Magic Cross-Training

Helly everybody!

A couple days ago, we had christmas, and as is tradition all of the family gets together for christmas parties which in my family includes a lot of games being played. While no one else plays Magic in my family, we did have a wide array of other games played, which embellished a point that I have been considered writing about for over a month: You don't have to play magic to get better at it. I call this Magic Cross-Training.

In high school I was a pretty avid runner, including becoming the cross country captain, and one of the thing that we often did as a team was cross training. In cross country, the race is 5,000 meters, or approximately 3.1 miles. The most natural way to train for this race would be to run 3.1 miles every day, right? However, as it turned out a 3 mile day was our easy day before a race. Instead, this is how our week normally went:

Monday - 6-8 miles
Tuesday - 2-3 miles
Wednesday - Race Day
Thursday - 3-4 miles
Friday - Track workout (sprints)
Saturday - 5-6 miles
Sunday - Rest

By doing extra distance monday and saturday, we were building up our endurance to do over the race miles, which in turn would give us more strength during the race when we input more energy per mile. Also, on Friday we would do sprint workouts, which were anywhere from 200-800 meters, depending on the week (for reference, a mile is 1600 meters). In these sprint workouts, we would go balls to the wall, and make it such that we could keel over and die on the spot. Then repeat it 11 more times. We pushed ourselves to our limits, regardless of the distance or speed we were supposed to go (there is a thing to forcing yourself to calm down, but that's another topic for another day). In fact, when the XC season ended, and Winter Track started, the distance team was so good at sprinting in addition to our own events, that 75% of our D team could out-sprint 90% of the sprinters. While at the time, we just blamed it on sprinters being lazy, and us being god's gift to humanity (we were humble, i swear), in hindsight I realize it was because we cross-trained and they didn't. We did everything, they only did sprinting. While we would all be the same speed on the first 200, by the time we were on the 6th rep of 12, they were crawling on the ground while we weren't breaking a sweat because we were used to never stopping, while their bodies had never been prepared to run so fast for so long. In addition, the distance team did weights together, including tons with the upper-body despite it seemingly useless for running, but I think by point has already been made...

So what does this have to do with magic? Just like how I cross-trained my body for running long-distance, in the same way we can cross-train our brain to perform at a higher level for magic. To cross train for sports we play different sports, so to cross train for magic we play other games! Playing a variety of non-magic games makes you think in ways that you don't exercise in magic directly, and a change in atmosphere is always welcome when magic becomes a drag from excessive grinding. I play a TON of different games! Here are some of them, and why you should consider playing them:

Chess
Chess has a board that is always the same when it starts, and has very few viable openings possible, so it's possible to simply memorize a million openings and have a flowchart of how games always go. But then how come no two games are ever alike? Why do we have a unique shorthand language designed to record and replay games? Playing chess has the standard expected moves, but the great players are able to break the traditional mold and capitalize on this new unique unknown board position. For example, heres one of my favorite openings as the black player:

1. e4    g6
2. d4    Bh6
3. ...     Nf6
4. ...     0-0 or Nc6

In basic theory this is a weaker opening, however I like it because it's not traditional, and most players don't know how to respond to it. This gives the the opening to play more aggressively because I already have a castled king with staggered pawns in front of him, so he is very well protected. Playing chess forces us to analyze unique board positions, play as our opponent, look forward several turns to see how a specific play will end, and use deception on the opponent (revealed/discovered check). Playing rogue is essential to break the mold of chess and move leverage to your side of the board, assuming it isn't just a horrific misplay. In the same way because chess in an open-information game, we can see everything both players can do which means we can play out 10 turns in our head before we make any given move. Mind games involving hidden information are useless here.

Absorb Chess
Absorb chess is a fun chess variant I occasionally play with my friends that takes basic dynamics of chess and flips it on its head.  Everything is the exact same except one thing: Whenever a piece is captured, the piece that dies has it's motion abilities granted to the piece that killed it. For example, lets say a Knight captured a pawn. The knight could move as it normally did, but it can also move/capture like a pawn does by sliding forward once or capturing diagonally. The most powerful piece in the game is a Queen-Knight, and the most terrifying thing is a King-Queen (or really King + anything not pawn). This makes unopposed captures VERY dangerous, and many games are dominated in the middle of the board as both players scramble to gain an advantage over a series of captures that happen on one square until 1 player is left with a super piece. All the same attributes of chess apply here.

Dominion
A year ago yesterday I wrote a fantastic piece on Dominion which is my 2nd most read post all time. That article does a great job explaining dominion and its relevance to magic, but as a short synopsis Dominion is a deck-building game where understanding how cards get better or worse based on its context is massively important. This game is essential to play if you want to become a better deck builder because context is everything. We have Unsummon being played in standard right now!

