Hey there! My name is Daryl, also known as Graveborn Muse from the Muse Vessel. I’m a gamer, and Magic has been my main game for more than a decade. The truth is that I’m hooked so bad that I’m afraid to start any other games for fear that I won’t be able to afford the simple pleasures in life, like eating and not sleeping in the street. However, once in a while, I jump into a new game with both feet.

Last year (That’s right, it’s 2012 now.  It takes some getting used to.), I started up fantasy football after about a four-year absence. I drafted four teams in four leagues, won two, was first seed in another league, and finished the season 5–1 in the last league. That’s pretty good for a Kiwi who hasn’t seen more than five games of football in the last four years. The fact that I don’t know a damn thing about football and throw like a girl with a five o'clock shadow is irrelevant; gaming is gaming, and the same things that helped me kick arse¹ in fantasy football help me to win in multiplayer Magic. Here’s some stuff I know:

Preparation Matters

The most important part of fantasy football is draft day. Some teams are destined to make the playoffs purely because of a couple of smart decisions made before the first game kicks off (first-round Lesean McCoy, third-round Matt Forte was a good start this year), and some teams are struggling from the get-go because they screwed the pooch on draft day. For me, it was first-round Jamaal Charles and Sam Bradford as my only quarterback that spelled disaster.

Maybe the football examples don’t mean much to you, but the basic principle is the same for any game. I guarantee that you’ve lost more than a few games to bad preparation in Magic—neglecting the fundamentals in deck-building, bringing the wrong deck to the table, or not adapting to a threat you know you're gonna see again. There are the games in which you lose to something you couldn’t have seen coming and the games in which your deck just doesn’t give you the answers that you know are in there, but we all lose some games because we don’t include the answers that we know we’re going to need, and that’s all about preparation.

Preparation allows us to prevent all of these types of losses, but especially the first and the last. Begin in deck-building by asking yourself if your latest creation can deal with the main types of permanents and strategies (aggro, combo, control, midrange). If your deck consists of twenty-four lands, thirty-six brilliantly synergistic powerhouses, and no more than four ways of blowing up or otherwise dealing with your opponents’ stuff, you’re not going to win. Period.

If we are caught flatfooted, we need to make some changes—either by bringing out another deck that can deal with the threats, or by adapting our decks to the new threat environment. That means that an important and underrated aspect of multiplayer preparation is choosing what decks you bring. I’m a diehard black mage to the core, but I’ll bring White, Green, and Blue decks with me on any given night as well. If your deck box doesn’t contain the answer to any conceivable strategy in Magic, you need more—and more varied—decks.

Finally, post arse-kicking, what will you do to prepare for the same strategy next week? If you don’t try to improve the deck that was stomped last week, do you really think things will be different next week? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice . . . uh . . . um . . . we can’t be fooled again!

Math Matters

The number one mistake in fantasy football is drafting a quarterback in Round 1—most players who drafted Michael Vick in the first round struggled to make the playoffs, and even drafting the invincible Aaron Rodgers in the first round didn’t guarantee a playoff slot. There’s this thing called the magic formula,² which says that it doesn’t matter how many points a guy scores; it only matters how he compares to the rest of the players at his position. Knowing who has the skillz in actual football doesn’t help much if you can't run the numbers for fantasy—or at least be aware that there are numbers to consider.

Magic is a hell of a lot more complicated than fantasy football, but we can see a couple of parallels in terms of the role that math can play in evaluating and improving our performance. First up, it doesn’t matter how good the card is if you can't play it. That means your mana base is important, and that means crunching the numbers to find the right mana ratio. Don’t just grab your forty percent of lands, but divvy up the colors according to the colors of your business spells (and count mana symbols rather than just the number of cards).

More than that, it means you need to think about how many of each business card you're running. Forty percent land is great, but only if you need to hit four lands on your fourth turn reliably. If you need to play an Ultimatum by turn seven every game, you need a hell of a lot more mana than that.³ In the same way, it doesn’t matter how much you like a card; it matters how often you need to cast it to win. A lot of folks will put in four copies of their pet cards regardless of the role that it is supposed to play in their decks. If you want to see a card in your starting hand every game, by all means run four of it; if you only use it to put games away, you can cut back to three; if you only need it for long games or very specific situations, there’s no reason to play more than one or two. Math matters, and that means that you're better off reducing the number of cards in your deck as close to sixty as possible and replacing late-game juice with early-game gas, rather than just cramming in more of your pet cards.

Redundancy Matters

In fantasy football, a couple of injuries can turn a dream team into an also-ran (see the aforementioned Jamaal Charles, or Peyton Manning this season). Usually, a team is allowed to field about ten players, but the players you keep on your bench each week are just as important; a team that can replace an injured or slumping star without a major drop off in productivity is going to the playoffs, while a rookie fantasy player who only pays attention to his or her starting lineup is going to be walking a tightrope all season.

However, in fantasy football, you have no control over whether your first round pick pulls a hamstring or whatever, and you have to field players at each position (quarterback, running back, wide receiver and so on), so redundancy means being able to find a backup player that you can sub in at any position.

However, in Magic, you also have much more control over how hard it is to disrupt your Plan A, which is what redundancy is all about. You also have the option of adding backup plans—ways to win on different axes if Plan A falls through—which is called depth. Depth is great for diversity and variance and whatnot, but those different paths to victory are going to conflict with each other more often than not, and then your chance of drawing the right card at the right time goes down instead of up. That's why redundancy, in terms of a path to victory that just won’t quit, is so important.

