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MAGIC: The Gathering, the best strategy game on this planet. Here you find an old strategy guide I wrote when I still played. I took part in two German National Championships, and in three constructed Pro Tours, PT New York I (the first PT ever), PT Dallas and PT Paris, so these strategies are battle-proven. Unfortunately, they are now years old, and on many counts outdated. Also, unfortunately, to play on the pro circuit, you have to invest a lot of your time, so I am not able to update the strategy presented here.
The tutorial starts below.
There are some accepted advanced concepts about how Magic decks work. It took the playing community several years to arrive at these insights. Often good players made use of them, without thinking about it. Then a few extraordinary Magic minds recognized them, gave them names and described them. The concepts follow, along with the strategy article that was responsible for establishing them, either because it was the first one, or the most influential one:
There is also some other old articles I wrote:
If you are interested in the the Magic: the Gathering computer game here are some of my decks.
This is an introduction to type II deckbuilding. It also is an introduction to some of the intermediate level concepts in Magic, such as card-advantage. A lot of other information that could be interesting for a newbie (i.e. a person new to magic), such as a list of interesting websites or a list of Magic slang words or abbrevations is not included, but may be in future versions in case there is enough demand for these.
In this document I will use big letters to signify the use of a major color (with double-coloured casting costs and/or about a dozen spells or more in that color), and small letters to signify a minor color. Thus U/W would stand for a Blue White deck utilizing both Counterspell and Wrath of God, while U/w would stand for one using white just for a couple of Swords to Plowshares and Disenchants (and Balance and Land Tax, of course). I will use this Abbrevations: U=Blue W=White G=Green R=Red B=Black C=any color.
[This primer is historic, being written originally in 1996. Most of the general concepts still hold, but of course example decks and cards are by now outdated or even not in print any more. I added small comments in brackets at some points in spring 2001.]
The size of the deck should be 60 cards (the minimum) if possible. This will maximize the chances to draw the cards you may have only 4 times in the deck, but would like to have more copies of, because you deem them so powerful or important to the deck's concept. It will also maximize the chances to draw any restriced cards, of which you are only entitled to have one each, as they are too strong in multiples. You also can use Urzas Bauble and/or Lodestone Bauble or Barbed Sextant, no-cost or very cheap cantrips (spells that replace themselves) that can go into any deck, the sextant especially in multi-color decks. These will shrink the size of your deck even further, and have been used with good success in several Pro-Tour Decks to do this.
You need generally 40-50% reusable manasources. This translates to 24-30 cards in a 60 card deck. 27-28 is a good average that can be modified later according to the deck in question. Reusable manasources in this context could be land, Felwar Stones, Llanowar Elves etc. Of these at least 20-22 should be lands, to start the manasources that have casting costs. [For decks with a cheap mana curve, i.e. lots of 1 casting cost (cc) spells, some 2 cc spells and a few 3 and 4 cc spells, 20 manasources (all land) can be enough. In that case, at least 16 should be lands that produce colored mana.]
Often it is advisable to use not only land, for two reasons:
First, castable sources speed your mana developement up as long as they cost less then 3 to cast, as they break the 1 land per turn limit.
Second, by using alternate mana sources your deck becomes less vulnerable to landdestruction decks and spells like Armageddon. One-use mana sources such as Tinderwall or Dark Ritual can stretch the mana ratio up to 50%. They also permit the use of spells with casting- costs higher than 4 with less risk.
Mishras and Strip Mines (soon to be restricted) also allow you to have a higher mana-ratio, and thus have a more solid deck as you are less prone to mana screw. They accomplish this without sacrificing deck density as they can also be used as business cards. This makes them first string cards for a lot of tournament decks. For a main colour that uses spells with double- colored casting costs, you need 12+ reliable sources of that colour. For a main colour with spells that cost just a single coloured mana, you need 9+ sources. A few spells of a colour, that use only one colored mana, can be supported with about 6 sources. Depending on the number of spells in each colour and the number of artifacts in the overall deck these numbers can be tuned. A main colour in a two colour deck means usually about a dozen spells. For a colour with double coloured spells that need these two coloured mana by any means in turn two, like blue with counterspell or black with the Hymn (soon to be restricted), there should be 17+ sources of that colour in the deck.
