by Andrew Lawrence
Undoubtedly, some games of magic are decided by skill and some are decided by luck. Ask two different people how important luck is, and what percentage of games is decided by it, and you will probably get different answers.
If you asked every player in the world, there would be a correlation in their answers between play skill and how much luck they think is involved in winning. The less experienced a player is the more importance he is likely to attribute luck towards his results. Better players will put luck as a much smaller factor. Unless they are playing someone of equal or higher skill good players seldom attribute their results down to luck for the simple reason that luck is only a small factor in the result unless both players understand the match up and play the game close to optimally.
Occasionally you will get that game where you feel you didn’t have the opportunity to win… perhaps it was just not possible to beat your opponents draw with the deck you had or you kept a good hand considering the match up but it just didn’t work out and you drew horribly. It does happen…but rarely, and if it does happen it is one game and we play best of three.
I would really question your deck choice and sideboard if we are talking a type 2 game where you could not do anything about your opponent’s draws. There are no decks I consider broken in this format. I concede that there are bad match ups as I often play mid range control decks that sometimes just beat well constructed aggro decks no matter how well the opponent plays.
Sometimes I do actively want to increase the “luck†factor in my deck if I believe that I will be playing players who are better than me or I know through lack of preparation that if I am competing on equal footing it will not be enough. I have actually tried playing 15 lands in a draft deck that went horribly wrong in the hope of “getting lucky†on mana or splashing cards with no mana fixing to boost card quality. Nowadays if I had such a disaster I would probably go the other way and play more land and hope my opponent is “unluckyâ€!
One event I was under prepared for was PTQ Hawaii. It was extended format and I did not really have an extended quality deck. I played my type 2 Boros deck with 4 Grim Lavamancers and luckily on the day I was able to borrow some fetch lands from Miles. Fetch lands deserve their own article in regards to luck but I will talk about Horizon Canopy later which is similar.
Because I only knew what approx 15% of the card in the format did I knew I wanted to play a deck that won in a short amount of time. The more turns that occurred the more opportunity there was for me to be outplayed by more skilled and experienced opponents. I finished the day 3-3 which was a fair result for my first ever extended tournament.
I went for the same strategy at the next extended PTQ and made the final. During the final my opponent made a radical play while in a losing position which extended the length of the game and forced me to make more decisions and possibly mistakes, and eventually the more skillful and experienced player won.
Now focusing on the more positive aspects and how to decrease the role “bad luck†is playing on your results. Rather than talk abstractly about luck vs skill in deck choice I will run through the building of a Kithkin deck and how I think these decisions relate to “luck†I put that phrase in commas because if you can influence it…is it still luck?
These lands along with man lands are some of the best lands an aggro deck can see. They let you play sufficient lands to reliably get to your sweet spot on the mana curve, but can easily be exchanged for non-mana resources (resources is registered trademark of Cameron Veigel) when you draw too many. While comes into play tapped lands are also great cards I would not use any in a deck like this. Cards like this reduce the losses due to bad draw. If you only have 1 turn to draw an answer with sufficient mana, a Soltari Priest, Wizened Cenn, Serra Avenger and Knight of Medowgrain) all have double white in their cost. If you start playing a card like Mutavault no one will take you seriously when you complain about manna screw. If you decide to go with Mutavault think of it more as a two power drop with cumulative upkeep of 1 and protection from Damnation. That’s actually pretty good hmmmm…
I think I just advocated playing 25 lands in a Kithkin deck but I stand by my comments.
Having the right mana is the number one way to reduce bad draws, guaranteed to be 3000% more effective than tapping the top of your deck or cursing your opponents top deck after the game.
The problem I have with the mono-white decks is that all but a handful of the efficient Kithkin creatures attack via the ground and all the white removal is only effective against permanents. That is a very one dimensional plan of attack and makes it easy for your opponent to figure out the strategy he should be using to beat you. If your only way of damaging your opponent is through ground attacks then if the other deck is playing the control route it doesn’t take a highly skilled opponent to realize they should remove as many of your creatures as they can and play as many creatures as they have on their side of the table as fast as they can.
Perhaps a skilled Kithkin player will hold his removal until he can use multiple amounts in one turn to mess with the maths of the defending player but the Kithkin player doesn’t have as strong a late game as other players so the more turns that go by the more he loses control over the outcome.
I don’t recommend playing cards just to make the game more complicated and often If I copy a deck list I may dumb it down by removing tricky cards like Persecute and Gifts Ungiven if I don’t trust myself to play them right. However if you have faith in your skills, playing cards which fit into your game plan like Goldmeadow Harrier and Rustic Clachan, which increase the complexity of combat, increase the amount of benefit you can get from being more experienced or skillful than your opponent.
To give the opponent something else to worry about and cause him to possibly misplay I would want to add another dimension to your deck. The white card that immediately jumps to mind is Griffin Guide, something that makes one of your guys bigger and gives it flying as well as providing a presence after a wrath.
This brings us to another area where often players make the mistake of believing something was “luck†rather than skill and that’s knowing your opponents hand. Sometimes the contents of your opponent’s hands really are a mystery but often when I am playing well I can be pretty confident on the key contents of an opponents hand. The playing of a Griffin Guide when your opponent has mana untapped is not relying on “luck†if you know your opponent would have used removal last turn if he had it.
Personally I would look to splash some burn spells to give the opponent something to worry about once he is low on life. Not only does it give you a different way of doing damage it makes it harder for your opponent to do the maths before announcing blocks and makes it more likely he would make a mistake.
At first I thought to try Psionic Blast because there seem to be better blue white lands than red white lands. But a Kithkin deck really needs to hit double white on turn two so Nimbus Maze is of no use to a Kithkin deck because I would not plan to use any mana sources that could not produce one white on turn 1. I would probably either try a red splash using Battlefield Forge and Gemstone Mine or go with the accepted strategy of mono-white.
Building the right mana base is fundamental to success because games can be won by such small margins. Despite only playing one Faerie card in my deck I once lost a sanctioned game of magic because I went into a tournament using Frost Marsh instead of Secluded Glen.
I could have put it down to bad luck that I drew a comes into play tapped land but I had Wydwen in hand … it was lazy deck building.
I initially thought Lorwyn was a bomb laden limited format but that was the thinking of someone who didn’t understand it. After slowly getting to grips with the format over a period of months I played in four events at the Morningtide prerelease. In only one of those matches I felt I lost to a superior deck played well. All of my other 5 losses over the weekend I could contribute to a key mistake or a bad judgment call on my behalf. Some would find that disheartening but I actually found it motivating to think that I really could influence the outcome of such a high percentage of my matches. The trend continued through to type two in the following weeks not just in my games but watching others.
I saw many people attribute their losses to bad luck when as an observer I could see many different plays that they could have made to dramatically affect there games. I also saw spectators give away vital information (not always verbally) that they obviously thought was trivial.
These are the little things I planned on highlighting which have more to do with play skill than anything else which have been written of as “luck†but I have already used more words than I planned so I will try and write more later.
The only downside is, after removing luck from the equation, who do you blame for your losses?
