around more things and is therefore more appropriate to the situation.

Example 5: Modern, Bant Midrange vs. RUG Delver

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We're on the play and led with a turn 2 Tarmogoyf off a pair of fetch lands. The opponent played Delver of Secrets, failed to flip it, and then passed with two untapped lands. It's our pre-combat main phase and our hand is Misty Rainforest, Birds of Paradise, Knight of the Reliquary, 2x Bant Charm, and Restoration Angel.

What is the play? What are you playing around and why?

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In order to know what to play around here, it's important to know your role in the matchup. The temptation is to play a 5/5 Knight of the Reliquary, but then if it gets met with a Mana Leak and the opponent untaps, flips the Delver of Secrets, and Vapor Snags the Tarmogoyf, we're in a pretty rough spot (at 11 life facing down an Insectile Aberration from a deck with burn spells).

The better line is to recognize the Delver of Secrets as the most pressing concern and to Bant Charm it to the bottom of the library. Our hand is full of spells that will allow us to gain an advantage over the next few turns, so there is no sense putting ourselves into burn range early and fighting an uphill battle against a flipped Delver of Secrets since we have the tools to avoid such a scenario. So the play is Bant Charm…

Well, we're halfway there. Now we have to determine when to Bant Charm and how best to set it up. We're going to have to use our Misty Rainforest since it's our only way to get a third mana this turn, and we will need to get a white-producing land with it since our other two lands can only produce green and blue. And we'll want to play Bant Charm on his upkeep after the Delver of Secrets trigger has resolved. This will give us maximum information about the contents of his hand, and it will also force him to tap mana on his turn if he wants to counter the Bant Charm. This will then give us the opportunity to untap and play our second Bant Charm to deal with the Delver, whereas if we played the Bant Charm on our turn, he would still have mana untapped to counter our second one the following turn. And if he resolves the Delver trigger on his upkeep and then sacrifices his Misty Rainforest, we would want to play the Bant Charm in response so that he would have to have Spell Pierce to counter it (as opposed to Mana Leak or Spell Pierce if we let the fetch resolve first), and will have to have it in hand instead of on top of his library or in hand, thus limiting the amount of places it could be. Sometimes playing around a card involves not only playing your spells in the right order but also playing them at the right time.

Example 6: Modern, 4-Color Pod vs. Reanimator

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It's our turn 5, post-combat, after having attacked the opponent down to 8 life with Kitchen Finks and Entomber Exarch. He has four lands untapped and we had just taken his Through the Breach with Entomber Exarch, leaving him with Goryo's Vengeance, Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, and an unknown card in hand. We have 5 lands in play and Kitchen Finks, Noble Hierarch, and Deceiver Exarch in hand.

What is the play? What are you playing around and why?

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Since we know about the Emrakul and the Goryo's Vengeance, the first thing we should identify is that we have a Deceiver Exarch to potentially tap the Emrakul before it can attack. So one line is to just play Noble Hierarch and pass, leaving open the Verdant Catacombs to fetch Breeding Pool for the Exarch. This plays around the Emrakul, the Aeons Torn we know he has.

The problem with this line is that it will only leave us with 6 power worth of creatures to attack with the following turn. This means he will have 2 life and yet another turn to try and assemble a winning game state. Sure, we're a pretty heavy favorite with this line, but is there a better line that allows us to play around more things?

If we play Noble Hierarch and Kitchen Finks, we go up to 23 life and have 8 power worth of creatures on the board, thus threatening lethal the following turn. This forces him to have to do something right away to stay alive. Furthermore, if his plan is to attack with Emrakul next turn, we could sacrifice all five of our lands and the Noble Hierarch to the annihilator trigger and still have 8 power worth of attackers. So he would have to not only hit us with Emrakul but also deal with at least one of our creatures. And if he's able to accomplish this, say via Lightning Axe, we can then sacrifice all our creatures and go down to 2 lands, and still be threatening lethal with a pair of persisted Kitchen Finks in two turns.

