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Just my thoughts on 'talent' in art while I do a picture in my new style. Actual paint time was 1hr but I sped it up to match the audio. Sorry if it's a litt...

This seems like it's about art, but it's actually about a lot of stuff. Including Magic. Think about the importance of copying, setting standards, and especially about the difference between practice and performance.

This is why 9/10 times when people see me playing at my shop, it looks like garbage, but then I can show up at something "more important," like a tournament, and my game looks totally different.

I used to not do this intentionally, but over the past several months I've been play-testing with a willingness to make mistakes, or playing looser, or allowing myself to fall into uncomfortable in-game situations. This is not to say I'm intentionally making mistakes, but playing at a speed and paying a level of attention to the game where they inevitably occur. The reason for this is three-fold.

One: when I practice, my focus is so far-flung from what my focus is like under pressure that acting like they're similar or trying to focus like I would in a tournament feels like a kind of false god. By making mistakes and playing loosely/instinctively, I can up my investment in a match by finding new ways to play from behind. When I'm invested, my drive to win goes up, which helps recreate a situation of pressure. In addition to being more invested, I've gotten very, very good at playing from losing positions, but more importantly...

Two: Before I show up for an event, I want to have already made as many of the mistakes I can possibly make. I've discovered that any mistake I've made and identified as a mistake is one I'm extremely unlikely to make again. I'll isolate some particular line which made me lose a game, like being able to do things other than crack fetches with a Miracle trigger on the stack (such as cast Vendillion Clique to rob them of the counterspell you know they have). Once I've isolated and extracted the core of the mistake (in this case, being able to play at instant speed during times which you're not normally accustomed to doing so), I can slow down during a real match and take this new line (or conversely, avoid this old mistake), and not lose the game on the spot.

Three: If you are practicing with a focus on experiencing new situations, even if they're losing ones, your knowledge accumulates much faster than it does if you play with the intention to win every practice game from the outset. Magic is a loser's game: it is most often decided by the player who makes the most mistakes as opposed to brilliance from the winner. (Most brilliance in Magic is simply not making a mistake that was hard to avoid, anyway.) If you can identify a plethora of ways you can lose a game of Magic, that knowledge is going to help you improve far more than doing anything else, like getting really good at exploiting your opponents' mistakes. You'll eventually get to a point where your opponents make infinitesimally few mistakes, and then where will your strategy be? Conversely, imagine being a player who knows how not to make mistakes in a meta defined by players who prey on mistakes. That would be an extremely good position to be in.

This is not to undervalue the importance of exploiting mistakes, but when you know how to not make your own, taking advantage of someone else's missteps is usually trivial.

What do y'all think?

<3

(This tourney report was shamelessly copy-pasta'd for the record, and I'm not sure how helpful it'll be to a Tumblr audience which may or may not know about ANT.)

Tournament Report:

For background, I played Ad Nauseum Tendrils, a deck which people seem surprised to learn that I'm quite comfortable with. I audible'd from Miracles because I felt unprepared to play the deck in such a deep field with higher than normal pressure with only two weeks of practice. I placed 43rd with a 6-3 record in a field of what I believe was 385.

  Round 1 v. TES: Despite being the slower deck, we managed to trade games 1 and 2. In game 3, he had a fantastic hand which was one mana short of killing me, so he made goblins instead and I was able to untap and kill him. WIN

  Round 2 v. Belcher: In the first game, I mulliganned, and did not keep a discard spell. I was quickly met by many, many Goblins. On my last turn, I topdecked Tendrils to naturally kill him at 14 life. That was pretty strong. I mulled to five in the second game, lacking a discard spell, and ate Char. In game 3, I mulled to 5 as well, keeping Echoing Truth but no discard, which was great for his goblins. A timely Duress grabbed a top-decked Belcher and I killed him. WIN

