Recurring Nightmares – Combating Combo | Magic: The Gathering - Strategy, Singles, Cards, Decks

Recurring Nightmares – Combating Combo | Magic: The Gathering - Strategy, Singles, Cards, Decks

Summary of Thought Process in MTG

This is a summary of

Thinking Ahead to Win by Frank Lepore 

1. The intention of playing Magic in Tournament. It should be aiming for wins rather than playing for fun.
2. Check every single options before you play a land and when a spell is on the stack.
3. Always think ahead a few turns before you put down a type of land.

Feature Article - Third Drive Noah Weil @ SCG

Feature Article - Third Drive
Noah Weil


Interesting article on competitive playing and where is the line drawn for ethical playing.

Breaking the Code by Greg McCleery @ TCG

Breaking the Code

Greg McCleery 


An interesting an article on mental magic.

Learning How To Draft @ Evan Erwin @ StarCityGames

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/fundamentals/12549_Learning_How_To_Draft.html

2010 Tournament Rules Changes @ Blackborder.com

2010 Tournament Rules Changes | Blackborder.com

5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Game @ Matteo Orsini Jones @ BlackBorder.com

5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Game

My last few articles have focused on the deeper, more abstract concepts of the game, and so I thought I’d go for something a little simpler this week. Though getting into the deeper concepts is necessary to really become “good”, it’s also good to remember the simple things that can give you an edge. Not necessarily things that will make you play better, but more things that will make better the way you play... if that makes sense. Some of them will seem obvious to you and may well be things you do out of instinct, but that’s unavoidable when my audience covers quite a range of players from those who started last week to those who expect to win most tournaments they turn up to. I’ve come up with 5 basic tips that will hopefully improve the way you approach a game of Magic. So, here they are:

Versions:
Rise of the Eldrazi (Foil)

1.      Play spells post-combat.

This one’s been repeated to new players since the dawn of mankind, and still holds today, yet still so many of my opponents tap out for a creature then send in the team, giving me perfect information and allowing me to set up a complete car crash of a combat step without fearing pump spells or removal. Not only does it allow the opponent to do this, but it also tells them that you don’t have a pump spell / removal in hand and so allows them to play accordingly for the following turns. Leveling a creature also counts as playing spells precombat – Knight of Cliffhaven being the biggest offender in the most recent set. So often people level it up turn 3 before attacking only to have it Heat Ray’d / Staggershock’d / Vendetta’d in response and losing 2 turns. If you just attack for 2 it’s unlikely your opponent kills it because the fact you didn’t level up suggests you have a better creature to play. Even if you don’t have a follow up, you at least get 2 damage in before having your guy killed in response to a post-combat level up.

2.      Do things in your opponent’s end step.

This one’s pretty much the same as point 1 in terms of reasons – It doesn’t tap you out, and so leaves your opponent wondering what you could have in hand to not want to make something last turn. There aren’t so many examples of this in Rise of the Eldrazi, but if we think backwards a little bit, cards like Harrow and Think Twice fit nicely into this category. This one’s a little bit more fluid than point 1 though, because there are times when you DO want to play the Harrow during your own turn – if you fear the Spell Pierce, or if you fear the Trapmaker's Snare into Archive Trap (lol) it’s better to run with it while your opponent is tapped out. Similarly, if it’s removal on a creature that you really want dead, Staggershock it during your own turn to stop yourself getting countered or fizzled with the likes of Emerge Unscathed.
Also, don’t always do this just because you should when it makes literally no difference – e.g. don’t save your Evolving Wilds until their end step on turn 1 when they already know what colors you’re playing just because you can – just do it in your turn; that way you can hit f8/f6 and sit back... (This is an online thing if you didn’t know).

