Stop Trying to Win

Today's Soundtrack: https://open.spotify.com/track/1AWsIwO7b5LqJ9vyVfIX2X?si=6da0d4fb5aac42f1

If you get everything right, then there's nothing else left.

Table of Contents

• Invisible Progress

• Two Modes

• Learning Mode

• Winning Mode

• Conclusion

Invisible Progress

I've been playing so much Magic. Bloomburrow Limited for RCQs and Arena Opens, Pioneer for the RC, Standard for Worlds, and of course Vintage Cube because there's a way to play that for high stakes.

I've been losing a lot. Here are my 17lands results for Bloomburrow:

Compare this to one of my best recent formats, like WOE:

If you asked me to play a high stakes tournament tomorrow and I got to choose the format, what would I pick? Gimme Bloomburrow, baby.

A lot of my WOE success came from finding an exploitable strategy on ladder, where most people significantly undervalued the Act of Treason effects - Eriette's Tempting Apple and Twisted Fealty. The fact that there were multiple of these effects at uncommon, a green deck that mostly tried to stabilize with Hamlet Gluttons and an underdrafted mono red aggro shell led to an extremely repeatable way to rack up trophies. And I mean extremely repeatable:

Notice how many of these decks have red in them. I'm not kidding when I say I was forcing an exploitable strategy. Even taking that into account, this run required a ton of luck, and a lot of good playskill of course. I doubt I'll be repeating it any time soon.

But with this run factored out, how does the rest of my WOE performance look? Honestly, kind of mid. My winrate before this insane streak was just 59%, pretty comparable to Bloomburrow. When I return to WOE today, outside of the particular late-format draft environment that allowed me to abuse the red strategy, I often find myself lost, and I think I very well might be in a high-stakes draft.

What about BLB? Well for this format, I had the intention going in of trying to be "blind" to as few cards as possible and try and find homes for all the commons to the best extent I could. I had this intention because I often felt lost while drafting MH3, a very different and more synergy-based set where my inclination to draft "the best cards" and flexible mana to make them all fit together I thought often led me astray.

I definitely haven't been perfect with this in BLB - I've played a lot more green-black than any of the other color combinations, partly due to personal preference and partly due to those cards being in some sense "objectively" the most powerful. But 13 drafts into this format (plus a few on MTGO and in paper), and I feel more well-rounded in my format knowledge than I did with WOE.

We try to chart progress in Magic through winning - but there's more to it than that.

Two Modes

Most people playing competitive Magic have one mode they predominantly play it in - Trying their hardest to maximize their win %. At least personally, this is the mode I have played in for most of my 'career'.

This makes total sense - Competitive players are competitive players because they want to win, and as we've discussed before, they want to prove their skill and smarts through achieving tournament success. (Listen to Mark Rosewater talk about the "psychographic" profile of the Spike, and you'll see he understands this very well).

It also makes sense when you have a limited amount of time to play Magic (most of us have jobs, Ryan!) and still haven't proven to yourself that you're "good enough" to take your competitive aspirations seriously. If you can only play a few drafts a week (this is still a very invested player) and occasionally a high-stakes tournament like an RCQ, you're going to want to try your best to win those drafts.

This makes total sense, but I still want to emphasize that it's serving an emotional need for competitive players, one that we might have to give up if we want to level up at a certain point. Why do we need to try and maximize our winrate during the regular, normal-stakes Magic we play?

Of course, part of it is that generally, trying to win when it doesn't matter is good practice for trying to win when it matters. A huge part of Magic is ingraining nuanced, complex habits deep into our subconscious, like reading draft signals and evaluating who's the beatdown. If we practice evaluating these things seriously and deeply, like we are trying to win every game or draft we play, it will become second nature and take less energy when we're doing it in a high stakes situation. This is part of why practice is valuable.