  Round 3 v. Aluren: In the first game, I Cabal Therapy'd to see the entire combo sitting in his hand, minus an Aluren: I was evidently the first player he'd met to know what he was trying to accomplish. I took his Recruiter, and then an Aluren, and killed him there-after. In game 2 he had a Wasteland DRS/DRS hand, and I couldn't cobble my combo together as I ripped away Force and Swan Song. I died to Cavern Harpy and Parasitic Strix making sweet love to my life total. In game 3, he mulliganed to 5, and got annihilated promptly. WIN

  Round 4 v. MUD (As piloted by Ali Aintrazi): In game 1, he lands a Chalice on 1 on the first turn. I go off immediately on my turn, but severely mess up my Ad Nauseum, forgetting that Infernal Tutor really needs an LED to kill someone. I could've kept going and potentially found the kill, but I was two LEDs down and my odds of success, even if I'd made the right play, were low. In the second game, I Cabal Therapy'd for Chalice on the idea that it was the worst thing he was most likely to do to me Turn 1, and missed, seeing Trinisphere. I got Wasteland'd the next turn, and had to Ponder to a find a land for a discard spell on top of my library. He topdecked the Grim Monolith and slammed Trinisphere into play, and I loss promptly after. LOSS (Ali placed 12th).

  Round 5 v. Dredge: I don't remember winning game 1, but I think he scooped it up pretty quickly. In game 2, he mulled to 4, and miraculously topdecked Cabal Therapy into Surgical Extraction on Infernal Tutor to make my next turn win, or any win, impossible. In game 3, he mulls to 5 again, and I keep an extremely greedy Infernal Tutor/Surgical Extraction hand. I extract his Troll in response to a Breakthrough, and we both totally miss that he never drew his cards for Breakthrough as we got caught up doing Surgical Extraction antics, and I went on to win the match. WIN

  Round 6 v. Sneak and Show: I manage to kill him in game 1 by ripping away two Forces and playing around a Daze. Ezpz. I played around a Blood Moon he brought in Game 2, but instead of trying to lock me out of my mana, he did the thing where he puts Griselbrand into play, finds Emrakul, and I die. In game 3, I rip a Sneak Attack from a Griselbrand, Emrakul, 2x Lotus Petal, Sneak Attack hand, and he immediately draws Ponder, finds another Sneak Attack, and I die before I can win. It was really frustrating to take that loss in the manner. LOSS

  Round 7 v. Esper? Stoneblade: Game 1 was uneventful, as he kept a hand good against creatures and I robbed him of his counterspell. His game 2 hand was nigh unbeatable, with 2 Snap, 1 Flusterstorm, 1 Counterspell, and a Force being encountered. In game 3 I ripped his hand, which was quite soft to disruption, to shreds, and then combo'd out. WIN

  Round 8 v. UWR Delver: Despite this being a rough matchup, my opponent had really poor hands and played extremely suboptimally game 1'd, tapping out and also not Wastelanding me ASAP. He could've pushed himself to an absurd 29 life by Swording his own creature, but I managed to hit 13 storm just barely and kill him through his misplay. In game 2 he mulled to 6 after I made some comments which turned out to be in poor taste about him having Batterskull in every hand. His 6 card hand had Wasteland, Force, and Spell Pierce, which I promptly tore away and then killed him. WIN

  Round 9 v. Storm: I'd like to say this matchup was close, but it's about as lopsided as the mirror can get. He killed me on turn 2 in the first game after an amazing Brainstorm into 2 LED on the play, after using his turn one to Gitaxian Probe into Cabal Therapy, ripping 3 (THREE) Infernal Tutors from my hand. In game 2, I failed to bring in Confidants, but my objective was to kill him faster, which turned out to be misguided as my Probe revealed 2 Duress, 2 Ponder, 1 Cabal Therapy. I ripped away Therapy with Therapy, but my own Ponder was taken, stranding me with Tendrils, Ad Nauseum, Infernal Tutor, and a ritual. My hand was further picked apart, and my opponent hit solid cards with the one Ponder I let him cast before taking the otherm finding multiple LEDs, which I thankfully snagged with a Cabal Therapy, but more importantly 2 Dark Confidants + 1 which was Infernal'd for. I had a chance to dome my opponent for 12 naturally, but I opted to wait, which was clearly wrong as my opponent knew about one of my LEDs and had a Cabal Therapy waiting to be flashed back in the yard. While trying to find the Past in Flames after hitting him for less than lethal was a slim out, it was probably worth a shot. Sadly, he found a Cabal Therapy on his draw after two Bob triggers, and the therapy in the yard was irrelevant as I died to Bob-induced beatdown into Tendrils. LOSS (My opponent got 16th.)