3.      Look at how your opponent is tapping their lands.

A lot of people try and get better by trying to “read” their opponents – getting tells through twitches, sighs and shrugs, but to be honest I’m not very good at this and I strongly doubt that anyone is as good as they might claim to be – I really don’t think you can get anything more than “that draw wasn’t great” from a competent player by observing their body language. Where you really get tells is taking note of how your opponent is tapping their mana. This set in particular is great for getting tells of this kind due to the fact that it’s full of levelers and spawn tokens. If your opponent chooses not to level up when they could then something is clearly up, but even if they do level up as much as possible you can gain something from the way they tap. If, for example they have a Kabira Vindicator and level it by tapping 3 Plains and leaving 2 Islands up, then play around Deprive. If you know they have Prey's Vengeance in their deck yet they make sure to leave a Plains up after leveling a Dauntless Escort twice then the Emerge Unscathed alarm bells should be ringing (or if nothing else it tells you they don’t have the pump spell). Similarly, if they chump with a Nest invader over an Eldrazi Spawn then you just know a boomboom is in arrival, so maybe keep that Narcolepsy you were about to cast on a Stomper Cub at the expense of slowing down your clock if it means you don’t lose to a Crusher.

4.      Make plans during your opponent’s turn, not yours.

Something that really gets me is when players draw their card, then tank for ages. They then ask for permission to attack, and after I grant it they then proceed to tank for another 10 seconds. What were you thinking about the first time you thought for ages? In general you should know what your next turn will achieve at least 1 turn in advance, but working it out during your opponent’s turn is a fine place to start. This way after you draw your card you can decide how the draw will help or, very rarely, change your plan, rather than starting to devise the plan only after drawing the card. I was recently observing a friend playing Magic Online (he is, to be blunt, quite bad at Magic). One turn he untapped and drew a Pathrazer of Ulamog and excitedly started counting his available mana sources. I told him he only had 10 and to attack just like he did last turn as nothing had changed since – he was in disbelief that I had counted that quickly and asked how I did it. The thing is, I already knew we had 10 mana available because I’d counted it a few turns back when working out how to best maximize efficiency over the next few turns. Drawing the Pathrazer now meant we had to be a little more careful with keeping spawns alive but ultimately didn’t change the plan I had already in mind. This opened my eyes to the fact that there are some people who don’t even consider doing what comes quite naturally to me – like I said at the start – a lot of you will do this already, but even if I change the way just 3 people reading this play the game then I’m doing good work.

5.      Do math.

This one’s similar to the previous one, but applies more to combat – Often I get people who attack with the same guy turn after turn without realizing that the guy they’re attacking with then allows me to attack back for more, and so the damage race is in my favor because I’m dealing 5 every time they deal 4. If they held their 1/4 back and just send in the 3/3 flyer then my 2/1 would have to stay back too and the race would be even – if they started first, then they’re winning first. Obviously there are a lot of factors to take into account with this kind of thing, and if you have, say, a pump spell or a removal spell with which you plan to win the game, then it becomes a lot more favorable to start sending in the men. Equally, however, the opponent might have a trick that is going to mess up your math, and so you also have to keep this in mind – even though your trick is going to speed up your clock by a turn it might be worth it to hold back with 1 of your guys in order to ensure that your opponent can’t speed up their own. Basically, do the math – don’t just send in a creature willy-nilly because it’s “dealing them 5 damage”.
I’ll leave it at those 5 for now. If you already do all of these things and understand why you do them, then I guess this article wasn’t for you (but as you’re reading this, then I guess maybe it was!), but hopefully most of you will at least think about the points I made next time you’re playing a game.

Summary

To summarize:

• Don’t give your opponent extra information when there’s no need to do so.
• Similarly, don’t let your opponent get away with unknowingly giving you extra information; try and take everything you can from what you’re given.
• Don’t think about what you’re doing now, but rather how what you’re doing now will affect what you plan to do with the rest of the game, and how what your opponent is doing changes this.
• When making plans do the math, go through the odds (or EV for the statisticians) of each possible plan and go with the one that turns out to give the highest profit based on the risks.
• And something I haven’t touched upon much in the article: don’t misplay!

