In the upcoming weeks, I will be looking at M12 in limited. However, this week I wanted to address a question I have been asked by a number of different people. How was it coming to paper Magic from Duels of the Planeswalkers? Did it help me getting to where I am today? What important lessons did it teach, or fail to?

I can certainly try to address some of these questions for you here; however, please bear in mind I don’t know what it like to come at Magic without having played Duels of the Planeswalkers, so mostly I’m going to look back at my experience and see what I gained.

Things Duels Is Good At

You can play the same matchup over and over again without your opponent getting bored and wandering off or changing decks. Sure, they don’t have the same draws, but you see similar cards and begin to appreciate the functions and plans of the different decks. My first understanding of synergy came with Goblin Chieftain in the Goblin deck you play early on in the campaign. With the card in play, the deck is really scary and can close the game out pretty fast. I learned to hold my removal to deal specifically with that card. It was an early understanding of value. It was important not to waste a precious removal spell on a Goblin Piker to hit my opponent for 2 on turn three. It’s a lesson I have never forgotten. Sure, I rarely see a Goblin Chieftain, but I think one of ways I progressed rapidly in Limited is from learning to hold my removal until I really need it. I did try spending it early, only to die to some ridiculous bomb, so it didn’t take long to appreciate that the same principles apply.

I mentioned you have an infinitely patient and willing play partner in Duels. I used this greatly during the campaign to make the same mistakes over and over again until I really had learned not to. The biggest one that sticks in my mind is walking over and over again into Wall of Spears. It has FIRST STRIKE. You may laugh; I certainly am at remembering my despair at losing yet another 2-toughness guy to this otherwise harmless blocker (or 4-toughness if there are two; yes, people, creatures can double-block . . . )., but actually, First Strike is a mechanic I actually see people stumble over at many levels of play, even at the Pro Tour. I had an opponent double-block a Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer; one of the blockers had pro Red, so it didn’t die to First Strike, but it was not large enough to kill Jor Kadeen, while the other blocker just fell by the wayside rather than blocking and trading with one of my other attackers. This kind of move happens a lot more often in Limited with cards that don’t see Constructed play, as people don’t consider the consequences before they declare blockers. If this has happened to you, I strongly recommend a course of Wall of Spears therapy to bash it out once and for all.

Duels is very good at presenting an array of decks with different plans: aggro/burn, permission, flyers/life gain, aggro/tribal, etc. This gives a beginner a nice opportunity to experience different matchups and begin to understand the concept of good versus bad draws. For example, I remember discovering the Red Goblin deck was really easy to beat with the White life gain deck, and when I subsequently played RDW in Standard I already had the understanding that Baneslayer was pretty bad for me (yes, I know it’s not only the Lifelink that is bad).

The AI in Duels of the Planeswalkers is not perfect, and one of the things it is really bad at is bluffing that it has a combat trick (or doesn’t). However, the discovery of combat tricks and their power for surprising an opponent was not lost on me. I have long respected Giant Growth and strive to play around potential tricks in Limited. The best way to do this is consider the colours your opponent is playing and remember what tricks are therefore available to them. Never underestimate the power of keeping cards in hand and maintaining an interested expression in the game. If you have no cards in hand or look resigned, you obviously have nothing. There was a pretty fine example of this occurring at the Pro Tour. I think it was a feature match; both players had three cards in hand. One of the players was posturing about how powerful his hand was. He actually had three lands, while his opponent really did have the good stuff. However, scared of what he was holding, the opponent never played them until too late.

Mulligans are performed in Duels, but you get one free mulligan to seven before continuing as expected. Obviously it was no small shock to go to paper Magic and discover I couldn’t do this. However, it also makes you more inclined to send a mediocre seven back to try to find a better hand. I’m sure this has helped me be better at mulligans than you might otherwise expect at this stage. With the free mulligan, I could assess the quality of a hand without worrying about going down a card to try for something better. Eventually, I learned that it was worth the card loss to try to find the better keep. Mulligans are a topic much discussed in Magic communities. I have no golden rules, and I keep my fair share of shaky hands, but I definitely learned the easy steps from Duels (Can you cast your spells? Do you have enough/the right colour lands? You are playing against Deck X; do you have something to deal with Y that you will otherwise lose to?).

Things Duels Did Not Teach Me

How to sideboard. I find sideboarding the hardest thing of all. “What do I take out?” and “Should I really be finding room for that card?” are questions that frequently cross my mind. A friend once commented that I was obviously pretty good at sideboarding and asked how I did it. I’m not; mostly I just wing it. It would have been nice if Duels let you play best of three matches if desired, with the option to sideboard. You don’t really need a Gaea’s Herald against a Red deck, and it would encourage the idea to adapt your deck to the matchup.

Speaking of deck alterations, the version of Duels I played would not allow you to edit the base deck, so you could not remove old cards as you unlocked new cards for each of the decks. This has been changed in Duels 2012, which I believe is for the best. In a similar vein, Duels does not allow you to build and design your own decks. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Let’s face it, most of us just net-deck and then tweak. By letting us play with a limited of selection of cards for each deck, Duels allows us to try different cards without resulting in a useless pile that just can’t win. Deck-building is not something I was familiar with when I played Duels, and I never felt restricted by this.

Priority! Oh, my goodness, a topic dear to my heart. I had no idea what priority was when I left Duels. In Duels, you can interrupt at any time during your opponent’s main phase. There is no end step, no upkeep, and you can just cast instants whenever. Unfortunately, when you move to paper Magic, this ultimately leads to trying to Lightning Bolt creatures or planeswalkers when you don’t have priority. I learned priority from MTGO, and there are a number of players out there who need to go do the same. No, you can’t Bolt Jace after he has resolved and before your opponent uses him; you have to wait until it’s your chance to act again (not that Jace will be Bolted again any time soon).

Speaking of Jace, what on earth is a planeswalker, and how does that work? In Duels, you play against Jace; he doesn’t sit on the table doing annoying stuff. Planeswalkers were really hard to understand initially, and it took me a long time to see the value in them.

Auras are bad. Duels does not teach this. Auras are bad. Okay, there are exceptions, but in Duels you can play Holy Strength with impunity and win because of it. It is quite hard to grasp the concept of the two-for-one from Duels, as the decks are relatively low-powered, so you have time to draw into answers and/or more threats. I went back and replayed some Duels before writing this article to remind myself of certain aspects of the game, and now that I know the value of card advantage, the difference it makes to how I play the game is really noticeable. I easily won matchups I had been stuck on when I first played.

One final point—and this is true for Duels and MTGO—automated triggered abilities make you lazy. I still struggle to remember Kor Firewalker triggers against Red decks. It’s very frustrating when this causes you to lose. Always pay attention to the board state. Often, I play with dice when there are triggers I should watch for. Doesn’t always work, though.

It’s time to wrap this up before I ramble on for too long. I hope this has shown you the limitations of Duels as a game to teach people Magic, but also the advantages. It doesn’t overwhelm you with the more complex aspects of the game but still teaches you combat mechanics, synergies, and mulligans in a situation where you won’t die of embarrassment for making seemingly stupid errors (hey, you’ve got to learn somehow). It is not meant to be an exact copy of paper Magic to play on the computer; that is what MTGO is for. However, if you have a friend interested in getting into Magic, I would definitely recommend he or she tries out Duels of the Planeswalkers. For those of you who think it’s beneath you if you have access to the game, try the Challenges. You might get them easily, but I found these to be one of the most interesting aspects of the game, and they really got me into the problem-solving aspect of Magic.

Thanks for reading. See you next time, when I’ll be taking a look at M12 in Limited.