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The Long and Winding Road – The Retail Game

Monday, September 13th – Magic is training for both school and for work; it’s an opportunity to discuss and explore; it’s a mechanism for understanding interpersonal relationships; and, sometimes, it’s a way to get some sweet trophies on a shelf in your living room.

In December 1997, I sold the majority of my non-common Magic cards, and didn’t play the game for over four years. Random chance pulled me back in briefly, when some new members of my fraternity decided to play some games in a common area of the house. The Invasion and Odyssey cards blew me away, and in 2002 I played a whopping six tournaments — at which point I graduated college and embarked on a career in retail. This involved working almost every Saturday for four years straight, which is obviously not conducive to tournament Magic.

Retail, of course, was not my major at school. I intended on being a double-major in History and English, leading to a profession of… smart guy? I had no real plan. I just knew that I enjoyed reading, writing, and analyzing texts and that an understanding of history was important to me. At Lehigh, I was fortunate to have some fantastic English professors. I found the classes extremely interesting, but I didn’t participate that actively until my junior and senior years. As I did, I jettisoned my plans regarding history (which has been relegated since to hobby status) and focused on my English classes, taking an absurd amount of them, as I’d qualified for a program that freed me from distribution requirements (including pesky impediments like “math,” “science,” and “business” — dead-end classes like those).

While I wouldn’t say I’ve ever been a shy person, I did have major anxiety about speaking in public when I was younger. Participating in English classes was one of the ways I worked through this. When debating someone in class, the idea was usually to show them why you thought their understanding of a certain text or point was incorrect, without making them feel unintelligent. That takes a certain degree of practice and skill.

Another way I worked through this phobia, unintentionally, was by working in retail. I started working when I was seventeen as a way to replace the income I’d lost from Magic. There was a point in time when winning Magic packs and cracking them was literally like printing money. Casual cards were often worth more than tournament cards, and almost everything had value to someone. Most stores didn’t stock a good supply of singles, and there was no eBay.

Beyond winning tournaments, managing my Magic collection correctly resulted in a constant stream of revenue for me. When that revenue stream dried up and I stopped playing the game, I found my new hobby (girls) to be even more expensive than playing Magic. Thus, a friend was kind enough to get me an interview at a Suncoast store at my local mall. I had no idea at the time that I’d end up working for that company off and on for a decade.

Retail work is an interesting field, and it certainly isn’t for the shy. I got over my phobia of talking to people I didn’t know very quickly. More importantly, being successful at retail requires you to become a master of interpersonal interaction. This may be hard for some people to hear, but the majority of people in retail fall into it because they gave up on whatever it was that the revenue stream from their retail career was supposed to be funding. I worked retail in college because I wanted money to pay for things (like beer, and the expenses to the aforementioned hobby that replaced Magic) — but I also took the work seriously.


“I’m a serious man, Larry.” -Sy Ableman

I don’t consider myself an overly serious person, really, in the sense that I enjoy comedies and I think my sense of humor is one of my strengths. That said, in truth, I’m a serious man. When I work on something, I generally not only aim to succeed, I
expect

to succeed. When I graduated college, I only knew that I didn’t want to engage in more college; parts of that experience had been unhealthy for me and I wanted to move forward, and working in retail had, by and large, been a positive experience for me. I found that I was actually quite good at it.

I quickly found that I was good at engaging customers in conversation. It takes some practice, but you start to get a read on people, their body language, how serious they are, who they’re shopping for, how much they’re looking to spend, and so on. In a lot of ways, retail is a battle of wits. My job then was to sell movies — and not just movies that day, but to lock that person into buying movies from me in the future by ordering items we didn’t have (necessitating a return trip), or selling a bonus card (necessitating or strongly suggesting a return trip), or reserving a copy of a title not yet released (necessitating a return trip) — in other words, my job was to either take money from a customer immediately, or to guarantee that I would be taking money from a customer in the future, or both.

That was the game. If I made at least one of these things happen, I won — especially if that interaction had started out with the usual, “I’m just looking.”

