[SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE ARTICLE!]

Become a StarCityGames.com Premium Member and receive exclusive access to top-level strategies, new decklists and entertaining reports from many of the best players and writers that the game has to offer! This includes "The Innovator" & Worlds finalist Patrick Chapin, 2010 Player of the Year Brad Nelson, Classic Theorist Mike Flores, Hall of Famer Brian Kibler, GP and SCG Invitational Champion Gerry Thompson, StarCityGames.com Director of Sales Ben Bleiweiss ...and many, many more!

PLUS! StarCityGames.com Premium members now have an EXCLUSIVE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER sent just to them with the latest tech, exclusive content and exclusive deals along with unprecedented access into America's largest Magic: the Gathering sales database, and can view lists of StarCityGames.com's top-selling items - broken down by category, format legality, and rarity - in real time! When it comes to trading, increased knowledge equals increased profits - and increased knowledge is just one click away for our Premium members!

A StarCityGames.com Premium Membership gives you exclusive access to the best Magic: the Gathering content available and is an amazing bargain for just pennies a day! When you're ready to start getting more out of this game, click here to join StarCityGames.com Premium today!

If you are a valid StarCityGames.com Premium member and still cannot view the article, please consult this FAQ.

Tom LaPille summons a Japanese Skeletal Vampire. His opponent doesn’t quite know what it does, except that it makes some bats and has the capacity to make some more. He could ask a judge for the Oracle text, but who cares? It’s getting Wrathed off the table next turn.

Later in the game, Tom’s opponent reanimates said Vampire with the Punishment half of Crime/Punishment. Tom shrugs and summons an Angel of Despair, indicating the Vampire as its target.

The opponent looks at its Japanese text with a sigh. “I guess it dies,” he says.

...

I guess it dies.

Magic is both a game of skill and of luck. We can’t control the luck component, so we compete by playing to maximize our chances of success instead. There are many ways we can tip the scales in our favor, including:

Making good attacks and blocks
Successfully bluffing the opponent into making a disadvantageous play
Deckbuilding with the metagame in mind
Playing with cards your opponent doesn’t recognize
Distracting the opponent and/or putting him on tilt
Cheating

Regardless of your moral stance, these are all tactics you can use to increase your chances of winning at Magic. I list these in as straightforward and deadpan a manner as possible, because I want to show that what is sportsmanlike or ethical is not a black-and-white issue — not even when it comes to outright cheating. No matter how loudly forum pundits cry that “If you blah blah blah, you’re unethical. Period,” it really is a question of where to draw the line.

Few people would consider it unsportsmanlike to make good attacks and blocks, for example, but some casual players will actually consider you unsportsmanlike if you metagame against them. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that stance — especially not in a casual playgroup, where your fun can be utterly spoiled if everyone starts maindecking Tranquility after you trade half your binder to assemble your Enchantress deck — but insisting that every Magic player ought to draw the line in the same place you do shows naiveté at best and bigotry at worst.

As I said, most people do not consider correct attacks and blocks unsportsmanlike. At the other end of the spectrum, however, almost all players consider cheating both unsportsmanlike and unethical — but the issue of distracting your opponent is less clear-cut. Several years ago, I inherited a very old book on Magic strategy written by Mark Justice. Justice wrote that at the beginning of one match against Mike Long, his opponent jumped up on the table and showed Mark how he’d painted his toenails. If you know anything about Mike Long, you know that this was no display of fashion — no, he was trying to put Justice off his game. If Mark defaults to engaging all of his mental faculties to deciding what to do with his opening hand, Long figures it’s a good play to make him divert some of his mental energy to wondering, “why is this crazy person showing me his painted toenails before our match?” instead of focusing entirely on the decision at hand.

Some consider such tactics unethical, and some do not.

Me? I’m pretty liberal; I draw the line at breaking the rules of the DCI. In my book, you’re only playing Magic unethically if you’re deliberately doing something the head judge would penalize you for if he caught you doing it. I don’t personally mind if you jump up on the table and show me your toenails; for all I care, you can dance a little jig while you’re at it. If the judge calls it Unsportsmanlike Conduct, though, that’s your ass.

This is not to say that I support every Magical activity that I do not condemn as unethical. Even if judges consistently let you get away with it, I don’t think you’re going to make many Magical friends if you make a habit of pulling the “painted toenails” trick. Making enemies is one of a whole host of reasons I will not employ this tactic, but I wouldn’t fault my opponent for trying if he decided to put forth the effort. If he kept up his antics long enough that it got to the point of harassment, I’d call a judge, but otherwise I’d probably just chuckle and keep shuffling.

The reason I take this stance is that I think a lot of really cool interactions happen outside the attacking and blocking of Magic. I am of the Mike Turian school of correct play, which teaches that no matter how technically accurate your plays are, so much as a blink at the wrong time can disqualify you from having played a perfect game of Magic. One of my favorite examples of these outside-the-game interactions comes from PT: Nagoya two years ago (Kamigawa Block Rochester Draft). Osyp Lebedowicz was getting hate-drafted on both sides at the time, and once it got bad enough, he decided to fight back.

