Two Turns Ahead: Have Fun and Be Lucky

My name is Tim Willoughby; thank you, and goodnight.

Somehow, I don’t think that I’m going to get away with having an article that is just a title and a signoff, great as it would be to be able to do so. While America has Independence Day as a national holiday, England just has Tuesday, the day after “The Worst Day of the Week.” We lost the War of Independence, which, I suppose, would have been called the Scuffle in the Colonies had we won, and as such, my Tuesday will likely go the way of most other Tuesdays. No holiday for Tim. Just an earlier deadline.

Let us try again . . .

Two Turns Ahead: Lessons for Losers

Losing, in wars or in Vs. System, hurts a little. In the middle of the 17th century, the then Lord Willoughby managed to lose in the English Civil War quite spectacularly by switching sides, going from what turned out to be the winning side to the losing one. Oops. It took a while for the family to bounce back from that one. If failing at something doesn’t sting a little, then it’s probably a sign that you aren’t taking it very seriously, in which case you probably won’t enjoy yourself all that much when you win. If you bicycle on the flat ground all the time, sure, you won’t have the bother of getting to the top of big hills, but you also won’t get the electric thrill of the wind in your face as you hurtle down them.

There are quite a few losses that sting more than usual, though. Any game where you feel that you have a good matchup but draw badly will hurt. Any game where that 1 point you took on turn 1 from forgetting to evade Electric Eve turns a win into a loss will end up being frustrating. The loss in the final round of the Swiss that callously robs you of your rightful place in the Top 8 is never going to be as easy to reconcile as the loss in round 2 to an unfortunate draw, even if ultimately the one in the earlier rounds was far worse for your tiebreakers.

Psychologically, this can rather wear one down. While the Willoughbys of today are happily doing pretty well as TV presenters, underwear models, successful writers, beauty queens,* and in any number of other fields, I can justifiably see the family as a whole having been in a bit of a funk in 1656. It is pretty unlikely that wallowing will leave one as happy as a pig in mud, and there can be unfortunate ongoing effects of taking losses too far to heart. If you are busy thinking about your last game, it can be really tough to do all of the thinking for your current one too.

There are really only a few reasons why people lose a game of Vs. System. Once you are familiar with them, you too can sit back and listen as people’s bad beat stories start to come out of their mouths as just “wah wah wah.” When you lose yourself, you should be able to identify why slightly more articulately. Points of articulation aren’t just for superhero figures—sometimes they are there to make you look clever too.

For the next week or two, I intend to go through them, with tricks and tips for either avoiding such losses, or at least dealing with them such that they don’t put you in a downward spiral.

Reasons You Just Lost:

You had a horrible draw.

These happen. You mulligan correctly and see a hand with nothing but characters. After a short curse that you aren’t playing a reservist deck, you draw for the turn. More characters. And more. And more. Technically, this is far from the worst draw ever. Assuming that you are playing a deck with good characters (which you should basically always be doing), then you aren’t necessarily out of the game with just a bunch of guys. You aren’t dead . . . just moribund. Replace the draw with just plot twists or equipment, and suddenly things go from bad to badder to badderest to badderesterer with alarming alacrity.

Once your deck is built, assuming that you shuffle in an appropriate fashion (read: thoroughly), there is not a great deal that can be done about the quality of your draws that within the rules of the game. While building, though, there are a few ways of minimizing the chances of a bad draw.

If you look at the last couple of high profile decks from The Donkey Club, you will see a number of these ways at work. It kind of makes sense that the better a player one is, the more frustrating it must be to lose to “getting unlucky.” In terms of consistently enacting a plan, both the X-Faces deck from Atlanta and Ivy League from San Francisco took the same route to minimizing luck. Firstly, each deck included copious amounts of search effects. Not drawing enough copies of a card when you run four? Why not effectively run eight or sixteen? With enough search effects, naturally drawing the appropriate card ceases to be a concern, as one should likely be able to draw either it or one of the many search effects that can find it. The only downside to running a lot of search effects is that it can make playing decks a lot more complicated. With more options come more opportunities to screw up. The difference is that you can practice to become better at making such decisions, but you can’t practice to increase your good fortune . . . unless you are a believer in Karma and in the notion that Karma can tell what is or isn’t good in a card game.