As it turned out, I was quite good at this game, and the company I worked for was rather fixated on specific numbers and goal-setting and score-carding. I like competition, and I came to enjoy working for Suncoast. I worked other places as well, sometimes concurrently, doing similar things (such as Blockbuster or Electronics Boutique) but none had the same competitive aspect as Suncoast. After college, not sure what I wanted do with myself, I threw myself back into retail with the goal of moving up the company as fast as I could.

At that point, the game changed a bit — now, I was doing the same thing as before, but I had a new adversary: direct reports. Not only did I need to understand customers coming into the store, and manipulate them, I also had to find ways to motivate other employees (who were often a lot less into the retail “game” than I was) to care enough to out-perform their doppelgangers at other Suncoast stores. Doing this as an Assistant Manager is particularly challenging in that you likely had a boss who was your boss because he or she was, well, older than you. Thus you had to find a way to motivate a staff that ultimately didn’t report to you, and give them direction that might contradict the Manager’s direction, but that all parties involved knew was actually correct.

Moving up in retail to become a Store Manager, then a District Manager, the game continued to change on various levels. As a Store Manager, I needed to collect the best talent I could, and find ways to push them. I had to get the right people in the right place, at the right time, and push the right buttons. This sometimes meant promoting people out of my store into other stores; the more I did this, the more it would appear that I could run a district. Sometimes, you would get a store humming perfectly, only to be moved to a store that was a complete catastrophe and have to start over from scratch. Again, doing this enough times proved that yes, you could handle multiple stores with a variety of problems.

I’m going to tie this into Magic shortly, but as an early example, I often think about new Standard formats, post-rotation, as being similar to managing a store: you’ll often move from a familiar location with a staff that you’ve mastered and a customer base you know, to a new store in a new area where you have to start over from scratch.

As a District Manager, the game stepped up to another level completely. There were new metrics on which to complete, new pieces and pawns to manipulate at the regional and corporate office level, and so on. Most people in retail aren’t even aware that they’re part of the game — and so if you’re one of the few that are playing, and you’re playing to win (and don’t cheat), you can experience success pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, the sector of retail I was in was slowly dying throughout the 2000s, and in 2007 I was forced to choose between relocating (and then being laid off at a later date) or taking a severance package. I took the severance package and found an office position with a company that manages facilities for retailers — snow removal, landscaping, HVAC, pest control, and the like.

Here, again, was a job with an interesting balancing act, where I had to negotiate with contractors at a rate where they could make money, we could make money as an intermediary, and the customer on the other side paid a price they considered fair.

I want to make something clear here: Not everything in life is a game. Although there are parts of interpersonal relationships that have equivalents to game theory, I don’t think you should view life that way. Perhaps even speaking about professional work in terms of being a game is wrong (or at least strange) but it
is

how my brain works — and I know I’m not alone in that regard. During a conversation last week with Brad Granberry, he got me thinking about how parts of my life, especially working retail and taking English classes, have turned me into the type of Magic player that I am today.

Unlike the first time I quit Magic, when I stopped playing again in 2002, I didn’t sell all of my cards, and I didn’t stop playing completely. Every few months, I’d play some casual games with a friend. Over time, I started picking up some tournament cards — building decks I found online from rotated blocks that I could pick up cheaply. It was fun to play something like an Invasion Block or Onslaught Block deck against my friend’s “casual” decks, which were basically bad Legacy decks (as he owned dual lands and other powerful cards, but lacked a solid framework for deckbuilding).

When I took my severance and then took on an office job in early 2007, I realized that I had a chunk of money to invest in the game — and, for the first time in years, I had Friday nights and Saturdays available to engage in tournament play! The closest store to me at that time was Infinite Quests, now Alternate Universe — Blue Bell, and I quickly found that I knew exactly one person still playing Magic locally: Matt Urban. I also bumped into Scott Landis, but he had since become a World of Warcraft ringer instead of a Magic grinder.

The first tournament I went to in March 2007, my then-girlfriend, now-fiancée, came with me — partially to see what the heck I was going to be doing, and partially because I literally didn’t know anyone and I think she was worried that I’d be lonely.

You see, when I started playing Magic, I didn’t need to meet new people through Magic — one of my groups of friends was into games like Battletech, Games Workshop stuff, and so on. Magic infiltrated that group, and a bunch of us became competitive Magic players.