Osyp didn’t hate-draft in the usual way, though. He selected a Cage of Hands that his neighbor wanted, just like normal, but instead of calmly adding it to his stack, he actually tore the card up right in front of him. There is no table talk allowed in Rochester Draft, but this sends a clear message: “You guys f***ed with the wrong Ukrainian. Now you’re gonna pay.” Presumably fearing a vengeful hail of hate-drafts from Osyp for the remainder of the packs, his neighbors backed down and Osyp’s deck finally started to pick up steam. You can read more about it here.

I think these little outside-the-game advantages are great. On MTGO, a hate draft is a hate draft is a hate draft — but in person, tearing up a Cage of Hands can be so much more than just denying your competitors a card. On MTGO, a Skeletal Vampire is a Skeletal Vampire is a Skeletal Vampire, but in person, a Japanese Skeletal Vampire can be so much more...

... but that’s not what I came to talk to you about today. I came to talk about the draft, not Alice’s Restaur — er, no, I came to talk about Pride.

See, there’s an interesting point to be made about that Skeletal Vampire play, and I can’t make it without establishing that it’s okay for your opponent to gain an advantage from his foreign cards. (Tom happens to like Asian cards, and probably did not intend to put his opponent off his game, but he gained an advantage from them nonetheless.) I wanted to set the record straight that in my book, you could theoretically sleeve up 100% foreign cards every tournament, just to gain an advantage, and the only crime you’d be guilty of was spending a lot of money for a very minor gain.

Regardless, the point is this: Tom’s opponent punted that game, but the biggest punt was not failing to regenerate the Vampire... it was failing to ask a judge what the card did.

Your opponent plays a foreign card at a PTQ. You know basically what it does, but not exactly what it does. You’re okay with this, and decline to ask a judge to look the thing up.

Why not?

It takes, like, a minute or two, and you’ll get a time extension. Your opponent might be grumpy that he has to wait, but that’s what he gets for playing foreign cards.

So why not ask?

It’s simple: Pride is why not. You don’t want to look like a scrub.

We Magic players do a lot of foolish things, but one of the worst — and most ridiculous - is making poor decisions in order to avoid looking foolish.

For example, there’s a new rule that allows you to place an object on top of your library as a reminder, say, to pay for your Pacts. I’ve heard it said that making use of this rule is frowned upon by some expert Magicians, as using a reminder tool makes you look Bush League.

Bush League?

Unless you have a positively flawless memory, not making use of this rule makes you goddamn Careless League if you ask me.

It’s simple to see what’s so wrong about this when you look at it in terms of Expected Value. EV is a term we Magic writers have pirated from statisticians, and we generally use it to mean “what you expect to get out of a play, considering all the costs, benefits, and any other knowledge you possess.”

For example, I consider the Expected Value of adding Wandering Ones as the 61st card in my Vintage deck very low. The cost of drawing them instead of one of my very busted alternatives will probably outweigh the benefit that they might, somehow, win me the game. Another low-EV play would be playing out the last creature in my hand, when I already have four creatures on the board to my opponent’s zero, and he’s at one life. If my opponent casts a mass removal spell, I’m far worse off if I have committed my last creature to the board, and if he doesn’t have the board sweeper, having one more creature on the table is almost certainly unnecessary to secure victory when he is at one life with no blockers.

As I said before, Magic is both a game of skill and of luck, so we compete by playing to maximize our chances of success. You make a play that has an 80% chance of winning you the game over one that has a 60% chance of winning you the game every time, because that maximizes your chances of winning.

So even if you only forget your upkeep triggers 2% of the time, why would you ever pick the 2% chance of losing the game to a forgotten Pact over an effective 0%? It’s not like there’s a ton of effort involved here — it takes a fraction of a second to drop your pen on top of your library instead of on the table — so if you’d just swallow your pride for a damn minute and quit worrying about being called Bush League, you might never throw away a match to a missed Pact trigger again.

And it’s not just Pact triggers, either. In the second round of a Trial for Grand Prix: Columbus, I drew a card before pitching something to my Masticore. Thus, the Masticore died. I was fortunate that the blunder didn’t end up costing me the game, but being forgetful cost me just as much as an incorrect mulligan or a misplayed attack could have.

After the match, I confirmed with a judge that you could, in fact, put things on top of your library in order to remind yourself of upkeep effects. (The rule was fairly new then, and I wasn’t sure if it was just a rumor or not.) I have not missed an upkeep effect in sanctioned play since. Ever.

Bush League, my ass. I call it the No Game Loss League.

If your opponent aims an Angel of Despair at your reanimated, Japanese Skeletal Vampire, ask the judge what Skeletal Vampire does. After he has read you the oracle text, put one of those nickels back in your pocket and say “I’ll regenerate with this bat.” Hell, if you’re not a particularly classy individual, it might even be appropriate to tack on a “... you idiot” for good measure.

If you don’t, it is precisely your ambition to appear wise — or at least not a scrub that doesn’t know what Skeletal Vampire does — that makes you maximally foolish in the end.

Think about it in terms of Expected Value. If there’s a significant benefit to be gained, and the only cost is swallowing your pride, consider: is it better for your reputation if you look foolish for a minute and then win the game, or puff out your chest and lose?

Personally, I’m for keeping all my future Masticores.

Until next time,

Richard Feldman
Team :S
lcd_cow@yahoo.com