The Grinding Station

So what will I be running from next week (assuming I've begged and borrowed a few of the new temples)? Well, I'm looking at updating my old best pal, Monoblack Devotion. I've loved this deck since Owen Turtenwald introduced the world to the might of the Pack Rat, and have run it solidly since around that time. It's grindy, presents a huge range of decisions, packs some vastly powerful cards and wins a lot. My kind of deck.

There have, of course, been several attempts to tweak the deck by adding colours already. In fact, every possible second colour has been tried at the top level - BW for Blood Baron, BR for Rakdos's Return (that second 's' really gets my goat, by the way) and BU for Notion Thief. All of these have upsides but whenever I've tried them it just felt like playing a watered-down version of the original, tried and true, ever-reliable mono version. You add powerful cards, but make your mana far worse and sacrifice some parts of an engine that's already the best in the format. The only colour combination that hadn't been given a run-out was BG, simply because we didn't have the Temple yet. That's the direction I'm taking - I honestly believe the humble forest has what it takes to crank black up a gear.

As I see it, there are two roads to go down. One is to take the current deck, add the BG dual lands, throw in Abrupt Decay and Reaper of the Wilds (a card whose time I feel is about to come, and which I suspect is far better than Desecration Demon), and call the job a good'un. I wouldn't blame anyone for that, but I have reservations. Having only eight sources of green makes finding your mana for the green cards on time problematic, and that gets even worse when the cards are being run lower down the curve (like Abrupt Decay). You can add Golgari Guildgates, sure, but then you have a heck of a lot of lands hitting the field sideways, and I do not love that idea. Before I went over to the dark side, I ran a Joel Larsson-inspired version of Blue Devotion which splashed black for Thoughtseize and removal. The deck was strong but the mana bit me one too many times for me to be happy with it - it's a lesson I learned and a mistake I won't repeat. So I'm looking at dropping the devotion aspect of black entirely and going to a straight split between the two colours. Ladies and gents, allow me to present BG Rock...

25 LANDS

4 Forest

4 Mutavault

4 Overgrown Tomb

9 Swamp

4 Temple of Malady

14 CREATURES

4 Courser of Kruphix

4 Pack Rat

4 Reaper of the Wilds

2 Scavenging Ooze

21 SPELLS

4 Abrupt Decay

2 Bile Blight

3 Devour Flesh

4 Hero's Downfall

1 Golgari Charm

4 Thoughtseize

3 Underworld Connections

This is something approaching my ideal deck, and I suspect I'll be having a lengthy and possibly slightly disturbing love affair with this particular pile of cardboard. I'll be sad to part with Gary, at least for a while, and it's certainly true that nothing in this deck hits the battlefield as hard as a big Gray Merchant, but that card can be unwieldy at five mana - for every time it hits and wins on the spot, there's a time when it gets stuck in your hand, or comes down for just 2 after a Supreme Verdict and looks a bit sorry for itself. Every spell in this deck will almost always do something. There are very few times when your cards will be low impact. Adding Courser alongside Underworld Connections gives us the card advantage required to take over long games, ably assisted by Reaper of the Wilds. Untap with that guy and he probably never goes away - and all those scry triggers will add up in a deck which packs a ton of removal. We also get some of the best sideboard options currently available to any decks - Lifebane Zombie, Duress, Doom Blade, Mistcutter Hydra and so on. Early testing of this build have shown it to be powerful and hugely consistent. The numbers of certain cards will no doubt need tweaking as the new meta shapes up, and some cards may need to go entirely if the meta swings a certain way (Pack Rat, I love you dearly my whiskery little friend, but if half my opponents start playing Detention Sphere you're out, understand?), but for now I can't wait to get this thing sleeved up. Now, if anyone can find me a couple more Temple of Maladies, that would be great.

Of course, it may well be that old-fashioned devotion is just the better deck - and I won't be trading away my Nightveils any time soon, just in case. Should the BG experiment fail, I'll cheerfully fall back into the waiting arms of Gary and his mates and say no more about it. That said, I wanted to brew up an alternative, and in the spirit of my last article where I wondered whether I should try and branch out in terms of the style of decks I play, I've come up with a brand new Naya Aggro deck, made possible by the printing of Mana Confluence, surely the most important new card in the set. It's much more likely that this brew is wide of the mark, because this isn't the kind of deck I know my way around - but I want to learn the ways of the beatdown, and so once I've got my Rock deck up and running, I'm interested in building this and giving it a spin. Anyway, deep breath, this is the first aggro deck I've ever designed...

