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My theory coming in was that if Master Sanchez can publish an article called “Catching Up With Kyle,” I can do more-or-less the same thing. The truth is that I have had a weight on my shoulders that you probably never imagined. When I won Writer of the Year for 2006, Ben Lundquist (probably the best money team draft partner this side of Matt Rubin) said “… and it seems that he cares the most about his readers, as he is always willing to follow up details on the forums” but I haven't really been doing that so much in 2007. The truth is that I got a new job in the first quarter this year, and decided that I was going to have a really good go of it as opposed to, you know, answering forum flames all day. Just today I accidentally acquired the corner office. I haven't done a roundup article in something like three years. Also, Chapin said I had to answer a then-unasked question about Necropotence, so the format seemed to make a lot of sense. The following Remie-esque Q&A is culled from (“inspired by”) questions across sites various.
“Onward.” -Jamie Wakefield
"The irony of this article is that it's exactly what everyone who hates Flores needs to read to stop hating him, and yet they'll never read it.
"Every time I read one of your articles, I have at least one small epiphany that eventually has an impact on how I play."
You want to know what the real irony is? I was listening to the Grand Prix: Boston 'casts a few weeks ago, and there are some Top8Magic.com listeners who stone cold hate me. I follow all the forums (my forums, that is) as you know, so I know there are some misguided souls who don't love every word they read. That's okay. I'm sure they'll eventually get tired of posting things like "this deck officially beats nothing" and "well, what do you do outside of these two matchups" as, honestly, the “silly” 4/4 decks, properly positioned, are never going to stop qualifying players. Anyway, I knew / know such readers exist(ed). But there were these cats who bothered to listen to my 'casts all the way from upstate New York to Mass who vowed blood feuds with me for God knows what reason. I was surprised on account of I assumed that, you know, 100% of the Top8Magic listeners had thermoses full of Kool-Aid sitting next to their iPods.
I know I just used it, but isn't "hate" kind of a strong word? I subscribe to the Orwell school of hatred, the notion that it (hate) is the opposite of love. Love is so powerful and exhausting. To properly love someone or something is not and should not be easy; therefore I assume properly hating something or someone would be similarly draining. I don't know. I don't hate anyone. I suppose I hate tyranny. I definitely hate the fact that we are all subject to stupid laws made by terrified or corrupt cronies and posers. I am frustrated by persons who seem to be reasonable... but vigorously cling to beliefs clearly in conflict with facts and logic. But people? I can't actually think of a single soul I hate off the top of my head. There are multiple people who write for this and other Magic sites that inspire me to muse "If I were to ever find myself as stupid and pointless as XXX, I would definitely you know, stab myself in the eye with a crayon / paper clip / thumb tack," but hate? I don't feel it. This actually makes me sad now that I am thinking about it, that anyone would actively hate someone he's never met. Back when I was playing a lot of MTGO eight-Man tournaments (like a year ago) I actually got a (digital) tongue lashing by someone who opened up with “I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but… I hate you.” I retorted with “What, too much joy brought to too many people?” Then, “Sorry, I just do.” This was tragic on multiple levels, including 1) despite 8-Man wins on either side of this one, my deck (Combo Deck) picked that Round 1 to manascrew me (obviously), and 2) he was playing an easy matchup… Ghost Dad. Ah, the humanity.
Lastly, I bet "every" is a strong word, but I appreciate the sentiment.
Next, on Stacking…
“I third or fourth (or whatever) this. I'd love to hear Mike talking about such a practical game mechanic subject as that sort of thing seems to be a strong point of his, and I've always picked something up when he does write on such a subject. Describe the best way to randomize, spot the non-randoms, and knowing when to call the judge.
“A redux on the old article please Mr Flores?”
Stacking is always a sticky topic for articles. It is the one place where a writer can really do more harm than good a large amount of the time… In teaching the audience specifically what to look for, he is simultaneously teaching them how to stack. Therefore, I am not going to go into any specifics here. However I am going to revisit this another time (probably not in print, specifically).
