Finding Your Way Out Of The Woods

(A quick note for those who haven’t taken statistics: the probability of drawing Lost in the Woods in, say, your 2-card hand, is not 2/40, as many people naively assume. It’s less. You have to take into account the fact that you didn’t find Lost in the Woods in any of your previous hands up to that point. The actual probability you’re trying to find is P(you draw it in your 2-card hand given you didn’t draw it in your 7, 6, 5, 4, or 3-card hands), not P(Lost in the Woods is contained in two random cards from your deck), and the two numbers are very different. This is why you can’t just sum 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 over 40 and get that as your probability of finding it.)

These odds look pretty poor. Even with the minimum deck size, you’re still only just over 50% to actually draw Lost in the Woods in your opening hand. But remember, your odds of drawing it in your opener aren’t the same as your odds of playing it on turn 5—you have five draw steps still to consider. Assuming you mulligan to one and miss, what chance do you have of still getting there?

So with the minimum deck size, and assuming they have a relatively slow draw and can’t kill you by their turn 6, you have a 60% chance to play your crucial enchantment in time. Every Forest you add loses you about one percentage point.

That’s a little worrying. You may be more likely than not to find it. But you have a decent probability of just losing the game.

You absolutely do, and this is the main reason I would never recommend siding into this strategy if you’re comfortable with your maindeck in the matchup. Even with the minimum 40-card deck (which is risky for other reasons), you have a 40% shot of never doing anything but playing Forests. You don’t get to play a game of Magic at all—you’ve effectively conceded before even showing up. It’s like keeping a one-land hand on the play. If you miss for two turns, you just lose, so you need something very strong to be able to justify it, or you need the matchup to be so bad you’re unlikely to win any other way.

The Lost in the Woods deck behaves in strange ways, though. With the one-land hand on the play, you’re never 100% to win even if you do draw that land on turn 2. With Lost in the Woods, you can be 100% to win as soon as you see your opening hand. You can also be 0%. It’s a little frightening.

What about enchantment removal? If your opponent has a Naturalize anywhere in their 40, they just beat you.

It’s not just Naturalize. Silverchase Fox, Urgent Exorcism, and Bramblecrush all do the same job. Not to mention direct damage—a Bump in the Night and a Brimstone Volley, combined with the damage you took in the first four turns, might be enough. Skirsdag Cultist, Heretic’s Punishment, and Devil’s Play all kill you dead by themselves. Also milling effects—Curse of the Bloody Tome, Trepanation Blade, Selhoff Occultist, Gravepurge, Nephalia Drownyard, Geralf’s Mindcrusher, Dream Twist, Chill of Foreboding, Memory’s Journey. Even a Griptide and a Thought Scour could get you, depending on mulligans and your exact deck size. Lost in the Mist is a one-card trump; they counter their own spell on turn 20, bounce your Lost in the Woods, and swing with as many power of creatures as they have in their deck.

It’s an extremely risky strategy. Luckily, almost all of the aforementioned cards are very bad. No one is rushing to fill their deck with as many Lost in the Mists as they can find. Unluckily, all they need is one, and it doesn’t have to be in their opening hand, or even in the top 39 cards of their deck. My opponent in Honolulu had a Gravepurge as his only out. It turned out to be the bottom card of his deck, but that didn’t matter—all he’d done for the whole game was discard creatures, and I couldn’t win when he put twelve of them back on top.

Let’s be generous and assume that a given opponent is only 20% to have one of these cards in their deck. As shown above, you’re 60% to find Lost in the Woods in a relevant time frame. That means your total probability of winning the game is 0.6 x 0.8 = 0.48, under 50%. That’s not even taking to account things like them mulliganing below you thus ensuring you’ll be decked first, or taking out your enchantment with a timely Dissipate or Frightful Delusion or Brain Weevil. And there’s zero latitude for you playing tightly and increasing your percentages. It’s an all-or-nothing deck; you have it, or you don’t.

