More thoughts on slowing down, patience, and curiosity

Today's soundtrack: https://open.spotify.com/track/521H4i1z61NsAwL84bMlAr?si=7ef0d23a9e7946d3

I want to write content that is useful in a short-term strategic sense (with format and/or deck knowledge), but also stuff that helps folks reflect on their relationship with and approach to Magic. This is the second one! (Don't worry, there will also be some OTJ draft stuff and maybe even some Standard).

The Grind

May 30-31st: Arena Championship

April 6: MOCS open

April 13: OTJ Prerelease

April 21: OTJ RCQ

April 27: OTJ Limited Super Qualifier

---We are here---

May 4-5: Arena Open

May 6: VML starts

May 10-12: OTJ Arena Championship Qualifier Weekend

May 18: Another OTJ limited RCQ

May 25: Another OTJ Arena Open

I've been playing a LOT of Magic. It's so amazing to be in a position like this which, while not long-term sustainable, represents a huge opportunity to dive deep into the game I love and try to reach its highest levels.

I've also been diving into making MTG content, recording tons of videos on my and my teammates' Arena Championship runs and writing the Quint guide (hope folks are liking it!).

I don't think I'm burned out -- If anything, the more I sink my teeth into everything, the more excited I feel for how much there still is to learn and do and how much better I can get.

The phrase I keep coming back to is that Magic is Hard. Obviously everyone knows this, and I've known this for a long time, but I think one of the biggest reasons it took such a long time to break through at the professional level (a thing that mainly requires a good run of variance, but also happens more often for better players) was that I had become too comfortable with my own skill.

Here is my 17lands winrate since I started using the program (September 2021), up until October 2023. Of course there are plenty of swings from variance or formats I clicked with vs. didn't click with, but largely it hovers right around 61.5% and is remarkably flat.

This is a great winrate! The average for all Arena players, obviously, is 50%. The average 17Lands user is somewhere around 56%. I'm significantly above that. I'm a great limited player!

Then, there's this dude. For those who don't know, Eken (Andeas Elkund) is a well-known MTGO and Arena grinder who is probably the best Limited player in the world. He is a living embodiment of the truth that Magic is Hard... but that it's not impossible to separate yourself from the competition.

Of course I've known about Eken for a while, but only recently have I really started to grapple with the idea that I'm truly not at the level I could be when it comes to Magic skill.

Now, is this inherently a problem that needs to be fixed? Not at all. Being great at anything requires time, resources, and sacrifices. If being the best in the world at something isn't your goal, then you may be satisfied with merely being the best in most rooms you'll find yourself in.

Still, personally, I'd like to win the World Championships. So it's a bit of a problem for me. Maybe you're also realizing you're not quite at your goal yet too.

Everyone has different goals in terms of their Magic skill level, but I think the worst position you can find yourself in is thinking you've reached your skill goal when you actually haven't. This is incredibly easy to do in Magic. The game is an ever-shifting whirlwind of probabilities, and figuring out which results are due to luck vs. skill is nearly impossible for anyone to do at low sample sizes. Any given tournament can go well or poorly for the best players in the world, so who's to say I'm not at their level, and just haven't gotten lucky in some key spots yet?

How about high sample sizes?

67.1%.

61.5%.

Yeah, that's pretty clear.

The Work

How does one close the gap between where they are and where they want to be in Magic?

Once you see how far there truly is left to go in developing your skill, it can be really intimidating. However, I believe this feeling is the perfect place to start - The comfort of thinking you're the best player in the room is the thing you need to be scared of.

Here's a part of a piece I wrote last year about my struggles with chronic pain and what they've taught me:

The older I've gotten, the more I've started to realize that this feeling of being totally blown away by the amount of work that will be required to get to where you want to go is actually the first sign that you're ready to start the journey. Seeing the gap between the person you are and the person you want to be feels daunting, but it's usually much closer than you think once the target comes into view. You were already traveling, you were just stuck in a fog, likely wandering in circles. The fog lifting, though it reveals the immense distance yet to travel, is still a good sign.

Still, you've got to keep walking.

What does this look like in Magic?

The Practice

Alex (Chord O Calls, host of Limited Level Ups) posted a very interesting link on Twitter yesterday to an academic article he was featured in.

https://x.com/Chord_O_Calls/status/1785345093232107539

I'm not going to pretend to understand all the language used in the article, but the basic thing it seems to be talking about is the habits we form as players, how those become ingrained, and how the best players (& content creators) can break out of their own habits to iterate on them and form new ones.

