The One About Gameplay

Table of Contents

• The Annoying, yet Obvious Stuff

• Gameplay is Lenticular

• Training the Recognition Muscle

• Getting Better Sucks

• Execution

• Cadence

• Pressure and Consistency

• Putting it all Together (Game breakdown vs. Sam Black)

I've been wanting to write a deep-dive post about gameplay for a while, but it's a very tricky subject.

Let's get the annoying, yet obvious stuff the way first...

• Gameplay is very hard to generalize about

Magic is such a beautiful game because every decision in a game is extremely contextual, and it's hard to generalize from specific examples. There is no way to create hard-and-fast rules about gameplay, and even useful heuristics are tough to come up with.

• Gameplay is the single most important skill required to be successful in Magic

I didn't always believe this, because gameplay is not my strongest attribute as a player (I think that is limited deckbuilding). But the more I've focused on improving my in-game decision making over the past few years, the more I've felt like I'm able to win consistently and rise above the competition.

Basically: Yes, it's that important.

• Gameplay is very hard to evaluate

Sometimes it's very easy to see a mistake that cost you a game because it's only a game action or two away from the loss, or immediately leads to a huge negative exchange. However, these aren't the mistakes that separate the best players in the world from each other. The most valuable mistakes to avoid are the ones that are masked in swirling probabilities, decisions that not every elite player will agree on. If you can make these decisions 10% better on average than the average competitive player, you'll have a huge edge. However, good luck determining what "10% better" means or how to measure your progress towards that goal!

Keep these facts in mind as we move forward - This is a huge, extremely opaque topic. The good news is that any progress we manage to make is going to be extremely high leverage when it comes to winning games of Magic. So where do we start?

Gameplay is Lenticular

I want to expand a bit on the "difficult to evaluate" point. Why is Magic gameplay so hard to learn?

I'm borrowing this usage of "lenticular" from Mark Rosewater when he talks about Lenticular Design. The basic concept is that there are aspects of card design/utility that are invisible to newer players, and only able to be recognized by more experienced ones. For a very simple example, most newer players will view Searing Spear and Volcanic Hammer as extremely similar cards, but experienced players will recognize that Spear is a lot more powerful (and harder to play with) because of the significant added optionality.

I believe all gameplay is like this. There are many games of Magic that newer players will see as simple (and drastically mess up without realizing they're doing so), but experienced players will have a hard time with, yet navigate significantly better.

Here's a game I played against Numot on ladder recently that I think a newer player would immediately discard as "nothing I could have done", but has some important questions I can ask myself looking back on it:

https://www.17lands.com/history/c22e6d91502041bd80a65baebf3d7482/0/0

The first major decision we have is on turn 3, where we can either play a land and pass, hoping to ambush the goblin with Fowl Strike, or play Glimpse the Impossible for "make 3 tokens" mode.

• Ambushing the goblin is the "obvious" play here. It's set up perfectly, it makes us feel smart by using the spawn in an unconventional way, and it uses a conditional card in our hand to have an immediate board impact taking out one of the better commons in the set.

• However, I don't think this play is actually obvious. There are some meaningful reasons to prefer Glimpse, mainly based on the weaknesses of the Reinforce line...

• It's weak to removal

• Our hand generates a ton of chump blockers on the ground but doesn't have an easy way to deal with fliers who have more than 2 toughness (There is a 4-mana 3/3 common white flier in this format)

• It takes us off the ability to play our spawn-gang commander next turn, unless we sac the now-relevant spawn... and we're not realistically getting more than a land drop out of glimpse if we play it next turn, our hand has enough lands in it that we don't really care about playing one off of glimpse...

In other words, when we zoom out a bit and think carefully about things like possible interaction from our opponent, our plan over the next few turns, and our long-term plan for surviving/winning the game (close to the same thing if we assume we're facing RW aggro), the play starts to look a lot less obvious.

I'm still not sure the Fowl Strike was the wrong play here. We're not in the realm of obvious mistakes. The way the game actually played out is far less important than evaluating the decision based on the information I had at the time - But I did make it and I did end up losing to large flyers.

