There is a very good chance that you are not Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa. Not only, chances are, do you not have his sweet name, you are not as successful a player as PV. This means that you are under no obligation to choose a deck for your next tournament in the same way that PV does.
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Monday, August 22, 2011
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
starcraft 2 and magic
Well, here's your standard apology-blogpost for not updating. I moved across the country and haven't been playing much Magic- there are a few guys here that are interested in learning, so we'll see what that brings. I'm hopeful.
Before I moved, I was playing the Starcraft 2 beta. Obviously amazing. I've been watching a bunch of videos about high-level strategy and play in it, and it's really fascinating to see all the perspectives and ideas on an entirely different competitive game, with its own jargon, metagame shifts, and general ideas.
What's really interesting to me is the lack of theory there is about the game- in video games, it's just not needed. You don't need to come up with elaborate concepts; things happen in real time, units take X time and Y resources, which are harvested at Z rate. If a player kills someone else, you can watch the replay and see exactly why. Pretty straightforward. There is one broad concept that's interesting to me for its application to Magic, though: the idea of a "timing push" ('push' basically just means an attack). The idea is to do your attacks at a timing that is either very convenient for you- such as when you're throwing down an expansion, or a key upgrade just finished as you're waltzing across the map- or extremely inconvenient for your opponent, such as when they're teching to something incredibly powerful, but either don't have it yet, or don't have them in any significant number, or when they just finished an expansion and haven't broken even on it yet.
How does this apply to Magic? When you're thinking about how matchups work, especially sideboard cards, don't just think of what your cards are doing, but when. Okay, that card is a fantastic hoser for your opponent's entire strategy... but it comes out when you're two thirds of the way to dead. Instead, you should try to fill in the gaps in your own tempo, and look for points where your opponent isn't doing that much that's very powerful, or they have to do a bunch of awkward things and can't react to what you're doing. This means you want to look for cards that come right at the moment when your opponent has to tap out for some spell that's usually safe to cast, and you want to play three-drops against decks with Cryptic Command or Thirst for Knowledge (so that they have to decide between countering it and drawing cards). Say you're playing an aggressive deck or Elf combo against scapeshift. Their two most important "timings" are turn three for Firespout (post-board, sometimes pre) and Cryptic, and usually winning on turn five. This means that you'll want to cast small guys (hopefully disruptive ones) after their turn three to put them in a maximally awkward position, and they can't stop your entire turn with Cryptic.
This is drifting toward very traditional theory, but I'll write more as I think more.
Before I moved, I was playing the Starcraft 2 beta. Obviously amazing. I've been watching a bunch of videos about high-level strategy and play in it, and it's really fascinating to see all the perspectives and ideas on an entirely different competitive game, with its own jargon, metagame shifts, and general ideas.
What's really interesting to me is the lack of theory there is about the game- in video games, it's just not needed. You don't need to come up with elaborate concepts; things happen in real time, units take X time and Y resources, which are harvested at Z rate. If a player kills someone else, you can watch the replay and see exactly why. Pretty straightforward. There is one broad concept that's interesting to me for its application to Magic, though: the idea of a "timing push" ('push' basically just means an attack). The idea is to do your attacks at a timing that is either very convenient for you- such as when you're throwing down an expansion, or a key upgrade just finished as you're waltzing across the map- or extremely inconvenient for your opponent, such as when they're teching to something incredibly powerful, but either don't have it yet, or don't have them in any significant number, or when they just finished an expansion and haven't broken even on it yet.
How does this apply to Magic? When you're thinking about how matchups work, especially sideboard cards, don't just think of what your cards are doing, but when. Okay, that card is a fantastic hoser for your opponent's entire strategy... but it comes out when you're two thirds of the way to dead. Instead, you should try to fill in the gaps in your own tempo, and look for points where your opponent isn't doing that much that's very powerful, or they have to do a bunch of awkward things and can't react to what you're doing. This means you want to look for cards that come right at the moment when your opponent has to tap out for some spell that's usually safe to cast, and you want to play three-drops against decks with Cryptic Command or Thirst for Knowledge (so that they have to decide between countering it and drawing cards). Say you're playing an aggressive deck or Elf combo against scapeshift. Their two most important "timings" are turn three for Firespout (post-board, sometimes pre) and Cryptic, and usually winning on turn five. This means that you'll want to cast small guys (hopefully disruptive ones) after their turn three to put them in a maximally awkward position, and they can't stop your entire turn with Cryptic.
