Sometimes a raffle ticket is better than a real card

When Dr. Neil Stacey was a kid he figured he’d be a scientist when he grew up. Now he’s a scientist and has no idea what he’ll be when he grows up. He currently leads a bio-fuels research project at Wits University and resides in Johannesburg, which isn’t as bad as people say.

Thalia in Affinity’s sideboard, and other silly ways to win when you’re not supposed to...

I’m not a big believer in tournament reports per se. Firstly because I assume no-one is especially interested in my personal experiences and feelings. To those who are: your restraining orders are in the mail, where they will get lost. The second and more important reason is that a dozen matches at a big tournament are statistically no more significant than a dozen matches of testing. They do offer a more compelling narrative but unless you’ve been exceptionally lazy, your play-testing will offer a far larger sample size so it makes sense to emphasize concrete data over the personal narrative of a straight-up tournament report.

My preparation for the first Modern WMCQ was embarrassingly lazy so in the absence of concrete data, I am seemingly stuck with the personal narrative. The short version is that I didn’t play all that well and my deck wasn’t perfectly tuned but I made it to the semi-finals, a surprisingly good result. There’s a bit more to it than that but before I really get into it, let me reveal the deck-list I ran on the day as a point of reference.

Affinity (Modern) by Neil Stacey

Lands (17)

4x Inkmoth Nexus
4x Blinkmoth Nexus
4x Darksteel Citadel
3x Glimmervoid
1x City of Brass
1x Island

Creatures (24)

1x Steel Overseer
1x Etched Champion
3x Master of Etherium
3x Memnite
4x Ornithopter
4x Signal Pest
4x Vault Skirge
4x Arcbound Ravager

Artifacts (11)

3x Springleaf Drum
4x Mox Opal
4x Cranial Plating
Spells (8):
1x Spell Pierce
1x Stubborn Denial
2x Galvanic Blast
4x Ensoul Artifact

Sideboard (15):

3x Ancient Grudge
3x Whipflare
2x Ethersworn Canonist
2x Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
1x Ghirapur Aether Grid
1x Spellskite
1x Etched Champion
1x Grafdigger’s Cage
1x Gut Shot

There are a few unconventional choices here but the first question that may spring to mind is selecting Ensoul Artifact over Steel Overseer, a generally more powerful card that is also easier on the mana base. The reason I’ve settled on that choice is that while Steel Overseer is better in game one in just about every matchup, Ensoul is vastly superior in postboard games because of how it matches up against the sideboard cards that people bring in against Affinity. It’s basically unaffected by Stony Silence, it shrugs off Pyroclasm and Anger of the Gods and of course, Ensouling a Darksteel Citadel gets around a lot of problem cards.

It’s also a better top-deck in the late-game, which is more likely to be relevant post-board when games tend to go longer. Affinity is so massively favoured in main-deck games that I’m perfectly happy to compromise a little on main-deck power level in exchange for post-board resilience. A 3-2 split is probably better than the 4-1 I went with, however.

The second question you might ask is “Neil, those Thalias are a typo, right?” and that leads us into a quite unconventional piece of deck-building philosophy which, in a pinch, makes a reasonable substitute for hard work. Magic is a game with inherent variance and good deck-building naturally focuses on minimizing that variance to provide consistent results. This maximizes the advantages that skilled players with good decks have over the rest of the field, and it rewards hard work and experience.

Once in a while, however, it’s in your best interests to turn up the variance instead. Sometimes there’s no way to get yourself a consistent edge over your opposition. Maybe you haven’t found time for that hard work thing I mentioned, or you just haven’t practiced a particular matchup enough to play it optimally. Maybe you’ve been out of the game for a while and you can’t reasonably expect to operate at 100% through a long tournament.

Or maybe you’re playing a post-board game with Affinity and facing down an array of overpowering hate cards. Regardless of the specific reason, sometimes you can’t get ahead by playing real Magic so you might as well roll the dice instead. Thalia in Affinity is one way to do that.

Thalia is not what you would consider a conventional choice for the deck. Eleven white sources aren’t enough to consistently cast her on time. She isn’t an artifact, so she dilutes your deck’s main plan. She’s also a lousy top-deck in the late game, and post-board games do tend to go long. So even in the matchups where you want her, she will only realistically work something like 40% of the time. But here’s the thing. With Affinity, if you offered me a 40% win rate in all my post-board games I’d accept it in a shot and expect to cruise through tournaments. The deck is so dominant before sideboarding that you generally get two cracks at winning a post-board game to take the match.

So in an Affinity sideboard, a sideboard card that only pays off 40% of the time you draw it is in fact totally reasonable provided it is genuinely effective in the matchups where you want it.