I think recognizing these moments is the crucial skill for improving your gameplay. You can't improve on something you can't see, so the biggest thing to work on is recognizing where the learning needs to take place. I even think this is true for the best players in the world - that's how difficult gameplay is. Identifying mistakes (or possible mistakes) is something every player at every level can and should work on, because of gameplay's lenticular nature.

If you feel like you're encountering a lot of games where you had "no decisions to make", you're either in the midst of an extremely rare negative variance swing, or, much more likely, you need to level up in recognizing which decisions are available to you in a game.

Training the Recognition Muscle

The way to get better at gameplay decisions is not to continue trying to make them in new games over and over. Don't get me wrong - practice is tremendously important, and playing lots of magic will certainly make you better at Magic. However, to focus on this specific skill, there is a far more effective method.

The best way to improve your gameplay is going back over games you've already played and deep-diving on individual decisions, ideally with a discussion partner.

If you're just charging forward into the next draft or the next ladder match, the only mistakes your brain will learn from are the ones it already understands as mistakes within the processing time allotted to you in a game of Magic.

In other words, if the only reflection you're doing on your games is happening while you play them or immediately after, you're only improving up to your current ability to recognize mistakes in the moment. To truly reach the next level (no matter what level you're currently on), we need to train the recognition muscle, or, another way to put it, the decision complexity your brain is able to process in a typical 5-30 second turn of MTG.

In the game above, my muscle recognized the ability to pass & ambush the goblin with the reinforce ability, and it recognized the weakness of that line to removal. It saw the possibility of playing the glimpse for three spawn, but failed to process the specifics of what the following turns would look like if I didn't do that now, or the possibility that with my hand, I would be weak to large fliers.

Since we can't, by definition, process more complexity than our current "muscle" allows for in a short period of time, we need to use our "slow systems" of thinking to learn how to recognize these new factors. The best way to do this is by reviewing your games after the fact like I did above, preferably with a player at or above your skill level also present to discuss decisions with.

If you talk to professional players, this is the advice you will get over and over again. The only reason people don't do it more is that it's not very fun, at least relative to playing live games of Magic.

Aside: Getting Better Sucks

I do want to take a moment to acknowledge that the most effective processes for gameplay improvement are psychologically difficult.

Reviewing Magic is not as fun as playing Magic. Magic is a fun game because it constantly presents us with novel scenarios and immediate consequences. Your brain doesn't want to spend long stretches figuring out what the right choice was in a story it already knows the ending for - It wants to experience a new story, one where the ending is unknown but just new information is just around the corner.

Often for me, this looks like caring more about figuring out what my record is going to be in a draft, as a sort of proxy for how good the deck is that I drafted, instead of reflecting on whether I could have played better in the games I already played. If I won, then I want to keep going and experiencing that feeling! If I lost, I also want to immediately jump into the next one to prove that was just a fluke and this deck is still going to trophy.

Of course, there's also the factor, present in many types of learning, of needing to directly confront your ignorance and shortcomings. Coming to the realization that you probably could have won a game that you lost feels incredibly shitty to most people. I think this factor is heightened in gameplay because it's the closest layer of strategy to the final result, so it's much more raw. To get better at gameplay, you need to really come to terms with the idea that you are constantly making decisions that cost you results. If I just hadn't made that stupid block on turn 4...

There are some things we can do to mitigate these factors. One of my favorite recent psychological tools for this is the value of curiosity - trying to have a beginner's mind when it comes to reviewing your games and finding new paths you could have taken or factors to consider.

There's also the classic manager-speak of turning failures into "opportunities for improvement". If you can truly make the shift from "ugh, I could have won that game if I'd just played a bit better" to "oh wow, I could have actually won that game and now I can see how!", it makes a huge difference. I think we're all somewhere on that spectrum - it's a very hard place to reach.

The last thing I'll say on this is that doing your reviews with friends is highly recommended! I talk a ton about how my roommate Mora is my Magic soulmate on here, and I'll continue doing so -- living with someone who I enjoy hanging out with and who is an expert player that can go back and forth with me about potential lines and gameplay philosophies is a tremendous advantage. Try to find these people and hold onto them tightly.

Execution

We've covered the high level about why gameplay matters, why it's hard to improve on, and the best strategy for improving at it. This is all pretty abstract, and I do want to get a little more concrete in this piece.