However, I don't think this is the only reason why we try to win above all else during non-tournament Magic. We put a lot of personal ego into our results. I have a distinct memory of going 1-2 at a local friend's cube draft (hi Evan!) and being deeply embarrassed... despite the room being full of good players, all of them already knowing I'm a strong player, and 1-2 being a perfectly within-expected-range result. I think this level of caring about winning is unhelpful for competitive players - because it prevents us from learning as effectively as possible.

Let me give some more concrete examples of what I mean, so you can more easily see where an overmaniacal focus on winning can get in the way of learning --

This was my first P1P1 of Bloomburrow. In my view, there are pretty clearly two considerations for us here, and they're both enchantments that cost 2W. One is an unconditional removal spell, and the other is a highly conditional but potentially powerful build-around.

If this had been a Pro Tour draft, given my format knowledge at the time, I think I'd have taken Banishing Light. I think there's a time in my Arena grinding where I'd have taken Banishing Light day 1 of the format for the exact same reason as I'd have taken it in a Pro Tour - Because given my currently knowledge, it's the card I think maximizes my winrate in the draft I'm currently playing.

But given my intentions heading into BLB, I think it's pretty clear that I went with Talent. The deck went 0-3 (partially because I was doing things like taking Jolly Gerbils over Intrepid Rabbit, lol), but I felt in the games where I cast Talent that just a single way to make a token turned the card into a powerful engine. I could easily imagine the card being an absolute All-Star in a deck that could consistently generate tokens. I had learned something while losing!

Learning Mode

So let's look at how we can step back from trying to win all the time and instead work on skills that will make us better in the long run. What does "learning mode" look like?

I'm going to define "Learning Mode" as playing Magic with the goal of getting better at Magic. This overlaps in large ways with playing Magic to win (as discussed above), but there are important differences. In learning mode, you will often make decisions that you think are likely suboptimal for the goal of winning the particular Magic you're playing in the moment -- If those decisions have a certain kind of upside for your long-term growth in the game.

Some of those reasons might be...

• Trying out a card or a strategy that you don't have a lot of experience with

• Making a decision you wouldn't usually make to see if the way the game plays out after that surprises you

• Stress testing a theory about the format that you have, but isn't easy to find opportunities to attempt

• Attempting to put a skill into practice that has bad consequences when executed poorly, but high upside when executed well

You get the idea. The biggest theme here is seeking out discomfort and failure in order to grow. It isn't exactly hard to grasp why this is going to help you get better at Magic in the long run, but it is emotionally difficult to put into practice. With that in mind, let me talk about a few more recent examples of what this looks like for me,

Let's start with a simple one. I've been doing a lot of pioneer testing for the Regional Championship at the end of October, and one of the consensus best decks in this format is Izzet Phoenix. This was the other deck I was seriously considering for the Arena Championship - I think it's incredibly strong and very likely the best deck in the format when played well.

But there's a reason I didn't register Phoenix for the AC, and I think it was the right call. I don't think I'm able to play Phoenix at a high level right now, and said as much in the team channel. Jason (Ye, currently one of the best few players in the world), gently pushed back, making the point that if I always took that approach, I'd never be able to play the best deck:

This, being something I already agreed with, stuck with me. My logic had been that I want to focus on Worlds testing, and learning a deck as complicated as Phoenix would be a huge time sink that took focus away from the more important tournament -- But there's another way to look at it, which is that this is an opportunity to push myself and get better at Magic in a way that might benefit me at Worlds.

So the past few weeks, I've decided to do as much as I can to try and improve my Phoenix gameplay, and see how things feel after a "good faith effort" at that. I've been losing a lot to some of the best players in the world on Sanctum, but I've also been getting detailed feedback on my games from the same folks, and I feel like I have a much better theoretical understanding of the deck (putting that into practice is still a challenge at this point).

I still don't know if I'm going to register Phoenix for the RC, and it's nice to have a fallback like Quint that I think is still pretty well-positioned, but I'm getting better at Magic by pushing my comfort zone and trying to be comfortable in learning mode, even while I'm taking a lot of Ls.

