The biggest problem that most intelligent players run into in their attempts at becoming better and better at Magic is that they hit a plateau and have trouble figuring out why they can't get beyond it. There's any number of things that could be holding you back, but after a certain point, it is rarely the usual suspects. In the early stages of your career, mistakes are obvious in every aspect of your game; you keep hands that are terrible, you give your opponent free information by playing spells at the wrong time, you miss on-board tricks, or you just plain forget triggers all the time. While these errors are glaring, they are also fairly easy to correct if you're willing to learn, and as you get more skilled, some of them disappear entirely.
So let's fast forward. You're a fairly skilled player, better than the average, but not among a pantheon of elites. You consistently perform well in small tournaments and maybe even have a PTQ Top 8 or two to your name. You rarely miss triggers, and while you may choose a less-than-perfect line of play, you almost never pick a path that's strictly wrong. You still make mistakes and don't always play perfectly, but there's no glaring problems with your playskill. This is the plateau that most competitive players find themselves on. You have room for improvement in your in-game decisions, but you are unlikely to see massive leaps forward in your abilities like you saw when you first started. So how can you still get an edge on the competition?
Well, there's several areas of Magic outside of the game itself that affect your chances of victory. This is actually one of the most wonderful parts of Magic; the tournament is as much won a week ahead of time as it is the day of. You are rewarded for forethought and effort in addition to your raw ability to out-think your opponent. I will, in time, discuss all of these aspects of the metagame of Magic, but for now, I'm just going to cover one: Deck testing and selection.
So the big tournament is coming up in three weeks. Let's say it's a Standard PTQ for simplicity's sake. There's a new set coming out in a week, and you already know the full card list, but haven't had any chances to play any new decks in FNM's to get a feel for how good they are. But you've got your group together and plenty of proxies. Where should you start?
Well, the first thing you should consider are the known quantities, and these exist for almost every tournament, even the ones where the format is experiencing upheaval. For Alara's rotation, this was Valakut, for the release of New Phyrexia, it was Caw Blade and RUG, and more recently for Zendikar's rotation, this was the multitude of Pod lists. These three actually provide some excellent examples of the different situations you can encounter with these known decks.
During the rotation of Alara, the biggest elements in the metagame were Jund, which was on the decline, Mythic, which was completely dominating everything, and then Valakut, which along with Mono-Green Eldrazi was on the rise. With the rotation coming, it looked like Valakut lost almost nothing and even gained a few new tools, and it was probably where everyone started. And when the first tournaments like States came around, it turned out that it really was just better than everything else. This is possibility A, that the known deck from the previous format is actually still the best deck. This is one of the easiest situations to recognize, and realizing it early means you can focus in on maximizing the quality of your particular list.
When you find yourself in this situation, you should ask yourself some questions. Was this deck popular before the change? If the answer is yes, you should put a significant amount of your time into the mirror match. Any edge you can get will be crucial in your hopes of winning the day, and you are likely to be a favorite in most of the matchups where your opponent is playing a different deck. Don't waste your effort, or your sideboard slots, trying to beat decks you're already favored against, unless the matchup is complex and you are only favored if you really understand it well. The exception to this rule is the deck that really beats yours. That's a different part of metagame analysis that I'll cover later on. Also, how tuned is this deck for the new metagame? When there is a change in format, the best deck may remain on top, but it usually needs to be tweaked to respond to new threats, be they from new competitors, or simply the mirror match.
Now let's look at the release of NPH. Prior to New Phyrexia, RUG Control and Caw Blade we're clearly the dominant forces in Standard. At GP Dallas, they split the top 8, and made up 15 of the decks in the top 16, marred only by Paulo playing Boros, and let's be honest, he could play Mindcrank combo and top 16 a GP. These were the decks to play, and no one really had a good chance playing anything else. Based on our last example, it would seem like you'd be pretty safe with either of these going forward, and you'd have almost been right. Except that Wizards decided to print a certain card called Batterskull that completely cemented Caw Blade's place as the best deck. RUG Control could never compete with that clock, and it never made another serious showing. This is possibility B, that one of the best decks in the metagame gets a card, or cards, that its rivals can't compete with. This may seem fairly obvious, and in this example it was, but it's not always easy to identify when this has happened. You have to understand how the decks interact with each other and evaluate how the new pieces fit into that puzzle.
So what should you do in this situation? Provided that you have accurately ascertained that a deck has gotten such a massive upgrade that no one else can compete, you should play that deck. It seems straightforward, and it is, but a lot of people struggle in this situation. This comes up in Magic more often than we'd like to admit, where there's a deck that has become so dominant that it has forced its main competitor out. This may seem like it was the case in possibility A, but it actually wasn't. In that example, Valakut still had aggressive decks like Mono-Red to keep it from just steamrolling everything. Caw-Blade never had that (prior to bannings), and yet, even at its peak, it never saw more than about 50% tournament representation. Why? Well, some players can't afford $800 decks, but at PTQs, we can start to push that group out of the equation. The real truth is that people don't want to win with the best deck. They want to be the person who came up with a way to beat the best deck, and in testing, they have trouble letting go of that. I cannot stress this enough. When you have a deck that is clearly better than every other deck in the field and has no real predators, play that deck. Decide if your goal is to win the tournament or outsmart everyone, and make the right call.