The next level down from building your "recognition muscle" is learning how to use it effectively. This is not trivial! In fact, it's a huge part of Magic skill. It's one thing to be able to come to the correct decision with time to reflect and discuss, it's another to be able to make that decision within 10 seconds inside a draft match, and it's another to be able to make that decision while playing a match for thousands of dollars.

So how do we train ourselves to be consistent executors in Magic gameplay? This is a huge topic, and I'm sure I'll write more about it, but I do want to touch on some things here.

Cadence

Not gonna lie, I almost named this section "tempo"

One of the biggest skills I think most Magic players can work on is the cadence with which they think and make decisions during a game. Everyone knows that one player who doesn't think at all until they're confronted with a difficult decision, and thinks they can take five minutes puzzling through it without worrying about the clock. Clock management is important, and learning to play at a consistent cadence will help with that, but let's just assume for now that you only have somewhere between 10-30 seconds to pause when making any decision that comes up in the normal flow of a game.

This may not sound like a lot, but try to time yourself next time you find yourself pausing on a decision. 30 seconds is actually a pretty long time. If you spent 30 seconds on each decision in a 50-minute match, you'd only be able to make ~50 decisions (assuming your opponent takes equal time, and no time at all is wasted to progressing the game, which is of course not realistic). There are far more than 50 relevant decisions to make in a typical match, so 30 seconds is really the maximum, not the minimum.

This is not the time to train the recognition muscle, this is the time to use it and work within its' limitations. The primary thing we want to do is claw back as much of that time as possible so that we can maximize the resources we feed it.

You know what's free to do while your opponent is taking actions or thinking about their own plays? Think about your own!

You should pretty much constantly have something relevant to think about while playing a game of Magic. There really isn't time for things like worrying about the match next to you, what you're going to have for lunch, or whether you fed the cats earlier. It's really important to figure out ways to tune that out and stay dialed in, using every second of the time available to let your brain process and/or pre-process what's happening.

Now, don't get it twisted. 10-30 seconds may sound like I'm telling you to rush, but that's exactly the opposite of the goal here. All of this is meant to give us the most possible time to think about the decisions that matter. I call it the "recognition muscle" because the most crucial skill is recognizing which decisions are the ones that matter, and how much of your time budget to spend on each one. Sometimes it's not worth thinking about thinning your deck by 1 basic land before casting that card draw spell if you're not even sure that you'd rather draw lands or spells here, and sometimes naming the wrong creature type with a Cavern of Souls on turn 2 can cost you a high-stakes match (ask me how I know, or read my Quint guide to find out).

Some players need to work on recognizing the less meaningful decisions and treating them with the appropriate efficiency, and some need to work on recognizing the meaningful ones before they rush through them without taking the time to pause. You'll probably be in both spots at various times throughout your Magic career. The goal is to find a smooth balance and continually get better at recognizing when to pause and when to proceed. It's a dance and an art form, and one of my favorite feelings is when I get in a flow with it.

To improve at your magic cadence, here are a few suggestions:

• Record yourself playing (if online) and notice which decisions you take a lot of time on. Are they the important ones? Are you rushing through things you shouldn't?

• Watch other players you respect when they play in paper and try and observe what they're doing. It's totally fine to try and mimic someone else's cadence to find what feels right for you!

• Try modulating up and down. Play an untimed casual game and pause on far more decisions than you normally would (this is actually really hard to do, but trying is really useful to get a feel for it), or try and play super fast (a great way to do this is playing 30-minute rounds of "blitz magic").

Pressure and Consistency

Besides cadence, the other thing I want to touch on is how the outside context of a match can affect gameplay, and how to try and avoid it. This is again a topic that deserves its own deep dive and has been covered before, but I do want to give some thoughts about how it can affect your gameplay.

Playing good magic is playing good Magic. In every game, you should strive to play "good magic", relative to your current skill level, and nothing else.

We've covered how critical it is to be able to put all of your cognitive processing into playing the game you're currently in. One thing that can get in the way of this is pressure/expectations/stakes.

I strongly believe that well-known professional players get a non-trivial win % bump when they play in open tournaments against amateurs, because those amateurs are spending precious energy thinking about how they're coming across to the pros that they would otherwise be spending thinking about their plays.

