Winning is kind of like eating peanuts. Once you’ve done it just a little bit, you want to do it a whole lot more. As fun as Vs. is (and it is a lot of fun), I think that secretly, everyone wants to be a winner. Admittedly, we all have our own little definitions of what winning is, be it reducing an opponent from 50 to 0 in one attack, or simply being able to tick the W box on the match slip. Broadly speaking, however, we all have the same goal.

Unfortunately, I have reached that sad point in my life when one realizes that just because you want something doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. This is where strategy comes in to play. Simply put, strategy is your chosen course of action that enables you to achieve your goals.

In my inaugural strategy article for Vs. System, I’ll endeavor to give you some sort of framework for introducing strategic thinking into your play that will hopefully improve your chances of winning more often*.

Bring on Ms. Spears!

Before we get on to the nitty gritty, let me introduce you to the lovely Britney Spears, popular songstress and idol of teen girls around the world**. I am of the opinion that she is a fairly comely example of the female form, and I have the following strategy for marrying her at some point before she loses her flexibility.

Sit around a lot

Watch TV

Play cards

Write the occasional article for Metagame.com

It hasn’t really worked so far, though I suppose that if I get a good enough picture of me on the front page here, and do well enough playing cards that I end up in Vegas at the right moment, it just might suffice.

This is an example of how what I currently do doesn’t really relate at all to what I want to achieve. Bad strategy. The foundations of what I would consider good strategy are the following:

1) Have a clear idea of what it is that you want. In this case, I want to achieve wedlock with a pop princess, most particularly Britney herself.

2) Determine what key factors are standing in the way of you achieving your goal. Her: all the way over there (wherever she is) in another country, already married, very famous, and hard to contact. Me: a poor student without huge amounts in common with her, who has very little opportunity to meet her, and may or may not be “her type.” Ideally, this should be a pretty exhaustive list. Depending on what your goal is, though, that can be pretty depressing. Don’t worry about that! At least for now, I’ll buy into the American dream that anything is possible***.

3) Formulate a set of actions that will deal with whatever obstacles are in the way, thus making achieving the goal inevitable once all of the contingent steps have been fulfilled. Determine the course of action that will best tackle whatever it is that stands in your way. For “Operation Bag-a-Britney,” the following might be a reasonable stab at strategy.

• Increase international profile such that she knows who I am. (This, in turn, would need its own set of strategies, which I’m not even going to go into, as it could go on forever.)
• Engineer a situation where I can meet Britney on a reasonably regular basis. I’m not convinced that I could turn her on one meeting, though I would have a good go.
• Get a haircut and sort my teeth out (apparently, being British, I have bad teeth by definition. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s best not to take chances).

4) Actually set about doing what you have planned to. This is where a lot of strategy falls down. You work out what you need to do, and then you ignore it when it seems like too much work. If it were easy to marry Britney, then everyone would be doing it. Admittedly, more and more people are, but this is by the by. Don’t get distracted.

So, have I got a good strategy for marrying Britney yet? Afraid not. You see all those little objectives up there. They just aren’t specific enough. If you want to get anything done, you need to know what’s important, what you need to do from the start, and how you are going to do it. The how just isn’t addressed there.

Realistically, I’m not ever going to marry Britney Spears. I don’t want it enough to formulate and carry out a strategy for success, so unless I randomly luck out, it just won’t happen. However, I do have a more relevant and achievable goal that I think many of you might share.

I plan to win $40,000 in the next year (by the end of 2005) playing Vs. System.

Doesn’t seem too achievable? So far, I have won about $3,000 playing Vs. System. I haven’t been nearly as active as I could have been. With the appropriate strategy, I think that most people have the potential to do significantly well at this game.

Here is my plan.

I will improve my technical game such that I consistently make less play errors than my opponent.

Vs. has more potential for bad decisions than virtually any other game I have ever played (except maybe Go). With every turn, there is so much going on that it is very easy to make sub-optimal plays. Perfect play is something you can strive for, but realistically, I think that every game of Vs. ever played will have mistakes on one level or another. If you make fewer mistakes than your opponent, and have average draws and decks of similar power level, you should ultimately finish with a winning percentage.

The technical game is further broken down into the following.

• Formation
• Appropriate timing for using plot twists
• Combat (on offense and defense)
• Knowing when to mulligan
• Resource point management
• Endurance management
• Appropriate application of card advantage and board advantage (virtual and actual)—knowing the relative value of each in various situations
• Basic “pot odds” calculations—finding the percentage play

In order to get there, I shall break down each of these functions and critically work on them, testing with the best quality competition that I can get hold of (which, conveniently, is pretty darn good). You guys (and girls?) will benefit indirectly, as I’ll expound as much of this knowledge as I can in future articles.

