Bringing in New Ideas: Keeping Your Playgroup Healthy

Ever wonder why you can see someone at PTQs regularly who plays a solid game and wins a few here and there, then next thing you know they put up a nice Pro Tour performance and they stick on the train for a few years? You always seemed to do well against them when you played them. Did they suddenly drink from the cup of infinite wisdom or sell their soul to the devil? No, they just got a few dozen matches of professional-level experience of Magic. They were forced to play at a higher level, gained a lot of confidence, and learned a lot about the game in just a few days – and they took those lessons to heart.

The thing about playing at high-level events against a diverse body of players is that everyone has a slightly different take on the game. It’s very easy to get locked into a certain way of thinking about how to play different situations that come up a lot. A good example is with Grand Prix: Seattle and Mistbind Clique. Some of the pros mentioned how people were so used to being upkeep Clique’d that they were totally unprepared for a Clique after attackers were declared. In many people’s minds, Faeries had two four-mana plays facing and aggressive draw. They upkeep Clique or beginning of combat Cryptic. These are so easy to play around it becomes mechanical, so a third option seemingly out of nowhere left them in a much worse position than the plays they were expecting.

For limited, people in different countries often have radically different valuations and strategies. Some people like the solid white-based aggro decks, some people are more than happy to force 5c every time. You attack your 2/2 into their 3/3. In your experience, your opponent takes it because they know you have the pump spell. Not this opponent. They block and force you to use it. They didn’t doubt you had it– they just felt that the tempo loss on your side of the board was worth losing a creature. Plus, now you can’t find a more advantageous time to use that spell. The more you can experience people succeeding with different strategies, the more your eyes open to the reality that there are tens if not hundreds of ways to play out the same games. If you let yourself fall into the trap of thinking that the cards play themselves out in the same way every time, then your games will all fall into the same pattern and you will have no way to win other than drawing better than your opponent.

A constant stream of knowledge is very important to the success of any playgroup’s success in the long term. Playgroups without a lot of outside influence become inbred very quickly. It’s important to find a way to bring knowledge into your group from other groups. This could just mean going to more PTQs and seeing how people in your region play, reading articles to see what the pros have to say, or going even further. You need to see new decks, new plays, and cards you are not used to seeing. If someone outside your playgroup plays a card in limited that you think is a solid 14^th pick, you should take notice. It may not be a great card, but you may be totally misevaluating a card that doesn’t fit into your preconceived notions of the format.

Someone I used to play with, Kenny Hsuing, spent a lot of time going to GPs and money drafting before he was Pro Tour caliber. He was loud, boisterous, and in general had the perfect personality for a money drafter. This was in the days of Masques and Invasion when money drafts were the big thing, where just about as much money exchanged hands as during the main event. Kenny was good for the local and PTQ level, but there was nothing that would have made him think he was ready to play the top-name pros in a 3v3 for twenty, thirty, fifty bucks or more. And he knew that. He knew that he was a major underdog in those drafts, but he also knew that the pros took their money seriously and would show him a thing or two. And they did.

A few months of this, and he was playing at a professional level. He went from Top8ing PTQs to winning them and having a few good GP and PT performances. And winning money drafts left or right. His teammates were generally pro tour regulars or semi-pros, but even they gained a lot by playing at the top tier. More than just that, they met a number of the top pros at the time and made contacts and friendships that were immensely useful when it came time to prepare for the tour.

When they came back from these events, they brought this knowledge to our local store, Egghead Games, for the constant Friday and Saturday night drafting, and the quality of the players in the store jumped dramatically. Pretty soon we went from sending a person or two to the occasional Pro Tour to regularly sending 5+ people and one of them, Alex Borteh, managed to get a few Grand Prix top8s, Top 8’d US Nationals twice and get 2^nd at Worlds.

Could they have accomplished this just by drafting the local players? Possibly. But they never would have learned how other pros drafted differently or gotten used to being punished for every mistake. There is a habit for playgroups to become too comfortable in their draft picks. It’s very easy for everyone to discount a powerful strategy or undervalue a hidden gem in the set. If nobody bothers trying the U/R Lavamancer’s Skill deck in Onslaught or the Dampen Thought strategy in Champions, then nobody in your playgroup will be ready for it if they see it in action. More importantly, they won’t be able to pick up that strategy and have the chance to beat others who haven’t figured it out yet.

Chances are that your playgroup doesn’t have someone who is on the tour to help bring in ideas from distant lands, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find them. Magic Online and improved strategy sites have to an extent removed the need to exchange draft strategy in person, and the resources for finding new decks online at sites like deckcheck.net. Someone in your group should subscribe to SCG Premium. Someone in your group should be checking for new decks on the Internet. Someone should be talking on message boards about strategy. The more people in your group look to different avenues for strategy, the more their own strategy will diverge from the group, and the more diversity of opinions you will have. The strongest groups in my experience are ones where everyone brings something different and useful to the table.

Despite it’s limitations (which I’m sure I will go into in a future article), MODO does have a very important role in the health of any playgroup. As I said before, left to their own devices, playgroups tend to become inbred. Much like Darwin’s finches, people will adapt to their surroundings and develop the skills and strategies to beat the people within their own group and lose skills and strategies that do not come up. Nobody in your group plays the typical red deck? People will end up adjusting their sideboard strategies away from beating that deck. Everyone plays it? People will end up including niche cards and become weaker against the field. Having at least a few people that do MODO, or play paper magic outside of your sphere of influence, will bring in decks and strategies that the rest of the group are unused to, and will strengthen it as a whole. While the MODO constructed queues do have a tendency to lean towards cheaper decks and it isn’t uncommon to see a few cost-related substitutions. Still, you decks that often surprise the coverage team and columnists alike are often well known to the hardcore MODO community. Decks emerge on MODO with a frightening regularity, and it’s good for any group to have someone who can keep up with it and bring the latest tech to the table.

Magic is a constantly evolving game. If you want to be playing at the professional level, or even just doing well at PTQs, you need to be willing to change with it. You need to be constantly thinking about what you are doing and why you are doing it. You need to realize that your solutions to the problems that come up are not the only ones, and there is a great deal of value in looking at things in a different way. Always be willing to learn from your opponent’s play. When you are with your playgroup, bring whatever you know to the table, be ready to share, and ready to learn.