This time, things were different. If I hadn’t gone through that time working in retail, I’m not sure how this would’ve ended up. I might’ve played a bit and then lost interest, as being the guy sitting alone in-between rounds is awfully boring, and not something my brain is wired to enjoy.

Thankfully, I’m not that guy anymore. I got to be friends with some of the TOs, judges, and store owners. My office job, as it turned out, afforded me a ton of free time, which let me devour as much Magic content as I could and churn out decks in Excel (which looked like I was doing, you know, “work”), and even blogged and posted some material on Magic sites.

During my time working retail, I made a lot of friends. I never realized it until later, but I made an effort to find people working retail that I knew could play the “game”, and pushed them to play it with (and against) me, so that we’d all succeed together. This time, in Magic, it was easy to do the same thing.

What does any of this have to do with Magic?

One of the most important things in retail is learning to read people. You have two main groups of people to read: customers and employees. Customers come in, and you have to determine if they’re there to shop, kill time, or steal your merchandise. Some come in and literally want to hand you money; you just have to tell them what they want to buy. Others need some convincing, and others come in determined not to buy anything at all. (Those were always the most fun.)

Similarly, every employee is a different person working for a different reason, and is likely to be motivated by a unique set of factors, one that might change shift to shift depending on what was going on in his or her life. It takes a lot of practice to be able to have a brief conversation with someone and know how to interact with them.

All of this has massive application in Magic. If you’re thinking specifically in economic terms, trading is all about reading potential trade partners, feeling them out; for a lot of people, Magic is more about trading than it is about playing the game of Magic.

I’m not one of those people. When I trade, I’m just hoping to find someone who has something I want, and values cards in much the same way I do so that I can get that thing I want without having to spend US dollars on it. Trading isn’t a fun game for me, now, but it used to be; I think a lot of my early success at retail had to do with what I learned trading Magic cards for value.

What about reading people? Magic is a social game, even at competitive tournament levels. You know something I find interesting? Sometimes, before tournaments, I still get nervous before the first round. I’m not sure why, as it isn’t like something’s going to happen that I haven’t experienced before — but for whatever reason, I sometimes still get that excited, nervous feeling if I’m playing a new deck, or am playing in a very large tournament, or whatever.

Even more interesting? I’ve noticed that local players get nervous when they have to play me.

Should they? I certainly don’t think so. I’m a reasonably competent enough player who’s likely to be playing a relatively competitive deck, but that’s about it. When we sit down to play, and I say good luck, and you say “I’ll probably need it!”, that’s telling me something: you think I’m a better Magic player than you. Or, distilled further, you believe that you’re most likely going to lose this match. It could be because I write for this website, or because you know I won a StarCityGames.com Open, or that you’ve heard my name and assume therefore that I must be relatively good. It could be anything — but for some reason, you think I’m going to be beat you.

Gavin Verhey wrote an interesting article that he got slammed for, in which he discussed ”
the aura

” — but there is some truth to what he wrote. Success can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think I’m going to beat you, and you play like I’m going to beat you, and you make mulligan decisions like they don’t matter because you’re positive that I’m going to beat you, then don’t be surprised when I beat you — I won’t be surprised, either!

There’s nothing wrong with being intimidated when playing someone you know is an excellent player (or even just a better player than you are). I wasn’t exactly stoked to be battling Brassman in the Philly Open earlier this year, just as playing Vintage Champ Paul Mastriano at an earlier Philly Open was intimidating, or playing Roland Chang in my second Vintage tournament since 1996 was a little nerve-wracking.

When playing better players, you need to bring your best game to the table, not your bad habits. These are all people slinging cards, not robotic machines destined to defeat you.

(Well, maybe Brad Nelson is.)

When I’m speaking about reading people, I’m talking about more than just “tells” or being able to read if someone “has it” — there are a lot of subtle ways to influence people as well. For example, I tend to play at a relatively fast pace, especially when I’m playing aggro decks like Zoo or Dredge. Because I enjoy these decks and find that playing them comes relatively naturally to me, I banter a lot when I play them.