I know this because I've experienced it.

Grand Prix Boston, 2012.

M13 Sealed.

17-year-old Ryan has two Staff of Nins in her pool and should be cruising to day 2.

Then I get paired up against Shuhei Nakamura.

There's only one play I remember from this match, but it's such a perfect example of how playing against one of my idols (Shuhei is an all-time-great limited player, specifically a great sealed player) frazzled me beyond belief.

Shuhei has in play a Scroll Thief equipped with Ring of Evos Isle, and I have two Ravenous Rats and a Vastwood Gorger (yes, all these cards were playable in limited back then).

The Scroll Thief has been growing for multiple turns, so it's well beyond trading range. My plan is to utilize the rats as chump blockers while I get ahead on board and prevent Shuhei from drawing more cards - but I'm at a pretty low life total, so I have to be careful. A hit from the thief will not only put me into lethal range, but it'll draw Shuhei another card and probably give him enough tools to close it out.

In my head, all I'm thinking is "gotta play smart, I don't want to look dumb in front of Shuhei. I have to play around the possibility that he has a removal spell like disfigure, so I need to leave back both rats. I need to leave back both rats for blocking. I need to leave back both rats for blocking. Don't be stupid, be careful. Don't look stupid."

When Shuhei attacks with his 6/8 Scroll Thief, I throw both 1/1 rats in front of it. They both die, pointlessly.

This is a play that makes absolutely no sense. It's a totally baffling choice. You know what the only reasonable explanation for me making that play was? It was an unorthodox play that demonstrated my commitment to "using" the two rats as blockers so as not to appear stupid. I'm not saying it makes sense from a logical perspective, I'm saying it makes sense from an emotional perspective.

There is absolutely no chance I'd have made that mistake playing against another random opponent in that tournament. Instead of playing the Magic in front of me, I was playing my emotions, trying to manage my fear of looking foolish and my desire to be recognized as smart by someone I looked up to. In the process, I accomplished the opposite (and lost the match as well).

This also applies in reverse, by the way. It's very easy to be playing Magic that doesn't feel "high pressure" enough to you and let it affect your gameplay. I find myself playing sloppily sometimes as I'm climbing up from platinum to mythic at the beginning of a month. Of course this is silly, all the same players are in platinum now who were in mythic a week ago, and even though there's no ranking next to my name the results I care about are equally valuable, but I've noticed it does affect me. It shouldn't.

It's worth reminding yourself, whether you feel like the stakes are too high or not high enough, that your only job during a game is to focus and play good magic. Everything else can wait.

Putting it all Together

To close this out, I want to go over a draft game I played recently that was full of interesting decisions and had some psychological factors at play -- namely, I was playing against Sam Black, another one of my limited idols, and I was also playing distracted while watching Mora play Elden Ring (not an ideal way to practice, I admit).

I haven't gone back through this game yet to scan for learning opportunities, mistakes, and interesting decisions, so let's do it together!

For each decision point I stop at, I'm going to give two different analyses: The "in the moment" processing I did within a few seconds, or at least my best recreation/estimation of it, and a longer breakdown that should illustrate the type of learning I'm trying to do when I go back over my games, often with Mora or a teammate in an event I'm preparing for.

Let's get into it! As usual, I recommend following along with the replay in another window and pausing at the same spots I pause at.

https://www.17lands.com/history/3ba61fa64fc04ff4bd8c5478833ae9d2/3/0

First, let's take a quick look at our deck. This is, maybe not a trainwreck, but a pretty clunky manabase and not a ton of strong payoffs outside of our P1P1 Psychic Frog, which I used as an opportunity to soft-force UB, a deck I didn't have much experience with yet in the format, and an Invert Polarity.

We've got a decent curve and enough removal, but the creature base is really quite poor (did you know Drossclaw is a 2-mana 1/1? I had shortcutted it in my brain to being a 2/2) and the fixing is limited. In fact, we're short enough on playables that I'm basically playing 19 lands with the two MDFCs.

Fast Brain: All that is to say, I'm quite happy with this opener that has access to all 3 colors and some spells I can cast - there's no world where I'm mulliganing this.

