Author: LSK

Foreward by Louie Scoot-Virgo, famed Magic art collector:

When I was a boy, my estranged father took me to see a Magic show at my estranged uncle’s bar. The Magician was a sad man: older, balding, hands arthritic from the repeated flick of the rabbit from the hat. But what struck me above all else was the wonder he filled the room with. Every child’s eyes were wide, his mouth drooling with the promise that he would bear witness to something amazing: that he was the chosen one. How could the magician do this? Because of his bloodthirsty desire to win. To win at all costs. To bet time and love on the roulette wheel of fate and roll blackjack. To do anything, even those things beyond the realm of man. To be superman.

I caught up with him on a stool and bought what little domestic beer my allowance could purchase and asked him how he got his drive. He giggled and with a knowing wink rasped this at me, “Sharpen your ears. You can’t be watching the spider’s web.” As we talked and drank he revealed his Ten Fold Path to Victory and with each gulp of Miller Lite I drank it in. As the divine night drew to a close and the cruel sun peeked through the window, he stood up, gathered his coat, handed me the original artwork for Spore Cloud, and disappeared into the wide world, a world of children in need of a little Magic.

I’ll never forget those words he told me but I’m not comfortable writing them down so I told them to a friend and we agreed this is a comfortable middle-ground. Spore Cloud formed the base of my Magic art collection, which has now grown to over six pieces. I am bloodthirsty.

10. Recycle

9. Save Up

8. Only Hang Out With the Right People

7. Draw Cards

6. Know Your History

5. Always Spend Your Mana

4. Petty Theft

3. Wake Up Early

2. Mono-Red

1. Respect

Does this scenario sound familiar?

“Draw a card, play Island, go.”

Welcome to Hell.

Crap, you say to yourself, Joey’s playing his Rite of Replication deck tonight.

Good news for you, though: you spent your Plains activating Sensei’s Divining Top during your turn, so you give the top three another look.

Thank god for house rules.

Since Bill’s successful campaign to get Spell Snare banned, you know the path is clear for the Squire you just moved to the top. By the time Joey deals with it, you’ll have all the mana you need.

We’ve all been there. The worst possible play that could have happened to you turns into a moment of triumphant victory. It’s because you set it up, you formed a backup plan, and you spent your mana to do it.

When you choose a deck to play, you have to decide which turn you intend to play on. A faster red deck plays on its own turn; slower draw-go style of deck plays on its opponents’ turns; a combo deck is not afraid to play on everyone’s turns.

When you moved your Squire to the top of your deck? That was on your opponent’s turn. Through careful use, Top turns your entire deck into a combo deck: every card you draw now reads, “1: scry 1.5.” If you always spend your mana, you can stay on top of the game.

In strategy gaming, the invariably central game mechanic is managing resources. In Chess, you manage your pieces; in Poker, you manage your chips; and in Magic, you manage cards. Another way of looking at this dynamic is against an opponent: by countering or destroying your opponent’s resources, you gain advantage by denying them any option other than conceding. As such, any play made in these games can be thought of as a one-for-one exchange: when you gain resources, your opponent loses choices.

For example, say you cast Time Walk. You’ve gained a turn, which means your opponent has lost a turn. But lots of cards are like Time Walk when you plan a strategy in terms of time and resources spent: if you cast Grizzly Bears and your opponent spends a turn casting Shock to remove it, then you’ve gained three times the advantage, because your opponent is down a card, a mana, and a turn.

What are some other forms of advantage we can look to? Consider the resources often left on the table, for example the upkeep step. Usually cards affect this step by costing resources in some fashion, but otherwise this step often goes wasted because only instants and abilities can be used here. Consider what a card like Shock means for you if cast on your opponent’s upkeep: they’ve just untapped, but suddenly they’re down two life when they hadn’t planned to be. Now their draw step has been radically altered, since the card they were hoping to draw may no longer be a valid strategy — they know you’re playing with fire, and have only one phase and one extra card to adapt a new strategy. This often causes fatal misplays from an opponent who can’t adapt on the fly.

More important than that, you’ve stolen three things from your opponent: a step of his turn, two of his life, and a pre-planned strategy.

Cards like Seedborn Muse, Paradox Haze, and Time Stop excel at this sort of strategy because they serve to gain extra resources for you that your opponent otherwise isn’t using, rendering those resources lost to them. Take everything from your opponent and they will be left with nothing. With a deck full of Time Walks, your opponent will be taken out completely: how can he play if he has no turns?

