Last Friday’s FNM was a five-rounder. After the third round, there were only two 3–0 players. I was not one of them. Those two players intentionally drew in the fourth round, and in the fifth round, they both beat their 4–1 and 3–2 opponents to finish first and second (tiebreaks pending). With a round left to go.

This was the second week in a row this has happened. It was the same two players both times.

I didn’t anticipate hitting the wall this soon, this badly, but between the fourth and fifth rounds, one of those players came up to me and asked,

“Are you regretting it yet?”

I was caught a little off-guard. “Regretting what?”

“Signing up to play a different deck every Friday.”

This question came right after he had drawn with the other X–0 to virtually lock up first and second place, with a round still left to play. I had lost to some kid playing U/R Delver because I didn’t mulligan in Game 2.

I thought about the question. I thought about the Casting ChannelFireball podcast I’d listened to earlier that week, wherein LSV literally said, “Never play a deck cold. Like, never play a deck that you haven’t played, like, at least twenty games with, or something like that; and, obviously, you want to play way more than that, but never play a deck completely cold.” I thought about Jesse Mason’s (literally the only Magic writer whose articles I don’t just skim through, for whatever that’s worth) article from just the day prior that stressed the value of putting the time in with one deck; since games of Magic are largely predicated by variance anyway, it’s better to just play a deck that you know really well in order to maximize your luck in lieu of trying to metagame and winding up either being wrong in your prediction or just doing worse than you would have had you just played the deck you knew better.

My foresight is not that great. Don’t get me wrong—this column is great, and I like talking about Magic culture and things; the column has basically been able to go exactly the way I wanted it to, thanks to both Cloud City and an extremely long leash provided by my editors and content managers, past and present. Thanks to 52 FNMs, I’ve gotten to play a lot of Magic, which is paramount in order to become a decent Magic writer; as a Magic writer, you can be as brilliant as anyone, but your best (Magic) writing will only come with actual play experience. So, I’m grateful to 52 FNMs for that.

However, I have to play a different deck every week. Every week, I go into FNM completely in the dark, and, without fail, I lose at least one match because I’ve misunderstood my deck and either fucked up a mulligan decision or just didn’t play to my outs. This happened in Round 3 last Friday. In Game 1, I kept a bad two-lander on the play because it had a Doom Blade, but both of the lands came into play tapped—I was beaten down by a Delver of Secrets that transformed on the first turn, and by the time I had access to two lands, he was able to protect his Insectile Aberration, and I (rightfully) never saw more lands. The third game of that match was also decided by my sideboarding; I took out a lot of countermagic for proactive spells like Timely Reinforcements and Day of Judgment, despite the fact that I was the control player in the matchup. What I’m getting is that I’m not really at the level at which I can just play a deck in the dark, and if LSV’s advice is to be believed, neither is he. Having the same deficiencies in your game as the best player on planet Earth tends to make you more comfortable with things, but this also doesn’t mean that my mistakes weren’t unavoidable. It’s easy for me to blame the machinations of this column, but I can’t help but feel that I’d cut down on the stupid mistakes I commit every week with some more experience with each deck.

A definite problem that I have is comparing myself to other people; that is, I don’t particularly love it when I enter a tournament only to have someone I perceive as worse than I am win it. It’s very easy for me to chalk these up to, “Well, fuck that guy; of course he wins, he gets to play the same deck every week while I have to start from scratch on a weekly basis.” Even if this sentiment were accurate (it’s not), it’s usually wrong to compare yourself too much to other people.

In every tournament scene, there will be people you like and people you hate. Comparing yourself to them is a good way to drive yourself crazy over nothing. I have no idea if anyone else does this, but I do it all the time, and it’s retarded. You would be better served reminding yourself that, yes, while that guy is a tool, there’s a possibility that he found the time in between being a tool to put the work in . . . and that he deserved the win.

That’s obviously a little easier said than done.

