How to not be a scrub - Part 4: Knowing your outs - Never give up, never concede.

"Never give up! Never surrender!". Ahh Galaxy Quest. An excellent 1999 parody film. But we aren't here to talk about old, awesome Tim Allen movies today. We're here to talk about not giving up a game you still have a chance to win. The movie's tag line however embodies today's lesson perfectly.

All to many times I've seen my opponents, both new and old just give up a game in a tournament setting. They think its hopeless. Sure they may have to draw perfectly the next three turns to get out of the situation, but they still give up. I, for the life of me cannot figure out why. There is always that chance it happens. The game isn't over until you sign the match slip.

Let me first start off by saying this. There are situations where it is perfectly acceptable to give up early. Your opponent's combo deck is solid and is going off and you have zero counters for it. You know this deck is consistent to military time, and your opponent has never (okay rarely) makes a mistake going off. Time in the round is short and you just want to get to game three to have a chance. This is acceptable. Another situation that comes to mind is practicing. A good practice group knows when the chance to win is 1 in a million. Once that situation has established, it is acceptable to enter your scoop phase and go on to another game. More games means more practice. These situations are the exception, not the rule. If you're in a tournament, don't give your opponent a win unnecessarily.

Gather around, its story time.

I'm going to paint a picture of a tournament I played a few years back. Jund was the new faeries and everyone played it, including myself. It was the night before a large SuperStars 5k invitational event, and I played the last chance qualifiers (For byes) to get in. I played, you guessed it, Jund. It was horrible. My technique sucked, I casted Blightning first in the mirror several times, I always cascaded into Goblin Ruinblaster without kicker mana. Hell, I even lightning bolted one guys Putrid Leech prior to him pumping it. I was off my game.

I went home that night defeated. I knew my pet deck (1) Grixis Control just wouldn't cut it in a field of Nissa's Elves and Boros. Both pretty weak matchups for me. I had a few options at my disposal for the tournament in 12 hours. I could play Jund again and hope for the best. I could play Elves which had been pretty good to me. I could just hope for good matchups with Grixis, or, I could build a new deck no ones seen. I took the last option and build a very solid Mono-Green ramp, big dudes, Eldrazi Monument deck. Sleeved it up, typed my decklist, printed and got some sleep.

The tournament was a breeze. I went 9-0 before cut to top 32 without dropping a single game. My super sideboard tech against Open the Vaults (the one that uses creatures, not my precious Time Sieve deck) worked 3 times to insane results. Nothing could get in my way. Until the top 32 came.

Round 10, I was matched up against Shahar Shenhar. This was prior to his rise to fame and was still a kid. He was playing Naya. I knew this matchup would be easy for me. All I needed was to throw guys in his way, drop monument and bash face. Easy right? Well, game 1 was easy. I crushed him. No mercy was shown. Noble into Leatherback Baloth, into Noble + Huntsmaster into Monument. Boom. Headshot.

Game 2 is the lesson. Shahar allowed me to make a mistake, and I did. He started off strong as did I. He got me down to 1 life (he was at 19 or so) and I finally was able to drop a monument and stabilize. The turn after the monument was the critical one. I had 14 damage exactly, except I had sacrificed a Wolf (2/2) token instead of a Snake (1/1) token leaving me at exactly 13 damage. I knew what I did exactly when I did it. I had already done the math. I was so use to sacrificing a wolf token to the monument that I had forgotten about the snake from my Cone of Dudes.

Suddenly I was on the back foot. Shahar had a gigantic Knight of the Reliquary with a Behemoth sledge attached. I had just enough creature toughness to not die on the board if I blocked with everything. I couldn't attack, I couldn't slowly chip away at his life total. All he had to do was top deck a lightning bolt, or another sledge, or a knight of the reliquary, or any number of things for the win. The crowd started gathering.

The game went on. Every turn I either top decked another creature to counteract the increasing size of Knight of the Reliquary, and Shahar top decked more fetch lands and was slowly thinning his deck trying to get one of three lightning bolts left in it. Eventually he started to attack with extra Knights, gaining more and more life, putting my large in number but small in power army ever so slightly behind every turn. Every end of turn, one of us had the upper hand and would win, and the following turn reverse those fortunes. Every turn we had to count up the combat damage to confirm the standstill. Neither one of us would give up, we both had outs.

