Stepping Up Your Game
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jacelightning
6 December 2010
2057 views
6 December 2010
2057 views
The Beginning
I started playing magic with my friends during Planeshift, but eventually fell away from the game for a little while. I rediscovered the game with Lorwyn block and I remembered every reason why I liked magic and threw myself into the game again. After the release of Rise of the Eldrazi, I looked back at all the time, money, and effort that I had placed in magic and figured out something had to give. It was then that I became the one thing I had always mocked, a tournament player. I started playing at FNMs and quickly wanted to play in bigger tournaments after having some success in FNM. I played in a PTQ and learned after a 1-4 record that I didnt really understand tournament magic. The fact of the matter was that a persons tournament success or failure starts well before the decks have been constructed or a game has been played. I had constructed a pretty good deck, but not a winning deck. I played some decent games, but didnt play anything close to winning magic. I hadnt been ready to step up my game. This space is all about stepping up your game, so I want to start at the beginning with deciding to step your game. After weve decided to step up our game we come to making an honest assessment of our magic playing skill. The honest assessment leads to learning via experiences, ours or someone elses. We learn using the tools provided for us in the magic playing community. Once we are learning and using our tools, we must set goals for ourselves to achieve and to drive us onward towards higher levels of magic playing.
The Decision
So what does it take to make a decision like this in your own magic playing? It first takes honesty. We can observe our game for years, but until we are honest with what we are doing we wont advance our skill. I used to think I was the most creative deck builder I knew until I realized that I wasnt actually creative, but just building bad decks that didnt accomplish anything. Id recommend taking the Fearless Magical Inventory here and really taking it because an honest assessment of your game is the first step. I had to realize everyone was a better player than I was when I started, that I wasnt going to outsmart everyone at every tournament I played by selecting the one deck that would crush all of them, that I wasnt going to draft a perfect deck every time, that my sealed pool doesnt need six awesome mythic rares to create a good limited deck, that I needed to plan my decks out to be consistent, that maybe 24 lands are not enough or are too much, and that I can still win a match if I drop game 1. We can talk all about getting better and reaching the pro tour, but until we honestly assess where we currently are and where we want to be then we have no point of reference to judge where our game currently is and how far we have to go.
How to Improve
After an honest assessment of your game, then the real work begins. At this point you know what you have to do to improve. Now begins the hard work of working on your game. There are two ways to learn anything, from the mistakes of someone else or from your own mistakes. In this case if you have a problem building manabases, as I did, you should start by looking at the manabases of decks that accomplished what you want to accomplish. By doing this you can have a really good starting point for your new deck that can give you some good testing results. For example if I were to build a Blue Black control deck there are good manabases all over to give me an idea as to what I should run in my manabase if I want to have access to certain mana at certain stages. Another way this can be important is that you can study all old successful manabases and figure out some characteristics that all successful manabases have. For instance by looking at the prevalence of manlands in the current standard metagame, you can learn that a good manabase tries to minimize the amount of useless cards drawn late in the game, or that by using the new dual lands that come into play untapped you can have access to sources of both colors of mana on the first turn which maximizes your options on turn 1 but eventually causes you to lose some tempo. The other way to learn is by making your own mistakes. To use the same example of manabases, when I started building my current mono red deck the manabase consisted of 24 mountains which led to lots of opponents surviving on less than 3 life because I was drawing useless cards. The next step was to through in cards like Evolving Wilds or Terramorphic Expanse that help thin out the deck, but this approach was hurt by the fact the land comes into play tapped so I was leaving opponents alive too long. The final evolution of this manabase was to include 8 of the Zendikar fetchlands so that I could go grab mountains and bring them into play untapped so with Plated Geopede in play it would produce a 5/5 first striker with an extra mana available.
