One of the sets of articles I’ve particularly enjoyed lately was by “The Rock” Olav Rokne, on all things random and how to get your deck that way. In one of them, he cites the work of a rather eccentric statistician (I hesitate to say mad scientist) who apparently determined that coin flips are actually about 51% in favor of whatever side the coin was originally flipped from.

Personally, I have a little trouble understanding how they came to this conclusion, as in my experience, virtually anyone who flips a coin more than about ten times in quick succession will begin to get some sort of a rhythm and feel for it, at which point the coin will almost always do the same number of spins on every flip. That means that the flip will always be skewed one way or another, which is the reason that you never allow the person doing the flipping to do the calling also.

As always, I have digressed. One way or another, coin flips, die rolls, high cards—whatever random means you have of determining who has the choice of initiative will go against you pretty often. It often serves as the “once upon a time” of a Vs. System bad beat story that is very unlikely to end in “happily ever after.” In my ongoing quest to end up hearing less of these tales of woe and more of the “and then I smashed him” type anecdotes, I have two reasonable options. One is to perfect my “disinterested and on the verge of being hostile” face so that people get the point about telling me about their bad luck. The other is to tell people how to minimize the chances of losing in such situations. Only one of these options produces a nice article, though.

Thank the people at Metagame and their folding green “incentive tokens.” My moody face will have to wait.

In Constructed, there is simply not a good excuse for not having a game plan for each turn on each initiative. Sure, chances are that you will have one initiative that you favor over the other in various matchups, and you should know what those are for those happy days when you win a coin flip. But the rest of the time, you should have a plan. This is where the idea of the critical turn comes in.

Typically, it doesn’t work out that every turn of the game is of equal importance to the game’s outcome. Any particular matchup will likely go in one general manner, more than likely with one or the other deck doing what it intends to and securing an advantage over the course of one or two turns that ultimately swings the game. In the case of aggressive decks, like TNB or Squadron Supreme, the critical turn might come very early in the game. Particularly against control, Squadron decks should be looking to get in as much early endurance loss as possible. In the late game, they will inevitably be able to sneak in a point or two here and there, but they make their big gains in the early turns and can happily burn resources to do so.

Things become interesting when decks have a very specific turn in which they intend to do their thing. If you have a deck sporting some crazy combo to win the game, you may very well feel that you need the initiative on a particular turn (turn 6, for example, with a deck looking to do breakthrough using Lex Luthor, Power Armor on turn 6 and then follow it up with Psimon on turn 7). In some matches, you will win the toss and get to have your turn 6. In others, you will lose the toss but be given the initiative you wanted anyway. A frustratingly large amount of the time, though, you will need to create your magic turn artificially at some other point in the game.

I can never really remember if it’s that the best offense is a good defense or the other way around. One way or another, especially when you feel that your opponent has some sort of a positional advantage over you in terms of the initiative, you should be looking to disrupt his or her play. Every deck has a critical turn, and if you can throw your opponents off theirs by either attacking their plans or defending really well against them, then it will matter less and less if your own critical turn has to be modified. Even better, if you have a modified plan, your opponent (who is looking to screw up your critical turn) might well find him or herself aiming in the totally wrong direction.

This is largely Constructed talk, but I feel that if anything, it applies to an even greater degree in Sealed Pack and Booster Draft. Even if you know nothing about the contents of your opponent’s deck, you can get a good idea of the format and metagame against an apparently random collection of cards. Typically in a format, there will be a turn on which the bulk of games end. In my experience in most formats, this turn will be number 7. If you have the odd initiatives in a one-game match in such a format, then you have just bought yourself the final opportunity to do the most endurance loss; as characters get bigger from turn to turn, the last one can make up the difference for any potential endurance deficit in a big way. If you subscribe to the idea that the turns you have with the initiative are your “good” turns, then you would effectively have one more good turn than your opponent would. This is a big deal.

After all this, it sounds pretty bad for the poor schmoes out there who end up on the “wrong” initiative. It is. However, there is no reason whatsoever to think that the chances of you being on the losing side of the initiative war are 50%. That seems like a losing proposition, and before you ever sit down at the table to play, you can make those odds look a little happier. The answer is relatively simple—find a way to make the initiative that you would most likely get on a losing flip the same as the one you would pick had you won the flip. It’s a little ballsy as Sealed Pack strategies go, but I’m a big fan of it. Essentially, rather than going middle of the road, curving out, and planning to win on turn 7, or 6, or 9, or whenever everyone else is, actively take the road less traveled and build a deck that can thrive on the initiatives that others choose to ignore. Typically, you want either to make the game last a turn longer than your opponent expects, or to end it before your opponent would prefer. These two strategies effectively give you your choice of initiative the vast majority of the time while using differing play styles.

I covered two drafts at PC Indianapolis last year. One was with Gabe Walls, who felt that he had broken Green Lantern Draft. Now, anyone who knows Gabe will be able to tell you that GWalls likes to proclaim loudly that he has broken whatever format in which he happens to be competing—he’s just that kind of guy. But as it happens, he had a very, very powerful Draft plan—to force a hyper-aggressive GLEE deck in every draft; to go off-curve and make the most of pumps like Shock Troops, which were whizzing around the table later than they deserved to be. Completely aside from the fact that this meant that Gabe was effectively playing the Constructed deck du jour in Draft and using all of the tricks that he’d learned while testing said powerhouse, this GLEE deck (in which G’Nort and Arisia were the absolute first picks) also won about a turn faster than most of the other decks that were being drafted. This plan worked very well for the Indianapolis home team and impressed me greatly.

It was with some surprise, then, that I found myself covering Bulk Lao’s draft in the next pod, where I witnessed all the hallmark GLEE cards zipping away in favor of picks like Malvolio and Katma Tui. Bulk’s plan was to do the exact opposite of Gabe. He took all the boom booms with the fattest numbers on the rear end, safe in the knowledge that he would be able to stick it out until the later turns (at which point he could secure big damage in a relatively small number of attacks after opposing decks had burned themselves out). Different strategies, same effect—the initiative had been seized, and it didn’t take The Power Cosmic to do it. Unfortunately for Bulk, he had GWalls at his table, who, along with Neil Reeves, was busily scooping up copies of Mouse Trap because they just couldn’t beat it. Still, the plan was sound.

Even if you don’t go as all-out as this to take a swing at the status quo while drafting, it is still worth taking a little time to think about how you intend to deal with the initiatives—which you want to take, who your key characters are for each initiative, and most importantly of all, which are the key turns for which to save your most powerful plot twists.

Personally, I’ve lately been playing really quite aggressive decks in X-Men Draft but putting a very high value on Genis-Vell ◊ Photon, Transformed, because if I can engineer an early turn on which I gain character advantage or effectively steal the initiative through judicious use of defensive tricks, then I feel pretty confident that I can back it up later with some juicy attacking up the curve with the extra character I have. The format feels less about getting a really good 4- or 5-drop down as it does about throwing curveballs to knock people off their curves and then riding that advantage all the way.

Until Atlanta, I recommend calling “whatever you don’t call” on the flip.

Have fun and be lucky,

Tim “Shotgun” Willoughby

timwilloughby@hotmail.com