Generally…
1) There is never a reason to table shuffle for randomization. Table shuffling does not randomize. It is highly time consuming (when compared to riffle shuffling). Did I mention that it does not randomize? Table shuffling distributes in a specific non-random way. Think about it like this: Say you are doing a five-pile table shuffle. You go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then either 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 again a total of 11 more times, or you go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 backwards and run a six repetition loop. Neither one of these is random. Your first card is 1, your last card is either 1 or 5. Every card is predetermined into one of either one or two spots. That is not randomizing. The goal of this is to distribute cards and break up streaks of mana or spells (by the way you inevitably and inadvertently create different streaks and patterns but that is a bigger topic than this paragraph can cover). While we all want to do this (break up streaks), functionally, to deliberately do it is actually against the spirit of randomization. For a long time, there was actually a rule that you had to riffle shuffle three times after any table shuffling prior to presentation. By the way, I also table shuffle most of the time. As with your case, “it makes me feel better” even though I know better. I still riffle sufficiently prior to presenting, though.
2) I generally watch any player who table shuffles to a 3-, 4-, or 5- card pattern (which includes 8, 10, and so on). If he presents without fastidiously riffle shuffling, and by this I mean 7+ tight riffles, I call the judge and request a deck check. I came out of a time when you couldn't swing a dog carcass without hitting a cheater in any tournament room. In fact, in the 1990s, most of the players who qualified on rating outside the Pro Tour directly were inflating their ratings with poorly executed cheats that you can't get away with at the PTQ or local store levels any more. You can definitely still get away with them at Vintage tournaments, according to every single player who knows what to look for who I have ever talked to who has ever attended a non-sanctioned proxy Vintage tournament. The reason is that the bulk of the players are not sophisticated enough to see the cheats and don't call the judge. By the way, I am personally skeptical about the ability of the average judge to identify a stacked deck. The reason is that a well-shuffled deck can look stacked and a stacked deck can look not stacked possibly because the cheater is very good or very not good at what he was just doing. He might be good in that he planted obvious mulligan patches to evade Game Loss, or he maybe just didn't execute well. I don't believe it is the letter of the law today, but my feeling is that stacking is a process-oriented cheat, and a player is guilty if he attempted a forbidden process, regardless of how successful it was. Anyway, long story short, whether or not you know the actual mechanics of a patterned table shuffle, if you identify the base-3, 4, or 5 piles with lame post-pile riffles, call the judge for a check, and then keep the judge there to observe and randomize for you. It is annoying for everyone, which is actually part of the point. If the opponent knows that you are willing to bring the judge, he is less likely to put you into a position to, you know, call the judge.
3) What is more dangerous is a player who knows how to break the bridge. “Mechanics” can make it look like they are riffle- or press-shuffling while actually just flopping the top or the bottom of a stacked deck so that a L/S/S, L/S/S, distribution is just starts with a different L/S/S with just a little disruption in pattern. Remember when I said that I riffle before presenting a table-shuffled deck? The mechanic “fake” shuffles are designed to preserve an actually stacked table-stacked deck. If you follow the protocol (2), above, you will eliminate most of the edge that this sort of cheat can provide, even if you don't actually get the offending opponent disqualified or banned.
“Something about Urborg in Dredge to beat Blood Moon. Or something. MTGO bugs.”
The craziest MTGO bug is Zur's Weirding if you have a Dredge card in your bin. This came up last summer when we were testing the wonderful Aggro-Ideal. Weirding + Life from the Loam was gas… But sometimes you didn't want to Dredge. Man… You get asked “pick a replacement effect” an awful lot. Sometimes the opponent is honorable and packs, but usually you just have to Dredge forever. Vomit.
“Mike Flores LOL.
“I actually found his little rant about edges fascinating. How today we are happy with 52%, whereas back then they could just steamroll anybody with a deck like Napster.”
This is from the interview Bill Stark did with me over at here. Actually, Bill came to the office and interviewed BDM and Grand Prix Champion Matt Wang. Me… He kind of scribbled some sort of pinball monologue down on paper… digital paper… you know, with crayon… digital crayon! The point was / is that there used to be decks that we could play that if we repeated the tournament ten times, we would get the same results over and over. Like I could play Napster at Regionals 2000 ten times and qualify at least eight times, maybe all ten. Jushi Blue at States 2005... There was never an edge like that at any tournament since Napster itself, in the same room. In the age of the Tier 2 cards, there are no such edges. You can win a PTQ but if you repeated the same tournament ten times you might make Top 8... once? At the beginning I think that Loam probably commanded an edge approaching 70% but it certainly couldn't hold that (otherwise if you had 100 Loam players in a tournament, you would be hard pressed to fit the requisite number of Loam players into the Top 8). The only way to get any kind of positive expectation in the past Extended was to play a weird mid-range Green deck, and the right mid-range Green deck - Haterator, Elf-Opposition, Bests, whatever - shifted constantly based on all the other variables in the metagame. I do think that if you repeated certain tournaments, you would see positive trends by certain of these decks (generally all finishing with positive records, peppering Blue Envelopes at greater rates than any archetype decks) but nothing like what has been possible in the past with Deadguy Red, Tinker / Rising Waters transformation, etc.