To use a sports analogy, you’ll often hear about teams needing to avoid playing to the other team’s tempo — for instance, football teams that would try to have a shootout with the Rams when they were the greatest show on turf, or basketball teams that thought they could run with Nash and the Suns. This is something you can recreate in Magic pretty easily. If your opponent is playing a control deck, establish a brisk game pace and see if your opponent bends to your pace. When playing control against an opponent who wants to keep things moving, be deliberate — not slow, but deliberate. There is a difference. I’m not talking about stalling here — just controlling the pace of the game, just as when I’m talking about playing quickly, I’m talking about going from “untap” to “attacking you in the red zone” in five seconds flat.

People have a pace, a comfort zone — push them out of it if you can, unless it happens to correspond with yours.

I don’t bluff a lot in Magic, but there have been times when I’ve “sold” something and won the game because of it. Often, these situations come about because I’m able to learn something from my opponent during chatter beforehand, during, or after a round.

Probably the most memorable for me was at the NYSE IV event in the semi-finals: an Oath-vs.-Oath mirror. I’d played my opponent in the Swiss and beaten him with a quick Voltaic Key/Time Vault in one game, and found out after the match that he wasn’t playing Time Vault in his deck.

This is critical information to have in an Oath mirror — because you then know that if you can out-Orchard your opponent, you’re going to win. In game one, I kept a hand that had no action at all, just a ton of Orchards and a Strip Mine… And when my opponent played Oath plus Orchard, he quickly lost to his own Oath.

Game two, I had to mulligan down to four and then watch him lead out with Ancestral Recall. To say I was behind in this game is a considerable exaggeration. The way the game worked out, I had Krosan Grip in hand to my opponent’s double-Orchard and full grip of cards. He finally found Oath of Druids, and played it out. I looked at my card, asked how many he had in hand, and solemnly said, “It resolves.” I then slumped my shoulders and sighed.

He looked over his hand, pondering whether to cast anything else. He didn’t really need to; all he needed to do was pass the turn, then make a token at any point before his next upkeep. Instead, he tapped two Orchards and played Null Rod. I then Gripped the Oath right through the six counters my opponent had in hand. Between fetches and Thoughtseize, the two tokens went lethal in eight turns and I won the game.

Had I not sold a look of complete and utter defeat, leading my opponent to play the Null Rod to shut off an irrelevant Mox because, well, “why not?”, I would probably have lost.

Reading people is important beyond tournaments — and perhaps even more important. If you play a lot of Magic, you’re going to interact with the same people repeatedly. You may find some that have similar interests as you, potential car pool buddies or testing partners. Some people may ask to borrow cards, and you’ll need to gauge how comfortable you are with that. If you’re testing for a tournament and don’t want a certain deck or sideboard card to be known amongst those at the tournament, you have to be able to know who is trustworthy and who isn’t.

What about forming a team, or just choosing testing partners? Not everyone playtests the same.

I change decks a lot, and I play a lot of formats. I just love the game. A lot of times, I want to test as many games as I can as quickly as possible, because I’m trying to find the deck I want. For example, I might think that, despite what everyone “good” says, Mishra’s Workshops are a good choice for my next tournament. To verify this, I want to play a lot of games, quickly. Not technically perfect games — just games, lots of games, to give me some sense whether a given deck is a remotely viable choice. If it is, then I’ll play more games, preferably slightly tighter/more serious games (but still fast-paced), just to tune a list.

Once I’m down to a decklist where I’m saying yes, this is the deck I want to play, then hopefully I’ll be moving on to tournament-level testing: the type of testing where you’re saying, “You should have left Volcanic untapped to bluff Pyroblast,” and that kind of thing.

The reason why I mention this is that not everyone can playtest at all three of these levels. A lot of people want all their testing to be fast and loose; a lot of people want all of their testing to be slow and tournament-level. As you test with people, it helps to read them and see who is able to test at what level, and who might be willing to engage at all the levels with a little discussion as to what the benefits may be.

Similarly, some people are “idea” people who are open to brainstorming about any card at any time, and are willing to seriously consider whether it has value; others are locked into an understanding of the game that says that anything worth playing is already out there, and when something new comes out, it will be from someone they’ve heard of before. Again, it helps to have a mix of these people; some that will let you try new things, and others that force you to engage in testing that’s definitely relevant.

