Bonus: If you have a Stopwatch/Timer, start it now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
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“Time is on my side, yes it is ”
After reading this article, perhaps you too will feel that time is your friend, not your enemy.
Given infinite time, a group of monkeys on typewriters could compose the entire works of Shakespeare. Yet we don’t have infinite time. How could we endeavor to create such masterpieces without infinite time?
If you answered “become Shakespeare,” then you are correct! However, how the heck does this apply to Magic? I believe the answer to this question is what you all came here to read about (or to troll me, but that’s cool).
In the world of Magic, I see so many people spending forever and ever thinking about plays. I see even more spending hardly any time at all. If you shake your head and say, “not me! I spend the absolute perfect amount of time, you are crazy,” you are probably half right.
Generally, practicing more and more will increase your ability to play faster, as you will recognize patterns and be able to use previous experience to decide on a line of play. However, often you will encounter situations in which you are completely without precedent. What to do then?
Well, Patrick Chapin, in his vastly underrated book, Next Level Magic, talks about using shortcuts to simplify all of your plays. He even goes as far as to state that the player with more and better shortcuts will come out victorious. While I believe that this is a powerful method, oftentimes your shortcuts will deceive you, because you will need to make an unorthodox series of plays.
In Chess, a game is ALWAYS played with a timer of some sort; you not only have to have shortcuts, in the form of tactics and patterns ingrained in your mind to save you time, but you also must come up with an overall strategy as to how you are going to gain an advantage, and ultimately win the game.
Magic is no different in that regard. You not only must have shortcuts that help you to quickly understand the board state, and calculate what new information and options you have available, but you must also formulate a long-term plan.
Magic is hard. Given infinite time, you could probably play a perfect game of Magic, but there is not infinite time.
As an example, Mana Deprived’s CEO, KYT, is a very slow player. He deliberates about every decision, and usually comes to the right one. However, this comes at a price. Not only does he end up with a higher percentage of games drawn, a number of Slow Play Warnings (different from Stalling by intent), but he also often makes errors BECAUSE he thought so long. Let that sink in for a moment…
How does thinking longer cause you to make mistakes? Well, the human mind is a funny thing. Sometimes you focus so hard on the calculations you are making, that you envision a board state in the future that is one of the possible positions, and see that it would be good to have made a certain play for that situation.
Example: Current state: you have a [card]Destructive Force[/card] in hand, 8 lands, a tapped [card]Inferno Titan[/card] with a -1/-1 counter on it, to your opponent’s 10 life, 7 lands and 1 card. You think “What outs (answers) does my opponent have to my [card]Inferno Titan[/card]?” Then you calculate that by casting [card]Destructive Force[/card] and getting rid of 5 of your opponent’s lands, he no longer can draw [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card] or [card]Frost Titan[/card], his only answers, because he won’t have the mana to cast them. So, after thinking for awhile about possible situations, you cast the [card]Destructive Force[/card], completely missing that your own [card]Inferno Titan[/card] is going to die. Not because you are just terrible, but because you thought about future scenarios too long, and forgot about the current state of the board.
If anything like this (missing something super obvious on the board) has ever happened to you, you suffer from over-thinking. While some people might not have the above problem, they have the opposite problem: not being able to concentrate/focus that intensely.
Those players who have the opposite problem that they spend too little time thinking have more obvious problems, namely that they overlook something.
Example: You have a [card]Dark Confidant[/card] in play, and cast [card]Brainstorm[/card] at the end of your opponent’s turn, with a fetchland open into your opponent’s untapped blue mana. You put back an excess land, and [card]Emrakul, the Aeon’s Torn[/card], then fetch. Your opponent casts [card]Stifle[/card], and you take 15 on your upkeep to Dark Confidant.
If you have ever made a play like this, or made a play, and then RIGHT AFTER you made it, realized that it was completely wrong (sometimes even as you just said what you were going to do), you suffer from under-thinking.
So, you now realize you suffer from a thinking disorder. Millions of Magic players worldwide suffer from the same disease as you do! But FEAR NOT! There is a solution!
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In reality, there is no easy fix. Though as with many things, noticing that you have a problem is the first step to solving it. As someone who has been fighting my over-thinking for awhile, I try to mix over-thinking with under-thinking. That way, you calculate advanced details of a position, while still taking into consideration the obviousness of a situation. I try to make myself spend a little less time thinking than I can, so that I don’t get too absorbed in future board states, and focus on the present as well. For those of you who suffer from under-thinking, I would suggest forcing yourself to take more time than you believe necessary whenever there is a remotely complex decision.
It will take time, and you need to make sure that you don’t go overboard (now I feel that sometimes I under-think too much), but try to find the balance in the amount of time that you spend making the decisions each game. After all, if you screw up winnable games, does it matter that you have the best deck, or are a better player than your opponent?
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Bonus: stop your stopwatch/timer. How long did it take you to read this article? Please tell me in the comments. Best time (that I believe…so don’t fake it!) wins a prize TBD.
Alexander Hayne is the 2012 Pro Tour Barcelona champion. He also finished 2nd at GP Montreal in 2011.