Thanks for reading,
Matteo

Draft #1014364 deck @ CCGDecks.com

Draft #1014364 deck

Main Deck
1 Battle Rampart
1 Battle-Rattle Shaman
1 Devastating Summons
1 Dread Drone
1 Flame Slash
1 Goblin Tunneler
1 Grotag Siege-Runner
1 Heat Ray
1 Hellion Eruption
2 Kiln Fiend
3 Lust for War
1 Nirkana Cutthroat
1 Perish the Thought
2 Raid Bombardment
1 Rapacious One
2 Soulsurge Elemental
1 Spawning Breath
1 Surreal Memoir

1 Vendetta
1 Virulent Swipe
1 Zulaport Enforcer


Land
7 Mountain
7 Swamp


Side Board
1 Arrogant Bloodlord
1 Bloodrite Invoker
1 Bloodthrone Vampire
1 Curse of Wizardry
1 Death Cultist
3 Demonic Appetite
1 Deprive
1 Distortion Strike
1 Escaped Null
1 Essence Feed
2 Forest
1 Island
1 Mountain
1 Naturalize
1 Nema Siltlurker
1 Shrivel

Breaking Through @ Conley Woods @ ChannelFireball

This is an article by a player that always writes about the thought process and different aspect of magic.

Breaking Through by Conley Woods @ Channel Fireball

Each week, dozens of articles are produced that help a player with his or her game a little bit more than the last week. Articles on theory or skill-teaching are released on a regular basis that all contribute to a player’s skill set. Sometimes these articles are just decklists and tournament info, but even then, a player is able to gain knowledge about some part of the metagame which allows that player to learn better assessment and metagaming skills. Theoretically, and I suppose in application as well, players should be improving at a fairly rapid rate due to the wealth of information available to them.

It is true that players on the whole are much better than in years past, but what holds players back from applying more of the skills they learn either in articles or from game play situations? The information on how to improve is rampant, but one of the issues is that most players cannot grasp exactly where they are and therefore from where they should begin to improve. Trying to do too much when you are not capable will not allow a player to gain much of anything in the form of improvement. Likewise, practicing skills that should have been, or already have been mastered, will obviously not add a lot to your game.

If you look at Magic in a light similar to schooling, it becomes a little easier to explain. Take an average 3rd grader and teach him high school algebra and you are likely to lose 99% of the information in translation alone, as the 3rd grader is just not ready to acquire the information. Take that same 3rd grader and teach him skills he would have learned from 1st grade though, and you either end up boring the child, or hindering his progress as you are effectively holding him back.

To help players understand exactly where they are in the scope of skill then, there have been a number of categorizations, but each category is unique. These all look to rank a player in some way, to give the player a better idea of where he is positioned. Olivier Ruel has written on the subject, as have I before, but there is no one hierarchy that can encompass all factors within a player’s game and still be practical enough to be useful.

This is why, rather than lumping all of a player’s traits into one category, multiple categories are needed and that when assessed properly, can propel the player to a place where they are streamlining their efforts of improvement. Today I would like to discuss an area that does not get much publicity, yet it is pretty simple in scope and application. For a lack of a better all encompassing term, I will refer to this as Independence Demographics (ID for short).

Everyone can remember back to a time when they first started playing. Lightning Bolts were cast targeting the opponent on turn 1. Everything was played before you attacked. And you would chump block that Grizzly Bears with your Llanowar Elves at 20 life on turn 2 because, “Why would I want to take damage?”
This is a time when there are no rules to follow in the context of correct play. Sure, the rules of Magic are at a foundation, but there are no rules in place that dictate proper play. These players are not maximizing their instants, instead using them main phase and so on. Essentially, they are virgins to the unwritten laws that govern competitive play.

These are the base of our little demographics hierarchy. They encompass all that is new and fresh and are thus the players that belong to group A, or level 1, or whatever bullet point you wish to dazzle the page with. For consistency purposes, we will just be simple and call them tier 1. These players think independently in an almost reckless way at first glance, but when examined more deeply, we can see that they actually aren’t thinking very independently at all. Instead, the rulebook, that is the actual guidelines of play created by WotC, is their strategy guide. If it’s in the book, it must be used!