  All in all, finishing 6-3 feels kind of like an average result, which is not to say that I didn't run quite hot, or that my matchups (78% combo) weren't a little strange, or even that I played well (when I only played mediocre with very little inspired play). What I really mean is that in another universe, I go on to achieve top 16, or perhaps top 8, which would have been a really satisfying experience, whereas top 50 feels like a consolation prize. I didn't earn either spot, obviously, but the goals feel so achievable it's a little bit of a let-down to not achieve them, even when I made the mistakes which inhibited me from succeeding. If you have questions about my list, it's exactly Erik Rill's from about a month ago, and if you have any questions about the games or deck, I'll do my best to answer them.

With spoilers for Born of the Gods a third done, there's one thing on many Standard players minds right now.

Why did Mono-Black Devotion need a better Infest?

Drown in Sorrow is Infest+Scry, and single-handedly hands Mono-Black a powerful tool for negotiating the aggressive match-ups which previously had the capacity to overwhelm Mono-Black: Red Deck Wins and White Weenie, I'm looking at you.

And don't forget about Bile Blight? An answer to Pack Rat... for Mono-Black players? That's all well and good, but that's talking about the mirror match! If you ask me, it seemed a lot like the other decks needed a way to beat Pack Rat.

Bile Blight is going to really shine as a way of reliably letting Mono-Black kill Mono-Blue's Nightveil Specters, which are easily some of the most important cards in the matchup with their high contribution to Devotion and their powerful card advantage-generating ability. While Doom Blade is going to be necessary as a sideboard card once more to fight the newer, stronger R/G Monsters decks which can lean on Xenagos the God for incredible late-game finishing power against Control and less-aggressive decks, Bile Blight equips Mono-Black with a main-deck removal spell which is more open-ended than Pharika's Cure, Doom Blade, or Ultimate Price, and enables Mono-Black's game 1 to be even more effective.

One card I'm having difficulty evaluating is Pain Seer. This is not Dark Confidant; but that's sort of implicit, no? How often am I going to be attacking with a 2/2 in a meta which, at FNM, is full of 2/1s and aggressive, inexpensive decks? How often am I going to be able to swing with this if my opponent has a Pack Rat in play? What about a Nightveil Specter? Master of Waves? Azorius Charm wouldn't be so hot against Dark Confidant, but it seems back-breaking against Pain Seer. His mana cost is 1B, which makes this at little easier because at BB the argument to play him in Mono-Black is at least moderately more compelling.

I don't think Mono-Black wants him. With Grey Merchant and Desecration Demon at a playset in all lists, the only one who will be seeing the pain is the Mono-Black player. The question, then, is: if Mono-Black can't profit from him, will other decks try to find ways to enable Inspired or make attacking with him profitable? BW Aggro, has been skirting around the edges of the limelight for a while, utilizing the underrated power of Xathrid Necromancer and Spear of Heliod could make attacking with Pain Seer easier. Or maybe Springleaf Drum is the enabler the Johnnies are looking for, and being able to tap him without attacking will be worth the investment within the deck for cards to help make Pain Seer function? I'm honestly not sure. If you have a Pain Seer decklist, message me the list, and I'll write something analyzing it.

I know the spoilers aren't completely out yet, but here is a preliminary look at what Mono-Black might look like post-Born of the Gods.