22 LANDS

4 Mana Confluence

5 Mountain

2 Mutavault

4 Sacred Foundry

4 Stomping Ground

2 Temple of Abandon

1 Temple of Triumph

29 CREATURES

4 Burning-Tree Emissary

4 Firedrinker Satyr

4 Firefist Striker

4 Gore-House Chainwalker

4 Ghor-Clan Rampager

4 Prophetic Flamespeaker

4 Rakdos Cackler

1 Rubblebelt Maaka

9 SPELLS

4 Boros Charm

4 Lightning Strike

1 Madcap Skills

Most of this list is reasonably straight-forward - you play a bunch of cheap creatures, protect them with Boros Charm, and use the hugely powerful new boy Prophetic Flamespeaker either to overwhelm the opponent with card advantage or deal massive chunks of damage with Ghor-Clan Rampager. It's so un-me it hurts, but I do also believe that this could be the real deal. It gets damage on the board very fast, and with Flamespeaker and Boros Charm it has genuine resilience and a plan for when the game goes past turn four or five. It certainly seems worth giving a crack, and looks more potent to me than the monoblack aggro lists that people are discussing (sure, Master of the Feasts and Gnarled Scarhide are good - but the existing shell they'll be crowbarred into seems much weaker overall).

You see, like most players, I have strong preferences for the types of decks I like to run. I play attrition decks. Black for preference, blue when Thoughtseize isn't in the format. Control, rock, tempo, whatever, I'll run it. You'll rarely see me sleeve up midrange or aggro, less still combo. I just don't feel the love for those decks. But is that an attitude that will work when I come up against the pros? It's done OK for me at FNM, but whilst the standard at Dark Sphere is pretty decent, nobody there is in the Hall of Fame - some of my opponents in August might just be.

The constructed portion of Pro Tour M15 will be Standard. With Journey into Nyx only just starting to be revealed and M15 a completely unknown quantity, there's little point in speculating which decks will be tier 1 at the time. But assuming that there's a fairly even spread of playable decks between the "classic" archetypes once we get the new Core Set, should I be looking to build another Thoughtseize deck? Another Sphinx's Revelation deck? Or should I cast my net a little wider, and be prepared to play whatever I feel the best deck is, regardless of whether it fits into my comfort zone or not?

It may seem obvious - surely if my testing shows me that RDW is the best deck going, I should run it. But I have a lack of experience with aggro. I'm not a Cox or a Sullivan, or even a Wescoe. Those players play their aggressive decks tournament after tournament, and produce results even when the meta suggests they shouldn't. I'm just not used to thinking down the lines of a deck which packs a playset of Rakdos Cacklers. The consequence is, presumably, an increased chance of me making suboptimal plays. I believe, actually quite firmly, in the power of "instinct". When I play monoblack in Standard, I feel I'm more likely to make the correct decision in a close spot - I've played that and similar decks plenty of times before and even if the precise situation I find myself in hasn't come up before, I've seen similar spots so many times that I will likely have a subconscious reaction that will prove to be correct a good percentage of the time. I noticed this when I played online poker - I would often simply "know" a player was bluffing, even with zero solid information, simply because his thinking time, bet amounts and play pattern flipped a switch in my hindbrain marked "I've Seen This Before". I'd have had a tough time telling you why I knew it was a bluff, but somehow all those imperceptible signals registered and I just got it. I think Magic works on similar lines. Therefore if I play a deck of a style I'm not used to, I just won't have those subconscious triggers. I won't spot the right play as often. At least, I think that's the case. After all, I've not been playing that long - just because I did badly with Thragtusk decks when they were crushing Standard at the same time as I was doing well with UWR control, does that mean I "can't" play midrange? Or is the sample size too small for me to able to tell?

I honestly don't know the answer to this - and it leads to another question I can't answer. If I feel my skill level with aggro and midrange is inadequate for me to feel confident playing them at a major tournament, should I start running these decks now in order to learn? It could prove a huge edge if RDW really is the best deck come M15 (or if, heaven forfend, Wizards are daft enough to reprint Thragtusk, my all-time most-despised card). On the flip side - if I devoted all of my practice time to playing my Thoughtseize decks, I could improve my level of competence with the decks I'm already familiar with to a point where maybe I was playing them at a professional level.

