I'm writing this from a bus somewhere in France. It's the middle of the night, most of the other passengers seem to have neglected deodorant, the bus driver thinks I'm an American jerk, there's no bathroom, and I just ate a kebab that I think may have been slightly . . . off. I'm elated. I'm serious—I'm happy as hell to be on this bus.

Why?

Because against all odds, I got a ticket. I think I know why. I've had a lot of good luck on this trip, and the reason is simple. I put myself in a position to get lucky. Sometimes you've got to realize that your only "out" is a shot at blind chance. The reason I'm so happy to be on this bus comes down to the fact that I'm abysmal at planning. I failed to book my ticket in advance, so I literally showed up at a filthy bus station in eastern Paris with a handful of euros and no Plan B. At midnight. The overnight bus was sold out and was departing in an hour. The next one didn't leave for another ten hours. Losing almost an entire day to a mistake like this was not an option, so I was faced with the choice of waiting until morning to pay through the nose for a high-speed train, or just getting savagely lucky. The train would have certainly blown out my budget for the trip, so I chose the latter. What's this got to do with Magic?

At the house in Paris, we were rebuilding sealed deck pools from the day's Grand Prix. I've got little experience in the format outside the MBS launch, but this was not my first sealed pool; I know a clunker when I see one. The selection was rather sparse. The removal was nice—Burn the Impure, Shatter, and a couple of nice bounce spells, and some pretty decent Blue creatures. The highlight was Corrupted Conscience and Strata Scythe. After I built a solid, slow, and unimpressive control deck, I took it for a spin and hated what I saw. The deck was fine, but going into a prerelease, I would expect X-2 if the event was longer than four rounds. The GP was much larger than a prerelease, so it would have taken a much better deck to crack Day 2. This deck just didn't have the power.

There are two kinds of luck in Magic: the kind of luck you can influence and the kind you cannot. The cards you get in a sealed pool are not in any way within your control. Nothing you can do short of cheating will change this. Upon realizing that we had a pretty mediocre pool, we stopped and tried to imagine what we needed to do. There is always another option, even if it is not apparent at first. We can't cheat, but if we realize we need to get lucky and we know what kind of lucky we need to be, we can at least weight the dice.

The first step to weighting the dice of your life? Figure out what you need to roll. If you need to catch runner-runner land drops to kill your opponent, your mind will begin to look for ways to help improve the odds. New lines of play may open up that were not apparent previously. With our sealed pool, our goal was to locate the forty-card combination that would have advanced the user to Day 2.

Step two in the process of generating luck is defining the scope of the universe. Stephen Hawking once said, "If you want to make something from scratch, you must first create the universe." I love this quotation because when he refers to "the universe," I do not believe he means the collection of stars, planets, and assorted stellar debris we call "space." I take this to mean that one must define the rules of engagement—the problem space—before attempting anything. The rules of engagement for the GP sealed pools were, beyond the normal scope of the floor rules and game rules, a function of how tournaments generally tend to unfold. You can usually guess that the best players with the best decks will advance deeper into the tournament. Not a good sign for our poor control deck.

Achieving Day 2 is not an easy task. I did it once, and it was damned hard work. People past Round 6 or so tend to be sharp players with good decks and a lot of practice. In a limited event, these are people who received excellent pools, constructed them well, and played correctly. When we looked at what a sample pool could contain, we concluded that we'd be facing down things like Myr Battlespheres, Massacre Wurms, Sunblast Angels, and Wurmcoil Engines at the top tables. Our mediocre control deck had no chance of beating those decks. None. Sure, we might eke out a game or two, but the odds of winning the game dropped once the day got later and the games took longer. That's not where a control deck wants to be. We needed a deck that could top-deck you out of the game before our four-drops got outclassed by bombs. How did we achieve this?

Step three boils down to "needing a miracle." The trick is, miracles happen all the time. Most people just don't have a good grasp on statistics, so something that appears highly improbable seems impossible. The difference between the two points is subtle and difficult to perceive, but it boils down to this: Our sealed pool literally could not win more than one or two games in the later rounds. We all agreed that the control deck didn't control well enough, nor did it have the tools to get a quick start. Decks like that can't get lucky. You never hear a guy talk about just how his opponent "just had no answer to my second-turn Wall of Tanglecord." We were that deck. We could grind aggro decks out, but the second a bomb hit the table, we were dead to rights. Despite the fact that our pool had some decent threats, there was just no way we were winning games against good players with real decks.

Upon realizing this, I rebuilt the pool. Instead of a Blue deck splashing Red removal, we were firmly in Boros colors. The Red creatures that were just too vanilla for our control deck were perfect at being Random Bears and turning sideways. Our logic was sound. This deck lacked any true end-game plan and probably scooped to the format's bombs anyway, but there was one major difference: It was the sort of deck that didn't let the game last long. The creatures were pretty mediocre, but there were enough 2/1's for 2 that I felt better playing Goblin Piker.dec than I did playing the Wall of Tanglecord deck. We would need to get lucky to win matches at the top tables, but we had the ability to get lucky. Unlike our previous build, which had almost no way to miracle out a win, this deck could close the game out quickly. If the opponent missed a land drop or ran light on removal, we stood a good chance of just tempoing him or her out of the game. Our Oculus deck didn't have such potential. We simply accepted that we needed to get lucky to get there, and I believe our final build reflected the correct way to build the pool.

As for my bus trip, we are still rambling through the French countryside on the way to Bruxelle and beyond. There is still no bathroom, that kebab was definitely not right, and this bus still smells worse than a locker room. Upon reflection, I realize how lucky I got. With no other options, I played to my only out. Knowing that the bus was sold out online, I figured my only option was to show up at the last minute with cash in hand and pray to Johnny Rungood that someone didn't check in. In broken English, Spanish, and French, I learned that someone had no-showed and that his seat was available. I managed to buy what appeared to be the final seat on the 11 p.m. overnight bus to Eindhoven, NL, at 10:58 p.m.

Run. So. Good.