It is most reliable to run a deck with modest mana requirements. Even in decks with minimal mana requirements, though, like a Weeny Deck (a deck that uses a lot of cheap to cast, usually small creatures) or a Bolt deck (a usually mono-red deck using lots of cheap direct damage spells), it is often better to run a meaty mana-percentage and include cards that can convert the useless late land into useful ressources (like Jalum Tome, Stormbind or Ashnod's Cylix), than to skimp on mana and risk manadeath. Since all tourney viable decks have to be built to survive the early turns of the game, when there is not much mana at hand, there are few decks that do need land after the first 5-6 lands drawn. Thus, nearly all decks can benefit from this kind of ressource-transformation. Beginners often make the mistake to mix too view lands (like 20 in a 60 card deck) with too many mighty but expensive spells like Mahamoti Djinn or Force of Nature. They die before they can ever cast them.
The right mana distribution is the make or break of any deck. Without it, the whole deck is useless.
Example: The hopefully-soon-to-be-defunct-classic Necrodeck 4 Strip Mine 4 Mishra's Factory 4 Ebon Stronghold 14 Swamp 4 Dark Ritual (DR) = 30 sources (50%); 26 reusable, 18 of these black. Pure mana percentage is just 22 cards, Mishra's and Strips can be used as spells.
Here only a few general things can be said, as the number of possible decks is nigh infinite. All of them tend to have some things in common:
A good deck should't contain too many spells with casting costs greater 4. Looking at a standard deck with 40% mana, by turn 4 the player will have drawn 10 cards (or 11, depending on wether he went first and wether the play-draw- rule was used or not). On average, 4 of these will be mana. Thus he could put down a land each turn. For the next, fifth mana, there is only a 40% chance with each card he draws. He will probably draw another mana source about every second turn. This means that spells with a casting cost of 5 can not be expected to be cast before turn 6, spells with casting costs of 6 even have to wait till turn 8, and all of that barring a lucky Stripmine or other land-destructing spell of the opponent's. Armaggeddon or Winter Orb can hurt here, too. Thus, while spells with casting-costs up to 4 can readily be cast, more expensive ones have to wait. Naturally then, you don't want to many of those, or else you risk finding yourself unable to cast anything for the greater part of the game while your opponent slaugters you with cheap stuff. Even too many 4 casting-cost spells can prove detrimental in this respect.
This ascension of available mana is also the reason why Solgrails don't speed decks up like Fellwar Stones do in normal 40% mana decks: If you draw the 3 land neccessary and cast Solgrail on turn 3, you have drawn your 4 mana-sources and won't draw another one before turn 6. Thus you have no mana turn 3 (casting the 'Grail) and four on turn 4 and 5. You also would have had 4 mana by turn four just by laying land every turn and you wouldn't have lost your third turn.
Spells with fixed casting-costs greater than 6 are really not worth including in a tournament deck, as long as the deck is not constructed to produce surges of mana (like Dark Ritual or Mana Vault do), and these "surge-decks" often have the problem to fizzle vs. fast decks, if they don't draw one of their surge- cards, and are generally weak vs. control-decks that use a single card (e.g. Counterspell) to make all those cards and work used to create the surge-effect come to naught (like Tinderwall-Lumberjacking out that Scaled Wurm on turn 3).
A higher mana-percentage, coupled with cheap defensive spells for early defense thus is mandatory in decks fielding big guns. With 50% mana one could, if unhindered, reliably cast a Serra Angel by the fith turn, with a Fellwar Stone even by the fourth turn (because with 10 cards drawn in turn 4, 5 will be mana-sources, and you could have cast the 'Stone on turn two or three). This is the principle behind the so called powerdecks, that try to increase the power per card by using fewer (because of the higher mana ratio), albeit more powerful business cards.
