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How to Get Better at Magic

This article was originally published on 20. January 2010 and forms part of the Blackborder Classics series.

About Martin Juza

Martin is a Magic player from the Czech Republic who has a number of high-profile finishes under his belt: Level 8 Pro Players Club member 245 Lifetime Pro Points Top 8 Pro Tour Austin 2009 Top 8 Pro Tour Berlin 2008 Top 8 Grand Prix Tampa 2009 Top 8 Grand Prix Bangkok 2009 Top 8 Grand Prix Brighton 2009

How To Get Better

I have a different article for today, there are no decklists or metagame strategy, instead Ill try to give you some ideas on how to improve your game and how to get better at Magic. We all make mistakes, sometimes its something small and sometimes you will miss a Bridge from Below in the graveyard which will cost you $5000. Its just a matter of avoiding these mistakes. Let me start with what I think is most important.

Mulligans
Do you remember that time when you kept a terrible hand? And then you drew perfectly for 6 straight turns? AND THEN YOU LOST ANYWAY? DON'T KEEP TERRIBLE HANDS! I dont know how to stress this enough. People keep bad hands and then they lose and proceed to cry because they got unlucky. You didnt get unlucky, you took your chance and it didnt work out, suck it up or mulligan next time, but dont go around crying that you got manascrewed. Actually, there is no such thing as "manascrew"; its just a terrible excuse for losing, while you should have in fact taken a mulligan. I think mulliganing is probably the most important decision that you make in a game of Magic. The rest of

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the game usually plays itself out, but knowing when and how to mulligan, both when you know your opponent's deck and when you dont, is very hard. And quite frankly, most people dont give it much credit. I have a very different opinion on which hands to mulligan and which to keep than most people. The only one who seems to agree with me on almost everything is Paulo Vitor and it seems like the rest of the world is against us. Ill give you a few examples:

This is a hand from GP Minneapolis, which resulted in a very long discussion. Here is your decklist: This hand looks fine, but in my opinion, its a mulligan on the play and even on the draw. Even though you have a lot of cheap drops, you dont really have anything going besides some useless enchantments. You cant play turn 1 Steppe Lynx nor the Gatekeeper of Malakir on turn 3. Your deck is very powerful and I dont think there is any reason why you should be gambling with this kind of hand. If your deck was bad, then maybe I would keep this, hoping to draw into 2 Swamps and have a great advantage with the Gatekeeper that I can return and play again with the Soul Stair Expedition, but given all the information, I take a mulligan. After asking others, so does PV, but LSV, Olivier Ruel and pretty much every other player I asked, all keep. From an article by David Ochoa: "Game 1: I won the roll and stared at my hand (Mountain, Goblin Guide, Plated Geopede, Adventuring Gear, Slaughter Cry, Molten Ravager, and Spire Barrage). This hand was perfect except for one problem: it needed land. Well, I had nineteen lands left in the deck along with an Expedition Map. I kept and drew three Mountains in a row." I would never ever ever ever keep this hand. Adventuring Gear is a dead card, so you are pretty much on 6

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cards already. If you dont draw your land right away, you lose 99% of the time. Why would you possibly want to gamble like that? And even if you draw lets say 2 lands in the first 4 draws, its still nothing special. From one of Nico Bohny's draft walkthroughs: "Schnauf wins the roll and I keep a rather shaky hand of Ior Ruin Expedition, Into the Roil, Oran-Rief Survivalist, Oran-Rief Recluse, Vastwood Gorger and 2 Forests." Not in a million years! This is a mulligan to 5 already. From a GP a very long time ago: "Levy kept a one Mountain, Pyrite Spellbomb, Leonin Skyhunter, Alpha Myr, Sun Droplet, Clockwork Condor, Krark-Clan Grunt hand, on the play." Seriously? From Cedric Phillips' Worlds report: "Game 3, I kept a double White hand on the play with two Knight of the Reliquary; Elspeth, KnightErrant; Emeria Angel; and some other stuff. I was discarding by turn 4 and getting my brains beaten in by two Putrid Leeches. Annoying!" Annoying? How about: Maybe I should have mulliganed ? You cant cast any of your spells and if you get lucky and draw a green source, then you still play your first spell on turn 3. And it's going to be either a 2/2 or a 3/3. This is not sealed deck. Even on the draw this hand is just terrible! All of the above examples arent meant in any way as an offense against the players, just something that caught my eye while reading some coverage and articles and how I feel about it. If you keep, always have a plan. If you keep a bad hand, be ready to lose (most of the time!) and dont complain that you got unlucky. Think about how the game is going to play out (I suggest you watch Masashi Oiso deciding whether or not to mulligan sometimes) and what you need to win. Not to cast your spells, TO WIN. It may sound a little harsh, but if you keep terrible hands, you deserve to lose.

