How To Win at Magic: Part 3: Playing the Deck (or "It's All in the Timing")

Okay, so you've collected your cards, and you've built your deck, now you need to play the game. Now, it's time to win! Right? Right! That's what this is all about.

There are two basic schools of thought about winning at Magic:
1. It's the deck.
2. It's the player.
As with most extreme positions, it's a combination of the two. The best player in the world can't win with a crappy deck, and the best deck in the world isn't going to help a crappy player. But, since we've dealt with the deck building (on a very superficial level), let's deal with the crappy player. Um, I mean, let's deal with playing the game.

There are, of course, too many different deck types and styles to go into any specific detail about how to win with any particular deck, but there is one general reason why people lose with even the best decks possible. That reason is bad timing. Yeah, playing Magic is more than a little like being good at telling jokes. Jokes are all about the timing, too. But, then, so are books.

Here, let me give you an example:
There is this card:

Before this card was removed from the game, it was the most common first turn spell in the game. I'm just gonna say that there is no reason to throw a "Lightning Bolt" on the first turn of the game. That's what's called bad timing. Despite its appearance, the bolt is a very versatile card, and using it on the first turn is a waste of something that could turn out to be more useful later on.

In similar fashion, players of blue tend to be very prone to using

at their first opportunity. I don't know about you, but the first spell I play is never my best card, so you wasting a "Counterspell" on it only helps me out. What I really used to love watching in tournaments is when someone would throw a "Lightning Bolt" on his first turn, and the other player would counter it. The most amusing thing about that was that one of those players was still gonna win.

So I want to jump back to my "Mr. Suitcase" example from the last post. Specifically, I want to talk about Mr. SouthLA. He waltzed into the store sometime during the summer of '94, literally, with a briefcase full of the top cards. I'm talking, like, 20 or "Black Lotuses" and everything else that implies. He had just moved up from south Louisiana to open a law office. No, I don't actually have any idea whether he was a good lawyer or not, but I will say I would never have hired him based on his Magic skills. Or lack thereof. See, he thought that merely the fact that he owned all of these cards that rest of us could only salivate over (it actually took me a really long time to build my complete collection of Beta/Unlimited and Arabian Nights (because we never got those sets in Shreveport, and it didn't take long before they were impossible to order) made him the best player in the city.

Oh, how wrong he was.

See, he had a timing problem, and, although he could build decks that only the rest of us could dream about, he didn't know how to play them. He never really got it, either. The fact that he had all of  these amazing cards often allowed him to play through his whole hand, or pretty close to it, on his first turn. The problem was that, once he'd done that, he had nothing left to play, and everyone knew it. There was no reason to wonder what he might have in his hand or anything, because we all knew he had nothing.

Of course, he started complaining that it was the fault of his deck. So he and I did a little experiment. We switched decks. Let me make it clear, here, that my decks were mostly composed of common cards. There were a few rares here and there but, mostly, commons, and I would just beat the stuffing out of him, and he couldn't understand why. I mean, his cards were better, right? That must mean his deck was better, too? Okay, his deck was pretty good. Anyway, we switched decks, and I proceeded to kick the snot of him with his deck. Which made him mad, so we switched back. And I knocked the stuffing out of him. I'm sure you get the idea.

The point is that winning at Magic is not all in the deck. It's also in the playing of the deck. The biggest issue most people have with being effective players is patience. You can't just play through everything in your hand as you draw it. There's lots of waiting and knowing when to use specific cards.

Which is a lot like writing. It doesn't matter how good your story idea is if you don't know how to plot it out. You can't just throw everything at your reader at once and expect people to want to keep going.

A while back, I read this particular paranormal mystery book, because, for some reason, people love the series, and I figured I may as well see what was up with it. Did I say it was a mystery? Well, that's what it said, anyway. So I was reading this nearly 300 page long book, and I hit about page 85, and, bam!, there's the killer revealed right there. But I'm thinking "no way" because I'm only on page 85, and there's no way she'd just lay it right out there for us and in front of her protagonist, too. So I kept reading, and it was increasingly apparent that I'd pinpointed the killer, but I kept thinking "no way" because it couldn't be that easy, right? There must be some kind of twist that I couldn't see coming! These books were popular, so it just could not be that easy. Her protagonist could not be that dumb, right? Well, it was that easy, and her protagonist was that dumb, and I never read another one of those books. And I'm still not sure how, after reading that first book, anyone would ever continue on to read a second one. At nay rate, the author cast her "Lightning Bolt" on the first turn and, then, continued to play through everything in her hand in the same way until she had nothing left to play but 200 pages left to write. It's the holding back that keeps the readers reading, not the giving away.