The best thing about the advent of online Magic clients such as Magic Workstation is that, no matter what time it is, there’s an opponent waiting to be beaten.

There’s a lot to be said about waking up early. Many of the world’s leading CEOs have gone on record as saying they’re at their peak when they get up at 5 AM, slug a can of Dew and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, then skip over the treadmill and hop right into a match. Exercising your brain is far more important than exercising your body, because your brain controls your body: if it is stimulated past its usual ten percent, your brain will take care of the rest of your body while you fell foes with a flurry of clicking and typing.

How you plan your day is just as important as how you plan your play. In the morning, your brain is close to a blank slate, which helps with making stronger instinctual plays while keeping your creative processes empty and fresh. This is similar to the process I call “Developing Your Mana”: each decision you take during the day is like a land drop, and your day starts going once you build up enough resources to make the big plays.

Imagine a notepad in your brain that starts on a blank page, and as you go through the day, it starts to fill up: bad matchups, losing to bad players with good luck, mana screw, these things all take up space in your mind as your day progresses. As the board fills up with lands and creatures (tasks and obligations), it becomes cluttered and difficult to navigate.

While it is important to keep these things in mind to learn from later, you must also keep your focus on the opponent at hand, because you never know when Stacy will call out and make you go in for your shift at Best Buy a little earlier, costing you valuable testing time and causing you to forget the data you’ve collected about the terrible cards your lucksack opponent is currently throwing at you.

Sun Tzu once wrote that a sharpened blade cuts more enemies. If you keep your mind sharp, you will be able to line up your opponents and strike them down, one by one, but if you leave your blade to dull, you will quickly be overtaken. Sharpening your weapon the night before a major battle is like playing a land on turn one: disciplined, fundamental, and in some cases necessary to succeed.

Keeping your brain fueled keeps your play clean and sharp; keeping your play clean and sharp helps you defeat your opponents.

As we learned in Habit 7: Draw Cards, a deck of 60 Shocks, while having the potential to deal 120 points of damage, doesn’t work very well when you bring it to a tournament, mostly because Shock costs mana to cast (but also because it is illegal to run more than four copies of Shock). You would think this would make a Shock-based deck unviable. However, you have not read to the end of this chapter. As you will learn, it is possible to also run cards with similar effects.

For example, I have purposely ignored the existence of Lightning Bolt until now to illustrate this point. Four Lightning Bolts and four Shocks combined adds up to 20 life and a dead opponent. You now have 52 other slots you can use to kill your opponent even more.

In most games of Magic, you will not draw your entire deck. Instead, we spend the game looking to draw the best cards in our deck, filtering through what won’t help us right now in order to find the cards that will. Sometimes, with cards like Arc-Slogger, the cards in your deck don’t matter; what matters is that your deck simply has cards. Being able to set your deck on fire is a great feeling, and in this way we get around that stupid four-copies rule by turning our entire deck into Shocks.

Sometimes your opponent plays cards that gain life. Your job is to kill them harder.

Sometimes your opponent plays cards like Ivory Mask, but those cards are bad so you should win anyway.

Sometimes your opponent splits the difference with cards like Circle of Protection: Red, which wastes their mana and gains you resources every time they fruitlessly stave you off for another turn.

It doesn’t matter how much life they gain, or how much they hold you back, as long as you break through for that final point of life. Nothing else is sacred: not your permanents, not your deck, and certainly not their face. The final point of life is all that counts.

Google defines “respect” as follows: “a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.” Now ask yourself: when’s the last time you felt deep admiration for an opponent that just countered your spell, destroyed your land, or wiped the board with an Obliterate without giving everyone three turns’ warning?

Think back to the last time someone called you a nerd. Remember what t-shirt they were wearing? It was an Affliction shirt, with the motto “Respect is Earned” written in gothic font. You were probably too busy feeling disrespected to realize that his shirt was telling the truth: respect is earned, and you felt disrespected not because of the insult, but because you knew at that moment that you did not earn his respect, despite how sweet your custom playmat and deckbox look. He disrespected you because he did not see you as a peer, but as being lesser.

When you are facing an opponent, you fundamentally are disrespecting his ability to play by asserting your dominance. You may offer a handshake and a “good game,” but by the time you lined up your Squire to steal his last point of life, you felt superior. Inside, you were wearing that Affliction shirt. You earned your respect.

When dealing with any element of Magic, from building a collection to defeating an opponent, you must have respect for yourself. Your goal is to not make friends, your goal is to be superior to all those around you. If your opponent does not respect you, he will crush you in short order. If you do not set out to earn respect, you have lost before you’ve begun.

