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Flow of Ideas – Breaking Contracts For Fun and Profit

Monday, September 13th – Nassif, the man behind the deck that beat Amsterdam, looked at the social contract everybody seemed to have signed, and found a loophole. He broke the contract. Again.

Picture this:

You walk into an event. You’ve prepared. You know what the Ruels say to do, you’ve devoured Gerry’s thoughts on the format, and you have even drawn a (rather poor) picture of Pat Chapin on the inside of your hand to keep his sage advice running through your head during games. You’ve assimilated the consciousness of the best minds of the game, just like everybody else.

But unlike everybody else, you sit down…
and do


exactly the opposite.


You know you just broke a contract. Everybody else will know you broke a contract. But for now, things are as quiet as usual. There’s no sound of sirens from the contract police coming to lock you up outside, no long lawsuits on the horizon. You might be on the receiving end of a few odd glances and a couple of whispered exchanges of “
That guy is 3-0 with maindeck Merfolk Spy? Really?”

— but that’s where it ends.

What did you just do? Who cares? Why does it matter? (And, more importantly, why did you draw a picture of Pat Chapin in your hand when you were going to ignore his advice anyway?)

Welcome to the world of contracts.

No, not the draw-seven (or even draw-four) kind. These are the convoluted social contracts we make as Magic players, and they’re crucial to understanding why sometimes it’s right to set down your Doom Blades and pick up a pair of Ajani’s Pridemates.

What exactly are these social contracts? As our poor friend Taraneh on Infernal Contract put it, “But I signed nothing!”

Let’s look at traditional game theory. In game theory, a social contract is the idea of an unspoken rule the players set up for themselves during a game, based on the actions they have each taken.

Instead of giving you more intentionally vague descriptions, let’s put it this way: I have a Silvercoat Lion (as usual) and you have a Canyon Minotaur. (I’m sorry.) I untap, play a land, and choose not to attack.

What happened while we were busy shuffling the cards in our hands was that we were establishing a contract:
I won’t attack with my Lion as long as you have your Minotaur untapped

.

Since you’re playing against me, I follow it up with a Wild Griffin — and now you know that you need to be on the defensive. The contract holds firm as I hold back my Lion. Four turns later, when I break the contract and attack my Lion into your Minotaur, you should know something’s up.

Lion versus Minotaur is a very simplistic example — and you can likely think up more complex ones, if you start considering the implications of a card as simple as Condemn.

Of course, at the single-game level this all just sounds like different words for the same thing. Social contracts, or just paying attention to what your opponent is doing in a game: What’s the difference?

Strategic bits like the situation above have been recycled by Magic authors ever since the Dojo was receiving a hundred hits a day. If you haven’t seen an idea like that before, then consider yourself informed and I can kick my ego up a notch for teaching you a little something extra. Consider it a one-time special between you and me.

But telling you why (or why not) you should be attacking your 2/2s into 3/3s isn’t why I’m writing this article. What I actually want to talk about are social contracts in the context of metagames. It’s within metagames that thinking about social contracts really starts to become valuable.

If you think about it, metagames are really just one gigantic social contract. (And in that case, that makes talking about contracts in the metagame a kind of a meta-contract.) Bill plays U/W, Bob plays U/W, Burdle plays U/W — oh, I know! I’ll play Pyromancer Ascension instead.

That’s the first level of reading the metagame, sure. It’s pretty simple stuff — the kind of thing that even that one kid at your comic shop who trades away his fetchlands for dragons can figure out. But, much like a teenage girl will insist that Twilight is awesome, things get more complex the deeper you go. (But, unlike that teenage girl, this concept actually has merit.)

Let’s take a history lesson. And before I hear you groan, don’t worry — we’re only setting the DeLorean for about eight days into the past.

Yes, that’s right — let’s start by looking at Pro: Tour Amsterdam. Eleven sets’ worth of cards were pushed out of Extended, sending the precious mana bases and artifacts we had clung onto out a ninth-story window.

Newspaper headlines spotted in the Extended section: “Beatdown is dead!” “Midrange is king!” “‘Punishing Fire only a temporary problem,’ Oona says.”

Here’s the contract you filled out if you were going to Amsterdam, which was carefully hidden in with the rest of Wizards’ consent forms:


Extended is all about midrange and tribal. There is no good beatdown deck. Punishing Fire is the most popular strategy. Be prepared to have answers to strategies like Living End in case of any meanies. The Phyrexians are a lie.

Sign your name here: _________

Everyone pretty much agreed to this contract. They just signed it, believed it was true, and registered as normal….

….Well, everyone except for a couple random people like
the Pro Tour Champion.


What in the world happened there? I’ll tell you what happened.

Look at the format. Look at all of the conclusions people drew. Everybody was playing by that set of rules without even thinking about it. Everybody seemed to have agreed upon the perimeters of the game. The format was to be flag football, 200-yard fields, no roughhousing, no LD.

