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Crazy Theories: Know the Power of the Dark Side

Magic is a hard game.

People are, generally, weak-minded.

What do these two things have in common?

People like easy wins. That’s why there are so many fast-track diets, so many get-rich-quick schemes and why people kill that turn 2 Myr or counter that turn 3 Preordain. They also tend to believe in things that they want to believe in: that you don’t have a second land, that you have all lands in hand, or that you don’t have the Wra…[card]Day of Judgment[/card] in your hand.

There can therefore be many, many wins accrued by allowing these tendencies to take over your opponent’s mind. Magic is, after all, the battle of two minds against each other. Let yours be the stronger mind. Today, I will teach you some techniques to superimpose your will over your opponent’s. After much training and experience, you too will able to do what I can: simply wave your hand and say “mulligan” to cause your opponent to start on one fewer card, get your adversary to not play a land turn 2, or to get your friend’s opponent to tell him what deck he is playing. Yes, all three of those things have really happened, one of them playing for 200$, one of them in a Grand-Prix Trial Top 8 where the winner got a free plane ticket, and one of them in the 3-0 bracket at a PTQ. I have even convinced my opponent and his two team members in a team draft that we had already played 2 games, despite only playing one, just to test my limits.

Disclaimer: Of course, all of this comes second to tight technical play. Often tight technical play is what allows you to come to situations where your mind trick will win you the match. Perhaps it is not as flashy as causing your opponent to play [card]Thoughtseize[/card] turn 1 when you had a [card]Leyline of Sanctity[/card] in play (the only legal target for [card]Thoughtseize[/card] is THEM) or having lightning come out from your fingertips, but it sure gets the job done most of the time.

Now, if you are a regular visitor to the site or listen to the Eh Team podcast, you may have heard of Manadeprived’s CEO, KYT, regularly getting mind-tricked. In most of these instances, he is facing relatively minimal opposition who are not skilled whatsoever in the ways of the force. The person causing the mind-trick is KYT himself. He somehow sees a [card]Sun Titan[/card] when his opponent is casting a [card]Gideon Jura[/card], or has a play planned out and then fails to execute it. When my opponents are mind-tricked, only in rare instances do they even realize that it was not just a mistake on their part.

First off, my techniques will not work for those of you who stick to the ways of the Jedi. Those ways will work occasionally, but often it turns out that you do have the specific droids that they are looking for. You know not the power of the dark side. If you are generally quiet and unassuming, you will not be able to do these feats. You must be talkative, at times even bothersome, yet generally you must portray an exterior of friendliness and sportsmanship. If your opponent makes a grave error because he was talking to you, felt at ease, and trusted you, then why would he suspect anyone but himself?

So, you must always wish your opponent “good luck,” introduce yourself, make pleasantries, and perhaps joke around a bit. I also tend to make accurate observations on the game state, and make joking comments such as “You sure you don’t want to target yourself?” when my opponent casts a card like [card]Blightning[/card] or [card]Lightning Bolt[/card]. This makes them believe you are but a harmless clown, a jokester, when in fact you are of a malicious will.

Now that the stage is set, it is time for the performance. Even with all the set-up, often there are games in which you cannot use your powers. It could be that your opponent is very quiet, or there is a language barrier. Sometimes you just mulligan into oblivion (that one is for you, Pascal), and can’t do much with your 1 land. Sometimes you are playing Zoo, and there isn’t much you can do when your opponent has a lethal [card]Scapeshift[/card] in hand (though, sometimes there is*). Sometimes there just simply isn’t a point in the game where an important decision needs to be made, typically in blowout games where one thing would not tip the scales in your favour.

I also would not recommend some of these techniques at your kitchen table, at FNM, or in an EDH match. Whenever the point is not simply to win, but to learn or to just have fun instead, many players will not find it amusing that you have tricked them into losing the game. In a PTQ, however, anything is fair game.

—————–

Story time:

It is a PTQ top 8. My opponent is playing Mono Blue Faeries and I am playing Next-Level Blue. We have just had a very hard fought two games, the first where we both had hands of similar value, and my opponent made a small technical error in countering a spell that didn’t matter, and lost the game. The second game I had mulliganned to 4, and yet almost came back through a couple of [card]Ancestral Vision[/card]s only to be thwarted by a top-decked [card]Sower of Temptation[/card]. The whole time, my opponent and I have been chatting almost non-stop, for my opponent sure is a talker, so much so that my friends who are watching are practically clutching their ears…but I never have trouble keeping up witty banter.

Game 3 begins with him going to 6 cards while I drop down to 5. [card]Flooded Strand[/card], [card]Breeding Pool[/card], [card]Island[/card], [card]Ancestral Vision[/card]s, Vedalken Shackles[/card]. I keep. The plan with this hand is to resolve Visions at all costs. Spoiler: to do so, I would need to beat a [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card], a [card]Spellstutter Sprite[/card], and a [card]Stifle[/card].

Turn 1, I play my [card]Island[/card] and suspend the Visions. My opponent mirrors the play.

Turn 2, I draw an [card]Island[/card], and tank. Yes, this was a difficult decision time. My opponent’s deck is 3 [card]Vedalken Shackles[/card], 2 [card]Sower of Temptation[/card], 4 [card]Vendilion Clique[/card], and cards that counter my [card]Ancestral Vision[/card]s (besides perhaps [card]Mana Leak[/card]). I play the [card]Flooded Strand[/card] and pass the turn.