Moving up the chain of command, we reach the middle class of independent thought. These are the players who have reached a level of competitive play and have begun to develop habits because of that. Through the consumption of articles and media, play experience, and general consensus, these players have learned to follow the “rules” of strategy.

This involved them playing instants at the end of the opponent’s turn, playing creatures in the second main phase, and using burn spells in Limited as removal and not direct damage. These are all things that are going to be correct a vast majority of the time, and are in place to help shortcut players looking to improve their game. The issue comes due to the fact that these rules for competitive play develop to a point where they are blindly followed. This is what separates the tier 2 players from the tier 3.

Once you hit tier 3, the players begin to define their own set of rules. While the basic rules of engagement for strategy are still in place, players now understand when to utilize the exceptions or in some cases, define their own set of rules. This is the tier that is more likely to main phase their Esper Charm because they know that otherwise they will miss a land drop, or to cast Terminate on their turn just to avoid Sejiri Steppe tricks.
In Limited these players are more likely to board into another color in order to answer a threat or play cards that are otherwise considered bad by the community. Luis’s love (or at least respect) for Razor Boomerang in Zendikar/Worldwake draft is a perfect example of this. Even after taking, playing with, and ultimately winning because of the card, there were still viewers that would comment in the forums about how he should have played card X over it. Those players have not been able to advance to tier 3.

So what can categorizing ourselves tell us in our efforts to improve? Well, as with anything in Magic that can point out mistakes, first you must be willing to be honest with yourself. If you are that 3rd grader, convincing yourself that you read at a 9th grade level will just throw you right back under the bus and have you barely treading water. We are looking to make up ground here, so being honest is a vital component of the exercise.

This exercise can tell a player a lot about things he needs to work on though. We are always looking for ways in which to improve our technical play, but mistakes of timing or rule keeping are going to be very difficult to recognize unless you can determine, even being told so by others, that you are in tier 2. Running your Terminate into an opposing Negate when they were tapped out just half a turn before is obviously wrong, but the issue here is that a player who is likely to do this would not recognize it because according to everything he has ever read, instants should be used as such. He has trained himself into making a correct play based on tons of practice and reading, so expecting him to realize this issue at the snap of a finger is unreasonable.

Just as it takes some amount of repetition to get a person to form a habit, it takes equal or more time to break that cycle. At the end of the day, these are what the “rules” of strategy are that we are taught; habits. So, allowing the player to see where he fits into this scheme may just be the best way to get him to begin self-correcting his mistakes. As he makes plays, he is more likely to assess those plays both before and after the fact to a more thorough state. This allows a player to grasp the times where rules are meant to be broken.

There are endless accounts of rules being followed too strictly. Whether it is a player casting 3(!) Sign in Bloods to draw cards while his opponent is at 2 life, or failing to Path to Exile your own wall after missing a land drop. These plays originate as outside of the box thinking and slowly get incorporated into the fabric of the tier 2 rules set.

Remember the giant hype around the m10 rules changes? Damage on the stack was said to have made the game deeper in strategy, when in reality, it has just become another rule that tier 2 players used to oppress tier 1 players (as they should have, mind you). Damage on the stack did not allow more options; it just fit into the neat strategic givens that all players would follow. Occasionally a tier 3 player would be able to abuse this fact, but rarely at that. The strategy surrounding combat was so uniform that players took the habits to heart. Then, with a change, no longer would combat come out as uniform. Sure there would still be common situation to arise, but nothing like before.

This type of breakdown can be seen in deck building as well. I have been heralded as a Spike Rogue for some time, and I could never figure out why that was a descriptor that set me apart. Then, using this work up, it all made sense. Rogue players by definition cannot be tier 2 players. They like to play by their own rules, which puts them into one of two camps. The vast majority of rogue builders will unfortunately fall in the tier 1 category. These players are not following the rules just to make that claim. There is little rhyme or reason here, which is why these type of players often get scrutinized. I was once here and understand how it works. The image is bigger than the results.