This type of work requires self-reflection and slowing down. Forging new neural pathways isn't easy, but reinforcing old ones is. Moreover, figuring out which new pathways to form doesn't happen automatically, and the entire point is that you don't know where you're going wrong. This type of work is, by literal definition, not something you can do "on autopilot".

There are different levels to this. In one sense, merely playing a format and noticing what works and what doesn't is a powerful form of learning. Honing this skill is crucial, and much of it can eventually be delegated to an "autopilot" of sorts. In a sense, I believe my 61.5% lifetime premier draft winrate reflects the strength of my "learning new limited formats" autopilot that I talked about in my first article.

What I'm talking about when it comes to improvement is a level of abstraction higher from this mode of learning - It's understanding your own Magic habits and biases and figuring out where they're helping and hurting you. Learning how to learn better. I think the best opportunity for this is when you find yourself struggling, and boy have I been struggling in OTJ:

Yup, that's me, Ms. 55% winrate! I've frankly been having an awful run in this format so far, beyond my normal "experimentation" window. Once I tried to "turn on the gas" and play totally towards winning the most I could, I found myself failing - in fact, falling even further backwards. Here's my most recent stretch of drafts:

Psssh... this is no record that reflects the skill of a Worlds competitor! Clearly, I must be running into a streak of horrible variance. Either that, or this is a no-skill, bomb-driven format and the designers of this set suck...

...right?

Mora & I went through some of these recent drafts last night, and what we discovered was that I've been rushing through OTJ on autopilot and missing out on some major win equity. I won't go into everything we covered, but here are some potent examples:

https://www.17lands.com/draft/484258f835de440e840646a6dc16cd5e/2/2

This is a draft where I started out on on a Bristlebud Farmer, one of the best cards in the entire set, and opened another one P3P1 -- So no excuses about the rares. Still, I only went 4-3. What went wrong?

Mora & I identified this pick as the key place I got lost during the draft. This is P1P2, and I've just taken a Stingerback Terror after navigating pack 1 deep into green, with a light touch into blue, but generally open to whatever my second color ends up being. After taking Stingerback, I see a Crackle with Powernext, and think, "oh wow, this is a perfect example of how my strategy to hedge your pack 1 towards any bombs you might open in pack 2 is genius in the world of play boosters! Go me!"

I end up waffling between red and blue for my secondary color for the rest of the draft, and end up with a powerful, but ultimately underwhelming deck that is too reliant on its bombs to win.

What I didn't notice was that there was an almost equally good green card in the pack (relative to crackle with power) in Throw From the Saddle, which would have let me stay comfortably in mono green until I got a stronger signal towards my secondary color.

In other words, I got too high on my own supply of draft heuristics, and forgot the fundamentals.

In gameplay, I was making similar blunders.

Sitting at 4-0, I was leaning hard on autopilot assuming my farmers would carry me through the draft (it's a no-skill, all-bomb format, right?). Here I make an indefensible attack in the name of "simplifying the board", and allow my 6/5 to trade for a 4/4 and my 5/5 to trade for a 3/3. Maybe I wasn't favored in this game (my opponent followed up with a Roxanne), but I sure as hell would have been in a much better position without needlessly throwing away board presence.

4-1.

You can't see it from the board state, but I'm already making two mistakes on this turn. First, I don't realize that Magda is NOT an outlaw, so I can safely play out my discerning peddler while still attempting to pyroclasm away the Magda next turn.

Do I even intend to do that though? My opponent needs to commit 4 crimes to get their dragon - Maybe it's better to just wait and bait out another 2-toughness creature so I can get value with my sweeper...

Except, Magda only requires you to sacrifice THREE treasures. Again, I was on autopilot in a new format and way overconfident with my having read the cards.

4-2.

What's the play here?

I think most good Magic players will conclude that this is a hand with significant mana requirements, and so the most important thing is to ensure we continue developing our mana with Dance of the Tumbleweeds. Instead, I (bomb-brained), suspended my Stingerback Terror, Tumbleweedsed on the following turn, and fell behind.