Strong decks should have a natural distribution of casting-costs with enough cheap spells to allow fluid play during every phase of the game. [The mana cost of your cards (y-axis) plotted against the number of cards for each cost (x-axis) is also called the "mana curve" of your deck.]
Example White Weeny (WW)All of the following points can help to make a deck successful. It may not be possible to apply all of them in the same deck, but some of them will fit all decks.
This means you should only use cards that produce maximum effect for their cost, usually mana. For Example, Serra Angel is better than Air Elemental, since they both cost 3CC, but the Serra doesn't tap to attack and can't be Red Elemental Blasted. Wether a card is worth its' cost in mana and other ressources like life, cards or built-in disadvantages has to be decided from case to case. Only experience can finally tell you which cards are the most powerful. Also, some cards can be strong in the right deck while weak in another. This effect, created by all the cards in the deck together, is called "Synergy". [If you manage to create a deck where the synergy of combinations defeats the disadvantages of the cards, it can be very strong, because without the drawbacks, suddenly all your spells become under-costed.] But generally it's a good idea to just use the most potent cards to get a strong deck, and think about synergy later.
For starters, here is a selection of the most commonly seen cards in Type II Tourney Decks [when this article was written in 1996]:
Some of the best players in the world belive that card-advantage is the most secure road to victory. Card advantage means that you have more cards you can play than your opponent. Thus you have more choices, more ressources and will finally overwhelm him. There are several ways to achieve card advantage.
Increasing the number or quality of your cards.
To achieve this, one can simply draw extra cards with things like Land Tax, Jayaemdae Tome, Sylvan Library, Elkin Bottle or Necropotence.
Or one can increase the quality of the cards drawn with help from things that cycle cards in your hand, like Jalum Tome, Ashnod's Cylix, Soldevi Excavations, thus drawing something useful nearly every turn. Browse lets you draw an extra card and then the best one from the next 5 cards, too, increasing number as well as quality. [Cheap search spells like Impulse also increase the average quality of the cards that you have available, and they also make your deck more robust.]
Decreasing the number or usefulness of your opponents cards.
This is positive for you, too :). One can utilize cards that force the opponent to directly discard cards from his hand, like Hymn to Tourach, Hypnotic Specter, Disrupting Szepter. This 'hand-destruction' is mainly the province (and strength) of black. If you can make him discard more than one card with one of yours, you are gaining an advantage over him. Black discard can be very strong, as it is difficult to stop, and even then stopping it means you have to use one card for one to stop it (like Counterspell vs. Hymn, 'Bolt vs. Specter) in most cases, so the discard player doesnt really end up with a disadvantage.
Another possibility is the use of multi-targetted or global spells like Primitive Justice, Tranquility and Wrath of God, to destroy several cards with just one card. While it is easy to see that selectively detroying all your opponents artifacts with PJ while keeping yours will net you an advantage, it's not quite as obvious why global effects like WoG will. After all it destroys all your creatures, too! The point is that you can decide when to cast it, i.e. you can hold back some of your creatures, while your opponent casts all of his. Or you can play a deck with few or no creatures, thus avoiding the disadvantages. (More on this in the "Playing" Section - essentially it are those cards, which net a card advantage not automatically but through artful play, or playing mistakes on the opponents behalf, that make decks very strong in the hands of a good player, while bad players still will lose with or against them. In contrast to auto-advantage cards like Hymn to Tourach.) A prime example for such global spells is Jokulhaups - it can utterly destroy an uncareful opponent who didn't hold back anything while you played conservatively and saved lands and other spells in your hand. Of course this kind of stunt is hareder to pull against an experienced player who saw it coming, but that's how it should be. The disadvantage of Jokulhaups, like of nearly all potent global cards is that it costs a lot of mana. But then, the ones that didn't, like Balance, had to be restricted.