There's one more consideration. There's at least a better than even chance that I'm nowhere near as good as some of the players I'll be up against in the States. I don't know for sure - my experience against big-name players is limited to one online match each against Sam Pardee and Ola Rade (beat the former, got crushed by the latter, since you asked) - but it seems a fair assumption. I'm not trying to delight you all with my very British sense of self-deprecation here, I'm just being honest. Someone like, say, Reid Duke has been playing at the top level for so long now, surrounded by such outstanding playtest partners, that even if we both have exactly the same natural aptitude for the game, he will undoubtedly be better than me. That leads to a temptation to play a more forgiving deck - one with "free wins" (much like RDW, come to that) which is more likely to let me off the hook if I make an error of judgement. If I'm playing a Revelation deck, then every time I play a mirror, I will have to outwit my opponent many more times over what is likely to be a much longer game than if I play burn, which seeks to close a game out much more rapidly and can therefore draw you out of your mistakes much more easily. I'm fine with trusting my intellect if my opponent is another first-time qualifier. I'm expecting to get a hiding if my opponent is Wafo-Tapa. And there's every chance that he might just be Wafo-Tapa.

So what are my weak points? A couple are obvious to me, because I make errors based on them often enough to notice when they affect my results. Some I doubt I will even be able to spot. After all, if one of my weaknesses is that I have a basic misunderstanding of an important concept - let's say tempo, for argument's sake - then so complete might my incomprehension be that I may not even realise that it's costing me games in the first place.

So let's start with a couple that are very obvious to me. To prevent this piece running into the territory of a dissertation, I'll put off trying to pinpoint and dissect my less opaque weaknesses for a later date (giving me a bit more time to actually work out what they are, for starters).

1. Missing triggers. I'm a martyr to the missed trigger. I think I may actually hold the world record for most accidentally-unflipped Delvers of Secrets. It's utterly unforgivable, of course, and should be easily remedied. I've already done some work towards this by getting into the habit of sticking dice on top of my library whenever I have an upkeep trigger, and that's pretty much solved the problem of missing those particular triggers for me - but I still miss mid-turn triggers far too frequently. In the finals on Saturday, I missed a Prescient Chimera trigger. I lost that game, and I'll never know whether the card I would have drawn had I been able to scry my top-deck land to the bottom might have won it for me.

2. Getting so focused on one part of the game in hand that I miss something important in another. This can be explained best with an example from my quarter-final on Saturday. I had 7 power of creatures on board, and my opponent was at 7 life and tapped out. He attacked me to about 10, leaving two blockers back. My hand was all tricks - Mortal's Valor, Sudden Storm and Triton Tactics - and I went deep into the tank over how to best get value in the next two attack steps. How should I get damage in whilst avoiding taking lethal the next turn? Of course, you've spotted it by now. It took me three plus minutes of concerted thought to spot that I just Sudden Storm his blockers and swing for exactsies. My opponent accepted my apology for the inadvertent slow-roll, but it was still bloody daft.

3. Failing to think far enough ahead. I usually untap with a pretty clear idea of what I'm doing this turn and on my opponent's next turn. But ask me what I'm expecting the board to look like three turns down the line, and I probably don't have a clue. I wonder how many times I've taken the wrong line because I failed to anticipate how things will pan out in the long term.

4. Getting trigger-happy with my spells. I'm too often in too much of a rush to use my removal to punch through some extra damage now rather than waiting on it to use it at a more pivotal point later in the game. Clearly, this is tied in with number 3.

5. Clumsiness. Physical clumsiness, I mean. Almost every tournament I play in, I get a warning for accidentally (genuinely accidentally) scrying an extra card because I get my cards stuck together, or just pick two up at the same time without realising. If Jack Doyle, a fine judge and someone I'd count as a friend, has to warn me for looking at an extra card by mistake one more time, I fear he may do something unpleasant to me with a blunt instrument. On the PTQ circuit, you get away with a stern word for these slip-ups. On the Pro Tour, I'll be racking up the game losses.

The fix for 1 and 2 sounds easy - be more methodical. Get into the habit of looking the board over regularly and memorising the triggers that might come up, on both sides of the board. In practice, this might be harder than it sounds - even though I rarely play red decks in Magic, I'm a very "red" person, and have a lifelong habit of rushing headlong into everything without thinking things through. Of course, I do think my plays through in Magic, often deeply and at length, but I still don't take the time to look around the board and consider the less immediate ramifications of my plays. I'll rush through "obvious" plays, and only pause when an evidently complicated spot comes up. Clearly I need to slow it all down. Take my time. Pause on my opponent's end step and think the game state through. It sounds easy - but it will require undoing a lifetime of acting on impulse.