Luckily for me, I eventually got another Eldrazi Monument, plopped it down and went sideways for the win. Dealing something like 50+ damage in that turn. Lightning bolt was the top card of his deck. Neither one of us gave up on this game. Every turn we had to draw either the final answer, or something to counteract an alpha strike, anything else would of resulted in a loss.

I'm using this example for one reason. (Not because it has a now big name in MTG) But because it was one of my most memorable games. Both of us were losing, both of us had outs, both of us could of just given up at any time. I heard the comments from the very large group of spectators that I should concede, or Shahar should concede based on the board situation all the time during that match. Things like, "Well hes losing and its not getting better, I would concede if I were him referring to both of us at various times. In the end, we both played to our outs. His Lightning bolts, or my Monuments.

In closing just remember this. If you're playing for money, don't just give up. Even if your opponent restarts the game with Karn and has a Platinum Empirion + 4 lands on turn 0. Just don't do it. If there is a glimmer of hope, or a lightning bolt of a chance, go for it. Its money. You don't have to be the good guy, and no one with a brain will fault you for doing it.


(1): Remember what I said about Pet decks? (or will say, if forget ;) I built this puppy, and it was a tier 1 deck for quite some time. I cannot take all the credit, but I can safely say my build was the foundation for all other Grixis Control decks to come that season. I played it because one thing, after 500+ matches, I had a 56% chance of beating Jund. Also, Cruel Ultimatum is the best spell in Magic: The Gathering to cast.

How to not be a scrub - Part 3: Unfun magic archetypes - How I stopped worrying and loved the counterspell.

There was a Daily MTG article a few years back that I can't seem to find. It said something very striking to me. Casual players feel worse when their big Craw wurm is counter spelled, than if it was doom bladed right after it came into play. They felt like they at least did something. This sums up the casual player. Both effects are the same; the Craw Wurm is in the graveyard and I'm down a card.

Scrubs tend to keep this mentality with them when they first enter competitive magic. They feel control decks are unfun. They feel combo decks are not interactive enough. They feel you're "rushing" with a red deck, you aren't giving them a fair chance(1).

I honestly don't know what heart warming thing to say to make you, the aspiring competitive player to get over these mentalities. Suck it up. Suck. It. Up.

These things are apart of the game. Control decks (Casual hated), Sleigh decks (mono red), Mid-ranged creature decks (Casual favorites) and combo decks (Universally disliked by all). If you remove one archetype, you screw up the universal magic balance chart. Whats the universal balance chart you ask? Its simple, allow me to show you.

Small Creature Aggro  -> Beats Control
Mid-ranged-> Beats small creature
Control decks -> Beats small creature aggro.
Combo decks -> Depending on the combo, inserts itself randomly in this chart as the meta dictates.

Sure there are crossovers, (aggro/control, combo/control, Midranged/Control) that pop up every once in a while to shake things up or ruin things (think Caw-blade) but this is the standard deviation of deck archetypes that make up EVERY magic tournament(2).

Good players gravitate to the best decks. Sometimes the best deck is a control deck, other times its a midrange deck. And every so rarely an aggro deck.We play the best decks because we want to win. We aren't there to necessarily have fun while playing the game. We want to win the prize, be it packs or cold hard cash. We don't care if its enjoyable for you to turn 30+ Craw wurm style creatures 60 turns into the game. That isn't why we are at the tournament.

The aspiring scrub should ALSO be working to that goal. If you never play control decks because of your own prejudices against the archetype as a whole, you are only hurting yourself in a tournament setting.

Lets break here for a moment to understand how tournaments work in a magic setting. Remember a few articles back when I talked about randomness? Tournaments are random as well. Assuming you play perfectly and have a random matchup selection, you are rolling the dice against your deck's win percentage. Occasionally you'll hear people say something like, "My deck has a 60% win ratio against deck X" or 40%, or 75%, or whatever number they pull out of their ass at the time the question is asked. Truth is, there real numbers behind this. High level competitive players use these real numbers to determine if a deck is good or not.

