You're probably wondering just what"Lateral Thinking" is, so I'll start by explaining it. Edward de Bono coined the term"Lateral Thinking", and the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as follows:

Lateral thinking - a way of thinking which seeks the solution to intractable problems through unorthodox methods, or elements which would normally be ignored by logical thinking.

Now, let's apply that definition to Magic deckbuilding. First, though, we have to figure out what we mean by"logical thinking". For our purposes, logical thinking produces traditional deck optimization; for example, you have five different counterspells that you could play in your Standard U/W control deck. Logically, you should test them all, and perhaps find that you want four of one and two of another. In other words, you already know what deck you're working on, and therefore what kinds of cards you'll need, so you test to see which particular cards are optimal. You have the foundations of the deck laid out, and you build up from that through testing, until the entire deck is complete.

Now, here's where many deckbuilders run into problems. They have their"optimized" deck, but it just isn't good enough. Maybe it has a terrible matchup against a common deck, or it's just a little underpowered against the field. The common response to a problem like this is to just load up on sideboard hate for your problem matchup, or to just blame your losses on luck, because the problem can't be in your deck-you optimized it! Every card belongs!

This is a much bigger problem in Type One than in other formats, however, because cards never rotate out of Type One, so you can keep playing your deck in tournament after tournament, even as the metagame changes. The cards are all still legal. If you wanted to, you could take Neo-Academy or Morphling Keeper to a Type One event tomorrow. You might even be able to take the optimal build, and if you're the best player there by a significant margin, you might even win. Unfortunately, those decks just won't cut it at GenCon. This is where lateral thinking comes in.

Now, if logical thinking is moving forward with your deck idea, lateral thinking is moving sideways. It involves questioning fundamental assumptions that you made when building the deck. Maybe your Red deck would work better with eight maindeck land destruction spells-cards you hadn't even considered for your original build. Or maybe your Neo-Academy deck would do better if you rebuilt it around Tendrils of Agony instead of focusing on the Academy combo. With each new idea, you have to use the logical approach to test it and refine it, but only lateral thinking can get your deck out of a true rut.

Now, those are easy examples, because Neo-Academy is obviously inferior to modern Tendrils builds, and Morphling Keeper is obviously worse than modern 4-Color Control. It's much harder to apply lateral thinking when your deck is already strong, because you see a lot of work for no real gain. For example, when Darren diBattista a.k.a. Azhrei wrote about building his"Old School Expulsion" deck here on SCG over two years ago, he had this to say about finally adding Red to the previously Blue/Black deck:

"This deck was simply superior to the Blue and Black version. I wish I had gone to it sooner, but my original deck was working well enough so as to discourage me from trying out new ideas. Let that be a lesson to you - just because something works well does not always mean that it cannot be improved upon."

A more recent example is Team Short Bus taking Meandeck's old Mindslaver decklists, and cutting the Mindslavers for Sundering Titan. Meandeck had been so focused on optimizing a Mindslaver build that, even when huge artifact creatures in the board turned around unfavorable matchups, they didn't go one step further and refocus the deck on the creatures. Instead, Meandeck let their rival team beat them to the punch with 7/10 Split. Meandeck turned around and added the Sundering Titan to Kenny Öberg's 5^th place deck from this April tournament. Meandeck's list then put Doug Linn in the top 8 of SCG's first P9 tournament. Lateral thinking allowed for two major improvements to this archetype, but neither team was able to make all the changes on their own-it took new heads to see the extreme possibilities.

Now, here's a much more detailed example from my own deckbuilding experiences. It all started last December, when I was thinking about Marc Perez's U/r Fish. I had been playing a mono-Green deck, so adding Green to Fish seemed like a natural idea. Now, here's where my first assumptions kicked in. Since Fish had been mono-Blue, and Red had only been added relatively recently, it seemed natural to try a Green splash instead of the Red splash. So I added River Boa, Oxidize, Suq'Ata Firewalker, and Tropical Islands, and cut the Red cards and Voidmage Prodigies, leaving the rest of the deck intact.

The deck worked pretty well, and in fact won me a Black Lotus, but it had aspects that I didn't like. The two cards I grew to hate most were Cloud of Faeries and Faerie Conclave. Both cards are very weak on their own, and were only run because of one card: Standstill. Since I wasn't having great experiences with Standstill either, it was time for some lateral thinking: I cut all three cards and added Brainstorms, Flying Men, and some basic lands. [Flying Men! - Knut, fan of one-mana Blue fliers since the beginning of time] The Brainstorms were absolutely incredible, but the Flying Men were a little weak, and my mana base had room for something more.

My sideboard had been in constant flux, but I could never find great cards for Workshop or control decks. Blue and Green just weren't giving me enough options. It was time for more lateral thinking. I decided to test a U/r/g build. To my surprise, the mana base worked. I got to play Grim Lavamancers in the maindeck, and Artifact Mutation and Red Elemental Blast in the sideboard. The deck now runs quite well, which makes the original name that much more amusing. Here's the build I'd play at GenCon, if I were going:

Worse Than Fish (WTF)
4 River Boa
4 Grim Lavamancer
4 Spiketail Hatchling
2 Call of the Herd
1 Gorilla Shaman
4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
4 Curiosity
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Stifle
1 Fire / Ice
2 Oxidize
3 Null Rod

1 Strip Mine
4 Wasteland
4 Mishra's Factory
3 Tropical Island
3 Volcanic Island
6 Polluted Delta/Flooded Strand/Wooded Foothills
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Ruby

Sideboard:
3 Artifact Mutation
2 Naturalize
1 Oxidize
2 Red Elemental Blast
2 Blue Elemental Blast
1 Stifle
1 Null Rod
1 Fire / Ice
2 Sigil of Sleep

A quick aside for people considering playing this deck at GenCon: I don't think Crucible of Worlds is worth running in this metagame, since too many decks can neutralize it with their own Crucible. Against control or Mishra's Workshops, Crucible is much stronger for them than for me, so I'd rather have Oxidize than my own Crucible. I don't need Crucible for the mirror either, since River Boa is so good there. If you expect a lot of people to be unprepared for Crucible though, then it could be a strong choice in the maindeck or sideboard.

The other cards that I'm"missing" are Daze, which just never works for me (but run it if it works for you), and Library of Alexandria, which just wasn't drawing me any cards. I anticipate playing some variant of this deck until the metagame changes significantly, at which point I may have to start thinking laterally again.

What I learned from this experience is that no matter how well a deck is doing (Marc continues to win power with his U/r build), and no matter how much a deck has been"optimized", radical innovation is possible-you just have to step sideways to keep moving forwards. In Type One and Magic in general, Lateral Thinking is key to these major changes.

Jacob Orlove
Jacob dot Orlove at gmail dot com

Props to Matthieu Durand a.k.a. Toad for his help with the Meandeck/Short Bus section and for catching a few other errors. Oh, and also for being totally awesome.