My name is Sam Stoddard, and I am not a naturally talented magic player.

I had a pretty good run between 2005-2008 when I managed to play in seven pro tours, make money at five consecutive grand prixes, and generally get very close to actually accomplishing something meaningful. Any success I had was from being a student of the game, and working my hardest to learn from every mistake. After a year-long break from playing competitively, I've decided to dive head first back into the PTQ grind, and I hope to use this column to impart some of the wisdom I have gained over the years, and to talk about the new things I am learning every day.

It is my goal as every round of a magic event starts to be the first player to the table. This isn't for some macho "I'm here first" mentality, or to get a head start on setting up my play area. I just want to be able to see the clock. I obsess over the clock. Out of my 1,682 sanctioned matches, I have been involved in maybe ten unintentional draws. Maybe. I believe the number is closer to five. As I said, I take this seriously.

This is something I see a lot of my friends struggling with; At the recent PTQ in Cincinnati, there were so many unintentional draws from UW mirrors that only one player had a perfect record going into round 7 of 8, with around 5 players having one draw floating around the top tables. Sometimes it was unintentional – neither player was paying attention, and they would go to shuffle up for game three and find only a single digit number of minutes left on the clock. Whatever the case, it was something that could have been prevented. Sometimes it was intentional. The player who won game one with twenty minutes left on the clock has no incentive to complete game 2 in a reasonable pace. In fact, they would be rewarded for having the match go to time during game 2. This is the textbook definition of stalling, and something that will be looked on harshly by judges, when it is caught. Or rather, if it is caught. Believe it or not, judges very rarely have the ability to walk by a match and catch a player trying to do this. As a player, you have to take the initiative and keep your opponent playing at a reasonable pace, or get the judge to force them to.

Imagine sitting down to a match and having your opponent present their deck without so much as a single shuffle and asking "Cut?" Or an opponent casting a foreign Brilliant Ultimatum and searching their library for five cards. In both of these situations, most players would have no problem calling the judge. Whether or not you believe the opponent is cheating, the risk of it is enough to call the judge. What people do far less often is call the judge when their opponent is clearly abusing the clock for their own advantage.

Magic is a game of resources. Most of those – deck, life, mana – are personal resources. Time is a shared resource. Every second that you take to make a play is one fewer your opponent has and vice versa. It is silly when people feel bad for calling a judge for slow play when their opponent has taken up 2/3rd if not a full 3/4ths of the shared resource allotted to both players. You need to make sure that your opponent is allowing you to take the time your deck needs to win the game.

People think a lot about the amount of resources their deck needs to succeed. Keeping a one-lander with Polymorph is probably a real bad idea. A hand of nothing but spells in Zoo is probably not good enough. What people don't consider is how much of that shared resource they are going to need to get the job done. Under ideal conditions, Mono Red and Allies can kill on turn 4. Polymorph, Mythic and Jund can get the job done around turns 5-6. UW Control is going to take closer to 8-10 turns.

But what about non-ideal conditions? Unless your opponent mulligans to four every game, he is going to put up some resistance. This may not be a big deal for Mono Red or Jund, but a deck like UW Control can see the turn count hit the teens pretty easily, if not even further for the mirror. If both players take a minute per turn, then there is little to no chance that the match will finish within 50 minutes. The only way the match will finish, then, is for one player to get poor draws, the match to only go to two games, or for both players to play faster. You can't really control one player having a bad draw, or guarantee that the match will only go to two games. The only factor that you have in your control is to make sure the game is played at a pace that will allow both players to complete the game.

You don't need to be a jerk to your opponent to set the pace of the game. Once you have figured out what the proper pace of the game should be in order to get through an entire match, play at that speed. Most people will (consciously or unconsciously) match the speed of their opponent. If this doesn't work, ask your opponent to speed up. It is important to do this fairly early in the match, not in a situation where it is advantageous to you. It is very hard to get a judge to enforce anything on slow play, especially in the last few minutes of the round. Even if you can only speed your opponent up slightly, shaving four or five minutes off of their time can often be enough

This whole concept was driven home for me many moons ago while watching a friend playing in an extended PTQ. He was playing Teen Titans, a Sundering Titan-reanimation deck against Mind's Desire. After winning a long game one, game two was puttering along when his opponent managed to go off, storming up to eleven and casting a Mind's Desire. His opponent asked if he could flip over the top 12, but my friend wanted him to shuffle (stating later that he had higher odds of hitting more lands, another fallacy, but one I'll have to talk about another time.) The problem with this move was that there were only about ten minutes left on the clock. All of a sudden Mind's Desire went from a thirty-second spell to a four-minute spell. At such a high storm count, the card is virtually lethal anyway. All that would have to come up was another Desire or a Brainfreeze. But still, my friend let the game go all the way to the end without scooping. By the time both players could check their sideboards and shuffle up, there were only five minutes left for game 3.

So, what's the problem here? Well, the Desire deck was good at keeping a Titan off the board, or being able to bounce it once it hit. That was why the first two games took so long. The desire deck was also designed to kill on turn 2-3. My friend had effectively given his opponent a no-risk game. He had little to no chance of winning the game in the time allotted turns, while his opponent had a reasonable chance. These are not the kind of odds that you can just give away in a match. Even if shuffling between each storm did slightly decrease the odds, they paled in comparison to the huge disadvantage he was walking into in game 3, which consequently ended up as a draw.

It is important not to let the clock become your enemy. When you sit down for a match, have an idea of how much time you need to take from the shared resource pool, adjusted by what the matchup is. How many turns you need should dictate how long you and your opponent should be spending on each turn. Sometimes this will lead to you "prematurely" scooping games that could be won, but that would put the possibilities of a 3rd game ending into jeopardy. Get comfortable playing your matches at different paces – sometimes you have a leisurely thirty minutes for a game three and can really think things through, sometimes you need to figure out how to win with UW Control mirror in five minutes. The more practice you have at watching the clock and adjusting your play to meet it, the more natural it will become. This will naturally help you build mental shortcuts, and make your thought process more efficient. One of the hallmarks of becoming a better player.