This second line gives him one turn to draw Lightning Axe, while playing around Wild Guess and Faithless Looting, because we are still presenting lethal despite having to sacrifice 6 permanents and lose 15 life. And even if he finds the axe, if we draw a land, we'll still have lethal on board and the Exarch in hand with 3 lands to cast it. This line puts him on having to draw a single card ( Lightning Axe), with one of the copies already in his graveyard, and then us also having 14 cards (untapped land) we can draw to win even if he does draw it. The Exarch line on the other hand gives him multiple turns to find an answer. Oftentimes playing around a card involves minimizing the amount of draws the opponent gets to find the card, but it also sometimes involves taking an unintuitive line that considers not only what your opponent can draw but also what you can draw.

Example 7: Modern, UWR Midrange vs. UB Tron

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We are on the draw, post-board, and it's our turn 4. We played Vendilion Clique during his end step and he countered it with Spell Burst, tapping himself out (Tolaria West, Urza's Tower, Underground River, River of Tears) except for an Expedition Map. Now on our turn we untap (2x Island and Steam Vents) and draw Smash to Smithereens. Our hand is the freshly drawn Smash to Smithereens, in addition to Spellstutter Sprite, Snapcaster Mage, Sacred Foundry, Cryptic Command, and 2x Restoration Angel. We have a lot of potential options.

What is the play? What are you playing around and why?

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In similar board positions, the play is usually to play Sacred Foundry untapped and pass. If the opponent does something important on his turn, we counter it with Cryptic Command and draw a card. If not, then we play Restoration Angel during their end step and repeat the following turn. This particular board state, however, really forces us to think about the question ‘What are we playing around?'

If we pass, then he likely untaps, sacrifices Expedition Map to find a missing tron piece, and uses some other card (either transmuting Tolaria West or hard draws a tron piece) to find the last remaining Urza land. This will enable him to start casting his big cards like Karn Liberated and such. If our plan is to leave open Cryptic Command mana, what are we willing and able to counter with it?

We can use Spellstutter Sprite to counter an Expedition Map if that's what he has, but if he has Tolaria West, there is nothing we can do to keep him off tron. In such a scenario, we simply play Restoration Angel during his end step and then pass back with Cryptic Command mana open again (after attacking for 3 with angel). At this point he has access to 10 mana, 3 of which are blue. So if our plan is to use Cryptic Command to counter his 7-8 mana spell, he will have enough mana to back it up with counter-magic, assuming he has a counter in hand (which is not that unlikely).

So we cannot play around Tolaria West + a counter with that line, nor can we play around Urza's Mine or Urza's Power Plant since he would get the other of the two with the Expedition Map in play. So if our plan is to keep him off Tron mana long enough to resolve our spells, our best course of action is to attack his mana. And our best opportunity to accomplish this is to Smash to Smithereens the Expedition Map now while he's tapped out, and then be able to counter a second Map with Spellstutter Sprite if he has it, and untap with Cryptic / Angel mana open to pressure him to quickly find tron mana through our disruption.

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So this second line of tapping too low to cast Cryptic Command actually plays around the important spells better by forcing him into a position of needing to draw more setup cards before being able to cast his real threats. Sometimes the best way to play around a card (or cards) is by attacking the resources necessary to play it (or them).

Conclusion

These are just a few examples to help acquaint you with the thought processes one ought to go through when considering the best line, i.e. the one that plays around the greatest range of cards the opponent could potentially have. For those looking to elevate your game, considering your own Magic Online replays in this way is a good practice tool for improving your ability to find the best lines. In any case, hopefully this article has shed some light on what it means to “play around” a card as well as when and how to do so. By asking the right questions and envisioning the widest range of potential game states the current one can develop into, you'll put yourself in the best possible position to properly evaluate the current game state and to thereby make the play the maximizes your chances of winning.

Craig Wescoe
@Nacatls4Life on twitter