Habits of Highly Effective Magic Players

It's been a while since we've had a soundtrack, but we're bringing it back!

https://open.spotify.com/track/3Q6VfeIZ1bTjWiNe2Or4LQ?si=10e27e94cc3045b8

Table of Contents

• New Friends & "Talent"

• Habits of Highly Effective Players

• Good players separate results and ego

• Good players are deeply curious

• Good players seek out and accept help

• Good players understand, but try not to commit to their own limitations

• Good players are patient

• Good players seek out discomfort

• Good players try to outwork the field

• Good players have fun

New Friends & "Talent"

I've met so many new friends over the course of this year while I've been getting back deep into the competitive scene. Everyone has been incredibly kind, lovely, and interesting. Despite all the griping we all do about our community (and I think it's useful griping! Let's always strive to make it better!), I think competitive Magic has some of the smartest, wisest, kindest, more creative and driven people out there.

Lots of these people are objectively less experienced in the game than I am, and many of them have expressed that in some form or another when talking to me. Often this can slide into assumptions about my own skill and/or "talent" level being much higher relative to theirs, and while sometimes these assumptions (at least the skill ones) are accurate, I think quite often, more often than people believe, they are not.

To illustrate this point, I want to highlight that at the beginning of this year, I had not played a meaningful constructed tournament in about 5 years, and moreover, before that had never succeeded at any major constructed tournament (I'm serious, my best constructed performance in my career before this year was missing out on day 2 of a modern Grand Prix by one match playing Melira Pod. I was not by any measure a successful constructed player).

In fact, I am extremely confident when I make the claim that at the beginning of this year, the average "good" RCQ competitor was a better Standard player than me. This is not an exaggeration, I literally mean that I would not have had a good chance of top 8ing if I tested for a week and went to a standard RCQ.

However, this year I was able to bring not one, but two off-the-wall combo decks to professional constructed tournaments (albeit, both developed by players other than me), and do well enough at both to write content about both decks and have lots of people use that content to succeed themselves.

Why is that?

The more I learn about Magic, the more I understand that it is a game about learning. This means that experience is crucially important, but equally necessary is the ability to learn effectively from that experience.

Like the dichotomy of luck vs. skill, experience vs. learning ability is not actually a dichotomy, it's just two necessary properties for success. When combined, they act as a force multiplier that vaults you ahead of anyone who doesn't possess both. Because it's possible to, the only people who succeed over long sample sizes do have both.

Obviously, these two things are not completely mutually exclusive. Experience in MTG helps you develop habits that increase your learning ability, and learning ability helps you translate experience into long-term gains in skill, which leads to a virtuous cycle.

However, there is an asymmetry here. One of these things is easy to acquire (you can just play a lot of Magic!), and the other is possible to never improve on. Many, many competitive players go their entire "careers" struggling to make significant progress against their ability to learn from their Magic experiences. One of the best, and most difficult things about this game is that it's very good at constantly testing your ability to learn, entirely separately from your ability to apply knowledge you already have.

Part of this is because Magic is actually not a single game with the same pieces and rules, but rather a constantly updating group of games with a (mostly) consistent rule-set between them. Experience in a particular limited set or constructed format will directly help you succeed in that format, but if your "learning coefficient" is small, it's going to be impossible to learn a new competitive format effectively in time for tournaments in it.

This means that, in my view, learning ability is the factor far more important for long term success. If someone has a good learning process in Magic, they are going to be able to succeed in the competitive scene astronomically more quickly than someone who has amassed a ton of experience but is inefficient in their testing/exploration process.

(This also applies at higher and higher levels of abstraction. Not only is being able to learn well important in Magic, so learning how to learn well, and onwards and onwards up the abstraction chain. The good news is that we can largely collapse this chain, because the mechanisms that make you good on one level mostly apply to the others too.)

All of this is to say that while we often spend a lot of time as a community judging others by their playskill, knowledge of Magic theory and even raw critical thinking & processing ability, I think we often do an extremely poor job of recognizing that "talent" is more than these things, and what it actually is is far more important to long-term success.

I've met many players this year who are objectively less experienced than me. Let's talk about how I know that some of these people are going to be wildly successful in Magic, if they choose to pursue this game as a competitive hobby (which, to be fair, is entirely up to them and a completely different question from whether they'd succeed at it... kind of. More to say about this at the end!)

