Don't play aggro. It's bad.

More accurately, don't play easy decks.

You probably didn't click on this article to read about my friends; you clicked on it to see what's good (or bad) on StarCityGames.com for today. But as it is based heavily on my experiences with one Paul Miller, he deserves some introduction. I'll try to keep it brief.

I first met Paul Miller (you can't just call him by his first name) at my first few FNM tournaments in Glen Burnie, Maryland. This was right after the Judgment release, and he was one of those who always played Psychatog. A lot of people did this at our tournaments; but Paul Miller always won. Since then, I watched him; he never seemed to play a straightforward, simple deck. Every format, you can guess what he played; either some rogue concoction his teammates cooked up, or the slow, difficult control deck. He played Psychatog until that rotated out, then a rogue mono-Black build, mono-Blue control in Onslaught-Mirrodin Standard, and most recently, Izzetron. In Extended he played Psychatog, and in Kamigawa Block he played Gifts.

Then he stopped playing Magic. Or tried. No one ever really quits, though, and every once in a while, he still relapses; He found a Gifts list online and played in the PTQ at US Nationals in Baltimore, placing second. I can remember one of his matches, in the X-1-1 bracket, where I came by to watch. It was Paul Miller's turn, and it they were in the extra turn number three. He had no board, and I was sure he couldn't win. His opponent, however, had a horde of White Weenies ready to thrash him.

Opponent: Are you going to scoop?
Paul: No.
Opponent: I don't see how you can win this game.
Me: [shaking my head] Paul, if you win this game, I'm buying you dinner.
Paul: [exasperated] Of course I'm going to win this game. [To his opponent] Go.

On his opponent's end step, he did a number of tricks with a spliced Goryo's Vengeance, and entered his turn with Godo, Bandit Warlord; Tatsumasa, the Dragon's Fang; and Meloku, The Clouded Mirror in play. On turn 5, he Goryo's Vengeance'd Kagemaro, First to Suffer. Then he equipped Kagemaro, gave him fear with Shizo, Death's Storehouse, bounced all but two land, and attacked with the team. After his first combat step, he untapped Kagemaro with Minamo, School at Water's Edge, and sent him in again (with Godo's extra attack step.)

I still owe him dinner.

I saw an early Dredge-a-Tog deck in Cleveland, where I go to school, and sent him a list (and the cards). He used it to Top 8 a PTQ in Westchester, PA the same weekend as Pro Tour LA. He even missed Top 8 on tiebreakers at a Maryland Kamigawa PTQ with a terrible rogue ninja deck I came up with; our testing for that tournament consisted solely of bad peasant decks made of common cards I had drafted online.

It should be evident by this point that the man is a good Magic player. What might not come across is that he's an amazing player. The tournaments listed above are the only ones he's attended recently, and he hasn't failed to make Top 8 despite a lack of preparation and no commitment to the game or knowledge of the format. How he won, and how he did it so consistently, was a mystery to me; bad draws always showed up at some point, even when I played my best, and gave me that second loss.

I have long been a proponent of playing an easy-to-play deck at long events, to minimize your chances of messing up. But recently, at a team event, Paul told me one of the smartest things I've ever heard:

“The more decisions you make over the course of the game, the more opportunities you have to outplay your opponent.”

Think about that. I've always looked at decisions as opportunities to screw up, but if you look at them as opportunities to win, you can take your game in a whole new direction. It's true that you have to be really good. Decision-heavy decks will punish your mistakes far more than decks like Zoo or Heezy Street. They will also reward correct play much more heavily and consistently.

Let's look at the matchup between Heartbeat and Zoo, from both sides. First, imagine you're the Zoo player. Your strategy, as I understand it, is pretty straightforward. Commit as much to the board as you can, and hope you can get them low enough to burn out before they go off; if you have nothing better to do on a given turn, burn them then, as you don't want to waste your mana and you're unlikely to get a better target, etc. Board in Kami of Ancient Law. This is strategically sound, and gives you the best chance of winning, but you still have to hope you get the right draws and they don't; there are very few decisions to make that aren't relatively obvious, and the ones you do make may be irrelevant anyway.

Now look at the Heartbeat side of things. Your decisions may still be irrelevant; you may still lose to a nut draw. But you have more decisions to make. When do you twist? How do you board? Do you cast Drift of Phantasms? What do you transmute for? Is it worth passing the turn with a Heartbeat of Spring in play? What are your outs? What are their outs? Do you have to try to combo this turn?

Now, you can make all of these decisions right, and still lose. But this matchup has been described as favorable from both sides by different sources; the truth is, it varies dramatically based on the skill of the Heartbeat player, and not the Zoo player. To look at it another way, Heartbeat is a deck that rewards you more than Zoo for being good at this game.

The difference is even more pronounced in a matchup between two decision-intensive decks, particularly mirror matches. This time, let's look back a few years, at when Psychatog was in standard. Carlos Romao chose to play Psychatog at Worlds because it was obviously the best deck. He eschewed the popular Red splash for Flametongue Kavu and Fire/Ice, instead choosing to win simply by being better than his opponents. He tested the mirror match all over the place, and found that by saving his counterspells for Upheaval and Psychatog, he could gain a significant advantage over an opponent who wasted them on other spells and was left with no answer to the deck's major threats. By judicially applying this theory, Romao won Worlds through a sea of mirror matches; in other words, he won by making better decisions than his opponents.

What about simple decks that do well at major tournaments? Some people say it's better to be lucky than good. In reality, you're going to need some measure of both to win. The ratio of luck to skill that's necessary just differs based on what deck you're using. Recently, Craig Jones made the finals of Pro Tour: Honolulu with a fairly straightforward Zoo deck. While he's certainly a very good Magic player, by playing Zoo, that only got him so far. Assuming he played flawlessly, he still had to topdeck that Lightning Helix to beat Olivier Ruel in the semi-finals; likewise, despite his skill, it was his terrible draws and bad luck that cost him the finals in a flurry of mulligans. Luck is important, but you can minimize its relative importance by playing a more difficult deck, and being good at it.

That's all well and good, but what if you aren't good at this game? In theory, everyone reading this article has someone out there who's better than them (I'm assuming here that Finkel and Kai have better things to do than read my articles). So, more to the point; what if you aren't better than your opponent? Does the first sentence on this page still apply?

Yes. You're right, if you sit down across from someone with a decision-intensive deck, and they are better than you, you will probably lose, because you will probably play worse than they will. This is especially true if they have a similar deck. But by doing this, you will lose less to players who are worse than you, and most importantly, you will get better. You usually learn from losing, but you always learn from losing to misplays if you can pinpoint the misplay. Ask your opponent where you messed up, if you aren't sure. He/she saw the game from a different angle, and odds are, if you lost, he/she is better than you are, so he/she can probably tell you. And don't drop from an FNM. Ever. You just throw away free experience that way, and make yourself worse at the game. Play every round, because the more rounds you play, the better you'll get.

There is nothing more frustrating than losing to a player you know is worse than you are, because they got lucky. In Magic, if not poker, you can minimize the risk of this. So for your next tournament, build Heartbeat, or Izzetron, or Greater Gifts, and may the best player win all your matches.

And they probably will.

Thomas Buck