Tool Box
Now youve made your decision and youre working towards the goal of truly stepping up your game, the last thing I want to look at is the tools you have available and how you should be using them. For any magic players wanting to get better the first tool is their own local store. Yep thats right, your own local store. At your store, a wonderful thing happens every Friday night, people show up to play competitive magic and there are even prizes. This is a great breeding ground to try new deck ideas or to just get used to playing decks against a living-breathing opponent. The store also provides a place to bounce deck ideas off of people, trade for the cards you need, or just to meet people that want to be getting better at magic like you. My store is Daves Clubhouse in Reynoldsburg, OH so if youre in the area stop by every Friday night at 6 and there are a great group of people there from new players who are just getting into the game to players like myself that want to be stepping up their game. That last phrase is important, a tool that is definitely a must for a player that wishes to step up their game is a group of players that also want to step up their game. This will in all likelihood make up your playtesting group. This group is vitally important because the time to test all the possible good decks in the metagame for an upcoming tournament takes a long time and is hard to do correctly (and by correctly I mean without bias) and with such a group in place the work gets spread out so that every one is much more prepared for the tournament. Another tool that is readily available is strategy writing about the game. There are tons of good writers (yours truly among them) out there that are writing about the game and the good decks and what makes them good. Its really important that as players wanting to get better we read these articles because they are written by the best players in the game and the information found in there can be used to learn more about this game of ours. The sites I read on a regular basis are: StarCityGames.com, ChannelFireball.com, Mananation.com, Magic.Tcgplayer.com, 60cards.com, Manadeprived.com, and of course Tappedout.net. Also I listen to such content as Limited Resources and In Contention on Mtgcast.com. (Also on Mtgcast there is a great Casual Magic podcast called The Mana Pool, all I can say about it is that its just funny) I also read the financial information at QuietSpeculation.com because it helps me know how to approach the trade market. These resources can be used just to get a deck for your next tournament, but if you really want to step up your game these sites will be used to help you understand the game and how it all works in a bigger picture than x-0ing FNM. The last tool I want to talk about is MTGO or MODO; I personally dont like modo that much. In my opinion it is so different from playing real life magic against a real life opponent that you are much better doing your testing with proxies made with some basic lands and a sharpie and just playing the game on modo because while I dont love modo it is a very valuable tool in learning how the parts of a turn work, how damage is dealt, and figuring out any number of crazy questions that can come up in a game of magic. I do have a user name jacelightning but the only cards in my account are the starter set I got when I signed up, so if you play me odds are Im refreshing my mind on how something works in the game rather than testing the deck Im taking to my next tournament.
The Goal
The last thing that I want to touch on today is a goal. This decision will mean absolutely nothing if you dont have a goal. The lessons you learn, from your experience or someone elses, or the tools you could use wont have a point unless you are active working on something. Goals are what we aspire to. They are why we playtest that one matchup against that last tier 2 strategy because we want to make sure we accomplish our goals. They are why we build decks on site like TappedOut so we can playtest before we assemble. They are why we drive hours on end to reach that tournament. They are why succeed. Goals arent nice ideas that well maybe reach for, but instead a fire that burns as the light at the end of the tunnel and races toward us pushing us onward. Goals shouldnt be some vague notion like, I gotta get better at magic. They should be something very defined like a particular finish at a specific tournament. For instance my first goals were to win at FNM in both draft and Standard, and to finish top 8 at states. I met my first goal, but at States I finished 46 out of 237. The people that beat me finished in 5,7,10,22, so I had my goal in my own hands and lost it. I made mistakes in both deck construction and in playing the deck and I paid the price for it with not achieving my goals. I want you to make a goal. Write it down. Tell someone or everyone. My goal is to qualify for the Pro Tour during the 2011 season and do well enough that I would merit an invitation to Worlds. Thats my goal whats yours.
Jarrod Williams Jacelighnting on Tappedout and Modo
The next article in this series is Stepping Up Your Game: Part 2
clusterfolk3 says... #7
this is a great article. ive been slowly evolving my own skills on sites like this for a couple months now, hoping to become a tournament sometime before zendikar rotates. ive always heard, "you can tell how good a magic player is by his lands," but i didnt believe it (i particularly never cared for fetch lands based on their price and the life loss). but now that i look back, I mirrored your path through lands exactly and im getting into manlands right now. so maybe i should give the fetch lands a look see. This article has helped me immensely. thanks!
crossclimber says... #4
Dude are you from philly?
December 7, 2010 12:03 a.m.