Another strategy is to make the opponent's cards useless. To this end, you can play without a certain class of cards, i.e. a creatureless deck or one without artifacts, and all the cards your opponent holds against these types of permanents will be of no use to him, at least as long as he doesn't play with pitch cards (cards that allow to throw away other cards as part of their alternative casting cost) or things like Stormbind or Jalum Tome. You can use cards against which some opponents cannot, or not easily, defend. Like Black Knights or Pumpknights, which make StP useless due to protection from white, or creatures with toughness greater 3 (like Erhnam or Vampire) that make 'Bolts less useful. Spells that the opponent can't cast in the first place are useless to him as well. This is the principle behind land-destruction decks and mana- attrition decks that use cards like Winter Orb and Armageddon and produce their own card advantage by being able to cast all their cheap spells (in this case Howling Mine fits in nicely, too), while the opponent can only cast part of his more expensive spells. Or decks that kill by exploiting the temporal mana- and thus defenslessness of the opponent to do him in.
[No matter how many cards you hold in your hand, you need enough mana to cast them. Even when you have enough mana to cast any single spell in your hand, you may still have not enough mana to cast several in a single turn. Instead, you use time to cast them over the course of several turns, one per turn. Thus, time and mana are related. The more mana you have, the less turns you need to cast your spells.
There is a second fundamental limit in Magic next to the draw-one-card-per-turn limit. This is the play-one-land-per-turn limit. It is limiting your available mana to one, two, three and four in the first turns of a normal game.
Time advantage literally taken is gaining turns over your opponent. Discounting the infamous spell Time Walk and its lesser bethren, you have no way to do this. Instead time advantage usually refers to gaining mana advantage, especially during the early turns of the game, where losing or winning a few mana is equivalent to losing or winning a whole turn.
This makes strategies effective in the early game that are totally useless in the late game when mana is abundand. You might even lose cards to obtain a time advantage, knowing that your opponent will not be able to survive and use the card advantage he got. Decks that employ these strategies try to force a decision before the late game is reached, and are often offensive decks or combodecks. (For decktypes see below). Some examples:
Weenies backed up by bounce cards like Man-o-war or Capsize. Attack for early damage. When the defending player has enough mana to play a large blocker, you make him waste a turn by bouncing the blocker back to his hand, getting in another turn of damage. Note how this would not be possible if the defender had enough mana to re-cast the bounced creature. Note how Man-o-war is a superior card for this purpose, since it stays in play, not losing cards for the time advantage.
A combo deck that will go off next round and stalls the opponents killing move by Memory Lapse. This is an interesting example, since Memory Lapse has been a notoriously difficult card to analyze. You do not lose card advantage. Maybe you lose card quality, as your opponent will always draw a useful card next turn (why else would he have tried to cast it), instead of a card he maybe cannot use right now. He actually couln't re-cast the spell even if he had the mana. Still Memory lapse only costs 1U, and thus is often cheaper then the spell countered, gaining a mana and thus time avantage in that way. Note how Memory Lapse would not be useful if you planned on a long game afterwards.
A deck that uses Dark Rituals or Llanowar elves to speed up the early mana base, so that it needs less turns to bring threats into play.]
If you can force your opponent to use certain cards that are useless against the major part of your deck you are gaining an advantage. He often will hold these cards and not be able to use them, thus giving you card advantage. Now, normally your opponent would sideboard out useless cards against you, but if your deck contains something that will destroy him and can only be addressed by these cards efficiently, he cannot afford to do this. Two prime examples for this are the Pumknight/Hypnotic combination against white decks, where the white deck has to use 4 StP if it doesn't want to risk losing to a first turn Specter. Or the Spider/Deadly Insect/dd deck Olle Rade played at PT3, where any non black deck had to use Pyroclasm to get rid of the Insect, but these were useless vs. the 2/3 spiders.
All decks are subject to the luck of the draw. It always can happen that you have bad luck find yourself in a desperate situation, no matter how refined and powerful your deck is. In such a case, drawing a card that resets the playing field can save the day by giving you another shot at winning. Nevinyrral's Disk, Jokulhaups, Balance and to a lesser extent Wrath of God fall in this category. Decks that include one or two of these cards are usually stonger than decks that don't. If you draw the card while you don't need it, then you are in a good situation anyways, and now you always can come back should lady luck betray you.