Let’s do a little thought experiment: Go find a Jace. Any one will do, although it works better with the more expensive ones. Take a good, long look at it. Notice all the details: the hood, the cape, the squiggly glowing runes. That’s what the face of a winner looks like. But what’s his secret? It’s not his diversified stock portfolio; the secret is knowledge. It’s the face of a man who knows more things than his opponents do, and knows those things harder than they do. And now, that knowledge can be yours. Just keep these ten simple practices in mind, and you too can be a Jace.

“Whenever you play a card, draw a card.”

For 4GG and a few other hoops (specifically, shutting off your draw step), this is the benefit Recycle gives us, and the primary reason to play this Tempest enchantment. Its most straightforward application is to fire off lots of small spells, eventually accruing tons of card advantage by drawing more than one card per turn, ideally — but it comes at a cost.

Green is known as the color of extremes: small elves give way to large forces of nature, a symbolic representation of natural evolution existing as a microcosm of turns. As anyone who plays Commander will know, with so many decisions being made each turn, the turns begin to resemble epochs of growth and change — fitting for such a theme.

Recycle fits this theme perfectly. By the time turn six has arrived, life has developed on your board, and is blossoming and evolving in many strange ways. So too do your cards evolve: this change now comes quick, as each card played turns into something new and exciting. Life gives way to life.

Similar to Recycle is the card Greater Good: it helps to draw you cards based not off spells you’re casting, but from the spells you already cast. It features a similar discard mechanic, symbolic of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, in that only the strongest cards survive to stay in your hand.

Each of the five colors approaches this theme differently. Black exchanges life for cards (Phyrexian Arena, Necropotence), red assumes you want all your cards to be damage spells and offers appropriate sacrifices (Goblin Bomb, Char), blue trades mana and doing anything else well for cards. White is an outlier, keeping its theme of balance, neutrality, and stasis by not drawing cards at all, as change and evolution are bad for white thematically; instead, it staples card draw onto effects like life gain and small dudes (Renewed Faith, Decree of Justice.)

When building a deck, it is important to remember what you want to see later as the game draws on, then to build with that goal in mind. Starting with a core game plan or ethos will help you decide what colors to play, as well. More important that victory is expressing what form you want that victory to take: do you want to overwhelm the opponent with flying horses, or with big beasts? The choice is yours.

Here’s a familiar scene: you’ve logged onto Cardshark, a freshly-deposited Best Buy paycheck on your bank card, ready to buy the last singles you need to crush the casuals at FNM next week. You get to the rares on your list, and recoil in horror as you realize a card that was fifty cents last week suddenly jumped to $2. In a fury, you slam your fist on the desk, lamenting that post you made on MTG Salvation about your sick tech, which drove prices up before you even had a chance to unsleeve your proxies. Suddenly, that 3 for $12 deal on twelve-packs of Mountain Dew seems as though it wasn’t a sound investment after all.

The internet is a double-edged sword: while it makes ordering singles and carving out new strategies easier, you also have to contend against millions of other players looking to get the small edges, many of whom may end up running your own deck against you before it makes its debut under your guidance. Ultimately, your success is built on cost-benefit tradeoffs: are you willing to trade your deck concept for those two or three cards that will push it over the top?

The same is true once you get into an actual game. Even if you can afford to build the deck, can you afford your spells? While Wizards of the Coast has shown some mercy by keeping basic land prices dirt-cheap, ostensibly so you have a chance of playing at all, many of the best lands are non-basic and suitably expensive.

This is where you can carve a niche by saving money on mana to spend on spells. Cards like Urborg Volcano offer the same benefits as Blood Crypt, but at a much lower cost. Trade a turn for 2 life and $10? That’s a fair trade on any day: there is no point in giving your opponents free cards (e.g. Shock), especially when you’re trying to save your resources.

Many lament the practice of opening booster packs to score specific singles, but these players often do not understand cost-benefit ratios and how packs are structured. These players often overlook the three uncommons and eleven commons in an effort to score rares, assuming they are the best cards available and often filling their decks with 60 rares in a vain attempt to “be competitive.” The savvy player uses all the tools available to them, finding uses for cards oft-overlooked, only to dominate the competition because their opponents are simply unprepared for the deluge of cards they didn’t see a use for.

Someone else’s trash is your treasure, if you put your mind to finding a use for it. When you do, it’s your opponent’s cards that will seem like trash.

It’s 11:59 PM and the GPT is tomorrow morning. You have in front of you two items, seemingly meaningless to the casual observer, but monumentous for yourself.

