Imagine that you're the star Quarterback at your school. You mad at me yet? Seriously though, let's use our imaginations. Aside from all of the fringe benefits of chicks and popularity, you have a genuine shot at going Pro. Despite the stereotypes, your mind is sharp and you get accepted into a Big 10 school with a full ride before you even mention that you play football. Things have never looked brighter. But it's springtime now, and your sport is traditionally a winter sport, so you pass the time by sitting on the couch, munching tasty salted treats and watching Hardball with Chris Matthews. Productive use of your time?

Fast-forward to November. The Big Game is fast approaching. You've been training hard five days a week and have finally returned to peak conditioning. You are untouchable, and those Pro talent scouts have started asking about you. But you're also exhausted, and damn bored with football. Once again, the comfy couch beckons to you with its promises of pretzels and Coke products and a TV full of blowhards. Is spending a little more quality time with your best friend, the TV, really all that bad for you?

The answer is an incontrovertible yes. Once you reach a certain level, allowing your muscles to atrophy and your brain to turn to goo is a serious liability. Once you reach the professional level, couch time becomes very, very expensive. Professional athletes have known this for years, and as such have developed a set of routines known collectively as “cross training” to counter their boredom and to increase their overall fitness.

The basic theory behind cross training is that focusing your training on a single activity will make you quite good at that activity, but such a routine comes with several risks. In sports, this single-mindedness leads to burnout and injury, as you are stressing the same group of muscles day in and day out. By cross training, you become a better athlete in the classical sense. You build muscles that you might not use as often, easing stress on your other muscles and making you fitter in general. You develop additional skills that you may be able to work into your sport to make you a better, more creative player. As if that weren't enough, cross training relieves the mind-numbing boredom that comes with working on just one thing for an extended period of time.

So how does all of this sports talk fit in to our world? In Johnny Magic and the Card Shark Kids, Richard Garfield claims to have designed a game for the "Mental Athletes," those who train their minds as athletes train their bodies. The analogy is apt, as those things necessary to be successful in sport (skill, endurance, creativity) are very much present in Magic, and indeed in many games like it. To anyone who disputes this, I invite you to sit down and play a Grand Prix, make Day 2 and then go on to the final tables. Even the seven or eight rounds customary for a Vintage tournament are mentally exhausting, not to mention the three intense rounds following for those lucky enough to make it that far. So what happens when you feel like you simply cannot play another round of Magic?

For different people, the answer will be different. The truly hardcore amongst us just shrug it off and keep playing. While I admire their intensity, there are times when I personally have to leave the world of Magic for a few hours and party with drunken sorority girls. True story. For the times when it is truly exhaustion that's causing this, taking some time off and relaxing is one of the best things you can do. Your brain doesn't like solving puzzles for hours on end, just as your muscles can't take the physical strain of constant work for long periods of time. Getting some R&R will allow you to focus more easily when the next game starts up, and your brain will thank you for it.

What if it's not exhaustion, but rather boredom that's causing this fatigue? Or what if you feel that you're just not learning much from the games you're playing? The solution is, as in sport, cross training. In Magic, this can mean one of two things; either you play another deck, or you play another format entirely.

Picking up a different deck has so many benefits that it's almost no wonder that every single top-level player does it. It is very difficult to completely understand a matchup while only playing one side of it. Even the specialist, the person who plays one deck exclusively, will not succeed without a million test games unless he or she switches sides every once in a while. Working out all of the intimate details of a matchup is what separates a good player from a great player, and it's important to note that many of those details won't reveal themselves until you've looked through your opponent's eyes. Playing the other deck in the matchup means so much more than simply getting a feel for what your opponent's deck will tend to do. It's seeing the options that your opponent has laid out before him at any stage of the game, being able to get inside of his (or her, but c'mon... we'll never understand women) head and reasoning the problem out with him. When you gain this ability, you can see where he's making mistakes; mistakes that he himself may never catch. You can capitalize on these mistakes. This is playing the game at a higher level. It's playing the player, not the cards.

This method of cross training also allows you to see where his deck is particularly weak against yours, and allows you to exploit this weakness by putting through more effective bluffs. You understand his plays better, and can tell much more quickly and naturally what those plays mean contextually, and what those plays say about his overall strategy at that particular instant. When you understand his play, then he quite literally shouts exactly what it is that he doesn't want to happen. Make it happen, or give him the idea that you might make it happen, and he will be running scared for the rest of the match. By doing this, you can maneuver yourself (or your opponent, if you're just that good) into a position where he will be forced to get lucky, lest he lose the game. You are using The Fear to your advantage. When you reach this level of the game, you very rarely lose. You are the consummate mental athlete. You are Jon Finkel.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? But the benefits of swapping decks for a few games pale in comparison to those presented by the other option in cross training. These benefits span the formats, with lessons to be learned by those who primarily play Extended, Standard, or Limited, but perhaps the group of people that stand to gain the most from swapping formats is Vintage players. Why them?