Reliability is more important than potential. This means it is no good in a tournament if your deck can totally anihilate any opponent half of the time, as long as it loses the other half. It is better to get a solid performance of your deck, just enough to reliably beat your opponents, even if those victories are close ones.
This means first and foremost: no sequential combos. No card combinations where one card has to be played first before you can play the other one. No card combinations where one card becomes only useful in combination with another one, or even worse, where both cards are useless on their own. You will draw the wrong card too many times, or not draw the second one in time before you die, no matter how deadly the combinations are. For example Stasis, Kismet and Obelisk of Undoing together are (with enough mana) a deadly combination. But each of them on it's own is not maximally useful. Before you get it pulled all together, your weeny-opponent just runs over you while being quite unimpressed by your Kismet and your Obelisk. Also, when relying on such combinations, a single directed destruction, like a disenchant, can break your whole 3-card-combo, netting the opponet three cards for one. [This changed when Wizards started to publish lots of efficient library manipulation, mana acceleration and tutor cards, like Vampiric Tutor, Impulse or Survival of The Fittest and Tolarian Academy, which allowed you to get your combo cards whenever you needed them. Combo decks became very strong, leading to the so-called "Combo Winter".]
A special case of this are creature enchantments: first, they are useless if you don't have a creature in play. Second, even if you manage to enchant a creature and the opponent subsequently kills it with a StP or 'Bolt, you lose two cards for one. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) is aware of these problems and has tried to adress this built-in card disadvantage with cards like Kjeldoran Pride or Casting of Bones. Still you face the problem of the sequential combo.
Something totally different are cards that are strong on their own, that can be played independently, but become devastating when combined. Cards that allow for such non-sequential combinations increase the synergy of the deck without weakening the reliabiliy. Some classical Examples include: Land Tax/IT, Land Tax/Black Vise, Land Tax/Sylvan Library, Land Tax/Zuran Orb, Land Tax/Stormbind, Land Tax/Recall Necro/IT, Necro/Zuran Orb, Balance/Zuran Orb, Armageddon/Zuran Orb, Armageddon/Black Vise, Winter Orb/Icy, Wrath of God/Icy, Armageddon/ Fellwar Stone, Howling Mine(in a deck of cheap spells)/Icy, Howling Mine/Stormbind. Because a lot of these cards is so strong and in concert with some of the others outright abusive, they became restricted. Nota: The advent of Lim-Duls Vault has made it more viable to build combination oriented decks that were not practical before, as it helps to pull the combo together. Still combos can be easily broken by directed destruction, so they better be really deadly to make it worthwile (like Stasis/Kismet/Howling Mine/lots of blue mana).
A situation where the enemy has no chance of winning anymore is called a lock. There are not many true locks in Magic, one example would be Zurs Weirding/Ivory Tower/Island Sanctuary/6 cards in hand and an opponent with empty hand and no dangerous permanents on the table, in other words total control over the opponents cards or Stasis/Kismet/ Time Elemental/enough mana and a tapped out opponent with no deadly permanents in play, i.e. total control over opponents mana (not quite as airtight since FoW anymore). Like one can easily see, these things are horribly hard to pull together and totally combo-oriented.
A different thing is the soft lock. A soft lock is a situation during which the opponent has to draw a special card to get out, often in short order if he wants to live, or a combination of several cards. Since this, while it can happen, is highly improbable, a soft lock will often lead to a win. An example would be Autumn Willow/ Armageddon, where the opponent has to draw or hold in hand a Meekstone, land and Balance or CoP:G, Swamp/DR/Dystopia or something similar. Soft locks are more tourney practicable than total locks, since they usually consist of cards that are strong on their own (like Willow, 'Geddon, Disrupting Szepter, Counterspell, Ivory Gargoyle, 'Haups) and can create the lock by a mere combination of 2 of them.