Mono-Black Devotion (Post-Born of the Gods)

Creatures (16)

4 Desecration Demon

4 Gray Merchant of Asphodel

4 Nightveil Specter

4 Pack Rat

Lands (26)

18 Swamp

4 Mutavault

4 Temple of Deceit

Spells (18)

4 Underworld Connections

3 Devour Flesh

1 Drown in Sorrow

4 Hero's Downfall

2 Bile Blight

4 Thoughtseize

Sideboard

2 Lifebane Zombie

2 Dark Betrayal

3 Doom Blade

2 Erebos, God of the Dead

4 Duress

2 Drown in Sorrow

The numbers, I feel, are fairly self-explanatory. Nothing has made us want to shift our core of creatures, and what really needed to shift was our removal suite and our sideboard. A single Devour Flesh was cut for 1 main-board Drown in Sorrow. This may be incorrect, and the number may be higher if we expect a more aggressive meta-game, but being able to dispose of Devour Flesh in exchange for additional Drown in Sorrows and a Doom Blade appears to be a better shift than attempting the reverse. Bile Blight was a one-for-one replacement with Pharika's Cure. The lifegain, while not irrelevant, is nowhere near as significant as taking out three toughness creatures and giving us an instant-speed combat trick.

The sideboard has shifted in accordance with our ability to better cope with Mono-Blue in the mainboard, and in anticipation of a Monster and aggressive-heavy meta on the strength of the new RG and mono-white cards. With Doom Blade to shoot down anything a RG deck will throw in our faces, and Drown in Sorrow and Lifebane Zombie for aggressive white decks, we seem to have all the tools we need to deal with new contenders. Our post-board matchup against mono-black is still shored up by Erebos and Dark Betrayal, while we still have all of our control hate present with Duress and the Black God.

All and all, post-Born of the Gods is looking like a great time to continue playing Mono-Black. Have thoughts on the decklists, or ideas about Pain Seer or other spoiled cards? Send me decklists and I'll write about them.

I want to get back into the habit of writing for y'all, so this article is going to be a little shorter than most, despite being about a topic which I think it extremely deep and relevant.

I was watching the finals of GP Prague yesterday, in a match between American Geist and UR Tempo-Twin.

Their deck lists can be found here: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/gppra14/welcome#1

The vods for the finals are nowhere to be found, but the coverage is here: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/gppra14/welcome#6

In game 3 of their set, the Twin player, Kachapow, has a Vendilion Clique in play, staring down Horvat's Restoration Angel. Both players are stuck on 4 lands, but two of Kachapow's are Tectonic Edges. Kachapow opts to attack Horvat's mana base, cracking both Edges with the first's ability on the stack to rob Horvat of two of his lands. Horvat proceeds to Lightning Bolt Kachapow's Clique, and the game ends a couple turns later as Restoration Angel's 3/4 body crashes in again and again, before the game is finally ended in the favor of the Geist player.

A friend and I were talking about the Tectonic Edge play, and how when you're behind on board, (Clique isn't going to trade 1-for-1 with Restoration Angel), blowing up your own lands is an extremely risky play.  If the Geist player presents a removal spell off a new-found red mana source, your Clique (and thus your hopes of blocking and killing Restoration Angel with the help of a Bolt, a Grim Lavamancer, or an Electrolyze) evaporate. The play is defensible, if extremely risky, though Kachapow had complete knowledge of Horvat's hand from his Clique. If he deprives Kachapow of his red mana sources, he blanks the known Lightning Bolt and can guarantee (except for if a red mana source is drawn) that the Angel can't attack into the Clique without extreme risk.

The game state was complicated, and if you can find the video coverage, check it out. What I ended up thinking about, however, was that no matter how Kachapow sliced it, he probably had to 2-for-1 himself to kill the Restoration Angel. My friend objected immediately to that idea, stating that an Electrolyze combined with any other 2-3 damage card keeps the card advantage neutral, because Electrolyze draws you a card. That was when I started to think about other kinds of 2-for-1s, and in this case, the big problem is that Kachapow, in order to kill the Angel, would have to Mana 2-for-1 himself in addition to possibly 2-for-1ing himself in the traditional sense of card advantage, in order to overcome the Angel. Keep this in mind as I go on a long-ass tangent.