As I write this in July 2012, the best deck in standard is Delver. A UW control/aggro deck everyone hates. Recently during a starcity games event, the casters revealed it had a roughly 52% chance to win. This is over hundreds of matches during that day and adding in a few other events. 52%. This is the BEST deck in standard. It was still played by some of the best players in the magic scene. Why? Because it has the best winning chance over all the other decks in the format at 52%. This may not seem like much, but it can be the difference between day 2, and going home early in a 9+ round tournament. You should take something from this small fact. A few percentage points different, and it wouldn't be the best deck in the format. Football may be a game of inches. Magic is a game of 1%.

There is another reason to play other decks. To get you out of your comfort zone so you CAN play the best deck, and to know your opponents deck better than they do. This is what makes LSV LSV, and not some random PTQ player.



Footnotes:



(1): True story, in one of my rare screw it moments, I played a mono red burn deck, second round opponent told me to stop rushing him. Uh, I wasn't aware I was playing Starcraft here and my Goblin guide was a zergling... but thanks for the round 2 win in a 250 person 5k tournament... I'll be sure not to rush my next opponent and give him a sporting chance at $5,000.

(2): Ok not vintage. Vintage is about casting Jace the Mind Sculptor and protecting it till he ultimates, be it from inf turns with time vault, or countering it. Everything else however...
Also worth noting, the more eternal a format is, the more crossover archetypes get.

How to not be a scrub - Part 2: Mana Screw - I could of won if I just had one more mana...

Today we'll be talking about mana screw. This is mostly theory, but its important to take to heart. It happens to everyone. You draw your first seven cards, see 2 land and a bunch of gas and never seen another land again. I could go into shuffling practices and theories which help reduce mana screw (by normalizing draws to a random distribution) but I won't. What I will talk about today is two fold. Making use of what you have, not going on tilt, and how to survive to flip more cards in hopes of a land.

Making use of what you have separates the good players from the poor players. Stuck on 3 land with a Day of Judgement in your hand facing down an army of opposing creatures you're only job should be surviving long enough to draw the needed land to cast day of judgement and seal the win. How do you do this? Proper blocking and use of your spells in hand that you can cast. While these are highly dependent on the exact game, it can all be summed up in a single thought: Stay alive as long as possible. Make trades that are advantages to you, use removal on the ones you can't block.

On the flip side of this, lets say you keep a hand of 2 lands, 3x 4 CMC, and 2x 5CMC and you end up mana screwed and can't do anything. This is your own fault. One of the key rules of mulliganing hands is, If you never draw another land this game, do you still have gas? If you can't cast what you have in your starting hand with the mana in hand and 1 more, the hand is not keepable. Sure it may of been godly, would of won, should of won, etc etc etc. Truth is, you kept a bad hand and you paid the price.

Watch some videos of non-LSV players (LSV tends to keep sketchy hands and just happens to draw the one of land he needs... you and I aren't as lucky as him. I mean, have you SEEN his wife? yeesh, that guy). Every hand they're thinking about throwing back always contains some sort of gas on Hand Land + 1. Depending on the format this turns into just the mana you have in hand. The most skill intensive part of magic happens BEFORE the game even begins. Think carefully before accepting the hand about what your lines of play will be. If it requires a god draw of cards xyz in order abc to be good, throw it back. You should never let your game be decided by randomness when you can help it.

The most important thing you can do is not let the game get to you. It takes time, and practice but what will hold you back the most from becoming a strong magic player (and indeed many other games, and life itself) is looking past the last small failure and moving forward. I can't tell you the exact steps to do this, its more of a personal growth thing. It comes down to one thing.

Shit happens. Get over it, and stop keeping bad hands.

How to not be a scrub - Part 1: Shuffling - Can you shuffle too much?

Every day Kibler's shuffl'n. Theres a good reason for it. Magic is a game of odds. Your deck choice, card distribution, even down to the die roll. Every thing you do in Magic: The Gathering is based on a chance. Even someone of Brian Kibler's caliber can lose against a person who's never played outside of Duels of the Planeswalkers. One of the biggest things that separates the the best players from your average kitchen table Magic player is one thing, playing to your outs.