In some of my recent articles, I think I’ve given you a bit of a feel for who I am as a Magic player. I like formats where there’s a “best deck,” and then I like to win tournaments by taking that deck down. If the best deck in Vintage is Time Vault blue, then I’ll play anything that I think beats that deck — including Time Vault blue, if I think one version is better than another. Similarly, just because I wrote an article defending Zoo as a viable deck in Legacy doesn’t mean you should expect me to be playing Wild Nacatls every time I play the format. (I was perfectly happy winning matches with Tendrils a few weeks ago.)

I’m a metagame opportunist. I’m not the guy who tunes one deck forever (although I will continue to go back and refine something I think is the best option in a metagame). Rather, I like to study a format and play everything I can. This is one of the reasons why I’ve gravitated toward Legacy and Vintage lately; limits on my time preclude me from metagame-hopping in a constantly rotating format. I would be happiest if I could literally play every deck in every format, because I want to know and experience everything there is to experience in this game. Sometimes, I may do so despite the fact that I’m lessening my chance of winning; I want to compete in the game, but I don’t always have to win.

I play poorly when I’m not having fun, so there’s a balance I have to find. Yours may be different.

Part of some people’s games is putting others on tilt. I can’t say I’ve done this intentionally, but I do know that I have occasionally forced misplays by running chats that distract people. I don’t really do it for that purpose — I’m just a talkative guy — but if that’s a result, then so be it. If you know someone is actively trying to tilt you, you have to be able to put that person on ignore and just play the game of Magic.

When I used to play Games Workshop games or Battletech, I realized that I actually enjoyed building armies and creating custom mechs more than I did actually playing the games. I had more fun trying to find a broken army at a certain point threshold, or a gimmick mech that I knew would win one-time and then would have to create something new from scratch. I think that’s what drew me into Magic; it has that same customization, but it is embedded in a game that I actually enjoy.

I think that’s why I’ll probably never be able to stop playing Magic forever, even if for some reason life forces me to take another five-year break at some point. When I would staff-up a store at retail, or now, when I build a call center team, or a work-process flow for a specific account, it amazes me how the things I’ve done in my life overlap and reinforce each other.

The game of Magic may be the deepest and most interesting game I’ve ever experienced — one that has feedback loops intertwined with so many aspects of my life. I hope that when
you

play it, you appreciate it for what it is. Training for school, and for work; an opportunity to write, discuss, and explore; a mechanism for understanding interpersonal relationships and finding life-long friends; and, sometimes, it’s a way to get some sweet trophies on a shelf in your living room.

I may disagree with other writers from time to time (or all the time — TES is
not

favored against Merfolk,
you goofy
Max McCall, you
), I might disagree with the DCI from time to time, and sometimes Wizards might print cards that make no sense to me — but I love this game and everything that it’s done for me, and the way it has helped push me throughout my life.

So, that’s the personal article that a friend challenged me to write. I’m eighty-two articles into my writing stint at StarCityGames.com, so maybe it’s good that we all get to know each other a little better. After all, I said I got past my fear of speaking in public. Writing articles like this one, well, you’re putting yourself out there even more than normal.

For fun, here’s the deck I probably played at the TMD Open 14 in Waterbury, a.k.a. the World Series of Vintage. I’m sure I’ll be writing about this more in the next few weeks.


A friend of mine described this deck as combo on training wheels, and that’s really what it is: a steady, relatively easy deck that still gives you free wins and is positioned well against most of the other movers and shakers in the format. (Trust me, I’m not above playing with training wheels on if it gives me a better shot at winning.)

Lastly, the top 10 movies of the 2000s, in no particular order:

Pan’s Labyrinth
The Dark Knight
Memento
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Requiem for a Dream
O Brother, Where Art Thou
Gladiator
There Will be Blood
Kill Bill: Volume 2
Royal Tenenbaums

Please note that I decided to exclude all Pixar films, because otherwise this was too hard. Also, I really wanted Children of Men, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Prestige, and District 9 to make the list, but they didn’t.

Matt Elias

[email protected]


Voltron00x on SCG, TMD, and The Source