Corollary:
“My point? When your deck is only 52% against the field, and with ranges from 70% against a certain deck to 30% against another, the role of deckbuilding and testing has vanished. You have to pick one of seven decks and then pray you don't face off against your bad match-ups early on.”
This is the following forum post from the same interview. This view is not correct. Deck development and testing is more rewarding than ever. It just so happens the number of players who can accomplish it is reduced. The 70-30 spread - if we accept this poster's position - is actually perfect. You have to position your deck in tournaments where the 30% matchups don't show up. This is why Week One Haterator won in the Midwest but only had one x-1-1 finish in the Northeast… The Northeast metagame was then (and predictably - this was my fault) full of unrealistic U/W decks that died out quickly whereas the Midwest metagame was full of predictable post-Worlds decks and a totally different unrealistic deck, but one that Haterator was well suited to beating (Nassif Counterbalance). This isn't about luck. It's exactly the same as with Napster. Napster had its hell matchups. Erik Lauer challenged me after I qualified with his Tinker deck. I wouldn't have beaten that. Regionals era Napster was AK versus QQ to Replenish Game 1, and I ended the tournament 1-1 in Replenish matchups… No one played Accelerated Blue. However you could predict that there would be thin numbers on Accelerated Blue due to Replenish and Tinker was not yet known. The difference between then and now is that the right deck to play is so much more ephemeral whereas you could hold edge with Napster from Regionals all the way through U.S. Nationals. You would never see that today. People are equally bad and make equally bad deck selection decisions. The difference is that the cards are just too close in power to one another so that rather than being 45% distant, the best and worst (viable) decks to play right now are maybe 10% apart from each other.
You also can err on the side of power, but just keep in mind that you are erring… you are just controlling the path of your mistake. You can always just play ‘Tron / Loam / High Tide whatever and not worry about matchups so much. This is a good decision a lot of the time, but almost never the best one (the glaring exception is Mirrodin Block Constructed when Affinity had massively supernormal value). You will never have genuine edge on deck choosing on power, especially when your deck is known (imagine choosing Ravager Affinity… all your opponents can force interaction). That said, you get a fair bit of wiggle room, especially if you assume most players are making bad deck choice decisions (that is, sub-optimal), which they will, or God forbid, position their main decks and sideboards incorrectly / predictably. Very often an old (and hopefully forgotten) linear is the best deck you can play in any given big set tournament. It is conceivable that Standard Ghost Dad with better lands would have more edge than Goblins at Grand Prix: Columbus (not likely… I'm just saying conceivable) because there is lots of hate for Goblins but relatively no hate for Spirits and Arcane. The right / best deck to play is rarely “the best deck” when measured on pure power, especially when that deck is not just known, but popular.
“In the casts Mike & BDM talked about transformational SBs and the Japanese. Mike said that making transformational SBs is something that he would like to get better at. After Champs, Mike also said that his SB for This Girl was the best he had ever made. While it did contain some notable metagame calls such as Fortune Thief, there were also some of the bad reactive cards (e.g. Repeal).
“Okay, the question: Mike, assume that you would still be playing This Girl (btw, I still do and win or x-1 every local Standard tourney I enter, even though he said he wouldn't play the deck again =P), give us a practical example: How could this SB be transformative? How could it be better than the best SB you've made? I ask not for this deck in particular (hey, I'm still winning) but rather because no matter what deck I build I still seem to make reactive SBs... Even my version of This Girls SB has changed to include 4 Disenchant to help the horrendous Glare matchup (since most pack Serrated Arrows or burn now). But for my entire playing career I always seem to make reactive SBs. How does one become comfortable entering a somewhat unknown metagame with an inflexible SB? Or is that the key...that the meta is never truly unknown? Thoughts?!”