What is an out? In simplistic terms, it is a card, or line of plays that allows you to get out of a losing situation, or outright win the game. Picture this, you're playing a core set draft, you have a fireball in your hand, but no red mana sources in play. You're going to lose next turn from his massive, about to be overruned army. Do you give up? Of course not, it isn't over until someone is at 0 life. (More on this in part 4), you cast your ponder, no mountains. You opt to shuffle your remaining 20 cards, draw, a mountain! You fireball them for the win! But what does this have to do with shuffling you ask?

You just played the odds. Your odds of drawing the one mountain were 1 in 20 (5%) off the ponder. (To save you from maths, i'll spare you the calculations for ponder as well). The better you shuffle, the more in line your odds will be with actual statistics allowing you to draw that mountain.

Since you're more likely an aspiring scrub looking to get away from scrubyness by reading these, you have undoubtedly heard the term, "Mana Pocket", or terms like "mana weaving". In short, there should never been whats called a "mana pocket", nor should mana weaving be valid (its actually against the DCI rules, and considered deck stacking, just FYI). If you shuffle enough, and play enough games, these will never be issues outside the normal distribution curve.

In closing, shuffle your deck. Shuffle often. Shuffle more. Shuffle your opponents deck. Everyday you should be shuffling so you can play the odds, and not mana screw because of your bad shuffling.

How to not be a Magic: The Gathering scrub - Introduction

I've recently started watching a lot more Magic: The Gathering streams on twitch and other sources. One thing I've gathered from reading the chat is, there are a lot of MTG scrubs in the world. I wish to dispel some of the myths and beliefs these "scrubs" hold in order to make you a better player.

Firstly, what is a scrub? Urban dictionary claims its from the depths of arcades in the mid 90's. These people would "scrub" the buttons in fighting games. While I disagree with this history, and being an arcade dweller in the 90's we just called them button mashers, the term is an accurate way to describe poorer players. People who don't play to win, have no grasp on the game concepts, or are just generally annoying to play against. What sets a scrub apart from the casual players is one thing, they try to win and consider themselves good. 

In this series, I'll address some of the habits of the scrub. Things they do which can be fixed easily. Many of these are just attitude adjustments, or play style habits that can be resolved. If you're a scrub take heart, you don't have to be one much longer.

Part 1: Shuffling - Can you shuffle too much?

Part 2: Mana Screw - I could of won if I just had one more mana...

Part 3: Unfun magic archetypes - How I stopped worrying and loved the counterspell.

Part 4: Knowing your outs - Never give up, never concede.

Part 5: Tournament losing - How to not go on tilt and lose more.

Part 6: Pet cards - Is it time to let go of Pikachu?

Part 7: The best deck - "Netdeck"ing is bad!

Part 8: Complaining - If I only... if you hadn't top decked... if you blocked this way...

Part 9:  Conclusion - I'm not a scrub! You just suck!

Update: I'm cutting "Part 8: Deck Building - All I need to do is draw all 5 of these cards and I can win..." This deserves its own hardcover book devoted to the art of deck building. I am no where near adept enough to begin covering the concept and where people go wrong. I've tried writing this section several times and came up with even more basic overviews of dos and don'ts. Thats not what I want. I may overview generic deck building for the rotation, aka How to build a control deck in a new format, but thats not how to not be a scrub.

First thoughts on Diablo III

Diablo, one of the best action RPG's in existence. I've spend many a hour trying to get just one more level, or finish one more Baal run. I even failed out of a few classes because of it. Third only to muds and Eve-online, the Diablo series has sucked more of my time than any other game. I even dabbled in the black market for Diablo 2.

This past week was the open beta. Available to anyone with a battle.net account. I eagerly downloaded the game and dived right in to the game. My first instinct was to play the wizard. I've always played magic users in the past, and this seemed a natural choice.

The story line quickly grabs you with an introduction of "the hordes at the gate" scenario, pitting you and the city guard against a large group of corrupted people. Reminded me a lot of zombies movies. The first chapter of the story didn't really engage me after the first point. The voice actors seemed disinterested, and the character's lines too jaded and snarky. Felt like "yet another dungeon I can loot and conquer" style to the game.  Honestly, I don't even remember the story outside of find and save Deckard Cain and kill the Skeleton king (again, didn't we kill him in the first game?)