CommanderCast had an interesting discussion along these lines recently, looking at the difference between bad, single-card strategies that really revolved around a single card (not good in a ninety-nine-card Highlander deck, and still questionable in sixties) and good single-card strategies that had multiple versions of something like the key card. Granted, some cards are more unique than others (Birthing Pod is the example they used, but I’ve also seen decks based on such unique cards as Hivestone, Necroskitter, and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth), but if there’s nothing to duplicate the effect of your key card, your deck will go from nasty to neutered the second you lose that particular card.⁴

That's why the best decks for me have always been the decks in which everything fits in together, not just in terms of synergy, but also redundancy—too many cards all doing the same kind of thing that it’s almost impossible to stop. I seem to be among the few people who really appreciated Kamigawa block—I loved the way that every card you played either triggered spiritcraft effects from half of your other permanents (like being able to chain together cards from the Onna cycle and play five spells a turn from an empty hand) or had Soulshift to get those permanents back. The much-maligned Splice mechanic helped you to milk even more out of this, allowing you to get a valuable effect (such as Shock or Naturalize) without giving up a card, so that you could cast that card again later and get another series of spiritcraft triggers from it. Even the Spikes realized that looping Hana Kami and Soulless Revival is good times, and they never got as much value out of it as a good casual deck can.

Howling Mine/Underworld Dreams is a popular casual archetype, and those decks often have the same kinds of redundancy—especially now that Spiteful Visions gives us a duplicate Dreams effect. Howling Mine helps you to draw the win-cons, and the win-cons make the Mine more and more lopsided in your favor—that’s synergy—but when every card you draw off the Mine allows you to play something that punishes everyone else for drawing or having a full hand, your redundancy makes those interactions overwhelming.

Redundancy can include tutoring, recursion, and being able to withstand disruption, as well as ensuring that your deck can still win with its main cards destroyed, exiled, or tucked. For example, my Arcanis the Omnipotent deck used to be so reliant on the Commander that I was often dead in the water if he died twice. How can that be? All he does is draw cards, and Blue is the color of card-drawing, so Arcanis shouldn’t be needed at all, right? The problem is that, in the early days, I was taking out draw spells because of Arcanis, telling myself that I wouldn’t need them with him online. This may seem counterintuitive—“redundant” often has negative connotations, after all—but it’s hard to have too much of a good thing if your whole deck is built around that thing.

For best effect, try to choose cards that have different strengths and weaknesses, and which occupy different spots on your mana curve. Sturmgeist is a great card that goes really well in my mono-Blue Psychosis Crawler deck, but when they both cost 5, the mana curve suffers.

Another common way to build redundancy is to add cards that make your main threat harder to deal with, such as the ubiquitous Lightning Greaves or the less popular Darksteel Plate. It can reduce interaction, which is unfortunately the antithesis of casual, but it makes it easier to put all of your eggs in one basket if that basket is foam-lined, gyroscopically balanced, and sheathed in adamantium.

Details Matter

As I said, being prepared is not just for boy scouts, but it isn't enough to guarantee victory. In fantasy football, it is very tempting to rely on a strong player without considering other variables (like who has a good matchup this week and what up-and-comers are available on the waiver wire). In three of my leagues, I was lucky enough to pick up a top QB in the middle rounds of the draft, but I was alert to the development of Rookie of the Year Cam Newton. By snatching up the rookie QB while everyone else was still wondering if he was just a flash in the pan, I was able to get a huge advantage that was the key to victory in at least two of my leagues.

Similarly, in Magic, it isn't enough to bring the strongest deck to the table each week. I usually play on Wednesday night, and my workweek is structured so that by 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday afternoon, I’m about ready to die. That makes it very tempting for me to just space out when we play without looking more deeply at what’s going on. When I’m tired, I often just swing at the player who’s open rather than the player who is the main threat to me. I also tend to blow up a troublesome permanent as soon as I can, but in both cases, I am making major mistakes. Strategic complexity, which is at the heart of multiplayer strategy, tells us that sometimes it is better to do nothing than to do something, but if you aren’t aware of the minute details that affect the outcomes of your decisions, you are destined to screw up.

Another common mistake comes from overbalancing; in other words, pounding on The Threat past the point at which he actually constitutes the threat. Always pay attention to who is the biggest threat to you now—not just who was the biggest threat to you last turn. If a new threat is waiting in the wings, you need to be sensitive to that, rather than wasting your resources on a depleted opponent.

Geeks Matter

While I didn’t grow up in the United States, I did go to high school, and high schools are all basically the same the world over: The way that football players treat the Chess Club in the US is about the same as the way that rugby players treat the Chess Club in New Zealand.⁵ But once the high school jocks realize that they're never going to make it as pro athletes, about the best they can hope for is to succeed in something like fantasy football. That’s when they not only start to get schooled by geeks like me, but they become geeks. As popular and as mainstream as it has become, fantasy sports is every bit as geeky as a pursuit like Magic, and I think it’s fantastic to learn that the geeks win in the end!

¹ Or ass, depending on where you call home.

² Check out thefantasyfootballguys.com if you're interested.

³ Forty percent lands in a sixty-card deck gives you about a seventy percent chance of having at least four lands on turn four, but a mere 22.2% chance of hitting Ultimatum mana by turn seven on the play. Don’t just take my word for it—I use a nifty iPhone app called Manalyzer to help me crunch the numbers.

⁴ Of the three decks I mentioned, only one of them had any kind of reliable backup plan. Necroskitter could fall back on Midnight Banshee beatdown, which isn’t the worst thing in the world. Two lessons I’ve taken away from this are that you should use critters as your support cards if you can, because turning sideways always works in a pinch, and that you don’t brag about how crazy sick your new Sliverless Sliver deck is if the black mage might be running Cranial Extraction. And yes, we’re always running Cranial Extraction!

⁵ In fact, we use the British system in New Zealand, which has one more year of high school (which sucks) and one fewer year of college (which is awesome), so we really get it coming and going.