Habits of Highly Effective Magic Players

If it were easy to describe what makes someone an effective learner, it wouldn't be as interesting a topic, nor as prized of a skill. Luckily for us, it is both of these things, but this also means I'm going to have to do that tricky thing we often use written language for - using many different examples that point to a truth we can't cleanly name. Hopefully the properties I describe here of highly effective Magic players will each be materially useful nuggets you can apply to your own game. A lot of them are common wisdom, so they can be easy to skim over and think "yeah, I know that", but they are common wisdom for very good reasons. These are skills that are almost infinitely maximizable. You can really never reach the end and declare "I'm an effective learner now!". So while you read, instead of skimming over things you've heard a thousand times, I'd encourage folks to reflect on why they've heard these truths so often, and seek to understand how they fit into the bigger picture of becoming an effective learner in Magic.

Good players separate results and ego

This is the first attribute I'm listing because I believe it is the most important. The better a player is, the less I see them trying to determine whether they are a "good" magic player by looking at their game results.

The more you let bad results, especially short-term ones like performance in a particular format or season, or god forbid a single tournament, make you doubt your own abilities, the less energy you have to focus on the actual things that make you a good player. Similarly, the more you let good results trick you into believing your skill is somehow innate and applicable to future tournaments without as much effort, the less you will be able to continue learning and growing, which is necessary for continuing at the highest levels (and the ones below too!)

One of the biggest ways prioritizing results can come at the expense of your own learning is that sometimes it's necessary to be willing to lose to try new ideas. If you're constantly translating your recent performance into your own self-concept of how good you are at Magic, operating in "learning mode" becomes much, much emotionally harder.

I think it's impossible to completely stop trying to determine whether you are a good player, because the nature of competition is to test your abilities. We are in on some level to win and to feel smart and capable - denying that would be counterproductive. This is why I'm talking about the direct, short-term linking of results and ego, not the existence of ego itself or caring about results in a general sense. In fact, I think ego can be a healthy psychological tool when applied correctly, which I'll talk about later.

Good players are deeply curious

If you want to learn well, you'd first better believe that there's something worth learning!

The easiest way to stagnate in your Magic skill is to get to a point where you can't recognize what else you need to learn as a player. If you're ever at a point where you can't identify mistakes you're making, this is a danger sign, but many people don't take it as one. Instead, they become bored or frustrated at their lack of success, chalking results up to variance. The trick here is that for an average-to-good competitive player, many of their results will actually be, by some definition, explainable by variance. It's impossible to win every tournament, because you don't get lucky enough to win most tournaments even with "perfect" play.

However, just because results are explainable by variance, many of them legitimately so, doesn't mean there is nothing to learn. It's fine, and arguably quite important to think about the role of variance in results in Magic, the mistake comes when you allow this to reduce your curiosity about other aspects of the game you could have controlled even if the variance was different.

Curiosity is extremely necessary for success because perfect play Magic is, in fact, practically impossible. This game is hard, not just in the colloquial sense, but in a formal mathematical sense. If you believe you know everything that is important to know about a particular deck or format, all I can tell you is that the best players in the world disagree with you when it comes to themselves and hope that shakes you out of your delusion.

The Socratic Paradox holds extremely true in Magic. The wisest players can see that they still know extremely little, and this fact makes them extremely curious to learn more about the game.

I don't just mean this in an abstract, "having an epistemically humble attitude is good for you" sense, I mean it in a very literal "vision" sense. The stronger you get at the game, the more things you will literally see that you are not able to fully grasp right now. One example of this for me? Paying attention to Thundertrap Trainer triggers and how they affect the bottom of my library while playing Otters. This can affect things like whether you should fetch with your fabled passage before or after playing a draw spell. I know this is something that Jason is able to track while it plays a game, and I'm aware that it's something I'm not yet able to hold in my mind along with all the other decision intensity of the deck. However, I know that I'm in a good spot, because I'm at least in a position where I can see this gap between my own play and perfect play.

Curiosity helps us find these gaps, and it can take a lot of forms. It can look like trying out an obscure build-around in draft because you want to see if you can make a card that should be "bad" work for you. It can look like searching on scryfall for a long time trying to find obscure cards for a new deck you're brewing. It can look like backing up a game in testing to figure out what would have happened if you made a different play. It can also look like asking for someone to review the logs of a difficult match you just played, which we'll talk about next!

Good players seek out and accept help

This attribute goes along with curiosity, but I want to highlight it separately because you can definitely have one without the other. It's not enough to believe there is always more to learn - you also need to believe that you are not capable of doing this on your own.