Like telling a good joke, timing is everything. In Magic and in writing. Seriously, I always loved when my opponent would go first and hit me with a "Lightning Bolt" on his first turn, then, on my first turn, I'd drop a

and a

And, yet, the same people would do that same kind of thing over and over, because they could not resist playing the card just because they could play the card. That's seldom a good reason for doing anything.

Here's the thing, people don't fear an empty hand. Because I was known for holding back, for always having something ready, I was able to win games even when I had a big hand full of nothing. They'd hold back in fear of what they were scared was in my hand; all it took from me was, "Are you sure you want to do that?" That's the same kind of feeling you want your readers to have. You want them to have that tension over what might be coming, even if what's coming isn't really that bad. It's the tension that keeps the reader going, and it's the release of tension, the relief or the horror, that gives the reader enjoyment.

Contrary to the evidence I've given (with the Kird Ape deck), my favorite types of decks were the ones that were slow builds and allowed me to control the game.  As a writer, I want to control the game in the same way. Keep the player going just enough to allow them to think he had a chance and, then, slam! killing blow! I mean, keep the reader going... yeah, that's what I meant.

And some cards:

The deck I built around this card was so powerful that people forfeited to me (in tournaments) rather than play against it. I even won one because my final opponent refused to play against the deck. It was another of those decks that I made because the card was considered useless, and it's one of my favorite decks ever. I was actually banned from playing it, because so many people refused to play against it.

Land destruction was always one of my favorite deck types.

As were decks designed to do away with my opponent's library.

How To Win at Magic: Part 2a: Building the Deck

As I mentioned last time, the first thing you need to be able to win at Magic is Magic, but I guess that's really kind of obvious. Still, I felt like the point needed to be made. Basically, in a lot of ways, anything has the potential to be "the next big thing." Richard Garfield only developed Magic because he was trying to sell some other game. Rowling was just trying to make ends meet when she wrote Harry Potter. George Lucas thought Star Wars was going to be a flop because sci-fi had been out of fashion for over a decade and no one cared. Still, they all had a vision for what they wanted to achieve with their separate projects and worked to make those visions as close to reality as possible.

But, now that we have Magic, what do we do with it? [I suppose, really, some explanation as to what Magic is and how it works is probably in order, but that would be a whole other blog post and I still couldn't get all of it in, so I'm not doing that. Let's just say it's a card game (a CCG (collectible card game), as they used to be called; the first CCG, in fact) and leave it at that. If you want to know more about how it works, you can look it up.]

Building a Magic deck is a lot like writing. No, really, it is. Sure, it's nothing like writing in that there is no actual writing involved, but there is that level of construction that is very similar. You could say that the cards are like words and the colors like genres. So let's get some basics down. There are five colors of magic in Magic that each use a specific (basic) land type:

• white/plains -- life magic
• blue/islands -- mind magic
• black/swamps -- death magic
• red/mountains -- chaos magic
• green/forests -- nature magic

There are also some forms of colorless magic such as artifacts (machines) and some other stuff that was introduced after I mostly quit playing. At any rate, before you can build a deck (write a story), you have to decide what kind of deck (genre) you're going to build. Yes, you can mix colors (blend genres).

The basic building block of any deck is your land. You have to have land; it's where the power for your spells comes from, and you have to have the right mix of it to not get stuck not drawing any or drawing too much. This is rather like word balance in your story. There are some words that you just have to use, but you don't want to use the same words so much that your readers get tired of seeing it. For instance, don't start every paragraph with your characters name; that's like having too much land. The balance of your land mix is one of the most vital parts of making a deck.

Actually, this whole land mix, achieving the proper balance, could be analogous to any number of things in writing, so we'll just look at it as having your writing balanced properly for whatever it is you're doing.

