Welcome to Decision
Points, a column where I break down magic into its most basic components
and walk you through how to make well
informed choices. The inspiration for this article comes from the work by
Michael J. Flores on his Make the Play
Monday series on TCG Player and decision making articles from Channel
Fireball authors like LSV, PV, Owen Turtenwald, and William Jensen. I will not
attempt to persuade you that my articles will be better in any way than the
content of those authors, but I want to offer another article to help in what I
consider the meat and potatoes of playing magic, proper decision making.
Before I begin I should start with a short introduction
of myself and guide through this series. I’ve been playing since 7th
edition and am almost exclusively an
MTGO Player. I really kicked my playing into high gear with the release of Rise
of the Eldrazi online. RoE is my favorite limited format which might be because
it ist he first set I was comfortable playing well and the set that really
hooked me on Magic: The Gathering. From RoE forward I was able to play well
enough to avoid putting any money into MTGO even when drafting up to 20 times a
week. Yes, I know I’m a bit of a draft degenerate, but in my defense drafting
is really fun
Unfortunately
around the release of Return to Ravnica I got cocky, developed bad habits, and
burnt through my winnings and most of my collection. By the time Khans was released
I had to put money into MTGO, and it became clear I was doing things the wrong
way and needed to refocus on my Magic game. I came to realize that I was making
fast and poor decisions without thinking things through when I actually was
thinking at all. I was playing on autopilot and just assumed what I was doing
was correct, because, after all, I had gone a long time without putting money
into the game. I was wrong and I let my ego get in the way of good decision
making, so I have been working to correct that flaw. Through this column I want
to help you avoid the same mistakes of letting yourself go on autopilot and to
help both of us develop tools to improve as decision makers.
For the first Decision
Points I want to draw on my own experience in the DTK draft format. For
this example you are playing the above Green/Black deck in game 3 of the
finals. You’ve curved well, taking your opponent to 10 life, but they seem to
have stabilized with a Noxious Dragon. Your face down morph is a Segmented
Krotiq. It is your first main phase and none of your creatures have summoning
sickness, so now you must decide how to play out your turn. Before reading on,
you should take the time to decide on your own line and think “Why do I think
this is correct?” When examining your play, the “why” behind the decision is
often the most important aspect of the decision made.. If you understand why
you made a correct response or error, you will understand how to improve and
how to make better decisions.
Decision Making:
Human beings just can’t process everything that goes on
in the world around them. There is too much sensory information for us to get
through the day taking in and processing all the information around us. To get
by, our brains have developed shortcuts to deal with all the information. Many
MTG writers through its history have talked about the various cognitive
shortcuts that people use and the biases they can lead to,so I won’t spend a
thousand words explaining how your brain deals with the information. For this article, the main point I want you to
keep in mind is that human beings are influenced by the amount of incoming
information we have available, the time we have available, and the amount of
choices we can make.
I our current case we have multiple choices we could
make. We have the ability to play any single card in our hand and the option to
play two spells in this turn as well. We also have the choice of whether or not
we need to attack this turn. In MTG we are also always in a time crunch, and we
need to play at a pace that allows us to finish the round. On MTGO, we have
just over 15 minutes, minus the time it will take us to play the rest of the
game to decide on our answer. In a real life tournament, if you don’t make a
timely decision you could earn a slow play warning, or worst. Being under time
pressure and dealing with information overload is a great way to ensure people
make poor decisions and obscure the optimal play.
What I did:
In this case, I couldn’t come up with a way to attack
through the board state without allowing my opponent to get back the Dragon from
the graveyard with the dutiful attendant. I chose to pinion feast, expecting my
opponent to kill my morph, so I attacked for 3 and set up my opponent to replay
the dragon at 7 life. I thought that put me at a good chance to deal with the
dragon the next turn with press the advantage and put him to 3 life after
trample damage with a 3/3 and 2 removal spells (Hunt and Coat). It took me
around 4 minutes to make my play, too slow for in-tournament play, and I didn’t
even make the best play. How I came to the decision was based on how much I
valued board position and how bad the Noxious Dragon was for me in the long
game if my opponent stabilized.
Because of information overload it was difficult to find
the key interaction I missed, and if I wouldn’t have missed it, I would have
most likely won on this turn or, at the worst, put the opponent to 1 life with
me having 2 creatures and two removal spells. This simple change now turns this
into a Duels of the Planeswalkers
puzzle where you can narrow down the relevant information. I can further narrow
it down by telling you to consider the interaction between trample and death
touch. Do you see it? Here, let’s run through what you should have done.
What I should have done.
My evaluation of the Dragon being bad for my game play is
correct as I have to “2 for 1” myself to get it off the board, and I have to “4
for 2” myself if he gets it back with the dutiful attendant. That’s rough and
tough to beat, but we could all but lock up victory with what is probably the
correct play.
The correct play, in my opinion, was to attack and then
use press the advantage and coat with venom. This puts your opponent in a very
awkward spot to survive the turn. The best block the opponent could make is to
block Dragon on the 3/2 and dutiful attendant on the 3/3 morph, and even that
puts them at 1 life as you Press the
Advantage the blocked creatures, and use coat with venom on the 3/2 shield-breakers.
You assign 1 damage to the dragon and 5 trample to the opponent. This was the
key interaction: trample and deathtouch. This combo allows you to assign only 1
damager because, due to deathtouch, you only have to assign a solitary damage
to any creature to kill it. Your emissary hits for 1 and your morph tramples
over for 3 damage. The opponent most likely kills the morph with noxious
dragon’s trigger and brings back the dragon to their hand. You are left with a
1/1 emissary, a 3/2 shield-breakers, pinion feast, and hunt the weak. However,
that is the best case scenario for your opponent, and if they block the
emissary at all they die.
During matches and drafts, I like to take notes on
interesting decision points and I recommend you do the same. If I can I ask
friends for their opinion and some may even get further opinions from their
friends. I like the different points of view I get from listening to others.
This alternate point of view is a great learning tool in MTG. Rarely will there
be one correct line of play and there will often be several reasonable lines
During this column, we may not have a for sure correct line. We can evaluate
how/why we made our decision and move on from there. In this case I know I just
missed an interaction that would have changed my reasoning. This took me around
an hour to understand, and if, you are wondering, that is about 59 minutes and
50 seconds longer than it took a platinum pro to come to the same answer when a
friend asked them their opinion. Until the next Decision Points, may the
variance be with you.
-DJ
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