Poker
How to win at poker: don't play the cards, play the other players. When I started getting into poker, I received some great advice: don't play the first 3-5 hands you're dealt. Allow yourself to take the time and analyze who you're playing against. Try to understand the tells people give. As you get higher and higher up into the professional poker field, it becomes increasingly difficult to read opponents, but the same is true for magic. In poker, the odds are always against you, so it's not a great strategy to bet on those percentages. Let's say there are 8 players at the table, so 16 cards are dealt (Texas Hold 'Em). Burn and Flop: 20 cards on the table, Burn and Turn: 22, Burn and River: 24/52 cards or 46% of the cards have moved from the deck. Even if you are bad at reading others, playing poker is still a great way to control how you maintain your own composure. Next time you play poker, pay attention to your body at all times: do you perk up after reeling in a huge pot? Do you slump after folding? Do you smile a little after being dealt pocket Kings? Some players go for the no tells style of play, where they literally poker face everything. I sometimes like to have fun and give easy tells for 30 minutes before controlling my body and making my bluffs become better and my nut draws more concealed. Unfortunately, this style of play has very quick diminishing returns. The correlations between poker and magic are blatantly evident.

Scrabble/Words with Friends

Once again, this game seems pretty basic, but the real way to win this game is aactually not completely obvious. You need to play the board and the multipliers, which often means playing words that are, at raw value, smaller than other choices in your hand. Also to go another layer deep, you can not add prefixes or suffixes to words to prevent your opponent form being able to play off those words and hit something like the 3x Word multiplier. Whether it was by design or dumb luck, last week I was playing against my girlfriend and she chained "qua" into "quart" into "quarter" across 3 successive turns and did a good job catching up. However I am good at maximizing multipliers and played "palm" for 33 points of a 3x word multiplier. She consistently plays words that are better in a void, but because I play the board and not the words, I am able to score more points off the multipliers. Here's 3 good videos. This relates to overextending - If I DON'T play this creature, I can kill him in 3 turns, but playing this creature taps me out and kills him in 2 turns. Is it worth it? If you're holding mana leak, almost always the answer is no.



Bananagrams
This game is a Scrabble varient where multiple players play solitare scrabble with 21 tiles, and when they have every piece used they yell "peel!" and everyone has to take 1 tile form a pile in the middle. First player to use every tile when there are no more in the middle wins. The inherent difference between bananagrams and scrabble is that in bananagrams you can break up your puzzle as you need to form new words. Sometimes I have had games where I blow up half the board because it was a bunch of dead ends I couldn't work with. Small words are useful, but too many small words leads to a board that can't be added to. This game makes you think very quickly and on many different fronts. Often the first thing you think of isn't the best way to approach a puzzle. This game helps me think about combo decks facing down certain kinds of hate: you have to very quickly come up with a plan B that is just as effective, such as narcomeba aggro vs leyline of sanctity. Being able to mentally destroy everything that you were working on and focusing on only what matters is also another important lesson to be gained from bananagrams.

Quiddler
And finally one more words game! This one is more like rummy in that you get dealt a hand of cards which feature letters that you try to form into words. I'm personally not a fan of this game as 9 times out of 10 each round is only 1 turn long. Almost any hand containing both vowels and consonants can dump its hand on the table as long as you're creative enough. Some great words I have learned from Quiddler:

Qua
Qi
Xi
Jo
Zin
Xu

Quiddler makes you always second-guess yourself if you say you can't possibly go out this turn. I was playing just 2 days ago, and my dad put his cards on the table saying "I have 3 words, and these 2 letters are negative points" (when someone goes out, everyone gets 1 turn to accumulate as many points as possible, and any letters not used are negative points). I looked at his cards suspiciously, and after his points were recorded I took his cards and rearranged them for 2 minutes, finally showing him how he had to make 4 smaller words to use everything he had available to him. This is the as in magic when we anticipate making play X, but then after long thought we realize that a different plan is actually far more profitable.


There were actually another half-dozen games that I had qued up to talk about, but I think this post is long enough as is. But ultimately, to get better at magic, it is often the best idea to play other games that stretch your brain in ways magic doesn't always do to increase your overall brain power. As the saying goes: knowledge is power. If you go to the channel where the Words with Friends theory videos came from, you will see he has a long series of videos about game theory basics. Every game is beatable, but you have to attack them from a variety of angles to do so, including magic. It is very possible that you have never practiced a certain angle of thinking, but that's exactly what you need in a tournament! That's all I have for today! Until next time, stay classy!

Ryan Lackie
@ThingsILack