Similarly, I've been trying to expand my comfort zone even with the deck I'm comfortable with - Quint! Back when preparing for the AC, the manabase was something we tried briefly to improve, but quickly found ourselves backing off because it was just too complicated, and we didn't want to mess with what was already working just a few weeks before the tournament.

One way I've avoided learning mode in constructed is being unwilling to try out my own adjustments to decks even just on ranked ladder. I've found it really hard to queue up with a brew that I know is probably janky, but could be broken if the cards flow together the way I hope they will. If I copy a stock list from MTGGoldfish, I tend to make zero adjustments, even if I know the list is outdated or I have things I want to try. Even now, I've been playing Phoenix exclusively with the first list from a good player I could find, even though that list was from the pre-ban pioneer format.

The logic here is that the adjustments I make, or the brews I create, are likely to be bad because I'm (definitionally) inexperienced with a deck I'm just beginning to practice with. There's some validity to this -- At least with a known deck, if part of what you're doing is evaluating how strong it is and how well you can play it, you want to start with at least a semi-competent version before making crazy adjustments, to control for the "list quality" variable.

But there are other things you're missing out on when you only play stock decks and don't give yourself permission to make mistakes and play with bad lists. You don't learn why the lists are bad!! It's no wonder I'm not a very good deck designer or deck tuner... I haven't practiced that skill!

There's been a new Quint list that folks have been doing well with on MTGO, and it looks very different from the version I'm used to:

https://x.com/smnttmtg/status/1831122509233598630?s=46&t=PVJkrDuPMqrNkh7LQIGGVg

This list is obviously pretty loose. It's playing 4 lands in the sideboard for goodness sake! But there's a lot of strong theory behind it as well, and it's been performing well. I've never been comfortable messing with the Quint manabase... but now's as good a time as any! Can we improve it?

I've been trying out some Fabled Passages to try and smooth the maindeck mana a little bit, as well as accentuate the sideboarded basics. Who knows if this is going to make the deck worse, but it's worth it to try, so that I can learn! I've also tried building my own hybrid version between the two lists, to see if a greedier manabase can accomodate my favorite green mana fixers & rampers as well as some treasure makers that add speed in the other version:

Again, are these lists good? Probably not! Will I learn more about Quint when I play them and lose more with them? Almost certainly. If I end up playing Quint at the RC, I will be able to bring a version I'm confident with and probably will write up another guide for the post-ban world.

Finally, let's close with an actually fun example from Limited. Check out this absolute pile of a vintage cube deck:

This deck was bad. It was too slow and easily disruptable, and it went 0-3 - but I learned a lot playing it. This draft came after my latest 64-person draft ended again in round 2 after I got run over by a fast combo-y start from a mono white shell with my boring good-mana interactive deck for the second time in two of these higher-stakes drafts.

I have good reasons for thinking the boring, consistent, interactive decks are the best in the cube, and most high level players seem to agree with me based on the content I've seen. However, I thought I might be leaning too far into this strategy, and wanted to push myself to try and draft the comboiest deck that ever comboed. This is a deck that can win with Doomsday (a card I hadn't read the text on before this draft) into Thassa's Oracle, Through the Breach + Emrakul, or Oath of Druids tutoring up either one. It can also win with balance + zuran orb + crucible of worlds. What it won't do is win by playing board-affecting threats, answering the same threats when presented by opponents, and attacking for lethal damage.

If I had been drafting to win, I never would have drafted this stinker. But I was drafting to learn, and I was surprised at how functional the deck actually was, despite looking like hot garbage. It won multiple games and was highly competitive in every match! I think a deck that incorporated some of these combos, even if the cards were blank otherwise, would potentially do a lot better than a deck that looks like something you can draft in legacy cube. Putting the two styles together in a cohesive way is another challenge, but it's something I won't learn how to do unless I try, and that might mean losing a lot in the process.

