Has this ever happened to you?

It’s Monday night, there’s a PTQ on Saturday and you have a vague idea of what you want to play. The format is pretty wide open so you pick a deck you’re comfortable with and you get ready to test like a beast. After over 30-40 logged hours on nights where you probably should have been doing homework or spending time with your friends, you feel like you’ve tested enough and that your deck has a really solid matchup against the majority of the field. As your friends are making last-minute deck choices after one measly night of testing, your hours of grueling preparation allow you to sit cozy and get some extra sleep on the Friday before the PTQ.

After a long sleep, filled with dreams of flying blue envelopes, you wake up just in time to take a long shower and get your head in the game. You eat your bowl of Lucky Charms (because you’re a big boy like that), put on your lucky article of clothing and head down to the venue to sling some spells, crush some dreams and win the PTQ all while maintaining your cool. After all, you’ve tested more than anyone else in the room and you can beat most of the top decks as long as you play tight.

Two rounds, two signatures and a checkmark later, you’ve successfully dropped from the tournament after losing to two matchups that you thought were a walk in the park. Baffled, you have no clue how you lost and claim your opponent drew the nuts against you because they had an out to give them the win. You try to figure out if there was any way you could have possibly won, but instantly disregard the possibility of making an error – you tested too much to miss any detail. Disgruntled and discouraged, you leave the venue and go home to watch an episode of Firefly with a bowl of pity ice cream. How sad…

Most Magic players have gone through days that occur exactly like that. Unfortunately, days like these can very easily cause people to go on life-tilt and consider quitting or taking an extended break in order to forget about their miserable performance. These players will generally claim that they were on the wrong side of variance, this game does not benefit tight play enough and that even though they tested like beasts they still had a dismal finish. While the first and second statements are stupid, childish, benign and can only truly be corrected by an adjustment in the way one thinks about the game, the third statement is easily correctable. If you ask most of these players how they tested, they will tell you that they stayed up all night grinding on MTGO or the two free counterparts, Cockatrice and Magic Workstation.

When you log onto MTGO to test for a tournament, you are joining games where you are playing against unknown opponents. By playing with any Tom, Dick or Jane who is on MTGO, you may be hindering the validity of your testing. Some argue that all testing is good testing, but after having heated discussions with both Alexander Hayne and Phil Samms, two of the top Magic players in Canada, they managed to convince me that one must examine the type of testing that they are doing.
“I wouldn’t say testing with weaker players makes you worse as long as you have a strong discipline and inner sense of direction in terms of Magic; you have to know intrinsically what is right or wrong, and what goal you are working towards. Most people don’t tend to have that kind of self-discipline.” Hayne continued to explain that guidance from more experienced players can help less experienced players obtain that kind of self-discipline.

On the same page as Hayne, “Psamms” explained: “I don’t think you should be playing bad players for ‘testing’ .”

By testing with partners of questionable skill level, you are assuming that the random players you are playing are playing optimally and are a good representation of how a given matchup should play out. Unfortunately, assuming that the majority of Magic players are good is a horrid lie. As Gerry Thompson once boldly and correctly stated: most Magic players are bad and only win because other people are worse than them. It is almost certain that the majority of the people you are testing with online are not the people you want to play against in order to receive the optimal results. Why hurt your own performance at tournaments by letting worse players skew your results?

Although many of us are culprits of testing with lesser players, a lot of players resort to this due to time constraints. An argument can be made that if there is no opportunity to test with people you know, playing for the sake of understanding the matchup is reasonable. However as Psamms explains, maybe this thought process is flawed: ” Realistically I don’t think the amount of games you need to test to actually truly ‘understand’ a matchup is a number that you will find two people willing to play. Given a reasonable set of time, that’s why most people use shortcuts and refer to previous matchups in previous formats.”

So if you aren’t prepared for a tournament and there’s no one to test with, what do you do? While playing actual games against good players is definitely ideal, there are definitely alternatives that can prove to be more useful than testing against weaker players. If possible, find footage of your deck in action (most likely StarCity Games events as they provide good coverage) and watch how the games play out.

Another method to prepare for a tournament without playing any games would be to find a deck that was played in the past that you know how to play and compare it to the deck you plan on playing. If one were to examine a Valakut list from the pre-Innistrad era and a Wolf Run Ramp list from our current Standard metagame, they would come to the conclusion that these decks play out in similar ways. These are two decks that run off of ramp spells to play a large six-drop (hopefully a [card]Primeval Titan[/card]) and search for lands that can win you the game ([card]Valakut, The Molten Pinnacle[/card] or [card]Kessig Wolf Run[/card]/[card]Inkmoth Nexus[/card]). These two decks have almost identical gameplans: you ramp into a fatty and win the game. These decks also suffer from similar problems of awkward draws and a vulnerability to faster aggro strategies. Chances are pretty good that if you played Valakut in the past and played it well or only piloted Valakut if your name is Psamms, you can play Wolf Run Ramp optimally.

Subsequently, mono red aggro has played out the same way for the last few years which will allow people to play this deck with little to no testing. Even as new control decks emerge, they all pretty much try to do the same things: counter spells, play a broken card that is difficult to deal with  and protect it and eventually win the game. By understanding how old decks work, less work is required to move forward and understand newer decks.

Now that you’ve all disconnected from MTGO and got off “The Cock”, it’s time to see who is this week’s………………….

CANADIAN MAGIC PLAYER OF THE WEEK

Since my two week absence from Exact 75, there have been some recognizable Champs winners: former Mana Deprived writer, Doug Potter, won Provincials in Alberta while current writer Justin Richardson succeeded in breaking out of his Magic life tilt to win Quebec Provincials. Either of these candidates would be worthy winners of the CMPotW.

However, while winning is obviously important in this game, making a class act to help a friend is definitely more important; that’s why Joey Smith is the winner of this week’s Canadian Magic Player of the Week. At the end of 7 rounds in Quebec Provincials, Joey Smith was locked into the top 8 with his good friend Justin Richardson finishing 9th. Seeing how much his friend wanted to be back to back champ, Joey dropped from the top 8 so that Justin could play to defend his title (which he did). I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an act and I doubt I will for a very long time – that’s what makes this so impressive. Congrats Joey, you deserve it!

Until next time, stay off MTGO or Cockatrice unless you know who you’re testing with. Maybe spend that extra time writing comments below?

Cheers,
Jake “Kid Hyper” Meszaros