Slow Brain/Later Analysis: This hand is definitely a keep, but it doesn't actually have a creature (Accursed Marauder is a removal spell). Marauder does help us set up victimize a bit, but we're still pretty far from being able to cast it effectively. I'm probably going to want to use the waterlogged teachings as a spell, and there's some tension there between playing it on turn 1 for our second black or holding it (I think holding it is better, but not obviously so).

Fast brain: Ah damn, it's going to take us three turns to set up Invert Polarity now that we played t1 Swamp after drawing Island. Maybe we should have been aware that was in our deck and led on island (or UB dual), but it's not useful to think about that now. Here the play is clearly an island

Slow brain: Looking back through our deck, there is nothing either red or black that playing t1 Island would prevent us from casting on turns 2 or 3, so the correct land drop on turn 1 would either be Island or UB dual. I lean towards Island especially after drawing a land and having opp lead on a slightly less aggressive land color (GB instead of R or W), making it less likely that we'll have to cast Breathe Your Last early and more likely we'll need an extra spell to grind.

Mistake count: 1

Fast Brain: Tricky turn. I don't have anything that lines up great against Ooze so I might have to use Breathe Your Last on it, but I don't want to take a whole turn off to set that up when I could just draw a swamp at any point and I can hold up invert here. I can also hold up teachings to probably find something that deals with Ooze if they don't play anything I can counter. Island go.

Slow brain: All that is correct, but I think I should have really considered playing the transmogrant here instead of holding up teachings. Cons are not holding up teachings and maybe telegraphing invert polarity a bit with the specific mana, Pros are I'm very choked on black mana and it lets me use one right away, it also looks quite different casting one spell on 4 mana in a color you're choked on vs. passing with 4 mana and a full grip. One looks like an awkward hand, the other looks like an obviously strong instant speed play. I think there's a real chance that playing transmogrant here baits out a stronger spell from my opponent instead of what Sam did, which was pumping the ooze and enchanting it, setting me pretty far behind on tempo. This isn't clearly wrong, but it's at least possibly wrong.

Mistake counter: 1

Possible mistake counter: 1

Fast brain: What to get here with the teachings? Options are: Galvanic Discharge, Wither and Bloom, or Eviscerator's Insight. I feel like I'm going to need to draw into more lands to unlock my hand here, and there will at some point be a pseudo-free way to do that when I chump the attacker with transmogrant, so I'll grab that.

Slow Brain: I think this was the right play, made for the right reasons. It would be easy to grab another removal spell instead of clunky card draw because I feel so far behind in this game, but I really do need to dig to more black sources at some point here, and my next two turns are both pretty scripted and cover the base of my opponent adding to their board reasonably well. Then I have a turn where I get to block, sac, draw 2, and hopefully put myself in a solid position, assuming I don't draw anything else more relevant in between. I'm pretty happy I made this choice.

Fast brain: I think I'm falling too far behind here to go to 7, and I want to get this transmogrant block in while I can save the life, now that I know I can kill the ooze next turn with BYL. Block.

Slow Brain: This is a very close decision, and I'm still not sure what the right play is, but I'm leaning slightly towards this being a mistake. Sam likely won't use removal on transmogrant unless it's for a lethal attack, but I won't be in danger of that over the next few turns since I can BYL the ooze next turn if needed. Transmogrant being in play is really important if I want to get in the block-sac, and by blocking this turn, I'm giving up significant value from my insight unless I draw another creature that I'm happy sacrificing immediately (I happened to do this, which was very lucky and might have prevented me from seeing this mistake if I didn't go back and review the game). It's close because going to 7 is scary for sure, I need to use my removal on the 7/7 and any evasive creature after that would force me to draw red to use Skoa on it (or if it's big enough, I'd just die) -- But the main equity I'd be losing by not making this block is simply taking a risk of not being able to make it in the future, and with the specifics of this game, that's pretty unlikely. Not clear, but I think I got a bit too risk averse here.

Mistake counter: 1

Possible mistake counter: 2

Fast Brain: This is a super tricky turn. My primary goals are to deal with the huge attacker and ideally one of the other creatures. I need to BYL the 7/7, so my next available play is to play out the Cyclops.