For reference, this is the This Girl sideboard:
3 Fortune Thief
4 Mana Leak
4 Repeal
4 Grand Arbiter Augustin IV
Don't forget that the sideboard can be the best one I've ever built and still not be any good. For example, Who's the Beatdown is probably the best Magic article I've ever written, but as a technical piece, it's probably a fat 6/10 if that. I used to joke with Teddy Card Game that Who's the Beatdown would have been rejected by StarCityGames.com for want of the 1,500 word minimum count for a feature article.
In all seriousness, in a case like This Girl, the degree of transformation is muted because the deck is mid-range. If I had been playing Patrick Chapin's deck there would have been a lot more room… For example bringing in a lot of creatures or upping the already heavy burn count over some element like Wrath of God for a creatureless matchup. I disagree that Repeal is bad. Repeal was key in several of my victories and one of the best cards versus any 1-3 mana beaters wearing some kind of offensive Aura. I played it over Disenchant to cheat on space. This, as well as Fortune Thief, are examples of superb positioning. Fortune Thief doesn't work two weeks in a row. You get to cheat with Repeal if people aren't running Annex (Annex pwns you). That said, Grand Arbiter is only medium-good once Dragonstorm figures out Dreadship Reef and Mana Leak is pointless if people know you are siding it in (I guess you can guessing game the face). Basically I had fifteen bad cards, or as I like to think of it, I picked the right lottery numbers. The same lottery numbers don't win two jackpots in a row.
By Worlds, we had to make the sideboard much less exciting:
2 Muse Vessel
3 Zur's Weirding
4 Condemn
4 Disenchant
2 Repeal
We actually had to play Disenchant because Kenji made Annex known, and because Firemane Angel loses to Debtors' Knell, etc.
Another non-transformative sideboard that was very good was that of Batman:
2 Muse Vessel
2 Orzhov Pontiff
2 Woebringer Demon
2 Debtors' Knell
4 Castigate
3 Culling Sun
It's actually embarrassingly bad. I had two Pontiffs because I wanted to play all four but didn't know how many to play main deck.
That said, I used all 15 cards, posted the best individual record of my life over two days, killed numerous Simic Sky Swallowers with my flying Diabolic Edict, and had Raph Levy complaining about Culling Sun six months later when I saw him in New Jersey.
The sideboards for both This Girl and Batman were full of cards that did jobs. I can look at a sideboard and read it like this:
3 Glare, maybe U/G
4 Gotcha!
4 Zoo, Boros, any time I don't know what else to do
4 Dragonstorm
Or this:
2 Any deck slower than I am or that shares 1+ colors
2 Fix your deck
2 Simic Sky Swallower defense
2 Firemane Angel defense
4 Any deck slower than I am
3 Levy's bane
When you play a deck that is not mid-range, transformation is much more pronounced. For example you can put creatures into a creature less deck or remove all your Disenchant targets as the opponent seeks to overload you. The sideboards for This Girl and Batman were the same, just don't seem as pronounced. That is the source of my quote… It's not that not being nakedly transformative makes the This Girl sideboard (which you say I said was my best ever) bad, just that it is a bad transformation. Transformative side boarding repositions a deck along the metagame clock such that the opponent is aiming for the wrong target. Isn't it the case that bringing in Fortune Thief for Glare or Grand Arbiter Augustin IV for Dragonstorm when they don't see the cards coming the same thing as Wildfire Emissary out of Finkel Prison, just using fewer cards?
“Is Body Double good? I see it in these Top 8 lists but I’m just not buying it. I haven’t done any testing but in the abstract it just doesn’t seem like a good choice. Zombify costs less and it doesn’t get its soul removed. What are the pros of having a Body double over a Zombify?”
I was confused about the Solar Flare switch myself, initially, but of course you can Body Double the opponent's cards. This is the perfect down-up for a deck with Mortify, Wrath of God, and Persecute, and permission.
“I just saw a Vore build in a Top 8 and I was wondering with all the control out there, can Vore make a serious comeback?”
I have the same thought every few weeks. I make a lot of mid-range control and therefore my friend Patrick Chapin likes to draw me back with “okay, I suspend Ancestral Vision on the first turn” (and then I hang up on him). However, when I suspend Ancestral Vision on the first turn, I only win, um, sometimes. Vore is too… I dunno. I was terrified of the Vore deck in the Top 8 of New York States. Luckily U/G got it. Here are the issues as I see them:
1) You're maybe 60/40, realistically, against the good control decks. They have ~8 fast response cards to your first land destruction spell, and the Boomerang draw is sadly less effective than the Eye of Nowhere draw. You are completely dead in the water to Extirpate out of either control or some beatdown (my Rakdos sides it, though neither my Rakdos nor Extirpate are really outstanding).
