Good luck vs bad luck

Usually when you hear someone use terms like luck in a contest such as MTG, especially "Bad luck" the first reaction is to think that this is the poor sportsman's excuse for playing unsuccessfully. However I want to point out a few things about MTG's unique game play as well as some very basic probabilities in the game that invite words that have the essence of misfortune. Mainly two phrases come to mind. "Mana Flood" and "Mana screw" and what do these two phrases have in common? Well mana. Now MTG's resource method has been one of the many reasons many people who have tried MTG decided not to continue it as a hobby. It requires a small bit of luck to work. Now for some very basic math here, I'm not going to get into the true math as it would be too difficult to go over and I want to keep this blog simple. The recommended amount of lands vs spells in a average deck is 2/5. For every 5 spells there should be 2 lands. In a 40 card deck this works out to be 16 lands to 24 spells. In a 60 card deck this works out as 24 lands and 36 spells. Now of course there are exceptions to this rule but this is a average way of building a deck. Now knowing this (and here's when my basic math comes in) every time you draw a card you have a 2 in 5 chance of it being a land. That's 40%. So at any given time if you want a land you have a 60% chance of not drawing one, on the other hand if you want a spell you have a 40% chance of not drawing one. Either way the odds are bad (worse obviously if you want the land) Think of it this way if you were told you had a 40% chance of dying if you have a unnecessary surgery would you have it anyway? How about a 60% chance of dying? Either 40% or 60% are both odds that's seem a high risk for having that surgery and you would probably not have it. So you see whether you want a land or want a spell the odds are a high risk of you not getting what you want. Now the argument against this way of thinking is that the odds are 40% and 60% of getting what you want as well. But here is the thing, when you get the perfect order, or at least good enough order of lands and spells you need, no one thinks about it much because it's the way it's supposed to happen, no one says "Mana Prime" when playing MTG. But when it works against you then the terms "Mana Screw" or "Mana Flood" are used. So what does all this mean? Well it means that luck has a bigger part of playing the game then some people are willing to admit. Luck even happens to you even when it's good luck but it's not as recognizable. So now that we recognize that luck plays a major part of MTG I want to tell you about a alternative way of playing MTG, casually of course. I was taught this way of playing MTG a few years ago that had only one library for all players to share, there was only commons in the library and there were no lands. The library had about 100 or more random cards and each player drew from it as though it was their own library. Instead of placing lands on the table players would lay down spells upside down on the table, these upside down spells were treated as basic lands of the color of the spell and was no longer a spell, for instance a red spell upside down became a mountain. If a creature had mountain walk then the upside down red spell was treated as such and the creature got to mountain walk it's way to the opponent. If a spell bounced a land back to a player's hand the "land" became a spell again and could be played as a spell the next turn. Colorless spells were colorless lands and multicolored spells were treated as multicolored lands (a blue black spell upside down is a island/swap) Get the picture? No more Mana Screw no more Mana Flood, the biggest problem you might run into is drawing two really good green spells and needing one of them to place upside down as your green mana source. The game is fun, and the fact that only commons are used does not in any way take away from the strategy or tricks a player could pull. Basically a MTG game that has no WOG's or BOP's or Planeswalkers still made for a good, fun game. So why do I tell you this? Well to point out that the method of getting resources in MTG is less than perfect, as a matter of fact it's far from perfect. But to mostly point out that the current method also makes cards like "Reflecting pool" more valuable and therefore harder to obtain. MTG is less about strategy and more about having the money to buy the expensive cards and having the luck to draw them before your opponents do.

Tie Breakers

So I was once in a tournament where the main prize was a Mox Emerald so you can imagine how upset I was to find out that when postings went up for the top four players that I was in a three way tie for fourth place, and I didn't make it in the final round. So I went to inquire just what factors went into effect that decided that only one of the three guys who tied for fourth would actually place fourth while the other two gets an "Attaboy"? Well as it turns out they had to use a tie breaker to decide just who places where. How does this tie breaker work? Do the affected players go into a sudden death match? Do we just add another round to the entire tournament? No, they check to see how well your opponents played. That's right, your place on the standings in the event of a tie is based on how well your opponents did. If the players you win against went on to lose more games or worse yet drops out of the tournament you will most likely not win the tie breakers. That's the best they can come up with? If I get matched up against a player who can't win, why does that potentially affect my place in standings? Worse yet there is a system that groups of players have come up with to exploit this flaw. Here's how it works. Let's say the prize is a card worth $200.00 Four players might get together and decide to work as a team. What they do is commit to each other that if any of them win the prize that hey will sell it and split the winnings among themselves. Unless in the unlikely event that they get matched up in a game they also commit to drop out if they lose enough games (usually 2) to guarantee that they will not place top 4. What this does is creates a situation that causes any tie breakers they may occur during the placing of the top 4 to be effected by their dropping out. They are basically trying to cause the players they lost against to lose any potential tie breakers. However if any of the four players are matched up against each other the loser of the match will then commit to stick with it until the very end to help the winner's potential tie breaker. Now this plan is not without flaws of it's own but surprisingly it works more often than you would think. Worse yet there is nothing that can be done to stop it as it's difficult to prove any intentions of the players. I however believe that any ties can be fixed just by adding another special round. Have only the two tied players play each other. If there are three tied for third then add two rounds (one of the tied players gets a bye). If time is an issue then for tie breakers only make the match only one game instead of three. However it's done something needs to be done.