Of course, there are real stylistic differences in how much different players will prepare solo vs. with others. However, there is a reason why the most successful Magic players form teams at the professional level - there is just too much to learn to cover all the learning ground solo.

Seeking out help on the macro level can look like forming or joining a team, or even just trying to make friends who you can talk about the game with (the lines between this and a team are blurry, and that's fine, both are useful for the same reason!).

But applying this in the micro is equally important. When they've stagnated in their perspective on a particular format or feel like they don't understand a particular deck, good players will seek out people who understand these things better than they do and ask them probing questions about how they are approaching it. (AKA, use the people you've cultivated! Don't be shy! People tend to like giving out advice more than receiving it, but sneakily you're getting the better end of this bargain, in a sense)

Of course, simply seeking out advice isn't enough. You also have to actually implement it, and part of that is at least allowing others to help you and influence your thinking and your play.

This can go too far though, which is why I next want to point out...

Good players understand, but try not to commit to their own limitations

Sometimes, you simply don't "get" a particular deck or format, and even though others try and help you with it, you can't apply their feedback in a way that makes sense for you. Sometimes trying to imitate other players causes you to lose more!

Here is where it's really important to understand that Magic is big enough and complex enough for players to succeed with a wide variety of styles. This means that no one person can master all styles of play (if they could, that would just be the correct "style"), and you will often run into things other players do that don't make sense to you and you can't emulate successfully.

It is important to be able to identify these stylistic differences when they arise, and have the self-awareness and confidence in your own approach to say "that's not going to work for me right now".

I'm a bit worried about saying this to a newer player, so let me balance it with some advice that hopefully will discourage you from dismissing the things that more experienced players might tell them as merely "stylistic" differences.

It's equally important to not let this slip into an inability to learn new things. There's a difference between "I don't think that works for me" and "I don't think that could ever work for me".

Playstyle is always a matter of tradeoffs and effort, never a matter of inherent limitations.

It's often correct to conclude that it's not worth the effort to learn a new strategy right now, but that shouldn't be taken to mean "I have to stay in my lane", it should mean "so I need to find other ways to grow my game that are more achievable/higher payoff, and maybe I'll even return to this eventually!"

This is one of those places where ego is actually a useful tool - both for sticking to your guns when you believe something works for you, and for maintaining a belief that you could, in principle, learn any kind of playstyle.

Good players are patient

Things that are worth doing are hard. Hard things are... hard.

This attribute of good players takes many forms, micro and macro. Patience can look like doing the math once or twice over in a high-stakes moment to make sure you calculated lethal correctly. It can look like holding your removal spell because you know you can't beat your opponent's bomb. It can look like taking one more pause than you normally would before making a decision while you have that nagging feeling you're missing something.

But patience can also look like testing the same matchup, over and over, until you feel confident you've got enough sample size to take conclusions from instead of declaring it to be one way or another after a few games. It can look like picking up a hard-to-pilot deck and expecting to lose a lot with it before you master it. Patience could even look like getting started with preparation for a tournament months before anyone else does, just getting as much experience as possible in a format before the new set gets released that will require adaptation in the weeks leading up to the event.

The patience I'm talking about here is relevant in gameplay, but it's also relevant in the longer game of competitive success. It isn't just the perseverance itself, it's the willingness to commit to difficult goals, and the recognition that the more ambitious goals you set, the more time they will take to achieve -- and that's okay.

The upside of patience is that once you accomplish some of your goals, you start to believe that the next one might also be reachable, and this time you know more or less what it's going to take. This can be an incredibly powerful feeling.

Good players seek out discomfort

One of the major factors I've been noticing more and more as I've gotten to socialize this year with extremely high level Magic players is their tendency to seek out clashes between their beliefs and reality. Times when your intuition said one thing, but the outcome surprised you can be deeply uncomfortable to many people, especially those who still tie their ego to their ability to predict (and control) these outcomes. Games and formats of Magic are no exception - Once someone figures out how to pilot a matchup or win with a deck, they stick to their guns and try and prove their own mastery by exploiting a winning strategy over and over.

This can be valuable, as "exploiting" in the explore/exploit tradeoff often leads to great rewards, especially when you've stumbled on something truly special. However, I think a great many Magic players, myself included, could use some psychological nudges towards the "explore" end of things, and I think one of the best ways to do this is figuring out how to get interested in areas of the game where you're weak and are failing to find effective strategies.

Maybe you're a great drafter, but can never win in sealed unless you open a great pool. Maybe you're an incredible pilot for decision-intense intricate combo decks, but always seem to "draw badly" when you play aggro. Maybe you just can't find a deck that works for you in standard and you're sick of trying, so you just play limited instead.