Think Harder
You play Faeries against Zoo, you each have 2 life, the board is Kird Ape against nothing and you have a Venser, Shaper Savant in your hand as the only card. Kird Ape attacks, you bounce it with Venser, and he replays it. You draw a land, chumpblock, draw another land and die. You pack up your things, leave the table and start complaining to your friends that you drew so many lands, literally anything would have been enough, there is no justice and so on. Then your friend points out that you could have bounced the

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Temple Garden instead, because it was your opponents only Forest, block the Kird Ape (1/1), kill it and attack for the win. Your opponent has an unblockable creature and you are hoping to draw one of your X removal spells. You did your best trying to buy as much time as you could, while removing 5 lands from your deck at the end of each of your opponents turns with Frontier Guide, but no luck. Well, if you had been using your Frontier Guide in your upkeep, you would have slightly improved your chances every turn and maybe gotten there. (If my math is correct, assuming you have 3 removal spells in a deck of 25 cards and we start this scenario in your upkeep, over 5 turns you are going to improve your chances by about 2%). You have a Gomozoa in play against your opponent's Vampire Nighthawk which he doesnt want to trade. Then he draws a Journey to Nowhere, plays it and targets your Gomozoa. You return it to your hand with Into the Roil and replay it again next turn. After some time, he draws another removal spell and you die. What you should have done is play the Into the Roil on your guy with the Journey to Nowhere still on the stack, then your opponent would be forced to remove his own Vampire Nighthawk as the only creature in play. Recently, Patrick Chapin wrote about a very good example of this. His opponent plays a precombat Garruk Wildspeaker, and then attacks with Putrid Leech. Patrick has the Lightning Bolt, but his opponent doesnt pump the Leech. After that, he makes a token with Garruk, which Patrick shot with the Bolt, hoping to draw something good but only drew a Wall of Denial. After the match he realized he could have killed the Garruk in combat after receiving damage from Putrid Leech, which would result in the board being stalled with Wall against Leech next turn and he would still be in the game. Im not sure I would have done it either, but by reading about it Im pretty sure I will make the right play next time. Things like that happen all the time, you had the win or a way to survive longer, you just didnt see it. Sometimes its much more complicated, but the more you play and the more you practice, the easier you are able to see things like that.

Analyze
Look back and think what you are doing wrong, maybe there is a simple solution to why you are not winning as much as you would like to. GP Chicago, Legacy (Dredge) 0-3 drop GP Barcelona, Standard (Sanity Grinding) 0-3 drop GP Sao Paulo, Standard (Elementals) 0-3 drop This year, I went 0-3 drop in 3 Constructed GPs. Im pretty sure Im the only person in the entire Magic world with this achievement. Was it because Im a bad player? Maybe. Because I suck at Constructed? Maybe. I have a different explanation though. Look at the decks I played. I have never played Legacy before but going to Chicago was convenient, so I gave it a try. I have also never played Dredge before, but

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it usually kills on turn 3, so how hard can it be, right? Turns out it can be pretty hard. I was probably mulliganing too aggressively, I had no idea which cards to expect from which deck (at that time, Fish often played Relic of Progenitus maindeck, who knew? I learned it the hard way), I didnt bother to check more than one decklist of each of the most played archetypes. I didnt even win a single game 1. Actually I didnt even get to play my turn 1 in one match and faced game 1 turn 1 Relic of Progenitus from the Fish player, but you get the point. Barcelona was all about 5 Color Control, Tokens, and so on. I thought Sanity Grinding was a good choice because it was very hard to lose against those decks and I would happily start with 4 cards if I was guaranteed to play against 5CC. The bad matchups were decks that had no chance against the tier 1 decks and once you get to the top, you should get paired against a good matchup pretty much every round. It was a gamble and unfortunately I played against Burn, GB Elves and some kind of Bant hate deck and went 0-3. I was laughed at by many and I probably deserved it. Sao Paulo was a different story. I was going to play something else, but then Manuel Bucher came up with an Elemental deck that nobody was expecting and it was fun to play. But just because something is fun and new doesnt mean you should switch to it from a deck you have been testing for a month. Likewise, where did your good results come from? Right after Zendikar came out, there were 3 high level tournaments. I spent some time before the first one in Japan at Shuuhei's place, practicing drafts with the Japanese players at a local card store. (Un)fortunately (and, well, obviously) the cards were in Japanese and I have only played 1 release in Europe, so I didnt know any of the cards apart from a few. I took the visual spoiler and memorized all the cards. I went through almost every set review from the top players to look for help, trying to evaluate the cards without actually playing them. Then we did about 12 drafts, compared our results with all the colors and figured BR aggro was the best archetype by far. White was pretty good too, mostly because the good aggressive cards were very underestimated and White as a color was thought of as the worst. My results? GP Melbourne 9th PT Austin Limited 6-0, which resulted in a top 8 GP Tampa top 8 Well, seems like the preparation paid off big time. I finished 9th in Melbourne on tiebreakers and getting a sick RB deck in the draft portion seemed to be the easiest thing in the world. Most people just had no idea how to draft yet. Then came Austin, my first deck featured 3 Plated Geopedes, 3 Burst Lightnings and a lot of other powerful stuff like 2 Ob Nixilis, the Fallen and so on. In the second draft, black got cut off by Kibler to my right, so I went with White instead. 4 Steppe Lynxes and 4 Kor Sanctifiers later and I was 6-0. In Tampa it seemed like people caught up with the whole RB thing, and every table had like 4-6 Black drafters. At the GP after that, every sealed deck was RB and it was also the archetype everyone was going for in draft. I failed to adapt and failed miserably on day 2, which brings me to my next point.