This is drifting toward very traditional theory, but I'll write more as I think more.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
the 95% rule
Quick thought on general combo deck construction.
When building or tuning any combo deck, especially engine-based ones where you draw your entire library, all you need to do is make sure that when you fully combo off, whether it's with Mind's Desire, Ad Nauseam, Glimpse of Nature, or anything else, you have a 95% chance of winning the game against a random opponent. This means that you shouldn't play otherwise useless cards that get your 95% to 99% or 100% in an effort to be super sure.
Last season, GerryT wrote an article on that incarnation of Elves that included one Mirror Entity as the kill, with two Thoughtseize main, and nothing such as Grapeshot, Eternal Witness, or the like. The reasoning is that if all your creatures came into play that turn so you can't kill them with Mirror Entity, or they killed it earlier or something, you can just put your deck on the table and Thoughtseize them a couple times to get rid of any way of them possibly killing you. Sure, it's theoretically possible that they have the perfect combination of cards to kill you when you have 50 power on the table after losing the two best cards in their hand, but it's incredibly unlikely, and you'll lose more games to playing do-nothings like Grapeshot.
Sometimes, this'll lead you to realizing that you don't even need the combo at all. When people first started playing Reveillark, it was with an infinite combo that did a bunch of crazy stuff with Body Double and Mirror Entity. When the deck started getting more popular, they realized that they would get that 95% win just by having good cards in play, not through an infinite combo. It was superfluous, so it got cut.
The same applies to this season's version: some people insisted on Grapeshot just to be super-duper-sure their opponent actually died when you combo'd, instead of playing a card with relevant text outside the combo, like Primal Command. This is bad. Don't do it.
By throwing in bad one-ofs to try to go from a 95% chance of killing to 100%, you're giving in to The Fear. You'll lose more to drawing dead cards than to whatever crazy situation you think of.
When building or tuning any combo deck, especially engine-based ones where you draw your entire library, all you need to do is make sure that when you fully combo off, whether it's with Mind's Desire, Ad Nauseam, Glimpse of Nature, or anything else, you have a 95% chance of winning the game against a random opponent. This means that you shouldn't play otherwise useless cards that get your 95% to 99% or 100% in an effort to be super sure.
Last season, GerryT wrote an article on that incarnation of Elves that included one Mirror Entity as the kill, with two Thoughtseize main, and nothing such as Grapeshot, Eternal Witness, or the like. The reasoning is that if all your creatures came into play that turn so you can't kill them with Mirror Entity, or they killed it earlier or something, you can just put your deck on the table and Thoughtseize them a couple times to get rid of any way of them possibly killing you. Sure, it's theoretically possible that they have the perfect combination of cards to kill you when you have 50 power on the table after losing the two best cards in their hand, but it's incredibly unlikely, and you'll lose more games to playing do-nothings like Grapeshot.
Sometimes, this'll lead you to realizing that you don't even need the combo at all. When people first started playing Reveillark, it was with an infinite combo that did a bunch of crazy stuff with Body Double and Mirror Entity. When the deck started getting more popular, they realized that they would get that 95% win just by having good cards in play, not through an infinite combo. It was superfluous, so it got cut.
The same applies to this season's version: some people insisted on Grapeshot just to be super-duper-sure their opponent actually died when you combo'd, instead of playing a card with relevant text outside the combo, like Primal Command. This is bad. Don't do it.
By throwing in bad one-ofs to try to go from a 95% chance of killing to 100%, you're giving in to The Fear. You'll lose more to drawing dead cards than to whatever crazy situation you think of.