I'm assuming that most everybody who reads this enjoys playing Magic, but also probably enjoys getting better at it. While there is more to the fun in Magic than playing it well, winning because of great play is definitely entertaining. But it can sometimes be hard to significantly improve your game. The better one person gets, the harder it is to improve. It will often come down to a few percentage points – maybe even less. But I feel that most people get stuck in the wrong place. Everybody is concerned with having the best deck, drafting the best archetype or guessing the metagame correctly. This obsession makes it easy to forget the skills you need to fully understand the answers to those questions.
Focusing on those questions might give you a small advantage against the field, but Magic is not a game that hands out huge advantages. You might have the actual very best deck, but this means you are probably about 2-5% ahead in that category. Those percentages are pretty much neutralized when you can't play it well enough or sideboard correctly. Magic is a game of adding together all the small advantages you accrue and what actually gets you ahead of your competition is finding as many places as possible where you can get a small advantage.
The Peter Principle
Statistics more or less confirms that over the course of a reasonable amount of games, everybody is getting results roughly equal to what they deserve. Sure, Magic is a highly luck dependent game, especially since winning tournaments requires winning an insane amount of games in a row. Winning a PPTQ is hard and in Magic, you are never ever an overwhelming favorite to win pretty much anything. But, over the course of a bigger number of tournaments you are likely to get your win percentage in relation to your opponents. If you are much better, you will win a lot more and vice versa. Being much better leads to eventually achieving your goals and advancing to the next step. If you are crushing your PPTQ constantly, you will very likely win some of them and move up to the RPTQ level. Maybe you are evenly matched there and will win less often, maybe you are still much better and move from there to the Pro Tour level. Or maybe they're now better than you and you will have to improve to be successful there.
This is called the Peter Principle. It roughly says that your achievements are, roughly, comparable to your skill. Be better than the competition: move up; be worse: move down; equal? You'll stay where you are. Seems pretty reasonable.
Information Overload
So, let's say you want to move up and thus, need to improve. You probably are interested I improvement, given that you're reading this. You've probably read some deck guides, watched some videos and have played some test games. Awesome. This will most definitely give you an advantage against people that don't do this. The huge problem is: everybody is doing it. Information about Magic has become absurdly easy to access. Because of this, everybody's very well informed and very prepared. When people discuss the early days, it's usually about how bad everybody was. Nobody had reasonable decks and experience compared to our expectations today. When you had a good deck, you were a massive favorite even if you played at the same level, because nobody else had access to the "best deck," mostly because no one knew what it was. Today, you might gain a bit of advantage from reading and watching and playing, but you're only gaining a narrow advantage if you're just blindly consuming all of this. What happens when the format is gone? What happens when the deck you are learning about is not good enough in a few weeks? What happens when you don't even realize your mistakes while playing the deck?
As I said, Magic is a game of small advantages. Learning from online content certainly gives you some of these advantages in specific areas. Watching a video might give you 0,5% because they play a better mana base and reading an article might give you 0,5% because they have some better sideboard cards than you do. But what happens when the decks around you change? How do you Adjust? Honestly, for most players, you probably don't do so easily because you learned everything from outside content and now you have no outside content to help you. And a failure to adjust will likely lead to defeat in those small margins we previously discussed. I am not saying that you should stop consuming Magic content (I think my editors would be less than happy if I was). Reading and watching content is very helpful – It's just not enough on its own, and there are other aspects of Magic you can and should try to improve in, as well. You should try to improve at every aspect of Magic as that will give you the marginal advantage you need to win.
Let's look at an example (there will be math). Let's assume that Magic is a game with 10 areas to improve at. One of them might be your deck, another one might be your sideboard, and one of them might be your postboard play. If two players are evenly matched, they each have a 50% chance to win in each category. To try and keep things relatively simple, let's assume that winning a match of Magic involves winning the majority of these 10 areas. It's basically a best of 10. If both players are at 50% in each area, it's a coin flip to determine the victor. But now, you read a good article that raises your pre-board and post-board deck area percentage to 80%, which means, that you are a huge favorite in two of those areas, probably giving you a 2-0 lead. If they do the same, it would be even again. Now comes the tough part. When you spend way too much time reading and watching, you aren't gaining percentage points at the same rate. If you spend 10 hours and your opponent only used one, your advantage in that category is not ten times better. This is because critical information, like the decklist and a sideboard guide is easily obtainable. Your first hours of learning something in Magic are much more valuable than every hour after that. Your first league on Magic Online or your first draft on Magic Arena are much more valuable than the next one. So, when you read ten hours of content, you might be raising your percentage to 80% in some areas, but if they read one hour, that 80% might drop to 60%, which is significantly lower. This is very crucial to understand. And generally, those numbers are much closer to 50%, because Magic is still a game with a high factor of luck involved.