Should I run it?

Probably not.

To quantify that a little: With the benefit of hindsight and experience, I would say that 95% of the time, if you have a Lost in the Woods in your sideboard, the correct play is to ignore it completely. The interesting part is the other 5%.

To even consider Lost in the Woods as a sideboard option, a few things need to be the case:

Your matchup has to be pretty rough.

Recall earlier when we worked out that the best possible percentage for playing Lost in the Woods before you die is 60%. Realistically you’re probably looking at 58%, because running less than 42 cards is a very risky proposition. If you’re on the play and you keep your seven, and they mulligan to five, you’ve already lost. On the draw you want 43 cards for the same reason. You might even have to run a couple more Forests to play around cards like Griptide and Thought Scour that let them skip a single draw step, in which case your probability of finding Lost in the Woods in time dips as low as 55%.

Now, 55% isn’t actually a terrible game win percentage. You’ll often hear pros talking about favorable 55% matchups, giving the sense that they would be happy enough to play the 55% side of the table all day long. The thing is, in this circumstance, there is nothing you can do to influence this outcome. Normally being good at Magic counts for something; with Lost in the Woods, all you can do is mulligan and hope. It’s like instead of showing up to play a game of Magic, you showed up with a 100-side dice and you and your opponent both agreed you’d win as long as you roll 46 or higher.

So assuming you consider yourself to be reasonable at Magic—and if you’re reading this article, chances are you do—you’d need circumstances to be pretty dire in order to actually accept that die roll. Maybe they have seven rares in their deck and five good pieces of removal, or maybe you disconnected halfway through the draft and are logging on now to find that your win condition is Thraben Pureblood equipped with Executioner’s Hood. In a case like this, you might be 45% to win in a fair game—running the gambit actually pays off.

You have to know their deck very well.

If they have Silverchase Fox, your chance of winning the game is 0% as soon as you both present your decks. Same goes for Lost in the Mist, same goes for Gravepurge. These cards aren’t necessarily huge flags that will register throughout the draft, either. Your friends might tell you if a given opponent has Blasphemous Act in his deck, but they probably won’t be as clued in about the likelihood of Silverchase Fox.

Don’t attempt Lost in the Woods unless you’ve seen a lot of their deck and you’re fairly sure they don’t have the trump. Remember, even a 20% chance of them having the right answer drops your odds of winning the game below 50%; do you really want to take that? I would say you need to be 90%-plus certain that you win the game if you resolve Lost in the Woods. That means knowing almost all the spells in their deck and probably also them being in the wrong colors to easily have something that will ruin you.

Blue is the riskiest color to try this against, because Griptide, Thought Scour, Dream Twist, Selhoff Occultist, and Lost in the Mist are all common, and blue also has some pretty nice rares (Geralf’s Mindcrusher and Increasing Confusion spring to mind). Against red, Curse of the Pierced Heart will actually kill you. Skirsdag Cultist is also highly lethal, and something like double Brimstone Volley will probably get you too. White is not too bad, with only the Fox that you’re really scared of as no one maindecks Ray of Revelation. Black mostly just has Gravepurge, although Night Terrors and Gruesome Discovery might get you, and Harrowing Journey can ruin your decking math. Green is probably the easiest, presuming you don’t have enough enchantments that they’ll side in Naturalize after game 1. Wolfhunter’s Quiver is the artifact you definitely don’t want to see, and Trepanation Blade and Cellar Door will also both kill you even if they’re awful on their own merits. (This actually illustrates a second reason why you want their deck to be very good before siding into Lost in the Woods. The better their deck is, the less likely they are to run Curse of the Pierced Heart or Chill of Foreboding or Night Terrors or whatever.)

Finally,

You have to be a baller.

Seriously, it’s not for the faint-hearted. If you find yourself wondering, “Should I side into it?,” don’t.

Until next time,

Jeremy