Finally we have the situation that we just went through recently with the Zendikar rotation. This is sort of the least common of the three, in that it's fairly rare for none of the dominant decks to remain after a change. Now, Pod was still around, but Pod had never dominated. Still, it was expected to be where most people started building for the new Standard, since it lost nothing except the Twin combo and gained some new toys. But as anyone who tested extensively prior to States can tell you, Pod wasn't good enough. How does a deck go from being a competitor in one Standard and then lose nothing and be a poor choice in the new one? Put simply, the environment changed. This is why it is so important to understand the metagame when choosing your deck. At first, Red reappeared, having previously been forced out by Timely Reinforcements and the prominence of white decks. The clock the deck could force on the Pod decks, combined with the somewhat suicidal nature of Phyrexian mana spells, made for a fairly poor matchup. Oh, and then there was Wolf Run, a deck that, much like Valakut, answered an opponent tapping out with immediate death. Because the Pod decks operate purely at sorcery speed, a Wolf Run player never even needs to respect open mana, and that makes for a bad situation.
This is possiblity C, when the known quantity isn't good enough anymore, and this is probably the hardest for people to accept. I mean, if it worked before, why shouldn't it now? We get set it in our ways, used to playing a certain deck or a certain style, and we mentally skew our results to fit our idea of how good we think our deck is. If we're wrong, we might not discover it until the actual tournament, and by then it's too late. Keep track of your testing results, and get good players playing good decks to try and beat yours. If they can, don't rationalize the losses away. Sure, they beat you because they topdecked the burn spell, but the deck is designed to do it. Sure, it's just a couple of bad matchups, but how many 90-10 matchups does it take to move on to something else?
For our example, we're going to assume it's option C, where there is no clear best deck, and there's enough of a shakeup that most of the group's ideas are coming from scratch. So we need to figure out what we're playing against to decide if our ideas are good enough, but there's so much to do, where do we even start?
First, I think it's always best to start with those decks that tend to exist in every metagame. Mono-Red and White Weenie fall into these categories, as they are very proactive, and their success tends to rely more on the quality of the cards available to them than on the other decks in the meta. Next, pick out any potential combos in the available card pool. If they are more than two cards, bench them; it's hard enough to get a two-card combo together consistently and you'll almost never make a consistent deck from more than two. Then look for powerful cards that you can make into an engine for a deck. Any kind of fast mana or repeatable card draw mechanic is a good candidate for this, but it varies from format to format.
Now, with some prototypes for those decks built, start testing. Test all of the builds against each other, and make note of which cards are performing well and which ones you hate having in your hand. Now, inevitably you'll have a couple of decks that seem like they aren't competing, but that doesn't mean you should abandon it. Figure out why the deck isn't working well. If you find yourself dying too quickly to aggro, add in some early defense. If you're having trouble keeping your opponent from stabilizing with a sweeper, add in some burn to give yourself reach. I can't tell you the specific solution, as they vary wildly from deck to deck. You might throw a deck out because you can't figure out the combination of cards that fixes all of the problems, and that's okay.
So let's say you've got three, maybe four, decks among your group that are all testing fairly well. Now is the time to brew control decks. You can't really do this without some idea of what decks are good. True control decks are very reactive. They respond to threats, trade one for one, and then eventually establish themselves and win from there. Now, control is an overused and underspecified term. Caw-Blade was aggro-control, for example, and thus much easier to build in a vacuum, because of its proactive gameplan, and then later tuned to the meta. But purely reactive control decks need to be special tailored to what everyone else is playing, so add them in later.
Now, the new set just came out and they had a Star City Games Open event. Mono-Red crushed, putting 8 decks in the top 16, 4 in the top 8, and won the event. This may seem like really good news, considering you had been testing Red and it was a front-runner to be your deck for the event. But it's actually the opposite; decks like Mono-Red are very easy to hate out of a meta, and it just made its way onto everyone's radar. This is something you need to be very aware of in testing: some decks are only as good as the preparation that everyone else is making for them. I like to call this Dredge Syndrome. Dredge is a deck that lives and dies by how well your opponents prepare their sideboards to fight it. These decks are sometimes the correct choice. They have a lot of raw power, but they sacrifice stability for it. These glass cannons lose a lot of their potential in metagames that are prepared for them.