Instead, Reitzel (and Budde, and a few others) showed up to the field with an aluminum bat and a brown leather glove.

One by one, the opponents fell like a perfect string of dominos. “But beatdown was supposed to be dead!”


Whoops.

Nassif, the man behind the deck Reitzel and Budde played, looked at the social contract everybody seemed to have signed, and found a loophole. Simple as that. He broke the contract. Again.

That’s how you get to be in the Hall of Fame.

It doesn’t stop there. Let’s rotate the globe to go back a few more months and a couple more time changes over. San Juan, Puerto Rico.

There were three main decks: U/W, Mono Green Eldrazi, and Mono Red. Depending on your testing, maybe Vampires or U/R/G Ramp squeezed in there as well. The contract of the format was fairly straightforward: be able to survive the initial barrage of Mono-Red, and have a late game that trumps everybody else. If you just packed single-method answers to beat early-game cards like Goblin Guide and Vampire Hexmage, you’d be fine.


Vengevine you.

The Vengevine decks dominated the constructed portion of that Pro Tour. Between Team Mythic’s mono green version, our U/G version, and other team’s G/R and G/B versions, the Vengevine decks were the breakout deck of the tournament.

Didn’t see that clause in the contract you signed, did you? But it doesn’t stop there.

A format with the major constraints of “play Jund” or “beat Jund,” as it was in San Diego? Just play Naya, the deck which can both beat Jund
and

the decks that beat Jund.

A format defined by small beatdown decks and quick combos in Austin? One-up them with bigger beatdown cards packing Punishing Fire for the attrition game — neither of which the control decks were prepared to handle.

The list goes on, and you can find evidence of people figuring out what everyone has agreed to and breaking that contract in almost every tournament. It’s not only being able to see the holes in the format, but realizing that you don’t have to play by them. There is
always

another strategy.

You can argue this is just simple metagaming — but it’s more than just that. It’s easy to call it simple in hindsight… but in reality, only a very small segment of the players figured out the contract they had been tricked into believing ahead of time.

Don’t agree with me? Let me ask you this: if I had told you White Weenie was going to be the best deck to play at the Pro Tour two weeks ago, would you have believed me?

I asked that very question on Twitter the morning the top eight of Amsterdam was announced. The response was startling. I was almost universally told that, not only would they have
not

switched into it, but they would have thought the deck was unplayable. Aggro didn’t seem to have been viable in any other way, so why would white weenie be any different? The midrange decks would probably still beat it… right?


I guess not.

The same kind of contractual thinking is easily applied to limited as well.

People are finally coming around to White in M11 Limited. Players were so absorbed in their perception of the format they were playing that they weren’t thinking about what they could do in the format they were
actually

playing. I was even told by someone at US Nationals, “Infantry Veteran? You know this format is about the long game, right?”

Two weeks later, and it seems like I have to first-pick a Veteran if I ever want to play with one.

I harped on this in “
ABC: Always Be Clocking

” three weeks ago — but the simple matter is that other options are also there. Unlike what I posited in that article, though, it’s possible to go the other way.

Soon after Zendikar had begun to degenerate into “who can beat down faster” fights, onetime Pro Tour top eight competitor Mike Gurney could no longer find an edge using attacking as a strategy in draft. Instead, he switched gears. Mike began to draft U/B control, wheeling all the cards that nobody else wanted. He snapped up Reckless Scholars due to people’s Plated Geopede tunnel vision.

Is this just simple metagaming? It might sound like it is — but, once again, there’s far more to it. This isn’t just drafting a color because it’s underdrafted. It’s doing the
exact opposite thing

everybody else wanted to do. Ask almost anybody, and they would tell you decks like that would never work. The contract of the format was that you always had to be as aggressive as possible, or you would run out of cards in the late game and lose to their creatures. Yet there Mike was, consistently cutting through perfect R/B decks with a mish-mash of well-played U/B cards.

Maybe his opponent shouldn’t have signed a contract with Vampire Lacerator after all.

This all brings us to you. What does all of this mean for you, the loving reader who wants oh so dearly to win his next tournament? Here’s my advice: figure out how to break the contract of whatever is going to be the next tournament you’re in.

For you, that probably means Scars of Mirrodin Limited. So I’ll let you in on a secret for the first PTQs of the season. Figure out what everyone seems to think at the Pre-release. Figure out what people seem to believe online. And then, when you sit down for that PTQ… Do whatever it is they won’t be ready for.

Sometimes, they just aren’t ready for Merfolk Spy. (As Thomas Ma can, perhaps, attest to.)

If you have any questions or comments about this article, please share them in the forums, via Twitter at
GavinVerhey

, or via e-mail at Gavintriesagain at gmail dot com. I would be more than happy to reply to any comments you might have, and to hear your feelings on the social contracts we all make while playing Magic.

Until next week, have fun beating down with Merfolk Spy!

Gavin Verhey
Rabon on Magic Online, Lesurgo everywhere else (Except for Twitter — T.F.)