The other way that The Donkey Club’s last few decks have dodged the slings and arrows of cruel misfortune is by virtue of their curve. For those not in the know, a deck’s curve is the relative amounts of differently costed characters and effects it contains. You would likely run more cards at lower costs, even though they’re less powerful, simply because you have less time to draw them when they’re needed. A typical curve deck would play the single most expensive creature it could every turn until the end of the game.

The problem with curve decks is that if you do miss on a particular drop, you can be in a fair bit of bother, and when you inevitably draw low cost characters too late, you will be lucky if they are anything more than a power-up. Reservist decks can get extra value by running enough characters that this isn’t a concern, but for everyone else, this is an irksome reality that can’t be avoided.

Off-curve decks, like X-Faces, have a different set of rules to live by. By playing predominantly 1- and 2-cost characters, it is very unlikely that early drops will be missed, and when it comes to later turns, recruiting multiple small characters is exactly the kind of play that the decks want to make. It becomes very difficult in this scenario for a character to show up late to the party, as there is more variation in when each one can be recruited. These decks get in trouble in quite a different fashion—by running out of cards in hand with which to spend all those resource points. Playing on-curve decks is pretty straightforward while it works. You play one card per turn in your resource row and recruit one character. As you draw two cards per turn, this is more or less perfect. For the off-curve decks, there needs to be some card drawing, or they will simply run out of gas as the game progresses. Conveniently, in today’s Constructed environments, there are plenty of options in that regard. Birthing Chamber is a great start, and if the discard costs of various card advantage / card quality effects can be mitigated by The Phantom Stranger, Wandering Hero or Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster, then they too become ways of gaining additional cards as necessary. It is entirely possible that Ivy League would never have worked at all without these last two characters, which provided the card advantage to cover the one-for-one trades of cards for cards in opponents’ hands. The other secret is for curve decks to try to more or less win the game before running out of cards becomes too much of an issue! Assuming that one option or the other can be enacted by an off-curve deck, then it has much less to fear from fate dealing an ugly hand off the top than an on-curve deck does.

You will lose games to bad draws, but beyond a little careful forethought about how your deck is put together, there is not a great deal that you can do about this. Bearing this in mind, there is not much point in concerning yourself overly with the loss. Unless you are playing some sort of non-UDE approved WWE style forfeit match, you probably won’t be physically hurt by your bad luck. All the chairs and tables should remain intact, as there is nothing to rage about. Just shuffle up and get ready to play again.

In my experience, the best players do not believe in lucky or unlucky streaks. The result of the previous match should have very little bearing on your next one. This means that if you are really good, you have no reason to predict your own topple off a streak of wins. You are just as well equipped to win the next game as you were the one prior to it. Similarly, you cannot let yourself think that just because you’ve had bad draws for a couple of games that you are any more likely than normal to continue that way. Luck lives in the now, and it is a good idea for you to also.

If you don’t sweat your bad luck quite as much, then you will suddenly feel a lot luckier. It has reached the point now where I’m really not sure if I’m genuinely superhumanly lucky, or if it’s just that when I’m unlucky, I simply don’t notice. I would provide some examples of exactly how lucky I am on a regular basis (taken directly from the “Mise of the Week” board that resides in my kitchen), but I’ve been informed that I couldn’t afford the bill for all the vomit over the collective screens of all the Metagame readers. So you’ll just have to imagine. Or ask me face to face, where I am pretty lucky / good when it comes to not getting hit by vomit.

You had a nightmare matchup

I’m always of the opinion that this is a rather shaky excuse for why you lost a game. Why? Well, while preparing for an event, it is incumbent on you to work out what your bad matchups are and to prepare accordingly to make them not as bad as all that. It takes quite an unusual metagame for me to turn up to an event with a deck that has a truly bad matchup against any of the decks I expect to see played in the field. I showed up to $10K London knowing that I had a very slim chance of beating Dean Sohnle’s Fantastic Fun deck, but I also knew that he was the only person in the field playing it, so I was happy to lose just to Dean. I once played an AGL deck at a Modern Age PCQ where the clear best deck in the format was GLEE, knowing my matchup against non-GLEE decks was abysmal, because I didn’t anticipate seeing a huge amount of anything else. Normally, though, I like to have at the very least a plan against every deck in the format to the extent that losing a matchup is more than just a case of sitting down opposite it. The plan won’t necessarily be a good one, but I want to be packing at least some answers to whatever is that could be making my life miserable with my chosen deck. Then, losing a matchup will be more than just having an inferior deck—it will require some difference in play skill and luck to determine who walks away a winner.