The Pitch
Now comes my pitch. Instead of raising specific areas a lot, it's much better (and easier) to raise every area a little. Let's assume we have 55% in all areas. That gives us around 74% to win at least five areas (for a draw) and around 50% to win at least six (for winning the match). On the other hand, if we raise one area to 80%, that gives us around 70% to win at least 5 areas and around 40% to win at least six. Amazing, isn't it. And this is assuming there are 10 areas, when there are actually many, many more. Ok, this is nice, but how does improving in so many different areas work? Nobody can write an article about being better at Magic in all points, clearly. This comes down to personal change, not what articles you should read.
I get asked a lot of questions: How do I sideboard here? What do I pick here? What would you do here? Most of the time I just answer because people are looking for an easy answer and it usually concerns a specific situation. But if it's somebody that clearly wants to understand why, I'll usually ask them something first: What would you pick and why? And I truly believe that this is the key - one easy step that you can use in every aspect of Magic (and life).
We are so used to have access to any and all information we could ever need. The downside of this is that we are, in a sense, losing our ability to understand the information we have access too, or at least understand how you arrive at these answers. Getting a solution is so satisfying that the circumstances about it hardly matter.
"Would you pick card A or card B here?"
"Definitely card A!"
That usually ends the conversation if card A is the favored pick for the person who asks and maybe even if they preferred card B. Sometimes, they want a reason; most of the time, they are already at the next decision. We, especially as Magic players, are so used to making a lot of decisions in a short amount of time, and so we will just accept the answers given to us, leading to forgetting how to find the solution for ourselves. Most of the time, it's not about getting to the right solution, but getting there for the right reasons. A few weeks ago, I was testing
And that goes for every situation. In total, Magic is nothing more than a chain of decisions and while the vast majority of them is made on auto pilot, we should be learning from every single decision and understand why we learned from it. Putting our thoughts to a specific matter into words, concepts, and rules helps immensely not only to understand why that decision was correct or not, but also to make those decisions an autopilot decision later on. There is nothing worse than making the same wrong decision every single time without realizing it.
Make a Choice
So, what I want you to do is simple really: make a decision before asking somebody. It is very easy to think: "this is close and I'm not sure what to do" and then stray to whatever you read / heard. Making a decision and considering the reasons for it immediately prepares you to discuss the topic in depth. One could say that people are more invested in the answer once they've actually made up their mind. This goes for everything. Draft picks, sideboarding, in-game decisions, food choice problems - really anything. By thinking it through before asking, your much more invested in the answer you get and much better suited to understanding how someone arrived at that answer.
A lot of the time, it's more about how to solve the problem than actually solving that specific problem. Magic is not a game where you can "learn" everything and remember it for the appropriate situation. There are just too many situations and variables. Instead, we should be focusing on techniques to solve those problems better on the fly. Unfortunately, that is not something any article can really help with. This is not about raw strategy. But once you start using this, all the articles and videos you watch will be much better at giving you those percentage points in all categories of Magic.
Finally, what I want to suggest to you is watching any of your favorite content and make decisions before they appear. Stop at each turn and think through what you would do and why. After you made the decision look what they did and why. This way, differences in your decision and your video creator's decision are much easier to see. You can't easily evade by saying: "oh, right, I probably would have done that too," because you already committed to something. And then you realize what went wrong or right and what the reasons for that were. Maybe you missed a card or an interaction, maybe you want to play around a card they don't want to. All of this is really just a way of focusing your brain power to learn more efficiently and, in the end, that makes you better in every area of Magic and not just a few.
I really hoped you enjoyed the article and I wish you happy holidays and a happy new year.
Toffel
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.