For a long while there, I was pretty spectacularly blessed. I was a columnist over at Wizards of the Coast, writing the weekly Single Card Strategies article. It was a hard gig, in a lot of ways, probably the hardest Magic-writing gig I’ve ever held. The big struggle of a column like that was simply keeping the content up, especially for the kind of audience it was targeting. Every week, I’d have to explore the intricacies of a single card. To use Mark Rosewater terminology, I am somewhere in between a Johnny and a Spike — I like to play to win, and I also feel that one way to get there is to come up with creative solutions to problems that might not otherwise be on peoples’ radars. My column, though, was largely one for Johnny/Timmy players, players who might like to be creative or who might like to be wowed by a card, or sometimes the Vorthos player who likes to steep themselves in the mythos of the game. It was a hard fit, notwithstanding the difficulty in writing deeply in a new way about a single card, week after week, and having people appreciate it. “That card is too old, I can’t find any,” “That card is too Spike-ish,” “BDM just covered that card last year,” and other complaints abounded.
One of the big perks of the job, though, was the access I had to a Magic Online (MODO) account with every card in the game. It even had a few tickets. The idea was that I could use the account to see how decks I might work on worked. I certainly used it for that, but I also got to use it for playtesting, then, as well. It was pretty awesome for that.
I’d been using MODO before that, but gave up. Early on, problems with the interface had driven me, aggravated, from the game. It wasn’t any mistake in MODO. It was my own mistakes in interacting with the interface. After losing in the finals of yet another 8-man queue from a misclick or a misunderstanding of how I needed to have my stops or other settings set to avoid losing to a Fear-infused Phage, I just packed it in and put that account on the shelf, and altogether stopped playing MODO until I got the God Account.
Since I lost that account, I’ve very, very slowly been re-accumulating cards in my regular account. It’s slow, slow going. I can almost play a Standard deck, but for now am pretty much stuck playing Block (though, to be fair, I love playing Shards Block). Even though these days I’m playing a lot more MODO than I ever have in the past, and even though I enjoy it, I can definitely see some things that MODO is doing to players that is definitely hurting them.
Yes, friends, if you’re hungry to make your game really good, MODO is not enough.
The Good Stuff
If you’re a MODO-lover, there is a lot to like about MODO, honestly.
MODO is a fantastic place to simply get practice playing the game of Magic. With its strict rules enforcement, a player looking to simply get in more “hands” can rarely do better than MODO. If you’re looking to just up your game, entering in queue after queue after queue (limited by your bank account) can be a fantastic way to improve the baseline technical skills that you have. Tons of players have cut their teeth on MODO, and these days MODO is a big part of the reason that PTQs are probably harder than they have ever been.
The nature of MODO as a part of the hive-mind that churns out decks is also very worth noting. If you’re tapped into the hive-mind, you do end up getting a good sense about what actually performs that is publicly out there in the metagame — at least if it isn’t being a closely guarded secret.
Another positive aspect of MODO is the honing of sideboard skills. In MODO, you’re generally going to be sideboarding the appropriate amount of times. On average, Magic games are played sideboarded roughly 60% of the time. MODO events actually give you the appropriate amount of experience with sideboarded games. In the real world, most people don’t practice sideboarding nearly enough, and MODO definitely facilitates this.
But Magic is not merely about practice. As I’ve said before, a hugely important part of preparing for events has nothing to do with practice, and is instead about learning, something that might seem like it is the same thing as practice, but in reality is not. Discovery and skill-building might happen at the same time sometimes, but they are not tied to each other. It’s in this second space (among others) that MODO is deeply insufficient in developing your game.
There is an awesome space for discovery that is largely only available on MODO. This is, perhaps, the final great thing about MODO: the value of easy access to unusual, regulated formats. You can always learn a lot from nearly any rigorously competitive format. Maybe you’ll learn that an archetype in Block will hold a lot of promise because even though the full “tournament” set of sets isn’t out yet, your previous experience has shown you lessons that you can build on when more sets come into the mix. Maybe it is because a moment in Online Classic will be something you recall as you’re working on a Legacy or Extended deck. Even a Momir Vig game can provide inspiration, as some unusual interaction spurs creativity, or merely unblocks some expectation you were holding onto maybe a little too hard.
Still, MODO leaves a lot to be desired…
Sold Short in Limited by MODO
A lot of people don’t realize just how much of a short sell MODO is for draft practice. Often this is because they simply don’t have the experience playing in a Magic community that is developed enough to really help pull up other members of the community. Not everyone can be so fortunate to be within easy reach of a Team CMU or YMG. Not everyone is lucky enough to have tournament organizers like Steve Port. For a lot of people, MODO is the place where they can get their game on, and start gunning the drafts. They can see the improvement of their game as a result, but what they can’t see is the improvements that they are missing out on. Like explaining to someone who is color-blind the richness of a sunset, they can hear the words, but they really, really don’t know it in their bones.