I used to do a lot of helping people build decks, and the most prevalent issue was not enough land. There was this one kid that couldn't ever win a game, and I mean never, so he brought his deck to me for help (a black deck). For one thing, he played with about 80 cards (sometimes more), which was too many (but more on that in a moment), but he only had about 15 lands(swamps) in his deck. Land concentration is dependent upon the type of deck you're building, but, as an easy way of dealing with it, let's just say 1/3 of your deck needs to be land. He was playing with less that 20% land, so it was not surprising that he couldn't get any land into play and always lost. I upped his land count to about 22 and dropped his deck size to about 62, and, guess what, he won some games. However, the next time he came in, he brought his deck to me again and told me that it had "quit working" and wondered what had happened. Had he done anything to it? Only added in a few cards. So I took a look at it, and it was close to 100 cards, and he hadn't added any more land to it, so he was, basically, back down to that 20% land mix he'd had before. He was so stuck on using particular cards (devices) in his deck (writing) that he couldn't make it work. (I think this is not an uncommon problem for writers.)

Jumping back to deck size... the minimum deck size is 60 cards (except in some variations), and, generally speaking, you want to stick to something around that size. Your deck should be designed with a purpose, a selection of a few cards or card types that the deck works around with other cards to support that theme (you can think of those as your cast of characters, if you want). When you get too many cards in the deck, you can't depend upon getting to the cards you need quickly enough for the deck to do its job. There are, of course, exceptions in increasing deck size as long as what you're adding is still working toward your purpose and you continue to keep the deck balanced as you do it.

But let's say you want to break some rules. You're a writer, right? Who needs to follow rules? Oh, wait, no, we're playing Magic, so let's break some rules. One of the guys I worked with and I were discussing unique deck constructions one day, and I suggested making a landless deck. I bet even those of you that have never played Magic are thinking, "What?!?" at this point. Let me clarify: non-basic lands were okay, but many of those only give colorless power (mana), so it was going to be a stretch. So we talked it out, what specific cards would be needed, non-land sources of mana, cards that didn't require mana, that sort of thing. I helped him get a few of the cards that he needed, and he built the deck, and we tested it. He played it in the next tournament, and it was worth it for the shock value alone. People couldn't believe he had a landless deck. It was great even if he didn't win with it. Admittedly, it was a difficult deck to play, but it was a lot of fun because it was something different. So, yeah, sometimes, it's good to break with the conventions.

To recap, here are the steps to building a winning Magic deck:
1. Decide on your colors. (Choose a genre.)
2. Choose your theme. (This is like a plot.)
3. Balance!
4. Don't put in too many cards. (It clutters your plot and throws the balance off.) Likewise, put in enough to support your theme (or your plot).

And, now, we'll talk about the deck I became known for. Now, pay attention, this has all kinds of good lessons.

When we first started getting our cards, I was drawn to blue. Blue is about controlling what your opponent does, rather than simply pounding him until he's dead, and manipulating your own deck so that you can get cards faster. To put it simply. It was my first intention to focus on blue... BUT!

It was early '94 before we were really starting to get our cards, and, by that time, the first expansion, Arabian Nights, had come out. This card was in the set:

One of the guys in  the group looked at the card and said something like, "well, it's okay, but you couldn't build a deck around it," and everyone seemed to agree with him. He tossed the card on the table, and everyone dismissed it. Except me. I knew exactly how to build a deck around it, and, so, I abandoned blue as my color of choice right then and there and picked up red and green instead.

Red/green is still my color combo of choice (Not that I really ever play anymore. I probably haven't built a deck in ten years or more.). It's what I became known for playing, and it was the red/green deck I built around the Kird Ape (or variations of it) that took me to being the top ranked player in north Louisiana throughout 1994. Not that I didn't play other things, too, but red/green was my standard. And I never quit playing with the Kird Ape despite the monkey boy, ape boy, and worse nicknames.

The point here is that you shouldn't listen to what other people say can't be done. Everything is worth trying. Even building a deck with no basic lands was worth trying. Some things just take a little bit of imagination and effort. If you believe in something, don't let people tell you it won't work. Figure out how to do it. You might also just discover something you didn't know you'd like.

For fun, here are a few of the other cards from the deck:

The Taiga helped make the Kird Ape even more powerful. With an ape and this land in the initial draw, you could drop a 2/3 creature on turn one.

Once Legends came out, Blood Lust went into the deck. Potentially, you could hit your opponent for 6 damage on the second turn with this.

The Elven Riders was just for fun. It was one of my signature cards that I included in pretty much every green deck I played.

Palladia is one of my favorite cards ever. He's expensive, and, mostly, he'd just sit in my hand if I drew him; however, I never lost a single game when I got him into play.