One should be careful of using lock-cards that cannot be used to get you out of problems or defend you, like Zur's Weirding: they represent sequential combos with 'a favourable situation' that will be all that much harder to reach when drawing the Weirding instead something that gets you closer to winning.
Every spell should be maximally useful. Generally defensive decks are more occupied with fexibility, than offensive decks. Flexibility in most cases means the ability to deal with a host of possible threats. Creatures, artifacts, enchantments, sorceries and instants, even interrupts and lands have to be adressed. Offensive decks tend to treat these all the same: kill the opponent before any of them can become a major annoyance. (See also under deck classes.) Some of the most flexible spells in the game are Disenchant, direct damage spells such as Fireball and Lightning Bolt, Counterspells, Hymn to Tourach, Nevynyrral's Disk and creatures that can attack as well as defend.
A good deck should to use all available ressources, namely the life of the player and all the cards. There are several ways to do this: One can use a slow deck that accepts early damage to buy time and establish control, or a fast deck that doesn't care for defense at all under the presumption that it failed anyways if it didn't kill faster than the opponents deck could.
Or one can use cards taht allow to transform less needed ressources into useful ones, like Sylvan Library or Necropotence (life to cards), Zuran Orb (lands to life), Stormbind (cards to damage) etc.
Sideboarding is one of the most important, yet most overlooked things in tournament play. There are two different kinds of sideboards: transformational and defensive/disruptive ones.
These sideboards are built to change the very character of your deck. For example, your main deck is a creatureless deck with lots of artifacts. So probably for the second game your opponent will take out a lot of his creature defense and take in artifact defense. By swapping 15 artifacts with creatures from your SB, you will make all these cards useless plus he won't have any decent defense against your creature horde left. The problem is that these sideboard can be spotted pretty easily, simply on the fact that someone sideboards all or nearly all his cards.
These sideboards are built to defend your deck against it's weaknesses, and to destroy other decks with cards that are to narrow to go into the main deck but highly efficient against a certain deck-type. Generally sideboards should contain cards to defend/disrupt the most prevalent standard deck-types in your area. Do not use more than maybe five cards against a certain deck. If you swap to many cards you will disturb the character of your main deck, usually weakening it. If your deck has so glaring weaknesses against another, highly popular deck that you'd have to swap ten or more cards, change your main-deck by including the ones that are still most generally useful, or build another deck.
Sideboards often contain color hosers, but additional copies of cards that are also in the main deck, especially dircted destruction, to shift the emphasis in your main deck is just as common. Some often seen Sideboard cards include:
Decks can (artificially) be divided in two broad classes: Speed Decks and Control Decks.
Games that are dominated by a speed deck or games between two speed decks are over fast, hence the name. The idea of a speed deck is to kill the opponent before he can get his defenses up, without trying to control the game environment first. Speed decks often accept card-disadvantage for the advantage of speedier developement [time advantage] (like by using DR). Better offensive decks often use some kind of environmental disruption like Hymn to Tourach, Armageddon or Manabarbs to protect their threats and create a playing field in which they can thrieve, just like controldecks do.[Speed decks tend to work reliably, because they have to use cheap spells and modest mana requirements, and because they can exploit a temporary mana screw the opponent has.]
Control deck try to set up an environment where the opponent is helpless first, and kill him later once they established this "control". To this end, they use environment-changing spells like Winter Orbs and threat destruction like Pillage, Wrath of God or Counterspells. Control doesn't neccesarily refer to spells that give you control over the opponents permanents (like Steal Artifact or CM). Since control decks are so heavy on destruction and on stopping their opponent from playing his game, games in which control decks prevail or games between two control deck take a longer time. This makes the use of Millstones or Jester's Cap/ Feldon's Cane efficient in this type of deck. Although games take longer, control decks are not really slower than speed decks: if they want to survive, their defense has to be as fast as the other decks offense. Control decks usually rely on card-advantage to win the game, because trading defense vs. offense 1:1 won't get you in a superior position and you die should your opponent draw some offense while you don't draw defense, while not much happens the other way round.