I’m very fortunate, in a lot of ways. Madison’s Magic community has had its ups and downs, but I was there during some its huge ups. There was a time in Madison where you’d easily be able to have twelve to sixteen people in drafts who had eight or more (often many, many more) Pro Tours under their belt, and other drafts going on besides. Playing games with Dustin Stern, Mike Hron, and the Great One, Bob Maher, was commonplace, and there were many other players that were absolutely worth your time to pay attention to. Many of these people have fallen out of the game, moved away, “grown up,” or otherwise started paying attention to other things, but there is still a really solid player base here in town who serve as the community that helps to uplift each other, and even if it is not what it once was, it is still really impressive, if you ask me.
Community matters. If you aren’t really sure how, let’s just think about the following distinctions that aren’t really possible in MODO:
1 — Access to “Intelligence”
You don’t have to even be playing in the real world and you can watch a draft. If you want to see how recent Grand Prix: Indy Top 8 performers Gaudenis Vidigiris and Ben Rasmussen draft, you can look over their shoulder, and follow one or both of them pick for pick. As you’re doing this, you can watch to see how their entire draft plays out, as well as seeing if anyone else is onto something that is worthwhile. If you’re actually playing in the draft, you can still look on to your neighbors. MODO really doesn’t allow this. Even if you’re reading along with the StarCityGames.com series “Drafting With…” whomever, you can’t actually really see how their games play out.
2 — Weighing of Archetypes
As you watch out drafts, and play in them, you absolutely will get into real life discussions that are entirely different than are likely to play out online. Arguments will abound. How valuable is Fathom Seer? How easy is it to cast Cruel Ultimatum? Is Watchwolf a bomb in the right deck, or only “merely” very good in the right deck? What colors should you lean towards accompanying your Tidehollow Strix — is Red or White better?
The real-time dialogue that happens throughout the entirety of a draft simply cannot be replicated by after the fact discussions of what happened on MODO. These things often devolve into anecdotal arguments: “Well, when I drafted that…” In real life, the ability to constantly get into a dialogue gives great potential in the development of real knowledge.
3 — The Power of Winning and Follow the Leader
There is something to be said about the power of knowing what wins. You can watch it play out. You can ask questions of the player who has drafted the deck, through many rounds. You can actually really get the weight of something more so than is possible online.
At Worlds, one year, I Rochester drafted a deck that absolutely bewildered one of the Australian players at the table. When I beat him in the last round of that draft to go 3-0, he asked me what it was that I was doing with the draft, and why I did it. In the following draft, he drafted “The Sullivan,” as he called it (though it would have been more properly called “The Madison”). “How’s it going?” Brian Kowal and I asked him between rounds. “$&@*$^@ing great!” was his reply. Online, there never could have been the time to go into it and get this kind of turn around. Real conversation and experience just wins out. And in a non-tournament environment, where time is not so regimented, the possibility of learning from winners is magnified.
Playing “Follow the Leader is a great way to try out new strategies. If someone has discovered a “winning formula,” you can try it out, and see if it works for you, but actually have their guidance, and the guidance of everyone around you. Typically, the best you can do, comparably on MODO, is to have someone literally at your computer with you, but this is still pale in comparison.
4 — Losing is not Damning
In a recent Drafting With LSV, we followed him throughout the entirety of his draft, only to have him run into me, and lose in the first round. Was his deck good? Was his strategy for that draft valuable? It’s actually hard to tell.
That’s because there is no difference on MODO between decks that lose in the first round of an eight-man. 0-1 might have ended up as 0-3, 1-2, or 2-1; there’s just no practical way to really know. This can actually be significantly stunting in your draft development. Maybe you’re really onto something with your strategy of forcing B/W in post Conflux Shards, for example (probably not, though), but you abandon it prematurely because you go 0-1 in three consecutive drafts, but would have ended up with a 2-1 finish every time. Further, what do you really learn about your opponents’ decks when you do lose? LSV’s write-up actually widely missed the mark of what my deck did. In real life, he could have looked at it after the match. In fact, we could have just played some more games to see how the matchup plays out. As it was though, that was it; he had lost and it was over.