I've been playing a lot of Magic recently, and I've been losing a lot. Partially this is just due to how much I've been playing, but as you can see, another large part of it is that I'm intentionally pushing myself into areas I'm less comfortable in, trying to expand my abilities within the huge possibility space that is this game. Doing this is emotionally difficult, but in my opinion, well worth it. It's going to help me when it's time to win.

Winning Mode

So what's the flipside to this? Learning mode is great and all, but there are also real downsides I want to acknowledge to taking this approach to the game. How do we take the most we can from our regular play, but still be able to optimize towards winning when it matters?

I think the most important thing to recognize here is that there will always be more to learn, but that doesn't mean it is always the right time or the right choice to learn it. It can be easy to get fascinated by the wide range of possibilities in Magic, and sometimes this is useful, but sometimes there are diminishing returns in doing things like trying to break Pioneer with Leyline of Transformation just weeks before the RC.

It's also important to keep a clear tab on your own abilities and proficiencies, even while you're learning, so that you don't get used to trying to do things you're not good at. At the end of the day, if I still feel like I'm not going to have an advantage in Phoenix mirrors at the RC, I'm not going to register the deck, no matter how "valuable" learning at the tournament would be. (I have 2 real shots at re-qualifying for the PT next year, and though I like to joke about how I don't care about the RC because Worlds is right around the corner, I think it would be silly to not fully optimize for winning when the time comes).

Even when I'm in learning mode, I try to keep a clear distinction between the times where I'm trying something new and uncomfortable and the times I'm mostly just playing to win and hoping to learn in the "normal" way. A good rule of thumb for this is that you should always be able to articulate what you're trying and why, and then be able to express takeaways from it afterwards. If you can't do this, not only are you probably not learning very much, but you're also at risk of ingraining bad habits that your brain confuses for normal decision-making.

You will know when a new skill starts to "click" and become a part of your repertoire - you'll start to win with it! Results are always important information, even if they shouldn't be something you anchor your mood and feelings of success or failure on. If you haven't been able to win with a strategy in testing, you shouldn't try to win with it at a tournament unless you don't have any better ideas (and hopefully, if you were exploring something outside of your comfort zone, that means you had a comfort zone you were leaving, and can return to).

Winning mode is the time to return to the things you know you're good at. If you're good at learning mode, you'll add new tools to this toolbelt as time goes on by seeking out discomfort and challenge, questioning your own thought processes, and honing in on your mistakes in order to grow from them.

On the flipside, focusing on your mistakes is usually a poor use of time in winning mode. It's quite difficult to learn consciously while playing a high-stakes tournament - any learning to be done is already being handled by your subconscious. You need your conscious brain to be available to figure out the next problem, not the previous one.

I really want to stress how different the mental and emotional states are here. I often find myself during testing in awe of how much I still don't know about Magic, and how far I need to go to get where I want to be. Sometimes I feel this during important tournaments too, but as much as possible, I try to ignore that feeling and remind myself that I've done the preparation, I've learned a lot, and now it's time to show it. They might be the same cards you're manipulating between testing and the tournament hall, but the mental and emotional game and the correct moves to win it are often entirely different.

Conclusion

These are the two pillars of truth to return to when thinking about winning mode & learning mode:

• Magic is incredibly hard, and no one is ever done learning it. There will always be parts of the game you are not as good at as you want to be, and trying to get better at those aspects is very worth it, even if it means losing in the short term.

• Everyone has parts of the game they excel at, and there is plenty of room in Magic to win with your unique style. The "right decision" to optimize for winning the tournament in front of you can sometimes be objective, but many times it is subjective, and depends on each person's experience level and unique strengths.

Learning mode is the time to remember bullet #1, realize you're nowhere near the player you want to eventually be, and be willing to put yourself through uncomfortable and mentally challenging experiences in order to get there.

But make sure you always have a voice in your head telling you that when the time comes, you're going to lean into #2 and kick some ass.

Expanding your skills is great and all, but you can't be a scholar when it's winning time. You've got to be a killer.

Study hard, stop trying to win, then go out and win when it matters.