Last Friday, I played this list:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

2 Phantasmal Image

3 Sun Titan

1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

1 Blue Sun's Zenith

1 Dissipate

2 Negate

2 White Sun's Zenith

3 Doom Blade

3 Mana Leak

4 Forbidden Alchemy

4 Think Twice

2 Day of Judgment

2 Oblivion Ring

1 Ratchet Bomb

3 Pristine Talisman

[/Spells]

[Lands]

1 Swamp

4 Island

4 Plains

2 Darkslick Shores

2 Ghost Quarter

2 Isolated Chapel

3 Drowned Catacomb

4 Glacial Fortress

4 Seachrome Coast

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

3 Nihil Spellbomb

3 Timely Reinforcements

2 Ratchet Bomb

2 Dissipate

2 Day of Judgment

1 Ghost Quarter

1 Phantasmal Image

1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite

[/Sideboard][/cardlist]

That’s the list Daniel Unwin wrote about last week over on SCG. I was going to follow his rules on sideboarding to the tee, but I just didn’t because I didn’t feel like it.

My first and last matches of the night were against two much less experienced players. My first game of the tournament, I almost get run over completely by Simon and his mono-Black deck. He wins the die roll and leads with Typhoid Rats. I do the standard mental fist-pump, play my land, and say go. He casts Tormented Soul and beats for 1. Whatever. I play a second land and say, “Go.” The next turn, he casts two Vault Skirges simultaneously. He’s pretty excited about his fast start—he gets real serious and starts playing very quickly. I remind him to slow down a little bit and play them one at a time, and I Mana Leak the first one. He flicks his cards very quickly for a while and says, “Go,” and I just lay my land and pass. For a while after this, I just keep getting beaten down by his guys. The clock is very fast—he plays both Dark Favor and Skeletal Grimace on his Vault Skirge. I have a Day of Judgment eventually, but he’s able to regenerate his lethal Vault Skirge. At 2 life, I’m able to play a Sun Titan, getting back a Phantasmal Image, and I’m forced to clone a Vault Skirge just to block his, which it does. Simon’s down to no cards (he’s playing every Swamp he draws) and just says, “Go.” I attack with a Sun Titan, get back Phantasmal Image, copy his Vault Skirge again, and I say “Go.”

I look up at Simon as he draws. His eyes immediately dart to my Sun Titan.

He drew the Doom Blade.

I have no permission in my hand, but I know in that moment that not only does he have the Doom Blade, but that he’s going to hit the Sun Titan instead of just hitting my Phantasmal Image to win the game. I know this because my Sun Titan has just brought back the Phantasmal Image. I know this because Sun Titan is a physical 6/6, while Phantasmal Image is a physical 0/0.

I also know that after that transpires, I am going to win the game, despite being at 3 life, and I do. The next turn, I draw Forbidden Alchemy, find the Oblivion Ring for his souped-up Vault Skirge, and Simon follows that up by drawing a lot of lands.

It’s easy to look at what I’ve presented you with and say, “Well, duh, it’s easy to predict what bad players are going to do because they’re bad,” but one could maybe make the case that Simon was better than me in that game. He had me on the ropes. All it took was one misplay on his part to turn the narrative around.

As Jesse Mason would say, one game of Magic does not determine which player is better.

(Our second game was uninteresting, other than the fact that he never killed my Phantasmal Images with his Hex Parasites; Ratchet Bomb just did a lot of heavy lifting that game.)

My fifth match wasn’t actually a match on the record; I was 3–1, paired down against R.J., who was 2–2 and out of prize contention, so I asked him to scoop to me, and he did, on the stipulation that we play the match out anyway.

The games weren’t that interesting; he’d get a big lead out on me, then I’d cast Day of Judgment and kill him with a bunch of Sun Titans and an Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, but it was the things R.J. did that surprised me, and they only surprised me because, somehow, I knew he’d do them.