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If you are playing to win , dont get too creative, dont play a deck you have not played before and know the metagame. If you are going to fly to a GP you might as well spend the extra hour looking at the decklists. Prepare, practice and you are good to go.

Adjust
There are a lot of Extended PTQs taking place right now. Whats the best deck? Well, there is no clear answer. You shouldnt just be playing a single deck (unless you only know one and you arent sure you would play the other decks correctly etc.), you should also be playing the metagame. After the first online PTQ I noticed somewhere that the metagame was around 17% All in Red and 17% Burn. Thats about 1/3 of the entire field. Now take one of the top decks that crushes both (Id say Affinity) and if you play an online PTQ the next day (which usually is 9 rounds), you pretty much start with 3 byes. Obviously this doesnt work out if the next event is 2 weeks from the first one, because most of the players are going to change their decks. Read and analyze decklists from PTQ top8s and so on. Dont just copy the winner's list from the previous tournament, where he was battling in metagame X. Think about what you need to do to beat metagame Y. This works in Limited too. After the whole RB thing, I should have just dedicated some time to find out how to beat it. I didnt, and my next 3 GPs saw me failing to make day 2 twice and making no money in the third one.

Dont Think You Are Due

This part is very important. Many players reach a point where they think they are due to win or do better just because they are better than most of the other people. You dont suddenly start winning just like that. Being a good player doesnt mean you just have to go to a tournament and expect to win. Most of those players are the ones that say they got terribly unlucky when they lose. They never lose because they got outplayed or made a mistake. The only way they ever lose is by getting unlucky. You have to cross this point where you stop thinking about yourself as the best player in the world and start thinking clearly. Sometimes a small break from Magic helps, maybe reading a good theory book about being successful, talking to others. Once you stop thinking that you only lose when your opponent topdecks 3 times in a row, you will start winning much more. Trust me. I played about 30 GPs before I ever top8ed one. All the time I thought I was due. I was so good! I tested so much! This year I started thinking more clearly, started doing things differently, practiced more, played more relaxed. Result? 3 GP top8s. I no longer think Im losing because of bad luck and I no longer think Im the best player ever. Right when I got to level 8. Isnt it ironic? So take your losses with respect, after all, you have to be prepared to lose some. Dont keep your 2 lander just because you didnt get there last time. Dont keep 6 lands thinking you cant get flooded 2 games in a row.

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Dont think you are due. The universe doesnt owe you anything. It was here first!

Additional Things That Will Help You Win More

Write down all the cards your opponent has played in the match. Why? Arent just combat tricks enough? Well, then you are going to find a Seismic Shudder in your sideboard and you wont remember how many 1 toughness guys you saw game 1 because all the RB decks you have been playing against all day long look the same. Once you get better at remembering all the little things, you can stick with the most important cards, but I would start with writing down everything. Call a judge when you have a reason to do so. Obviously Im not saying you should call a judge on your opponent because he put a spell in his graveyard before it resolved (like many players do with cards like Rampant Growth or Thirst for Knowledge), but dont feel like a jerk because you called a judge to watch your match for slow play. If you ever feel like your opponent is playing slowly, shuffling in a weird way, doing anything shady, raise your hand. They are here to help you. Get enough sleep, eat, rest, etc. I came to GP Paris on Friday straight from Japan. I slept during the day and stayed up all night. During the tournament I felt soooo miserable. I didnt even have the will to win. All I wanted was to go to bed and sleep. It isnt worth it to go to a PT and party all night long the day before day 1 and then lose 2 matches because of it. Dont make stupid and avoidable mistakes. At GP Sao Paulo, I got a matchloss for sitting at the wrong table. Just because I was lazy to go check the seatings myself and accidentally mixed up the number with my friend. Dont get a gameloss for tardiness just because you had to eat that delicious burger. Triple check your decklist. Ask the judge about rules if you are not sure. Put a marker on your deck if you have to pay for a Pact. Read. There are a lot of articles and strategy on the internet. Most people write about mistakes they made, by reading it you will experience the situation too and next time you will know what to do. Hopefully you will find this article helpful. Thanks for reading!
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