And Thalia is an absolute beating when she works. One of Affinity’s main strengths is that it gets to produce more mana in the early turns via Mox Opal and Springleaf Drum. Thalia lets you extend that mana advantage by taxing your opponent’s relevant spells and delaying hate cards by a turn. She has the added bonus of being immune to most of those hate cards herself. She also hoses decks that rely on casting multiple spells per turn: turn one Thalia can be totally crippling to a veritable plethora of Modern decks. Combo decks like Ad Nauseam and Storm not only have their early library manipulation grind to a halt, they have to have to find a way to deal with her in order to combo off without jumping through hoops. Meanwhile, midrange decks find themselves overpaying for interaction right when they most need to be efficient to keep up, and Tron’s array of search and manipulation effects transform into a clumsy mess.

I bring Thalia in for the following matchups: Storm, Ad Nauseam, Jeskai, Living End, Jeskai, Delver, Jund, Abzan, Burn, Infect, Tron and probably a couple others that I’ve forgotten or just haven’t run into yet.

If you’re not sold, just try it out for a while. Go ahead. Watch an opponent’s face when their first play of the game is two-mana Serum Visions. Or a Burn player keeps a one-land hand that suddenly can’t cast anything except a Goblin Guide, and then reads Thalia a second time to confirm it has First Strike. Or a Jund player stares at an Ancient Grudge which is unexpectedly too slow to matter. Turn 1 Thalia doesn’t just win games; she breaks hearts.

And she can give you easy wins when you would otherwise get smashed to pieces. Sure, she can’t do it reliably, but you don’t need her to. When you’re as unfavoured as Affinity is after sideboarding, you don’t want a real Magic card. You want a raffle ticket.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you show up at tournaments with wonky brews and no practice; that’s nothing but a ticket to an 0-3 drop. The point I’m trying to make is that some basic principles of deckbuilding go out the window in extreme circumstances.

Our assumptions about what choices are reasonable are tied to a set of subconscious mental shortcuts that we necessarily take; Magic is too complex for total empirical rigour to be practical. These shortcuts can lead you astray, however, because the same heuristics aren’t always applicable. Thalia would be an absurd card choice for Affinity if you were trying to improve a 50% matchup, but she’s perfectly reasonable for trying to salvage a 30% one.

A more prominent example of playing raffle tickets was on display back at Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch, when the field was led by Eldrazi decks playing sets of Simian Spirit Guide and Chalice of the Void in the main-board. Chalice is a highly situational card, bordering on potato status in many matchups. Simian Spirit Guide is also something of a liability; conceding a card for a small mana boost is not how you win fair games of Magic. The reality, however, is that the Eldrazi decks were so overwhelmingly good that these weaknesses didn’t matter in most matchups. Instead, the purpose they served was to let those Eldrazi decks totally shut down certain problematic matchups such as Infect and Burn while fending off the cantrips and card filtering that power Modern combo decks.

By conventional deck-building wisdom it is genuinely absurd to run those cards in a deck like that. You’ll note that Chalice and Simian Spirit Guide both remain legal in the format and any deck could run them if they wanted to. And yet, they are conspicuously absent from virtually all deck-lists; they’re just too much of a liability for fair decks to play them and expect to win in the matchups where they’re bad. However, that particular tournament presented circumstances extreme enough to throw conventional wisdom out the window. The Eldrazi deck was so overwhelmingly powerful that in most matchups drawing a few lousy cards didn’t matter; it would win anyway. So they salvaged the few bad situations by playing a raffle ticket in the form of the wonky Chalice of the Void plan. The results were spectacular: Colourless Eldrazi obliterated everything in sight, with one exception: other Eldrazi decks that weren’t running terrible cards like Chalice or Spirit Guide.

The raffle ticket philosophy extends beyond the occasional counter-intuitive card choice. WoTC are careful to ensure that no single deck has favourable matchups across the board. Moreover, perfect preparation for every matchup simply isn’t practical for most, so you can’t realistically expect to outplay every opponent. At some point in every tournament, you can expect to find yourself in a position where playing by-the-book Magic gives you very little chance to win.

Sophocles said ‘It is but sorrow to be wise when wisdom profits not.’ He probably didn’t have Magic the Gathering in mind, but the proverb fits. So prepare as well and as thoroughly as your circumstances permit but be honest enough with yourself to identify where you’re going to come up short. Then try the unconventional. Sure, you run the risk of looking foolish, but you’ll win a few more matches of Magic and have a bit of fun, both of which matter more than avoiding embarrassment.