5 — Metagame Development
As your community develops, you can actually really grow into a sophisticated understanding of a format that is not as accessible to others without that community. In Madison, for example, during Invasion Block, it was believed that the following archetypes were viable:
1 — Maher 5-Color Green (an even balance between fixers and bombs)
2 — Hron 5-Color Green (an emphasis on bombs, playing “subpar fixers”)
3 — Stern 5-Color Green (an emphasis on fixers, and emphasizing card advantage, taking bombs when they are available)
4 — Sullivan 4-Color Non-White (avoid White, emphasis on fixers, drafted on a curve)
5 — Kowal 5-Color White (an emphasis on fliers and fixers, splashing into bombs)
6 — USA A-OK (R/W/U, with fliers and sweep)
7 — BUG Advantage — (B/G/U, card advantage based, but hoping to become #1, #3, or #4, above)
Literally, we didn’t think any other deck was worthwhile. By the time we got to Worlds that year, this opinion seemed pretty heavily vindicated.
You can see other elements of this in Mike Hron’s trip to the championship at Pro Tour: Geneva. He was deeply interested in going Black, and wanted, if he could help it, to avoid Green, though he would take whatever would come. BDM states the he was “stunned” when Hron took Tendrils over Teferi, a comment that led to much amusement amongst the Madison crew that he had prepared with; we all felt that his “force Black” strategy was absolutely correct. Interestingly, if you look at the Top 8 Profiles, Willy Edel, Jim Herold, and Marijn Lybaert all adamantly claim that avoiding Black was a key, and they were joined, to a lesser extent by Ervin Tormos. All lost in the first round of the Top 8. While clearly they had had amazing skills to get that far in the first place, this doesn’t seem like a coincidence.
Missing something has long been a fact of life on the Pro Tour. Some people didn’t get the memo on Elves. Some didn’t get it on Affinity. Some didn’t get it on Mono-Black. And some didn’t get it on Slivers. Jacob Van Lunen even actively references Hron in the coverage of his and Lachmann’s Sliver-fueled victory in San Diego. My own playtest partner for the event, Jim Hustad (playing at that event with Gaudenis Vidigiris), was shocked at how many people failed to realize the value of many cards, even as high as the Top 16, and in my first conversations with Van Lunen, it was gratifying to see someone had gotten the memo that Hustad and I had gotten about card values.
This Limited metagame development can only happen when discourse is involved on a deep level of your regular drafting.
MODO almost never supplies this. It’s simply too easy to have it all reduced to, “I went 3-0, lol. Green/Red is teh best!”
Constructed Too!
The disadvantages of MODO for Constructed are absolutely less pronounced, but they are real:
1 — Lack of Actual Factual Scouting
At a tournament in the real world, you can walk around a room and see who is winning. This can matter a lot. While the tournament practice room can be scouted (within the limits of any participant there), the value from this is much lower than the value of being at Round 6 of an event and checking out, in a glance, the top performing decks, and watching them play out against each other.
Maybe the kid at the top table with Zoo playing Lightning Angel is playing a subpar deck. Winning isn’t everything, after all; he could have gotten lucky. But, you get a far better opportunity to check out what he’s doing and decide for yourself.
2 — Time Constraints
MODO might let you shuffle quickly, but everything else sure takes a hell of a lot longer. How long can it take you to gun games in real life? With the right partner, you can make a ton happen. With one playtest partner, Nathan, I was able to gun around sixteen games in slightly less than an hour as I prepped for a potential opponent in the Top 8. I walked into the Top 8 with a solid plan based on the lessons from those sixteen games. Doing such a thing in MODO would have been impossible.
3 — The Joys of Spectators
Unlike the “Tournament Practice” room, seeing your community play Magic, there is often a sense of ownership that comes into preparation. “John’s” deck becomes a kind of communal property, as everyone tries to make the deck better, calling out suggestions in real time to problems that are faced. “What about running another Jitte?” “Why not try out Repeal?”
Further, in trusted spaces that can get built up in a Magic community, “secret” decks can be played. People are less apt to share each others’ decks. “Jeremy’s” secret sideboard card for some particularly rough matchup might completely turn a match over, but you might not want to test that against some virtually nameless opponent, who very well might be someone that will further disseminate the concept to the hive-mind.
Denouement
For a lot of people, this might be a moot point. You might not have a Magic community near you to try to take advantage of. If this is the case, you should actively work at being a part of one. You should actively work at building one, if you can. It matters a lot if you want to succeed in this game.
The hive-mind has given the game a lot. Access to it is deeply important if you want to compete these days. But it cannot be overlooked how valuable it is to have access to something that is more akin to family and friends. Even if you are a cold-hearted player who is only interested in things that improve your situation, it is to your absolute benefit to be a part of a community and to raise it up.
Doing anything else is simply selling yourself short.
Until next week…