Sure, later on in the game I got blown out by a Final Showdown and could blame it on the bomb, but I made a pretty fundamental development mistake on an early turn. Usually it's extremely difficult to determine how the game would have played out differently without those.

4-3. Man, this format sucks!

The Mindset

I've been trying to notice how different physical & mental states are affecting my ability not just to play Magic, but to learn while I'm playing Magic recently. Looking back at this draft with Mora, I was flashing back to playing it and remembering the thoughts I was having.

These decisions are the decisions of someone whose main thought is not...

"Wow, this is an interesting board state, what do I think is the right play?"

but rather...

"I really hope this game goes according to plan so my winrate can get back up to the 61.5% where it rightfully belongs".

Of course, these are natural thoughts. We care about results, and results are an important indicator of whether your strategies are working. Still, it's vitally important when playing to be able to focus as much as possible on the process instead of the results.

I know I'm playing my best Magic when I'm significantly ahead on board, yet my brain is scrambling to piece together ways I could lose the game, desperate to claw back the last 1% of win equity before my opponent can grab it.

I think this kind of mental state can only be achieved by a player who wants to play well, not a player who wants to win. A player who wants to win is going to lunge at the first possible victory they see. A player who wants to play well will think, "oh, interesting, that's a way I could possibly win. Is it the best one?"

A perfect example of this happened at the Pro Tour over the weekend. If anyone hasn't watched the quarterfinals match between eventual champion Yoshihiko Ikawa and Sean Goddard, it was one for the ages - I highly recommend it. In game 1, Sean makes a sequence of plays that separates the masters from the mere experts like me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wauTUZUwa8Y

Sean untaps for his turn and has access to 16 basic lands as well as two Virtues of Strength in exile. These are 7-mana super-rituals that will triple the mana production from Sean's remaining lands. If he casts both, (the first one meaning he only has to tap 3 lands for the second), he will have 6 lands left over which each produce 9 mana (the triples stack) -- Plus two floating. That is a Worldsoul's rage for 54 damage, with Ikawa at 39 life. Game 1 of my Pro Tour top 8 match in the books!!!!!!

However...

What if Ikawa can disrupt the first virtue before the second one resolves? Say there is a leyline binding in hand. This would reduce the mana production down to a mere 18 + 2 floating, which is not enough for lethal.

Still, Sean has another rage in hand and can kill Ikawa next turn. Except, what if Ikawa can disrupt both virtues, so Sean is only left with 16 mana on the turn he's trying to accomplish this?

This really shouldn't be an issue, unless Ikawa can put Sean under enough pressure to prevent him from spending his Shigeki to get back a virtue in addition to the rage. That would delay Sean by a turn, but still, the kill is inevitable. Ikawa has literally zero creatures on the board. How on earth would he be able to kill Sean from 24 life over just two turns, starting from an empty board?

Well, Ikawa does play a singleton copy of Imodane's Recruiter in his list, and 4 copies of Herd migration... a herd plus a recruiter would represent 23 damage next turn (scary, but not lethal!), and more importantly, kill over two turns unless Sean can wrath the board. If Ikawa can find one more way to add to the board (in addition to migration + recruiter + 2 sources of disruption), Sean would be dead next turn unless he gains life or produces blockers.

So, to recap:

Sean can probably win the game immediately if he goes for it right now. Even if he does and Ikawa has the disruption, Sean is still likely to win the following turn unless Ikawa has the second piece of disruption. And still, Sean will be massively ahead, unless Ikawa has the singleton copy of Imodane's recruiter, plus a Herd Migration, which will simply get the game to a state where Sean is forced to wrath and reset -- basically a neutral state where Sean is still in his endgame and Ikawa must continue to draw threats and add pressure to the board before Sean draws out of it, something his deck is designed to do, having removed all his basic lands. And finally, if Ikawa has:

Disruption + Disruption + Recruiter + Herd + Additional threat...

Sean would then lose unless he gains a significant enough amount of life this turn.

Going for this right-there, but not-quite-guaranteed win is not a good enough play for Sean. Because it's not the right play. He finds a line that wins the game deterministically over two turns -- Cast only a single virtue, play the could-have-been-lethal Rage for X=16 (which gains him enough life to be safe from any recruiter shenanigans, even with an additional threat). This sets up a followup turn where Sean can cast his second virtue as a ritual and cast Rage for X=25, killing Ikawa from 23.