1337

So if you read my last blog you would've read that I've temporarily quit playing Magic the Gathering. Although I said this is because I dislike the latest block of MTG (Forces you into 3 colors) I have a few other reasons leading up to this decision. It makes me sad to say this because I love MTG so much, but much like the famous quote " I love Jesus, but I can't stand Christians" I love MTG but I am becoming dishearten by MTG players, well the competitive ones anyway. Here's my problem, with every set that is released there is something that comes along with it called the metagame. Now the metagame tells us what decks are popular and gives us an insight to what people are playing so this gives us an advantage right? Well you may think that knowing that faeries is what 40% of the players are playing is a good thing as you build your deck full of board sweepers like Infest or Pyroclasm. Bt what happens when your first opponent is playing 5 color control? Well there goes your deck that does nothing but buy time for your opponent to get the mana to start whipping you right out of the room. So how do you build a deck that will be competitive against more than just one type of deck? Well sadly the answer is for you to simply build one of the decks in the metagame, thereby taking all the creativity right out of the game. This is only a small part of what bothers me, not only does every person in the room have a Netdeck but so do the ones who consistently win, the guys who have a DCI score of 1800 that win all the time. Now it's not the same guy who wins every week but one of about 3-4 guys who wins every week. My question is simply this. Once a player has reached a certain ranking why not have specific events for those players and restrict them from playing in tournaments with lower ranking players? I went to a draft once that had two guys in it who were both playing in a draft for the first time, as a matter of fact they were still filling out their DCI cards when I was paying to enter the event. Also in this very same event was someone who had just taken 4th place at States. Guess who won the draft. I believe that the number of MTG players who play in sanctioned events have been dwindling lately. I remember being at a draft at a place here in my hometown that attracted so many people that they had ran out of booster packs (I think it was 7 drafts in 1 night) and this was just a standard FNM and not some special event, and this happened in a region where there is at least 4 more places that have FNM within a half hour drive from where this took place. The last time I went to a MTG event only 6 people showed up. All of which were leet players (excluding myself), and the rest of the people wanting to play were reluctant to sign up for the draft based on the competition.

My opinion on mana and printing crap rares.

Mana has always been a controversial issue with Magic the Gathering. Just check out the Wikipedia article on Magic the Gathering to see this is a common consensus, however I want to take the mana issue one step further by arguing that the best mana fixers are needed to play competitively, and most of the best mana fixers out there are printed as rares which drives up the value of each card. Rare Lands can run up to about $10-$15 dollars each, even $20 for the really good ones like reflecting pool. The problem with this doesn't necessarily arrive from good mana sources being difficult to draw but difficult to own and the simplest solution to this problem goes back to yet another issue the players seemed to complain about. Crap rares. I think the biggest issues with MTG goes back to the fact that they print crap rares. Now I've seen several articles written by Wizard's people trying to justify why they print these bad rares and none of the explanations seem legit to me. However after talking about this very topic at a local store someone there summed up for me in one neat simple sentence why Wizards prints bad rares. "Because they don't want it to be profitable to buy a booster pack of MTG." And it makes sense, but at the same time it doesn't make sense. It makes sense that they don't want to have every rare they print have a street value of $5 or more if they are only charging $4 a pack. The reason for this could be that they don't want the store owners buying up all the packs for themselves and strictly only selling singles to make a larger profit. Or it could be that they don't want players having a huge surplus of MTG cards of value that they can trade for cards they need instead of buying more booster packs which is how Wizards make their money. However neither explanation makes sense in light of one simple fact. If all rares were good rares, none of them would have any monetary value of more than the cost of a single pack. Think about it, if every rare in every booster pack you buy was as good as any random 20 dollar rare is now, those rares wouldn't be worth as much. Look at it this way, a box has 36 booster packs in it, so that's at least 36 rares, if only 4-6 of those 36 packs had good rares (value of at least $10-$20), another 15-20 had ok rares (value $5-$9) and the rest were crap that wouldn't sell for $1, then mathematically the chances of getting a good rare is about 1 in 5. This means that in order to statistically get a good rare of $20 value you need to spend about $20 on booster packs. The reason the cards that are good are worth 20 dollars is because it cost about 20 dollars to obtain one. However if all 36 rares were good rares, it would only cost $4 to buy a booster pack and to guarantee yourself a good rare, so it would only be worth about $4 street value. Get it? The rares that are needed to win are so high in value because Wizards wants to print crap rares. If Wizards printed all good rares that can actually win games then any rare you needed to help you win would only cost you about 4 dollars each. So my point is this if you decide to play in a competitive game and you find yourself playing against a deck that was put together for $300.00-$500.00 and you realize that your cheap $25 deck is not going to have a snowball's chance in hell of even staying stable much less actually winning, remember the basic problems rest with wizard's decision to keep certain rares values high by constantly printing crap rares.