Game 2 (I didn't see Game 1, though the written coverage shows that it was fairly irrelevant to the point) was won and lost on mana and resource denial. Twin was constantly attacking Geist's manabase, and quickly gained a more pro-active position in the matchup, which is exactly what both of these decks ideally wanted to accomplish. Twin wants to disrupt mana and field development until it can randomly win the game. Geist wants to play a Geist and defend it until it wins the game. Both of these game plans are characterized by the term Tempo.

Tempo is a lot of things. Tempo is part mana-advantage. Tempo is part time-advantage. Tempo is part controlling the things that matter.

If you use your mana in an efficient manner each turn, by not letting any of it go to waste, you are generating a mana-advantage over an opponent who does not, because each turn they don't tap an available land for mana and utilize it, that turn's mana disappears forever.

Time-advantage is crucially tied to mana-advantage, and some theorists say it's the same thing. You're creating a time-advantage when you do something and your opponent isn't. If you play a creature, and your opponent plays a land, and you each do that for four turns, you've probably won the game. You're taking advantage of speed, or time, to start winning the game, presumably over an opponent who is not enacting their winning game plan as quickly.

If those first two points sound like an aggressive deck's winning mechanisms, ding, a prize for you! It's the third which creates the unique deck that is Tempo.

Controlling the things that matter is a tricky business. Decks tend to do it differently. Twin only cares about cards which impede their combo or directly result in it losing the game due to life loss. Twin is very concerned about beating cards like Path to Exile and Abrupt Decay while it is attempting to put a Splinter Twin on a Pestermite. A card like Batterskull, on the other hand, tends not to phase them until they're at just four life, because the life gain their opponents gain is irrelevant in the face of infinite damage. A deck like American Geist is far less bothered by a card like Abrupt Decay, which can't deal with Celestial Colonnade or Geist of Saint Traft or Restoration Angel. The things which matter to the Geist player are the things which kill their singular threats, such as an instant-speed Pestermite to block Geist of Saint Traft, or Tectonic Edge to deprive them of their ability to cast or protect their threats with expensive spells like Cryptic Command. Batterskull is a huge problem for a deck which likes to attack on the ground with Geist or in increments of less than 4 with Vendillion Clique, Restoration Angel, and Colonnade. Both decks must control the things which try to stop their game plan.

Having outlined the basics of tempo, when two tempo decks collide, if both players attempt to stick to their tempo-based strategy, the player who is the most mana-efficient, the most time-efficient, and controls the most important things is going to win. Card advantage, which normally stands as a counter to Tempo-like game plans, doesn't figure into the equation.

Restoration Angel became a problem the Twin player cared about when he decided to use both of his Tectonic Edges on the Geist player while he was staring down the Angel. By setting both himself and his opponent back to the Mana Stone Ages, the Twin player made the choice to deny both players the ability to do mana-inefficient or expensive plays. He did this while losing the war of time-efficiency: Restoration Angel is far more likely to survive, by nature of its four toughness, than Vendilion Clique with just one toughness, and thus continue to pressure his opponent's life total. What Kachapow discovered, much to his horror, was that while his opponent could deal with his threat in an extremely efficient way, he had no tools of his own that could do the same to Restoration Angel. He was going to need two cards, but more importantly, two cards worth of mana, to beat the Angel, and by depriving himself of the mana he needed, he lost control of the things that mattered in the game. Something which wouldn't have normally been a big deal, like a Restoration Angel, became a game-ending threat because Kachapow could no longer mitigate its effect OR win the game, because the Splinter Twin combo requires 7 mana over 2 turns.

He needed to be able to make a mana and card-inefficient play in order to keep the game at parity and kill Restoration Angel, but loss sight of that reality because he mis-evaluated the things that mattered, fixating on the same land-domination that worked so well for him in game 2. Without a clear view of what he really needed to control, he lost his ability to control anything, a problem which his opponent exacerbated by a follow-up Tectonic Edge on the Twin player's constrained red sources as Restoration Angel rained down destruction. 

What I don't want to do is villainize or attack Kachapow, though, because while he almost certainly made a mistake, he understood his alternatives could conceivably be quite rough. With no combo pieces at his disposal, Restoration Angel would be something which would demand him to make plays that could put him intensely far behind in terms of cards, mana, and time, and thus swing him into a position that would let his opponent have a potentially game-dominating grip of the things that mattered: his life total, which spells get to resolve, and when his mana is tapped and untapped.