Well, for one thing, the very rules of the format demand it. To borrow a term from Set Theory and horribly misapply it, Vintage has the highest cardinality of all of the formats. That is, Vintage plays with more of the cards than any other format; the set of cards used in Vintage is bigger than the set of cards used in any other format. Cards that are relevant in Standard or Extended are cards that are legal in Vintage. They may not be powerful enough when weighed against every other card ever printed, but there is often a card or two from each set that will make at least some kind of splash in the format. Playing with a card in different settings is the only way to fully explore what that card is capable of. One of the clearest and most relevant examples of this is Worldgorger Dragon.

In Standard, the 'Gorger was complete trash. It wasn't until it was taken to other formats where the critical second half of the combo existed that the card became more than an aggressively costed bad card. It still took about eight months from Oscar Tan's passing mention of the combo to Philip Stanton claiming that Dragon was "a top concern in any near-future B&R decisions". Psychatog is another good example. That toothy bastard was dominant in Standard and Extended, and later went on to single-handedly displaced Morphling in Vintage. Even something as evidently terrible as One With Nothing could have uses. It's no Tolarian Winds, but Friggorid could theoretically have a place for it... Wait, sorry, I had something crazy in my ear. The point is that Vintage has historically borrowed tech from other formats, and so to not remain active in other formats is to allow others to break Vintage for you. In general, it is useful to play formats with a lower cardinality than the one that you normally play - for example, Limited rather than Extended - because the individual legal cards may have applications that you hadn't thought of.

One of the most noticeable things that playing in another environment does is to allow you to flex the muscles that might otherwise atrophy. The hallmark case is Limited, a format based upon the combat step. It's always a treat to watch someone who plays strictly Vintage try his luck in a Sealed Deck or, even better, a Draft event. Mispicks and distorted strategies abound, and then they send creatures into the Red Zone (I can just see the outraged forum responses now...). People, I'm not trying to stir up emotions, nor am I trying to call Vintage players bad, for I am one of you. The fact of the matter is that the combat step is all but non-existent in Vintage. We all started out playing Standard with the kiddies, so at one point we all knew how to attack and block effectively. If we have spent more than a cursory amount of time around the Limited tables, then we all know to watch out for combat tricks as well. The problem is that many of us have all but avoided all other formats since coming to Vintage. On the rare occasions that a deck based upon the combat step surfaces, Vintage players on the whole have absolutely no idea how to block effectively or what combat tricks to watch out for.

The solution? Draft. One particular solution is to four-man constantly. At my shop, on any given weekend, there are usually between three and four Drafts a night. Is this the right solution for you and for your team? I have no idea, but it is one possible solution, and it will make you a better player. When you play other formats with good players, you begin to see the game in that format's paradigm (Sorry, I'm wordy, think “world-view”). Jim Erlinger, a teammate, once told me that he is constantly seeing the game-state from a Limited point of view. Not his words, but his idea. When he gets attacked in any format, even Vintage, he asks himself what combat tricks his opponent might have. Waste of time? In Vintage perhaps, but it does get him thinking about what cards his opponent might be holding, and what that particular attack means.

Similarly, having played Vintage for years and years has occasionally helps me to draft better. In the now-defunct Triple Ravnica Draft, I was known at the shop for forcing Dimir, usually Mill. Unfortunately, UB Mill is good, and a four-man can rarely support more than one deck of a given archetype. As a result, I'd often be fighting someone else and we'd both end up with average decks. Normally this turn of events spells doom for both parties involved, but luckily my above-average play skill usually managed to make up for my terrible drafting skill. One of the foundations of UB Mill that most people don't realize is that, when it's built correctly, it is the spitting image of The Deck. For the non-Vintage readers amongst us, it follows the Weissman school of deck-building. One-for-one answers? Card Drawing? Giant walls? A handful of win conditions? You bet.