This is not to say that you can show up to an event without bad matchups, or that losing in bad matchups will not be part of your tournament experience from time to time. The good bit about losing in bad matchups is that you have a fairly well justifiable excuse for what happened in the moment at hand. While there is still the bigger question of how exactly you got in a position where there was ever the potential for things to get this bad, this is something to dwell on and build from. It is pretty hard to work out how to win until you know exactly how you lose, and while in a perfect world you would be learning these sorts of lessons while playing outside a tournament setting, sometimes that just isn’t possible. You lost, but hopefully you also learned something useful about how not to lose again and be better prepared for future similar matches.

You messed up.

This is one of the ways of losing that stings the most, and it’s the one that is most frequently masked by any number of other excuses. Chances are, if you lost, it is because of some combination of luck and making mistakes. In my experience, the latter is much more important than the former. Playing the perfect game is pretty absurdly tough in Vs. System, and much of the time, making fewer mistakes than your opponent is plenty good enough to get you to the win. This is the reason that playing with players that are better than you is a key driver in improving your play. If I can play against somebody where I make a bunch of mistakes and still reliably win, where is my incentive to play any better? This is just another reason why I love playing against the likes of Dean Sohnle and Ian Vincent; they give me a tough game. Michael Jacob is also an opponent that I have really enjoyed playing against whenever I’ve had the opportunity, as he will pretty happily point out everything that I am doing wrong in any given situation. A single mistake will not necessarily lose you a match; normally, there will be an accumulation of mistakes that put a game beyond your grasp. If you notice that you made an error, in actual fact it is likely that you made a few and only spotted the biggest one. This is where having extra points of view really helps. In testing, I am a big fan of playing open-handed and getting the opinion of both players as to what is the best way to play out a game. This way, there is a much better chance of the best plays being found quicker, and the whole testing process will be that much more useful. The more you test, the better the chance that you’ll get more of the screw-ups out of your system. You’ll learn what the best characters are at various points in the game so that your formations and attacks protect your good guys and make life difficult for your opponents. Attack orders can be agreed upon and relevant tricks will become something that you can play around rather than be the surprises that your opponent wishes they could remain.

I think that formation and attack order is still the area where I see the most clear cut errors (as opposed to questionable judgment calls) while doing feature match coverage on the Pro Circuit. This is understandable, as it is one of the tougher elements of the game, and one that is not given a great deal of attention, especially by decks whose primary win condition isn’t dominating the combat step reliably. My first recommendation for anyone looking to improve their abilities within the combat step is to pick up any of the recent starter decks. The X-Men, Batman, and Fantastic Four starter decks have been really carefully designed to hammer home the importance of formation and attack order by stripping back some of the extra abilities to allow people to focus on the basics. The guys at UDE R&D clearly put in quite a lot of work ensuring these decks are well balanced, and they are a good place to go back to just to get a good feel for where you are going with formations. Beyond this, most Draft formats are much better for improving your forming than Constructed formats. At that level, you look to form general principles to improve your play rather than specific formations for specific situations, which is more often what I get from rigorous Constructed testing with any given deck.

With each turn, look at your board and work out which characters you really want to keep and which characters of your opponent’s you really would like to get rid of (bearing in mind the one free recovery per turn). These are the two most important pieces of information for every formation step, and they should inform any subsequent decisions that you make.

In the short term, it can be hard to reconcile the fact that you have thrown away matches due to your own play errors. One of the first steps in getting there is to become used to the fact that play errors happen and not to allow it to throw off your thinking for subsequent games. Take each play error you’ve spotted as a clear cut sign of how to improve, and seek to do just that by not repeating mistakes.

For this week, I shall leave it at that. There will be more losses to come, but I hope to provide you with a suitable set of tools for dealing with them that can keep you looking forward. Without things going wrong once in a while, we never appreciate when things go right.

A guy can hope, though!

Have fun and be lucky,

Tim Willoughby

timwilloughby@hotmail.com

* These are not all me, I hasten to add. While I like to think of myself as a successful writer, I have never presented children’s TV on a major station or appeared on the cover of Esquire magazine in my pants.