So you continue testing as you have been, trying out new cards and improving designs. Another week passes, and with it comes another Open Series event. As we expected, Mono-Red gets beaten down, both by the decks that prey on it and because of over-sideboarding by the decks that are weak to it. Control decks designed to handle its clock seem to rule the day. Except for that one deck that no one has heard of that tears its way through the Swiss and wins the whole tournament. This is a major shakeup, as we now have a deck out there that appears to beat everything and that no one seemed to expect. This is a dangerous situation in a metagame, especially when it develops just before the important event. People favor results that seem particularly vivid and compelling, even if logic doesn't support them. You watch a deck crush an event, and it becomes easy to get locked into that deck without any further thought. But you're letting someone else do your testing for you, and that's never a good way to get ahead. There's a lot to consider when a deck breaks a single tournament open, especially when no one knew it was going to be played. Does the deck do something that can be easily disrupted? Are there strong hate cards for it? Can the existing decks adjust to compete and make it a pretty good deck instead of the best one? How does this affect decks that you've written off, like Mono-Red? While it may be easy to jump on the bandwagon of the vogue deck, there's a lot of things that could make it a very poor choice. Keep a healthy perspective on everything that's going on, and don't get caught up in the hype.
You'll notice that I haven't at any point really explained how to build a deck from scratch. That isn't merely oversight. Deckbuilding is a complex thing that I could devote an article series to, and the specifics aren't really the point in this article. I'm assuming that you understand why you shouldn't run twenty lands or which cards go in which decks. If you don't, you probably don't spend a whole lot of time playtesting for PTQs, and this article is explicitly tailored to you. And that's okay. This article has some bleed over into deckbuilding; many of the ideas I've described are things to keep in mind when building a deck regardless of occasion. But what I am going to discuss in detail is constructing the right sideboard.
This is an area that some people put too little effort into and some people put too much effort into. Building the right sideboard is easiest when you recognize what it actually is: hedging your bets. A sideboard isn't a magic pile of cards that guarantees you victory, but it also shouldn't just be ignored. You simply have to understand what each card does for you. This is one realm where matchup percentages, which are usually arbitrary and distracting, provide a good visual for what your goal actually is. Let's use an example.
You're playing Mono-Red pre-Zendikar rotation, and Soul Sisters is a deck. Prior to boarding, you feel this is a really horrible matchup, maybe 10-90 in their favor. So you're looking at some sideboard options, and you realize that Leyline of Punishment does a good job of shutting them down. So you board four of them and slam your opponents, right? Not quite. Let's do a little simple math. Boarding four Leylines doesn't even guarantee one in your opening hand, and it's probably too late if you hardcast it. Let's say, optimistically, it takes your matchup up to 30-70. Now, Soul Sisters is not very well represented in the metagame. At a 7 round PTQ, you'll probably play against it once. You'll probably lose game one, statistically speaking, so you're under the gun in game two. Boarding in the Leylines increases your matchup by twenty percent, which is pretty good. That means that out of ten games, you'll win two more than you used to. But you need to rattle off two straight to win the match, and with just a thirty percent chance to win, you have only a 9% chance of winning the match. Now, without the sideboard changes, your chance of winning is a measly 1%, which means those four cards have upgraded you 8%, which is not meaningless. But consider that this is one match in the entire tournament, and that your chances of winning both post-board matches is still below 10%! Is that worth 4/15ths of your board space?
Now let's consider a different situation. You're playing against an artifact heavy deck, maybe Grand Architect, still with Mono-Red, and you figure that pre-board, the match is probably 40-60 in their favor. Now let's say that you bring in 4 Manic Vandals that really hurt them and swing the matchup to 60-40 in your favor. Again we have an increase in post-board game win percentage of 20%, but this time we go from a 16% chance of winning both games two and three to a 36% chance after adding the Vandals. And let's say hypothetically that Grand Architect represents 3 of the 7 matches you'll play in the day. That seems like a much better allocation of slots than the Leylines.
Without doing the math, let's consider a matchup that you're a heavy favorite in game one. You can board in four cards to go from 70-30 to 75-25, but is that really worth it? Based on what we've seen before, you're only getting a marginal increase, and you're also favored to win game one and thus not need to win both post-board games.
I think you're probably getting the picture I'm trying to paint here. It's not worth trying to save your really bad matchups; if there are enough of them that they warrant half your sideboard to just bring them to feasibly winnable, then you probably have the wrong deck for the tournament. And you shouldn't spend slots trying to improve matchups you're already likely to win, even if that deck is very prevalent. I've seen Soul Sisters decks with 8-10 sideboard slots devoted to Mono-Red because it's prevalent, but statistically, those cards aren't earning them wins, and that's what it's all about. Your sideboard cards are best in the middle of the field, where they can eat up large percentages and turn bad matchups into good ones. If you make a bad matchup close but still lose, you don't get points for trying, and you don't get extra points for blowing opponents out. Use your sideboard to maximize your wins, and your tournament results will improve.
There's a lot more in depth that I could go into about building and utilizing sideboards, and I'll probably cover that in my next article. But for now, I've led you up to the day of the tournament, and hopefully your metagame analysis has put you on the path to success. Until next time.
Late Disclaimer: I'm hardly flawless at math, especially probabilities, and I will be the first to admit that the calculations above may be off slightly, or even a lot. I don't think it affects the merits of my points, but feel free to correct me in the comments, as it is my desire to know the correct approach.~Kyp Maher