After attaining level 6 and realizing I had 0 choice in character customization, I noticed It was taking me quite a bit of time and tactics to kill even the smallest of enemies. So I switched to the Witch Doctor.

Zombie, fucking Dogs. Yes, Zombie Dogs. Such an awesome summon creature to do my bidding. I'm hooked on the witch doctor now, even if he looks like a scrawny malnourished redneck with a beer belly. I quickly ran through the entire first act, and easily figured out the best way to kill enemies. After about an hour I was greeted with the "You won the beta! Congratulations!" screen. Humm, that was easy. ooo gold item. (Note, I had to google how to identify items, it was buried in the fourms. FYI. Hover over the item for a few seconds. Yeah thats it. Why even have to identify it then...)

I then tried my hand at multiplayer. My first instinct was to grab every item I could find. After a while I was feeling like a douche for picking up everything when the loading screen tip popped up: "Item drops are your own in multiplayer. Everyone has separate drops." At least I don't feel so bad now. Glad to see one of the better ideas from Guild Wars/Muds was incorporated. I'd really love to see the stats on how drops work now. Do we all get the same item? Is it a normal drop (ala D2) that's randomly split? or do we just get the same roll of loot level and items are randomly generated at that level?

After the third multiplayer game I started notice there was zero, ZERO randomization. Every dungeon was identical. The one large outdoor area only had a few randomizations with the major landmarks. (Tree, Crater, or Dungeon entrance, slightly randomized, thats it) Also chests would move around slightly. In otherwords, the game is NOT random generated like D2/D1. Its a static world with slight decoration differences. (Ok ok, D1 wasn't truely random, every dungeon level had 99 maps, but it was close enough) This is going to bore me to death, or make writing a bot easier. One or the other.

The concept of crafting is interesting, and I see myself spending a lot of time gathering normal magical items this game for crafting. I forsee the majority of runs purely for craft ingredients. Good way to keep us playing I suppose.

I read on the forums the stash is shared this time around. This is good I suppose, but maybe bad. I tend to horde my items, (Even those stupid low-end set items). I suppose i'll have to get over having everything.

The real money market was disabled during the stress test, so I was unable to see how it functioned. But I fully support this. The black market on Diablo 2 was HUGE, still is to some extent. Making it accessible and taking a cut is the best thing Blizzard has done since the removal of LAN play. To the nay sayers: Get a job, or if you have one, don't partake. No ones forcing you to use it. For those of us who want to buy/sell for real money, (seriously, $10 isn't a lot of money) this is a huge boon. Even allows for power gamers to make a bit of money on the side. Perhaps not much down the line when the slaves in third world countries get into the business and undercut everyone, but for a while it'll be great.

Blizzard did a poor job balancing the classes. By this I mean It takes longer to do the same things with class A than B. For example, the Wizard kills at a 10th of the speed of my Witch Doctor, and the Barbarian just slaughters everything in it's path. I suspect they haven't done balancing yet, but this needs to be addressed, or everyone will be the same class in multiplayer games.

On multiplayer, I was deeply annoyed there was no real benefit to playing with other people. No additional experience, Monster HP and PC damage bonus scaled 1:1, and the drops even felt lighter. Sure it was slightly faster, but if you wern't able to keep up with the fast people, you missed out of a lot of loot. This needs to be addressed, otherwise I'll be spending a lot of time on Skype/Vent and never joining a game. Sure I understand the need to not make XP 4x like Diablo 2, but ffs give us something.

Achievements. I like this. Please don't make them impossible.

That's about it. I preordered my copy and will undoubtly play quite a bit when its released. (Also since I'll be  losing my job at the same time, Its a perfect start to my vacation!) But I don't see myself playing as vigorously 5 years later like I did Diablo 2. The rest of the game better be kick ass for that to happen.

Converting a U3 drive back to normal

I have a couple of old U3 drives. Since U3 is pretty much dead, I wanted to make use of these drives. (Some of which are 16gb) It took me a few extra minutes more than it should of to find this information around the web. Many older links (like u3.com) are now dead. So here it is.

http://u3.sandisk.com/launchpadremoval.htm

Run application, easy conversion back to normal. Good bye U3. Simple as that.