The mistakes (tapping out to play Batterskull when he was already way ahead, playing into Mana Leaks) are irrelevant. I can’t yet articulate how I knew he’d do them, but the intuition has definitely come with playing a lot of Magic. My guess is that my being able to read Simon and R.J. comes from the fact that my play-skill was once very comparable to each of theirs; between that and their general mannerisms, it makes it easy to pick up on things.

Writing an article about detecting a shift in demeanor is complicated; part of every message is a sender and a receiver. Let’s assume that a shift in mannerisms—someone going from ambivalent to alert—is the message. The message stays the same. Since the sender is the opponent, that always stays constant, too. However, where things become tricky is with the receiver. It’s important to acknowledge that messages are not inherently defined—their context is important, too. The context of a message—specifically, their receiver—is where things become tricky. An article about reading bluffs would, in essence, be a message about receiving messages. It’s a lot easier to interpret plays than it is to interpret mannerisms, and because there’re all different kinds of skill levels in Magic, and a lot of different senders, while the message is sometimes the exact same, the meaning is not. A pro changing in demeanor might quantify something different than an SCG shifting in demeanor, and so on. Detecting and (correctly) predicting what a shift in mannerisms from your opponent will result in is totally dependent on the signifier and the signified, and anyone who writes an article telling you different is trying to steal money from the website it’s published on.

I don’t remember Round 3 at all, except for that I won it.

One of my high school classmates, Adam, now lives in Syracuse—the same city as where I live. In high school, we never talked at all; we were both assholes; one of us grew out of it (hint: it was Adam). He played a few games against me at his apartment before FNM while I was playing the Esper deck completely cold, and Adam noted that the deck really fit my play-style. And he was right. I love the deck, and the fact that it wins with an end-of-turn threat, White Sun's Zenith, is among my favorite things about it. You’re drawing live in most any situation, and Forbidden Alchemy is very good at digging for specific answers. Think Twice kinda sucks, but I don’t know what I’d replace it with. A few Wring Fleshes, maybe. I can’t speak to which action spells I’d take out because the deck is certainly built to be open to tweaks depending on metagame (another thing I dig about it). The Timely Reinforcements don’t totally get shit on by your Pristine Talismans, which I was kind of worried about.

The deck has big-time game against mono-Red, purely because of Pristine Talisman. I played against mono-Red in Round 4 and only dropped one game; I won the die roll, which forced my opponent, Zach, to break serve. This is pretty hard to do against a turn-three Pristine Talisman, turn-four Day of Judgment deck. As it went, Pristine Talisman single-handedly won me both games. They quickly made his Shrine of Burning Rage (mono-Red’s best card against control, traditionally) irrelevant, so they were forced to take out Sun Titans, which never mattered because the card that was actually killing him was always Pristine Talisman. Getting multiples out in Game 1 actually forced a concession.

Tomorrow, I’ll be playing Charles Gindy’s winning deck from last week’s SCG Open:

[cardlist]

[Commander]

[/Commander]

[Creatures]

2 Merfolk Looter

3 Invisible Stalker

4 Delver of Secrets

4 Snapcaster Mage

3 Geist of Saint Traft

[/Creatures]

[Planeswalkers]

[/Planeswalkers]

[Spells]

2 Gut Shot

2 Midnight Haunting

4 Mana Leak

4 Vapor Snag

3 Gitaxian Probe

4 Ponder

2 Runechanter's Pike

2 Sword of War and Peace

[/Spells]

[Lands]

1 Plains

9 Island

3 Moorland Haunt

4 Glacial Fortress

4 Seachrome Coast

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

2 Ratchet Bomb

2 Phantasmal Image

2 Oblivion Ring

1 Celestial Purge

1 Dissipate

2 Divine Offering

1 Gut Shot

2 Negate

2 Timely Reinforcements

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

Here’s to hoping I read all the cards.

Jon Corpora

Pronounced ca-pora

@feb31st