I will improve my tournament experience such that I can perform at my best in tournament situations.

There are a few elements of playing in tournaments that simply aren’t the same as testing or playing in a more casual environment. The value of good time management and the knowledge of the tournament floor rules (so that dealing with “difficult” opponents isn’t an issue) are both very important. In addition, tournament stamina (being able to play twelve or more rounds a day for a few days without losing quality of play) is necessary to succeed at the highest level.

I will be the king of the metagame.

Metagaming is the process of making choices outside of a single game that will help you win in a wider perspective. In constructed tournaments, this largely consists of picking the deck to play that can best compete with everyone else’s. It might also reflect decisions you make in Booster Draft, like hate drafting, which can hamper opponents enough to give you a good chance of winning your table, even when you have the worse deck.

I will have strategy superiority in every matchup.

I cannot stress how important it is to have a good idea of how your deck wins in any given matchup, how it loses, and how you should alter your play style to best go about getting the tick in the W box. This is something I will talk about at length very soon, as it’s a huge way of improving your game. Having a strategy for each matchup will sway a lot of play decisions—all of my technical play should befit the situation, beyond just what’s on the board at the moment.

I will have the best deck.

The holy grail of any format—the best deck. This one is a really tricky thing to pin down, but I would define it as the deck that gives you personally the best chance of performing at the highest level. This means that it won’t necessarily be the most powerful list, because if you haven’t practiced enough with it, you can’t expect results. On a personal level, my deck building is strictly average. I have fair card evaluation and am quite prolific in my building, but I fully intend to brainstorm, test, and tweak with the best players I can.

I will learn to draft. Each and every format.

Drafting is something that, historically, the British have a reputation for being pretty bad at. I think this comes from the fact that we focus too much on Constructed, and treat Booster Draft as a side event we indulge in to numb the pain of having been knocked out the “main event.” Now that I can’t play in PCQ’s (too many points), I fully intend to become a drafting machine. I have broken down Booster Draft into the following elements of study.

• Basic pick orders/card valuations
• Signaling
• “The Hook” (signaling and then cutting off a player)
• Archetypes within formats—are there any worth forcing?
• Hate drafting
• Curve screwing people (using picks from irrelevant packs to cut down on the numbers of a particular drop)
• Initial analysis of sets for draft (looking at sets to get a quick idea of what the most important drops are, the availability/value of different types of plot twists, and so forth)
• The “all-in” gambit (how to adjust for a draft gone wrong)

I will be the Yoda of Vs. psychology

For a long time now (about eighteen years or so), I have wanted to be Yoda in one way or another. Tragically, I was too tall almost as soon as I decided that Yoda was a good role model, so I’ve had to take it in different directions. Yoda followed the Taoist (Jedi?) principle that “there is no try, there is only do or do not,” which is pretty widely applicable in general life. I also have the sneaking suspicion that he had a good grasp of using mind tricks and bluffs, and of sensing the bluffs of others. If I can get anywhere near close to that, I will be a very happy young Padowan.

There is quite a lot going on in this article, and while it is a big task to get to a high level in all of the above areas, the fact that I have identified what I need to do and can relate that to an ultimate and specific goal gives purpose to everything I do next. It’s really hard to motivate yourself to do anything if you have no reason to do it. The very fact that I have now set myself up for failure in front of the whole Vs. community is just a little extra motivator to keep me honest. For that, I thank everyone for reading this and Metagame.com for publishing it.

If you are looking for tech from my articles, you might have a hard time. If you are looking for a framework on which to improve your game, then hopefully you’re in luck. In my next article, I shall look at applying strategy (What do I want? What is standing in the way to stop me? How can I overcome it?) to specific matchups, and discuss how it can alter your play and improve your win percentages. I hope you’ll join me.

Tim “too tall to be Yoda” Willoughby

* When you think about it, if I make everyone else better, then relatively speaking, I’ll be getting worse and worse. At first, this seems like pretty poor strategy on my part, but if it means that there are more really good players who can, in turn, work some moves against me and teach me something, then I think it will probably be worth it.

** She also appears to be idolized by one Mr. Richard Edbury Esq. (winner of $10K Minehead), who knows a quite disturbingly high proportion of the lyrics to her songs.

*** Is that actually the American dream? I’ve never really had it clear in my head what the American dream constitutes. If it involves being chased by a giant robot Barbara Streisand, I really don’t want to know.