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Mind's Desire

Well it’s been a little while since my last article, I’ve been pretty busy with school and poke, but I have the pleasure of playing an extended PTQ this weekend, and I get to have the most fun you can have with a deck of Magic cards.

Yes, that’s right.

Cast 6 mana spells that let you cast things for free on turn 3 ;-).

Personally I feel that Desire is THE format defining deck. In my last article, I discussed Affinity and pressure, but really there is no better pressure tool than a combo deck that can all of a sudden go off at the blink of an eye, from out of nowhere, straight from the nether regions of one’s behind to the drop box for your opponent.

This deck is perfectly suited to my style of play. I’ve always talked about making people face decisions they don’t want to make, and the more decisions you can have your opponent make, the more mistakes they can make. It’s that simple, period. Even a player who will only get something wrong 2% of the time will get it wrong twice as often if they have to make twice as many decisions (duh!). This was the beauty of cards like Fact or Fiction, where your own fate rests in the two piles you offer your opponent. Also, whilst trying to gather the raw information merely from the cards in front of you, there was always the sinking feeling in your mind when they took the pile you were sure they weren’t gonna take.

“Uh oh, looks like I just lost the game.”

But Fact or Fiction was more subtle than the Desire deck. So your playing Affinity and you think that you need some more pressure, otherwise the Desire deck will go off in 2 turns and you'll lose. If you don’t apply the pressure, you have more versatility if things start to go badly, maybe you have a Stifle spare or something similar. Taking the first direction you apply the pressure, tap out and they go off. The other direction, you don’t apply the pressure and you give them another turn to get things up and running. This is a horrible place to be, as all it can take is a single piece of misinformation from your opponent and all of a sudden you’ve made the wrong decision and you’re ticking the drop box.

Nothing better. Better than nude jelly wrestling.

Now, how do we apply this misinformation? I think the best one I’ve come across in the playing of the deck is to miss a land drop. WHHAAAATTT!!!? Think about it. It’s very simple.

You want someone to commit all their resources to the board so they tap out on the crucial turn? What better way to do so than to miss your 4th land drop on turn 4. All of a sudden they’re under the impression that you need to topdeck to win and they can force the rest of the pressure onto the board as fast as they can, so there is no tomorrow for the poor Desire deck. They tap out, you draw some cards, untap, land, mox, Fairie, Snap, Faeries, Turnabout, Desire I win (or ULMFSFTDIW for short. Just kidding! But it would be pretty cool to have some anagram for whoops you stuffed it and you lose). Things went from gravy to custard in a matter of seconds for your opponent, and now they sit silently while you go off in your own sweet time.

Of course the flipside to this is to make it appear that you have all the gas, and just want them to tap out, where really what you need is a couple more draw steps. I like asking people how many cards they have in their hands, checking your own life total, and also being active in your own turn. This will often cause an opponent to sit back on their defences while you draw a few more cards. Let’s face it, it doesn’t take an awful lot extra for any Extended deck to go off, if you give any deck in the format 2 or 3 more cards it can usually go off without any problems (going off of course being dealing 20 to the dome, setting a lockdown or comboing out on someone). The key to this style of play is to have your opponent constantly worried about YOUR side of the board, no matter how nonthreatening it appears. This can be difficult, but you can do it by rearranging your permanents to represent different things (lands are good for this of course), and in desires case adding up various tallies “in your head” for all to hear, such as spell counts, mana available, recount the lands if you had a turnabout etc. While it seems like a ploy and can be read into easily, here’s the trick:

SO LONG AS YOU COUNT OUT LOUD AND CLUMP THINGS TOGETHER WHEN YOU’RE ACTUALLY GOING OFF, THERE IS NO WAY FOR THEM TO TELL WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO CONVEY.

It’s very, very important to be erratic if you want to take this approach. You will often have to think aloud, tell them what they are going to do next, EVEN IF IT SEEMS SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT TO THE CONVENTIONAL PLAY THEY COULD ORDINARILY MAKE. Mike Long is a true master of this style of play, and many times he has convinced his opponents to make a play that lands them right where he wants them, simply by telling them what’s going on. It seems moronic, but so many of the plays that you make during a game of magic are mechanical that very rarely will you be telling your opponents what to do, you will just be speeding along their thought process With any luck you will start doing the thinking for them at key times during the game.

There’s a great example that I have come across while playing No Limit Texas Hold'em tournaments. When your playing loose, raising and reraising with a lot of hands, obviously they can’t all be good. You can get your opponents into a mindset that you have nothing, and your raise is merely a mechanical response that you are making, which, for the most part, when you're playing super-aggressive it is.

The real beauty in this situation comes from being able to “sense” when they are getting frustrated, and changing down a gear just before their frustration sets in. This is a real art form, which I am yet to master fully (my timing is a little off at the moment, often a couple hands too early or late), but when done perfectly they end up making a play at you when you hold a monster of a hand, and you win a lot of chips. This happens because everything seemed so mechanical. You were speeding round, they were behaving and eventually they would play back and you would stop speeding around so much. This is a very common occurrence in NL hold'em tournaments, and yes it is quite mechanical. But if you can get just that ONE step in front of the game, that ONE level above where they are thinking, then you’re golden and you're in an excellent position to get a win you otherwise may not have had.

Well, that’s me for now guys, I hope you enjoyed the article, sorry I don’t have a decklist for my Desire deck that I’m playing because it’s on its way down from the other island on Saturday morning, the morning of the tournament of course. But for a reasonable decklist, look at the top 8 of the Extended Pro Tour, there’s one in there (reasonable, all it did was make the top 8 of a PT, psssshhhh!!!).

Keep smiling,

Richard Grace

Gracey