For 3, the same is partially true - but in order to programme myself to start thinking about the long-game more, just trying to go at a slower pace won't cut it. So to try and train myself up, every time I sit down to a competitive game of Magic for the next 4 months, I'm going to be doing a mental exercise - I'm going to try and predict the next three turns for each player. I'm going to try and work out likely follow-up plays, possible blow-outs and top-decks that could change the game. Will I have the patience for it? No idea. Will my opponents be able to bear watching me spend every end step in deep concentration for five solid minutes? Probably not without a few choice words. We'll see how it goes. On the plus side, if this works - it should neatly solve 4 as well. I need to learn to see the bigger picture and not look for advantages as soon as they present themselves. I need to stop trading short term gains for long-term losses. I blow my hands too quickly, and I've got to learn to think long and hold those spells for better use later.

Finally, number 5. Well, a bad workman blames his tools, and I blame my sleeves. And my enormous, inflexible thumbs, for flipping up an extra card all the time. But whilst I can change my sleeves (and I will, if only to convince Jack that I'm honestly trying to sort it out, and please don't ban me, sir, please), I can't change my thumbs. We Magic players fall into habits too easily. I always arrange my lands the same way, with the same overlap. I always place my deck at right-angles to me on my right hand side. I always lift the card on top of the deck and look at it before drawing it into my hand. So every time I get a sleeve stuck to the next, I see two cards. If I can get my muscle-memory to remember to slide it face-down off the deck and across the mat, I'll catch it before I see it, and avoid penalties. That may be the most boring and mundane piece of self-improvement advice I've ever given myself, but I don't fancy going all the way to the States to get DQ'd round one for flipping half my library face up with my ham fists.

I first picked up Magic back in 1999, with a Starter set. I can't remember how I came across it, although I can remember how I came to stop playing it - suddenly I found that girls, cigarettes and what I genuinely believed to be the rock'n'roll lifestyle were becoming rather seductive, and I had the vague (and largely accurate) impression that young women were less than interested in boys who spent their weekends pretending to be wizards via the medium of cardboard. It was that and the reaction of my mother when I asked her if I could play in a Grand Prix in London - "for heaven's sake, haven't you grown out of that game yet?". Between a brief conversation in the car as we trundled through the Sussex countryside and the increasing influence of hormones, I stopped playing.

Aged 25 and I'm bored of poker. I hadn't really figured it out yet but my head was naturally wired up to love games, and I had always been wildly over-competitive, so I naturally gravitated towards the promised riches of the felt. I was pretty good, too. But it wasn't that long before I'd check-raised on a pocket pair so many times that I'd grown sick of it. The same 52 cards, over and over, in an endless loop of flops and turns, six tables at a time on a computer screen. I quit poker, for far more sensible reasons than I'd quit Magic years before. It left a hole though, one that I itched to fill with something that could get my synapses going again. Then I stumbled across Magic Online. What the hell, I was bored one afternoon and why not play a couple of games, for nostalgia's sake? It's 18 months since then, 12 of which were spent playing exclusively online because work prohibited me from getting to the FNMs or Sunday drafts at Fanboy Three in Manchester. Then I moved to London, played my first paper draft at a store called Dark Sphere, and six months later, I'm somehow on the Pro Tour already.

I've started this blog because I felt it could be interesting to watch a relative newcomer to Magic: The Gathering try and gear himself up for the Pro Tour, a mental challenge that I may very well not be ready for. I've also started this blog because in a short space of time, I've come to love this ludicrous game, the store I play it in, and the people I get to play it with, and because the idea of writing about the madness that I've embroiled myself in is exciting enough that I don't care if not one single other person is ever interested enough to read it. Perhaps I am insane after all.

I've already come up with a hundred ideas for the posts and pontifications I plan on foisting upon the unwilling and quite possibly utterly indifferent gamers of the world - but whilst I will never be able to dedicate every thought I have on Magic to this blog, there is one that I must broadcast - and that is my enormous thanks to Alexi and all the players and staff at Dark Sphere for making it feel worthwhile to spend 14 hours of a searing day in a gloomy room in Buckinghamshire. It would have felt worthwhile even if I'd lost. You guys make this game a passion worth indulging in.

Oh, and my mother's reaction when I told her that not only was I still playing Magic 15 years later, but that I was being flown to the Pacific Northwest of America to play it? "Bloody hell, Matt - well done".