To your left is a deck box containing the brew you plan on playing tomorrow, and with it the decision to get some more testing done.

To your right is a coupon for Denny’s, and it’s only good until 3 AM.

Depending on how hungry you are right now, the choice is obvious. But it isn’t always: what if you want to test, but your friend Joey absolutely hasn’t shut up about food for like three hours now? Joey loaned you cards for your deck, but on the other hand Joey is a fat fuck who has to eat like all the damn time.

Joey is an example of a person you shouldn’t hang out with. On your journey to winning more, you can’t let Joey’s stomach get in the way of that delicious testing. Bill, on the other hand, has a coupon for Domino’s and figures that solves both problems — but he wants you to order because his phone is dead, putting your testing in jeopardy even though Bill appears at first to be a trusted ally. You’ve just lost a precious twenty minutes of testing because you were sorting out the order and then your phone died midway through so you have to plug it in and start all over. Bill forgot his charger at home of course, so by taking his suggestion you’ve gotten in your own way.

If your true goal is to get testing done, both Joey and Bill are adversaries who seek only to undermine your testing with selfish desires, like eating dinner. Your victory will provide enough sustenance, and your morning hunger pangs will be sated by the tears of the fallen you leave in your wake.

When you have a goal, nothing can come between it and you, or you are setting yourself up for failure later.

This seems simple — it’s something you do every turn! But did you know that there are ways to turn this mundane action into a great source of card advantage, even when you aren’t drawing cards? For example, you can select to scry 2 instead, which is strictly better than drawing a card blindly: if you will, imagine the card you need in your mind, but may not need it right now. You can bank on the following turn’s needs with some simple planning, and after you get used to scrying 2 instead, you’ll feel like you’re cheating because of how much more valuable you’ve made your future draws.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mike Flores’ Peabody-winning article The Philosophy of Fire, I’ll summarize: one red mana is worth two damage, e.g. Shock, but unfortunately I stopped reading before he explained what one blue mana was worth so I’m going with Serum Visions (I immediately grabbed a stack of Shocks, 56 other cards, and put the theory to the test at FNM that night. I got disqualified because the other 56 cards were also Shocks, but I did get a participation promo.)

In a subsequent article, Critical Mass, he posted a decklist that featured Keiga, the Tide Star, then wondered why his deck was great: because Keiga, the Tide Star is easily the closest replacement for Serum Visions in the deck. For five extra colorless, and it’s a flying 5/5, it is exactly like one mana for drawing a card and scrying 2: when Keiga dies, he likely traded for another card on the way down (a creature in combat; a kill spell; the Legendary rule), and got to steal a creature to replace itself as well.

That’s three cards — just like Serum Visions. In other words, Keiga is a Serum Visions on legs.

But what if you don’t draw Keiga?

When it comes to winning games of Magic, your plays are ultimately defined by how many cards you drew. But even more important than drawing cards is what you choose to do with them. While the best cards in the game are ones that draw you more cards, it’s also important to eventually defeat your opponent.

At one point, these two cards were identical. Take a moment to consider these cards if they had been printed back in 1993, when Magic first released.

Back in 1993, Stoneforge Mystic is functionally blank, because Equipment cards wouldn’t exist for another ten years. Mystic is considered “a mistake” in terms of power level, but Squire is largely considered unplayable, even though they both cost 1W for a 1/2 body.

This is a fatal error in deck building. Rather than rest on the notion that Squire is and will continue to be bad, always, instead flip the question on its head: how good does the text in the box have to be before a 1/2 for 1W is playable?

Now let’s consider another “mistake”: Tarmogoyf. By the Squire test, Tarmogoyf is imminently unplayable; he’s 1G for a 0/1, if we ignore the text in the box. But as current secondary-market prices and multiple reprints attest, that text is worth about $150, give or take.

Mindblowing, until you consider that Squire’s text comes from The Canterbury Tales, a book which sold for $7.5 million at auction. Squire takes a large portion of its text from the book, which is over 200,000 words — meaning each word is worth approximately $37.50. Suddenly, Tarmogoyf seems as quaint as sixpence next to Squire’s incredible value.

Sometimes we have to take cards in historical context to understand why they are secretly powerful. Chaucer, the author of Canterbury Tales, did not write about Stoneforge Mystic, or about Tarmogoyf, but instead the secret power of the game he had discovered and revealed to us hundreds of years ago: Squire is truly a juggernaut from the past.

Only by knowing the history of the game as well as the history of the authors and geniuses who came before the game can you truly unlock your deckbuilding potential.