These are classic deck types every tourney deck should be prepared for and able to beat. Depending on what is popular in the area it is wise to be prepared for some of them better than for others.
Then here are a couple of unique decks that were so successful and interesting (and had cool names, too) that they were widely copied after their publication on the net and thus have become decktypes in their own right:
A good deck alone does not a winner make. You have to be able to play it right. To become a good player you have to gather experience through practice. There is no way around it. If you don't practice a lot, you will never become good. It is the single most important thing. No amount of net-reading can substitute it. Still, there are some principles which experienced players usually employ:
Of course you should know what is in your deck by heart. Only then is it possible for you to determine what is left in your deck and make good guesses what you're about to draw. You should have play- tested your deck and know what it does, how it wins, what it's weaknesses are, and how they can be adressed by playing or sideboarding.
But it is as important to analyse the opponents deck and understand how it works. The colours and spells used can give you clues and make it possible to figure out what's left in his hand or library. If the opponent plays with 'Bolts, you will not use your DR for a first turn Specter in the second game, but save it for a third turn Vampire or a Drain Life. You can also check his graveyard to see which spells already are used up. For example when playing vs. a monochrome white deck, and there are alredy 3 StP in the graveyard after four turns, you are pretty secure playing your Ivory Gargoyle, as it is not probable that he will draw the fourth StP anytime soon.
Typically global reset spells are the ones you have to be on your guard against the most. Play as if you always could suffer from one of these spells if the opponent's colors and available mana are right to cast them: Jokulhaups, Wrath of God, Armageddon, Hurricane, Earthquake, Pyroclasm, PJ, Nevinyrral's Disk. Balance is deadly as nothing else, and you should pay heed to it, but it quite frankly is hard to play around it. Thank God it's restricted. If playing creatures vs. blue, think about ways to beat CM, like using weeny hordes, non- targetable creatures or disenchant/REB.
Also be aware of lock cards, like Weirding. Infernal Darkness. Ritual of Subdual. Actually you have to hold your Disenchant or Counterspell in hand when they go down, as beyond that point there's not much left to get out of this situation - it's not called a lock for nothing, after all!
Never put into play more than you have to. Every single card is a valuable ressource and may not be squandered. For example, if you have a Dragon Whelp in play, don't put out a second one. The opponent will have to deal with it or die. If you put out a second one, they'll both go down in the opponents Hurricane. Had you held back, he still would have been forced to play the Hurricane, and you could have played the next one afterwards. This strategy of "always put out a single creature" is not optimal vs. an opponent who doesn't use global effects and has to deal with your threats one-by-one anyways. It also is bad for a swarming weeny deck. But then, such opponents or decks are often not the most dangerous to face or play. This is about not losing several cards to one of the opponents'.
You should double-check every move you make, to make sure it really is the best possible move. Never react hastily. Many a new player loves to play fast and emotional, to 'Bolt creatures, or even worse, the opponent, at a whim. Though this may be fun, it is unwise. The opponent can bring out a creature afterwards and beat you up with it, and you wish you hadn't spent that 'Bolt so thoughtlessly. A lot of threats can be endured for much longer than one should believe. For example, Bertrand Lestree chose to ignore Hammers Millstones during PT1, and concentrated on killing him faster than being milled instead. For new players it is very hard to resist the urge to destroy that evil 'Stone that shoves all their good cards into the graveyard (they never notice it shoves the bad cards just as well.) By playing deliberatly and patiently you get maximum effect out of your cards. George Baxter once bet an opponent by telling him he was dead and drain-lifing him down to zero life. Said opponent accepted his fate without doublechecking, thus missing he had the Zuran Orb in play. This is about not wasting cards on something insubstantial.