It turns out, Ikawa DOES have Disruption + Disruption + Recruiter + Herd + Threat (though, with Sean's line, he doesn't have to use the second piece of disruption, a Boseiju who Endures). He removes the first virtue, makes a massive board in a single turn, and attacks Sean down to just 4 life.

Still, this is the ridiculously specific scenario Sean accounted for. He still gets to untap and cast a Rage for 25 for the win. Victory in the first game of his Pro Tour top 8 match, a position players across the world would give their left arm to be in, is right there!!!!!!!!!

Go for it Sean!!!!!!

Sean's not focused on that nonsense. He's focused on what he can control and what matters. Sean is curious. Is playing the Rage here the right play?

What if Ikawa has, on top of everything he's already had...

The second Herd Migration?

This would bring Ikawa up to 26, and with the Rage, back down to... 1 life. Which is not zero life. Ikawa would get to untap with all his creatures and kill Sean.

So it's not actually the right play. Good thing Sean was curious!

Sean wipes the board, Rages for 20, and passes the turn, planning to rage next turn when it is not 90%, not 97%, but 100% certain that he will win the game. Because it's the right play.

Major props to the announcers, Marshall and Mani, for seeing the intricacies of Sean's play this game and conveying them to the audience in real time. This is no easy feat - but what Sean did was harder. Remember, the announcers can see Ikawa's hand, so imagining the sequence of cards Ikawa might have to get out of this situation was relatively easy -- Ikawa already had them!

It takes a master to have the curiosity and composure (not to mention the mental calculus) to come up with the ideal hand your opponent could have completely from scratch and play around it, even when an easy victory is sitting right in front of you, tantalizingly close.

This is the kind of mentality I want to have while I'm playing Magic. Of course, Sean assuredly has had hundreds, if not thousands of reps in this matchup, which helps when it comes to being able to see outlier situations and possible routes to victory from your opponent. But I've been focusing on the mentality because I think this is what separates someone who is merely a very good Magic player going through the motions (myself in the draft earlier) from someone at the top of their game.

You can't be running scared from defeat or chasing blindly after victory. You instead must be at peace in the moment, enjoying the process of finding the right play, or at least the best approximation of it you can generate with the resources at your disposal.

The Capacity

The ability to have this mentality in the highest pressure situations, on the biggest stages, after the most mentally taxing few days of Magic you've ever played, is the thing I'm striving for. To not feel the pressure because you're just having too much fun solving the problem. To be able to laugh and say "Oh no, I went for that but realized too late it loses to X, wish I'd played better even though you didn't have it" or "Oh, you had it, cool. I'm dead. That was an amazing match! I've got to go tell my friends about it."

I think this is the type of Magic that helps you learn. The more focused you are on the process, the more opportunity there is for growth. It can be so hard to reach this state, and it's fleeting even when it comes. I reached this state in my AC finals match against Toni, where after he won the first of 3 matches, I messaged him "that was a REALLY good game!!!!", and meant it with 100% sincerity. I didn't really care about anything else in that moment.

I didn't reach this mental state before the finals - I think because I was still battling for the Worlds invite. I had put too much pressure on myself to do well in my first professional tournament, and cared too much about the result. This is normal and I can forgive myself for it easily, but it's still something I hope to get better at. I'm significantly more proud of the Magic I played in the finals, where I lost, than I am of the Magic I played in the rest of the tournament to get there.

The past month has reminded me how easy it is to fall back into the frustration-anxiety cycle over Magic results. I've been trying to feed my curiosity, and this is something that's been genuinely working well. I can see the long road ahead of me and what it will take to become a true Master, and I'm so excited to continue traveling down it. The fire is here and it's burning strong.

But I think the fire also needs to be tended a little if it's going to be carried on such a long journey. The fire has to keep me warm and give me the energy to go on, but it can't burn so bright that it's hard to see where I'm going.

I need to take breaks. I don't want to be playing frenetic Magic, I want to be playing curious Magic, and curious Magic requires some amount of distance + re-engagement.

Nothing crazy!!! I'm still going to be playing the Arena Open this weekend and VML starting next week. But I think for the next few days, I'm going to stop myself from playing on Arena or MTGO and engage with some other life stuff.

When I return on Saturday, I'll be trying to build my Sealed Pool like Eken or Sean would.

Patiently and Curiously.