Every time you're failing in an area of Magic where other people can demonstrably succeed at higher rates than you can, there is something you are missing, and if you can find joy in pursuing that, you'll have far many more opportunities to level up your game. To get there, you're going to have to get comfortable with discomfort.

Good players try to outwork the field

This is the most difficult aspect of what constitutes success in Magic, so I want to be really clear. This is a strictly necessary factor -- ignore it at your own peril.

One thing about competitive Magic is that it is filled with smart people who are good at learning and playing Magic. This means that getting an edge is hard. One of the only ways to guarantee yourself an edge is to have more reps than your competitors -- In the format, on your deck, in Magic generally. The only way to acquire this edge is by playing a TON of Magic.

Good players understand how to lean into their passion for the game and have fun with diving as deep as possible into a strategy that they believe gives them the best chance to win a particular tournament. It's not enough to have a big-picture strategy. In this game, no strategy, no matter how brilliant, can win without the sometimes boring work of intricate execution. Good players know that the only way to maximize their chances of executing well is to train their subconscious, intuitive processing and situational recognition through intense practice - the more, the better.

There is realistically no cap to the amount of effort one can put into practicing for a Magic tournament. The game is hard enough that even playing the deck you're going to bring to the tournament 24/7 wouldn't let you see all the possible lines you might encounter with it, and moreover, you first have to decide which deck (of many, many archetypes and configurations) you're going to bring.

If you think you're working hard enough that you "deserve" success at the highest levels of play, I would like to point you to my own lived experience watching Jason and cftsoc spend literally 12+ hours a day, for weeks, on public streams in our discord grinding the Otters deck online and in person, constantly iterating, constantly learning, constantly questioning whether we could improve things even by just a smidgen in preparation for Worlds. If you're factoring in things like sleep and food and other basic biological needs, let me emphasize to you that it might be functionally impossible to outwork the best players at the highest levels - so the best you can hope for is a tie. Their ability to do this is why they win. They don't "deserve" to succeed at tournaments because they do this, and neither do you or I - it's just a necessary part of making it possible to succeed.

People's material realities will of course impact their ability to "outwork" the competition - Many times in ways that are unjust, but simply true. I know I personally can't play as much Magic as some of my teammates because my chronic pain prevents me from doing so, but I also know that I can play far more than someone who has a full-time job, and my not having one is in part a way to balance out the first factor (a tradeoff I am materially lucky to be able to make right now). There will always be structural barriers to more people succeeding at our game, and we should do what we can to reduce or remove them.

Still, within the scope of your practical limitations, know that every minute you spend preparing for a Magic tournament can be translated into valuable win percentage at that tournament - and the best players in the world both squeeze a lot out of their practice, and will push hard to make sure they get more of it than everyone else.

Good players have fun

Separate your ego from results, know how there is so much you don't know yet, try and get help from others, know your limitations, be patient, seek out discomfort, and WORK, WORK, WORK!!!!

Uh.... isn't this a game? Isn't it supposed to be fun?

Yeah - that's kind of the point. If my descriptions of these behaviors sound like an intense, boring, "try-hard", soul-sucking way of engaging with something that is ultimately a silly game, then I don't believe you have what it takes to be a competitive Magic player.

Another, more accurate way to phrase it would be: You wouldn't enjoy being a competitive Magic player because it's not fun for you, and being someone who enjoys the process required to be a successful Magic player is a necessary attribute for being a successful Magic player. Duh!

I hope it's obvious that I don't think simply being the kind of person who enjoys this activity has anything to do with someone's value as a person or even their natural intelligence or critical thinking skills. There are plenty of good, smart people out there who would be entirely capable of winning at the highest levels of Magic who simply don't have the "talent" of... actually wanting to do that. I'm happy they don't choose to do something that they would dislike!

However, I also think that there are lots of people who find these descriptions aspirational, and think that becoming better at the game they love through all of this curious, patient, social, explorative, and self-reflective hard work sounds like one of the most fun and fulfilling experiences they could have.

I also know that there are a lot of players who still struggle with having fun playing Magic unless they win, and what I want to drive home here is that being unable to have fun learning holds you back from winning (which can start a negative cycle).

But it doesn't have to be that way. The joy of approaching competitive Magic from a more learning-focused, nonjudgmental, explorative and humble place is that it's not just fun, it actually works.

Short-term results extremely not guaranteed.

But I'm willing to take the long-term bet on you. Are you?