Slow Brain: I also have two other options here: Drossclaw + Victimize (bring back marauder+visionary), which results in a board where I'm taking some damage next turn, but have dealt with one of Sam's creatures, am untapping with one of my own, and have drawn a card and scryed 2. The upside is I'd get two black cards out of my hand, the downside is I'd take quite a bit of damage. Or Skoa kill dog, which also means I'm taking 8 damage unless I want to chump with my best creature. I don't think either of these two lines are better, so I like my play.

It's also worth thinking about playing BYL mainphase to play around hexproof/indestructible tricks. Scanning through the card list, Collective Resistance would punish me, but nothing else in green. I think an uncommon is not enough to play around and I'd rather pass and hold up the instant in case something else weird happens, but this is worth considering.

I think I made exactly the right play here (and I was rewarded for it when Sam pumped his dog up to a 6/6, which the prowess + death trigger allowed me to trade for).

Fast Brain: Another tricky turn, but similar to last turn, and the threats are just a bit less scary. Skoa lets me kill the bigger one and block the other while getting the most expensive card out of my hand and potentially setting up a nice Victimize, so let's do that.

Slow Brain: Again I have the Victimize play here available to me and I'd be taking less damage this time, but playing the Skoa is better, because it sets up a potentially better victimize the following turn. Also, this may be the last chance to kill the 4/4 before it grows out of range, and becomes tricky to deal with. This was the right line.

The game goes on to progress quite well for us, and we end up in a dominating position a couple turns later:

Fast Brain: Opponent's card is probably not very good since they passed with it, let's deploy to the board as much as possible by playing from and returning transmogrant. Get em dead.

Slow Brain: I think I should have thought more about getting the last card out of Sam's hand here with Familiar instead of adding just one more power to the board with transmogrant. Frog lets me be flexible with breakpoints, so 1 more power is pretty unlikely to chance the clock, and it's totally possible the card is either something situational yet powerful (a splashed bomb for example). Worst case, if they use it in response, familiar's ability still draws me a card. This was a minor mistake, but a very easily avoidable one. Oops. Shouldn't rush even when I'm ahead.

(The card was a land and let Sam play & adapt Fetid Gargantua the next turn instead of needing to wait a whole turn cycle; making him discard it would have definitely been relevant and cost me a small, but real amount of win equity).

Mistake counter: 2

Possible mistake counter: 2

Still, I was so far ahead at this point that the game progresses pretty smoothly and I win shortly thereafter.

This was a really fun game with lots of interesting decisions, most of which I made well (I skipped through a lot of correct decisions and didn't skip over any mistakes I saw).

And yet, I think I could have given myself a much higher win % in this game with tighter technical play - Specifically, by playing island on turn 1 and by not blocking with transmogrant on the turn before I could sacrifice it to Insight.

One of these was a definitely incorrect play that was extremely tricky to see (I would have needed to think about my whole deck and realize it was possible to draw Island->Invert Polarity on the first 2 turns), but nonetheless possible to avoid if I had thought about early land sequencing and double pips before jumping into games, something I hope I'd do in a high stakes tournament and not just a draft on Arena. I think without a black 1-drop, it is always correct to play island over swamp on turn 1 in this deck, and I could have figured that out if I'd thought about it.

The other was a slightly more ambiguously incorrect play that I think was probably the time in the game where I lost the most win equity. It's extremely easy to see me losing this game if I don't immediately topdeck a Serum Visionary right after making that block.

Let me say that again.

It is very likely I would have lost this game to what was probably a bad block if I hadn't topdecked a creature right after making it.

It's really hard to see these things if you're just jamming match after match on ladder. The decision to block was defensible, it worked out, and it happened in a game where I won and made some really cool and smart plays (my favorite was tutoring up the Insight, which got a pause and some confusion from Sam on stream, but looked brilliant a few turns later).

You can only see these things by going back with a fine-toothed comb over games where you suspect there were some interesting decisions and you might have made some mistakes (and spoiler alert, most games of Magic have both interesting decisions and mistakes that you made).

You can only start building your recognition muscle for the nuances of these decisions and making them more consistently and correctly within games if you take the time to convert slow processing into intuition and instinct that is executable within those 15-second bursts of thought you have to plan a turn of Magic.

You are currently losing many games of Magic you could have won because of your gameplay.

What are you going to do about it?