Upon realizing this, you now know exactly how to play Dimir Mill. Trade life points (except for the last one) for board position. Make trades only when necessary. Gain complete control of the game. When played correctly, every game ends with you on a few life points, in no danger from creatures, with a handful of counterspells and removal versus their empty hand, with an active Lurking Informant controlling their draws. At this point, you cannot lose, and you mill them at your leisure. As with Stax, if you're playing at an efficient pace, you won't go to time. It's a brutal strategy. I've won with terrible cards like Muddle the Mixture. I've actually cast it and blown people out. The strength of the deck is in the strategy, which has been around literally since the birth of Magic, so even if the power level of the individual cards isn't quite there, the deck is still solid.

What absolutely blows me away is when people who draft every day don't realize the power of the deck, simply because they've never played a deck like it before. I watched someone draft a ridiculous Dimir Mill deck and the proceed to play UB Aggro because he had only four or five Mill cards, including Glimpse the freaking Unthinkable. Damn it Kyle.

Finally, there is one part of playing other formats that cannot be denied. Let's be brutally honest here: Vintage players suck. I realize that games are far more compressed in this format. It's one of the things I love most about it. But a Pro Tour regular might make the same number mistakes through three days of Pro Tour play as the average Vintage player makes in a turn. What's more, that Pro Tour regular can point to each one, telling why it caused him to lose the game and how he's going to fix it in the future. Vintage players become lazy because we don't have to hold ourselves to that kind of standard to succeed in this format, as everyone is making mistakes. Are you seeing the advantage yet?

Obviously, playing in other formats allows us to test our skills against the best players in the game. Let's say theoretically that you're the greatest Vintage player on earth. Playing Vintage Magic no longer offers you the opportunity to grow as a player, because the only effective way to get better is to play better players. So what? You've dominated a format, so why not just stick with that format, raking in the power and glory? Well, if this is your response, then I'm afraid that you and I are playing the game for different reasons.

If you want the selfish answer, there's no money in Vintage. If you take into account travel and accommodations, along with food, then that $300 Mox that you just won has only profited you $150-$200 for an entire day's worth of work. A Pro Tour player will profit by $39,000 with a win, assuming he has to buy expensive plane tickets and wants to get a ridiculous hotel room and some amazing food. If you're just in it for the money, you've picked the wrong format and, to be honest, the wrong game. Poker is a much easier game, and pays ten times as much as the Pro Tour for a tournament significantly less difficult than your average Pro Tour with a comparable number of players. Granted, the buy-in is quite a bit higher, but a single win at a medium-sized tournament will pay for your buy-ins for the next two or three years. If you can't win (or even cash, making your money back and then some) a medium-sized tournament every two or three years, then maybe you shouldn't be playing poker. If you can ever crack your way into the money of a $10,000 buy-in tournament, then you'll never want for money again. And a medium-sized tournament win will pay for about thirty or forty $10,000 buy-in tournaments. Not to mention the cash games, where the real money is at...

That's a fairly weak answer, since there is obviously a lot of money at stake for becoming the best. If you want my honest answer however, improvement is its own reward. It's the same reason why learning can either be fun or drudgery. If you enjoy bettering yourself, then you want to get better at every opportunity. All of us who play Magic competitively want to be the best. Maybe it's the freak in me, but I love learning about interesting things. Poker is all well and good, and is a great source of income, but the game has no soul. Magic is still, and will always be, fun. It's something that can be played around the kitchen table as well as at the final table. Perhaps that's why I play more Vintage than anything else, but playing Vintage and wanting to get better aren't mutually exclusive, by any stretch of the imagination. For love or money, getting better at Magic is something that everyone can appreciate.

The ability to kill boredom by switching formats is one that can't be denied, and my last reason for advocating cross training in Magic. Playing nothing but Vintage, or Standard, or Limited Magic is boring. When a format gets stale, and all formats go through a stale period, there's nothing more satisfying than throwing those Arcbound Ravagers back in the deck-box for a while and chaining Black Lotus with Ancestral Recall, Time Walk and Goblin Welder for the utter ridiculousness that defines Vintage. In fact, adverse feelings towards a particular robot and his black disciple buddy are the main reasons why I got seriously involved in Vintage. Try a new format. You just might like it.

At any point of the year, it's the winter of one format or another. If you live and die by Extended play, then it's time to find a cave and hibernate until roughly September. Vintage is just about through with its traditional lull (coincidentally, actually during the winter), and what a long winter it's been. If you don't engage in some form of cross training during the winter months, then you're going to have a very tough time getting back into shape when the competitive tournaments come back around. Sure, you could just train twelve months a year, but if you've been thinking nothing but Extended season for nine months, you'll be sick of it long before you've played a single sanctioned match.

Ben Allen
Benthetenor@gmail.com