Following a tier 2 set of rules would have you win much more, but you would rather go 6-2 with some concoction than dare be seen hoisting a trophy with Jund or Faeries. Because of this mentality, it is very difficult to break through to tier 3, which is inevitably where the other rogue camp lies. This time, they are still breaking some of the rules, but doing so for justifiable reasons. Instead of simply being different for the sake of being different, you are now making card choices or play decisions to gain a strategic advantage.

The line here may be thin, and it is easy to occasionally relapse into a tier 1 rogue builder, but with a good head on your shoulders and an understanding that winning is what matters at the end of the day, the urge is able to be contained. Image will only get you so far; eventually results are going to be required or your efforts will all be for naught.

Ultimately, how each player comes to conquer the transition to a tier 3 thinker will be different, but each will begin in the same place: accepting that you are taking too many situations as a given and allowing others to do the work for you when you are potentially capable of solving these situations in unique and better ways. It is going to be best to learn to incorporate independent thought with the group-think that the Internet provides to maximize results. Even then, you are able to academically criticize the common thinking and arrive at the same decision point only after investigating its path.

The biggest step is to simply realize that all of the givens are actually not and move on from there. With a little time and effort, eventually you will be processing information on your own terms and hopefully expanding the “rules” for the rest of us. The more minds we have contributing to a problem the better solution we can arrive at so long as each mind is willing to bring something new to the table. Stay independent but not to a point of self-corrosion and the world of Magic opens up for you.

Thanks for reading.

MTG Forums and Websites

I surfed a few MTG forums to improve my skills in MTG.
This is the list of website and forums that I always scan through.

Official Website - DailyMTG.com

Unofficial Website
1. 1MTG.net  (Malaysia Forum)
2. MTGSalvation
3. BlackBorder
4. ManaNation
5. ChannelFireball
6. TCGPlayer Magic
7. DeckCheck.net (A website to check deck)
8. Magiccards.info (A website to check cards and price)
9. StarCityGames
10. Tomoharu Saito Blog
11. Mtg Translation for Japanese Website

I will update this blog more often since I'm going to learn how to use this blog to record my results for my playtesting. Adios.

Malaysia National Championship 2010 @ Cititel Midvalley

Malaysia National Championship 2010 is one of the anticipated event for any magic player in Malaysia to qualify for. Why?

1. You can draft for free - Keep what you draft :D
2. When you register for the Nationals, you get a free LINVALA playmat.
3. You get to compete with the best player from the whole Malaysia.
4. It's FREEEEEEEEEE, only by invitation.

There's a few ways to get into Nationals.
1. By ratings.
2. By National Qualifier.
3. By Regional Qualifier.

I'm lucky to get into Nationals through Ratings and ranking in DCI. This happen due to the major event wins that I got in GP KL. I was in Top 75 of whole Malaysia.
 Lucky me.

So this is the official website for the Malaysia National Championship 2010.

Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur @ 13,14 March 2010 @ Cititel Midvalley

Malaysia Biggest Magic Competition is in Town. All pro players will be gathering in this place to compete with each other to win for the prize of USD 3500. I only manage to get into top 37 with 10 win 4 lost, which is a good match cause it's my first GP.

This is the deck that I'm using in my GP.

Creature Valakut.

Qian Jie Seow

Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur Day Two

				Main Deck 61 cards
				3 Forest 1 Jund Panorama 14 Mountain 2 Naya Panorama 3 Terramorphic Expanse 4 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle 27 lands 2 Avenger of Zendikar 4 Bloodbraid Elf 4 Borderland Ranger 3 Siege-Gang Commander 13 creatures	4 Expedition Map 4 Explore 4 Harrow 3 Khalni Heart Expedition 2 Lavaball Trap 4 Lightning Bolt 21 other spells Sideboard 2 Burst Lightning 2 Dragon's Claw 3 Goblin Ruinblaster 3 Grazing Gladehart 3 Naturalize 2 Searing Blaze

It score awesomely for 10 wins. No one expected that Valakut could make it into Day 2. I was surprise by it too. Anyway, I'm going to get my pro points and USD200!! Top 37!!!

Feature Match with Jason Yap

GP KL event Coverage

Feel so tired. Need to replenish :D Thanks God for the win.