Maybe Kachapow saw what lay down at the end of the road that started with a mana 2-for-1, where an Electrolyze and a Lightning Bolt on his own turn against a tapped-out opponent slowly but surely turns into a total loss of control of the game, and the top of Horvat's not revealing a land was an ultimately better line?

Hey all! I know it's been something ridiculous like over half a year since I last posted, but I'm interested in writing this again, so I'll try to have some content for y'all out in the next few days.

In the meantime, enjoy the map of Modern in the link above!

For those who've been wondering what I'm playing in Standard right now, I have Mono-Blue and Mono-Black devotion totally assembled. My love for Sphinx's Revelation decks has fallen dramatically by the wayside in light of their shift away from pro-active wincons and the resurgence of the evil Andrew Cuneo-style Elixir of Immortality lists.

In Modern, I've finally succeeded in assembling the entirety of Jund, which I intend to pilot at the Grand Prix in Richmond, come March. I'll be doing periodic updates on matchups involving the deck and about Modern theory in general, because the format is so deep and vibrant that I actually can't get enough of it.

Expect articles about all three decks some time in the near future.

"What about decks without good, proactive plans? The much-loved Mono-Black Control archetype jumps to mind. Mono-Black Control was a powerful deck during the era of Torment when it had access to cards like Mind Sludge, Nantuko Shade, Cabal Coffers, and Skeletal Scrying. I played Mono-Black Control in that Block format, and my deck had an exceptionally powerful game plan of using Mind Sludge to tear my opponent's hand apart followed up by using the mana generated with Cabal Coffers to chain Diabolic Tutors with Mirari and bury my opponent under card advantage and card selection.

That's why Mono-Black Control was good then—it had a cohesive, powerful, and, most importantly, proactive game plan that was good no matter what the opponent was doing. A deck full of Mutilates and other removal may seem like a good idea in a creature-heavy metagame, but how does its plan hold up when it plays against anything else? What is its plan, even? Mike Flores touts the "Destroy All Monsters" school of thought, but that's not a realistic plan in anything but the most tightly defined fields. Your deck needs to be working toward something rather than just answering what your opponent does.

I was toying with Mono-Black Control toward the end of the last Standard block, using a plethora of removal and discard to try to keep myself alive and eventually win with something like Sorin or Griselbrand, but I frequently lost games that seemed under my control simply because my deck didn't do anything. Too many of the cards I drew were entirely reactive in nature, and many of them could line up poorly with my opponent's threats. My "plan" boiled down to trying to survive until I could play Griselbrand, which wasn't consistent or realistic enough. A far cry from the days of Mind Sludge and Cabal Coffers. Compare this to a more recent incarnation of Mono-Black Control, the deck played by Conley Woods to a Top 16 finish at Pro Tour Gatecrash. While I'm not sure if the deck is actually any good, he had a much more proactive plan. Instead of focusing on using all of his cards to answer what his opponents played, he planned on using Crypt Ghast to power out huge threats early like Griselbrand and Rakdos's Return. His plan relied on a very fragile 2/2 creature for four, so it may not be stable enough to work in the long run, but at least he had a vision in his head of what he wanted his deck to do and built toward that." -Brian Kibler, from a recent Premium article, linked here: http://www.starcitygames.com/article/25833_The-Number-One-Rule.html

Kibler is brilliant, and the rest of the article has made its way into my library of resources. As usual, I can't espouse enough the value of Premium, blahblahblahfanboying.

That being said, he makes a truly phenomenal point succinctly here. I myself have struggled with the Mike Flores School of Monster-Slaying. It feels like it should work; it just does: but it doesn't. Kill All Monsters is a naive plan in a complex metagame, and the reason for this is it's not a proactive gameplan, and it doesn't have the resources to become proactive. Kill All Monsters doesn't have a goal in life: it just sort of rolls with the punchs until it dies or until it wins. And that's not good enough, most of the time.