2) You're even worse against aggro than you were last year. The attackers don't have Jitte to side out any more. Your Magnivore is at least four littler, your card drawing is less consistent, and the other guys may have Aces in their sideboards.
Can it make a comeback? Absolutely. I can't see most of the mid-range control beating it. Vore has a solid matchup versus the popular ‘Tron decks, and the few beaters can be managed somewhat. I don't see it as the deck to play, though.
“I think you guys forget one of the best cards in the format - Sudden Death. The more I play it, the more I love it. It does a lot more than people give it credit too, and is so much better than Damnation in the Dralnu deck. I'm running 3 main in my current version and the 4th on the sideboard.”
I actually like Sudden Death quite a bit more than Damnation in Dralnu because of Mystical Teachings. I really hate Damnation in the abstract because I went to the trouble of figuring out Stinkweed Imp to kill Silhana Ledgewalker - which is the sickness, by the way - and Damnation simultaneously obviates that elegant solution and is worse and less synergistic at the same time. I play quite a few Sudden Deaths. I have a total of four in every Black deck due to Teferi (no NO Stick in Standard).
“3. Necropotence (Sorry Yawgmoth's Will and Tinker, Bad Beat, tune into Flores' article for why...)”
In the beginning, Pat and I were both on Yawgmoth's Will, chuckling about Tinker‘s bad beat. Then Pat said, “What kind of list is this that Necropotence isn‘t on it?” Then I said to scratch Will for Necro. He started to make some irrelevant Vintage argument and I slowed him down. Necropotence defined - even ruled - Magic for at least 5-6 solid years, from Black Summer to Trix. There has never been a card so powerful, so elegant, so dominating. The only reason we think of Yawgmoth's Will as the best three mana spell is because of Vintage Storm decks, which don't really speak to the power of Yawgmoth's Will - which is powerful - but to any random way to break Storm. You might as well have Hurkyl's Recall on two or something if that is your criteria. The fact of the matter is, when both cards were legal, the competitive decks ran 4/2 Necropotence over Will (B/R Rome Top 8), or 4/3 (Lauer-style PTQ 20 land Mono-Black, which qualified Macey). There was never an err in favor of Will over Necropotence, and they were concurrent when the best deck designers were all shaking giant penises at each other. We say “Necro” and we think not just of a card, but a deck, a family of decks, and numerous big wins. We say “Will” we see only a very great card and its utilization. There are Skull Catapults, Trixs, Classic Necros, Free Spell Necros, hybrids… Will was a second fiddle in almost every great “Will” deck up until being Restricted alongside Storm in a relatively narrow format. I personally made the best dedicated “Will” deck ever, and I'm giving it to Necro, which ruled Magic for essentially half the competitive game's history.
“Boxers or Briefs?”
Have you ever thought about the fact that Ric Ocasek got to marry Paulina Porizkova? Okay, you probably never thought about that, but when I was 13, the “Dancing with the Stars” SI supermodel was the most beautiful woman in the world; at 42 she's still pretty close to perfect, whereas Ocasek is… Not handsome. You see the same thing over and over. The Donald and Melania. David Spade and Lara Flynn Boyle (ever see Threesome?), Kristy Swanson (the original Buffy), and Heather Locklear (see Porizkova, above). People tend to go out with other people of around the same level of good looking-ness. If you ever want to see how a girl looks at you, check out the girls she is fixing you up with. That is your relative measure of aesthetics. Looking at the above pairings and countless others, such as Vince Vaughan and Jennifer Aniston, Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie, or John Mayer (whom I really like, by the way) with either Natalie Portman or Jessica Simpson, we can conclude that men just aren't good looking. Even the most beautifully constructed male bodies are just Lego-like boxes stacked near one another by rubber bands. I don't know how it works, only that beautiful women latch onto what amount to essentially goblins, famous and not, fat or not. I, for one, married a 10 12. It's unbelievable! Apparently we don't have to be good looking in order to score primo. That said, there is no reason we should be forcing any kind of disgusting shapes at any onlookers, even if they love us. It's just a matter of being polite, even humane. In short, boxers.
LOVE
MIKE