My opponent plays an untapped land and passes. On his end step i stop the excited chatter and fetch my land a little too quickly. Due to the speeding up of the play, my opponent also feels pressured to play quickly. The win iss right there – I was fetching so quickly because I didn’t want him to [card]Stifle[/card] it. I had mulliganned to 5, he was so close to victory, and I probably didn’t have another land. He taps an [card]Island[/card] and casts [card]Stifle[/card].

Had he thought a little more about it, he would have realized that had I truly been land-short, I would have fetched on my turn, when [card]Stifle[/card] was not a possibility. The extra 2 damage I would take from a dual land untapped would hardly be relevant in this control mirror, and besides, there was nothing that he could play turn 2 that would matter.

Turn 3: I draw [card]Spell Snare[/card], play [card]Breeding Pool[/card] and pass the turn. My opponent plays a shock land, but he took 2, and passes.

Turn 4: I draw a [card]Polluted Delta[/card]. Here I stop, looked into my opponent’s eyes, and ask “Do you have the Mana Leak?”

Now, it can NEVER hurt to ask opponent’s if they have a certain card in hand. Even if they give a non-committal response, you can still gleam a bit of information from them. When I asked this question, he said nothing, and his eyes gave me no information.

Nothing to get there, right?

Wrong.

Like Sherlock Holmes said to Watson “then there is the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”

Watson asked, “What incident? The dog didn’t do anything.”

Sherlock replied, “Precisely.”

Why did my always talkative opponent say nothing? The more standard response for such a player would be a babble of incoherent nonsense. Like the dog that did not bark, his silence told me something. It told me he was not confident or perhaps felt that he had screwed up.

I said “You have nothing,” played my [card]Vedalken Shackles[/card], and he quickly [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card]’s it, removing a [card]Vendilion Clique[/card] that clearly he had been planning to cast at the end of my turn. I’m sure at the time he was very excited to prove me wrong.

On his turn 4, he plays a [card]Riptide Laboratory[/card], and passes.

My turn 5, Visions went on the stack. He plays [card]Spellstutter Sprite[/card], and I play [card]Spell Snare[/card]. My 3 cards are [card]Future Sight[/card], [card]Island[/card], [card]Island[/card]. I draw for my turn: [card]Stifle[/card].

I Stifle his Visions’ “cast this spell when the last time counter is removed” trigger, causing it to remain in purgatory forever and ride that [card]Future Sight[/card] to victory.

My opponent said that this match was what inspired him to take Magic more seriously, and since then has played on 2 Pro Tours (including one qualified for by winning an MTGO PTQ, no small feat). The next match we played together, he refused to talk during the match, and after casting [card]Slaughter Pact[/card] while I continued to talk to him, kept on repeating his mantra of “PAY FOR PACT, PAY FOR PACT.”

———————

While I won’t divulge all my secrets (I do like winning, after all), I will end with a very simple trick that is nevertheless quite effective.

Let us say that you are in a match against, I don’t know, KYT. You have both drafted pretty good decks. He won game 1 off the back of a [card]Myr Battlesphere[/card], for which he used 100 dollar bills as Myr Tokens. Game 2, your efficient curve of [card]Plague Stinger[/card] into [card]Septic Rats[/card] plus a [card]Grasp of Darkness[/card] got there. In game 3, after you [card]Shatter[/card]’d his Battlesphere, and he drew that [card]Arrest[/card] for your [card]Plague Stinger[/card], your [card]Septic Rats[/card] are now staring down $400. You have a [card]Swamp[/card] and [card]Mountain[/card] in hand to his 0 cards. He draws for his turn and goes into the tank. Here is where you unveil this little number.

“It’s a land, you might as well play it.”

I have only ever seen 4 different responses to this.

1. They play their land. “Wow, how did you know?” they reply in astonishment.

Next turn they draw [card]Sky-Eel School[/card]. This is the KYT.

2. They say “It’s not a land,” and play whatever fatty or removal that they drew, just to prove you’re wrong. “What an idiot,” they say. This is the Gordon Snell, man.

Both those responses gain you something. You had 0 information and now you have 100%.

3. They laugh, and say “Nice try.” This is generally the response my friends have, since this trick loses its effectiveness after awhile.

No loss, no gain.

4. They say “It’s not a land,” and attack you with all their creatures. Then you look up, and realize its not KYT you are facing, and yet the person looks remarkably familiar. After losing the game, you go onto ManaDeprived to write a comment for this article, and look on with shock and awe at the author photograph.

Thanks for reading. And yes, I may be Evil and Vile, but i will continue to hide under my Veil, and my draws will always be Live.

* Somehow, my opponent ended up finding 5 [card]Mountain[/card]s, 2 [card]Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle[/card]s game 1 with his lethal [card]Scapeshift[/card], and game 2 found his only basic [card]Mountain[/card] when I had a [card]Ghost Quarter[/card] in play (if there are less than 5 other Mountains when the ability resolves, the effect fizzles). Was it me, or was my opponent just really bad? I’ll leave that for you decide.

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