As the example with Baxter suggests, mind games also play a part in Magic. Given two opponents with equal decks and equal playing skill, the one with more luck or the one being more able to psych his opponent out will win. One can put pressure on a knowing opponent simply by holding cards and not playing them. Even if among these the threatening cards are not included, the opponent doesn't know so and may be scared into playing too cautiously. Two classical examples include leaving UU untapped when playing a counterspell deck at all times, or leaving G untapped when playing green/creatures. It also is amazing how many spells one can get through uncountered vs. a counter/control deck, just by playing with the threat of Armageddon.
Still I believe that this is something that is very hard to learn by practice. The ability to bluff, to make people do or not do things to their own disadvantage by clever masking of the true circumstances, is more of a personal trait than anything else.
The general problem here is the following: "If you have them
by the balls, don't just wriggle, SQUEEZE!"
Mark Justice stated in an interview some time ago,
that he always seemed to lose, if he was impatient and tried to force
a game to his favour. If he instead let the game develop, he'd
win. (Ironically he double-consulted himself to death during the world
championships '96, proving his own point.)
(-"The Reverend" Henry
A. Stern, as cited in the admittedly funny .sig of Preston
Poulter)
Both players are undoubtedly excellent magic players, yet the claims seem to contradict each other. As I have often observed, by waiting to respond to a threat, however huge the urge to do away with it, you often can lure your opponent in revealing an even worse threat and deal with that instead, thereby gaining maximum benefit from your cards.
For example: Your (Necro) Opponent is hitting you with a Mishra's. You hold a bolt in your hand, yet you don't use it. After he hit you for 2 consecutive turns, he thinks you don't have a bolt but something else you just can't cast and so he casts his Hypnotic he was holding, to strip you of your secret treasure before you can put it to use and to also kill you faster. You bolt the Hypno, naturally. The problem is that the other player might be evil enough and also play ultra-conservatively, thus not putting another threat into play before he has to. So he goes on to hit you with his Mishra's turn after turn, until, after 4 turns (suppose you didn't draw anything against the Mishra's) you can't/won't take it any longer and bolt it. Then he plays his Specter, and in the process you took 8 points of damage you could have avoided in the first place.
Another Example from real play: I played my friend Daniel with a 'Geddonform Test Deck vs. a U/W Denial Test Deck. In the first few games, he sworded every Dervish in sight (as long as there wasn't an Arrows in play that is, but then of course you wouldn't see a Dervish in the first place). So he ran out of Swords and would then die to a 'Geddon/Something, which I would pull as soon as the Something survived 1-2 turns, knowing he was out of swords. Then he switched his tactic and didn't sword my dervish in the next game, and the thing got bigger and bigger. He just wanted me to 'Geddon, then swords it in response and I had wasted a 'Geddon (well not really, but that's another thing). He just had bad luck, as I didn't draw a single one, and so he _had_ to swords it in the end, after it had done about 15 points of damage. But I also could have been a really hard-boild player who'd just not 'Geddoned on purpose.
It is clear that you can have these Problems with immediate threats, like the above that just kill you, or like two U/W decks, where one plays a Szepter (well ok, there's not much doubt about wether _that_ has to be done away with ASAP or not).
Another thing is hidden, creeping demise. Things like Winter Orbs, Howling Mines and Sylvan Librarys. Maybe an Icy. These things all won't kill you right away. They even won't kill you in 20 turns from now, not until something else shows up, which threatens you, as a red Goblin horde for the Orb, a Stormbind for the Mine, or some Erhnams you have to plow for the Library or just about anything for the Icy. Like Winter Orbs and Howling Mines. The problem here is: these things weren't put in your opponents deck for no reason. To be exact, they were put in there to set up the environment under which his deck will thrieve, and yours (hopefully) will not. So in the end you die. The question here is: should you kill the environment altering stuff, or should you try to kill the final threats? I'd go for the environmental stuff as far as it disturbs my game significantly more than his, and then for the threats. Choices are tough sometimes when you can have only 4 Disenchants. (Most environment stuff seems to be artifacts and enchantments, except for the little tricks like Protection from x critters and their ilk.)
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