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Editor: Audrey Chin-Quan. Saturday 16th October 2004.
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Take Good Care Of My Baby.
Have you ever played a net deck that made top 8 on the pro-tour and wondered why you can't get it to win? Have you ever built a strong deck with all the pieces but they just don't seem to work?
A better situation is this. You build a deck (net deck or from scratch) and every time you play it you get land screwed, land flooded, don't see the key cards, always draw spells right after you needed them and so on. Someone else picks up the deck and plays it. Right from the start the deck decides to behave itself and it annihilates all who play against it.
The best term I've ever heard for this occurrence is 'Terminal Deck Dysfunction'
What is Terminal Deck Dysfunction?
We all build or copy competitive decks for tournament level play that all have one thing in common. That is they are statistically designed to work. The odds of being screwed by the deck should be lower than the odds of the deck functioning properly.
Originally people used to run 20 lands, 40 spells as a standard in constructed. Over the years this has changed to be 21-24 lands. The extra 1-4 land tip the scales slightly back in favour of not being land screwed, but it makes the odds of being land flooded higher. Most decks can handle being land flooded a lot better than being land screwed so it's the lesser of two statistical evils.
The chances of a well designed deck being land screwed is pretty remote, but its still there.
How can we prevent being land flooded?
One way to prevent being land flooded is to run alternative sources of mana. This can be in the permanent form of creatures, artifacts or enchantments. There are also one-shot instants, sorceries and sacrifice abilities.
Another method is to use cards for extra draw or fetch other cards. Land search not only thins your deck of land, decreasing the odds of being flooded, but may also put extra land into play.
These methods of avoiding land flooding may even speed up your mana production.
A deck can also be screwed by simply not drawing the key cards when you need them (card screw). Again, fetch cards and extra draw can fix this. You can also avoid card screw completely by running a deck that does not require key cards.
Okay, you have your deck now. It has a good balance of lands to avoid land screw, some fetch cards to grab land out of your deck and some card draw. Here's an example of a deck that has all these elements for current Type 2 (Mirrodin Block, 8th Edition, Champions of Kamigawa) -
This deck contains 22 lands, creatures that produce mana and land search (anti-land screw), and some card draw (anti-land flood, anti-card screw).
I built this deck myself and followed all the ideals to prevent land screw, land flood and card screw. I have played this deck a lot. Even with all these elements I can't get it to win.
Whenever someone else plays it the deck dominates the game and wins.
There can only be one answer to explain what's going on...
My Blue/Green Baby does not like me!
I can already hear all the Spikes laughing... 'A deck can't hate you, its a deck! You are just a bad player!'
Think about it. How many decks have you played that just wouldn't work the way they should but everyone else gets it working? Every player has played at least one or two.
It also works the other way. You play a deck and get god draws each game and even wins games it should have lost. In this case the deck loves you!
We could discuss Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect (The shuffling of a deck on the other side of the world causes an effect that clumps all your land at the top, then your opponent randomly cuts it to the bottom) but discussion of these theories won't change a thing. If a deck does not like you it will rarely win for you.
Do you believe in karma? Perhaps its that one card you ripped off a new guy in trading to get that's providing all the bad luck? Maybe the feng shui of the deck is all wrong? Maybe it's the gods of Magic dropping a subtle hint not to net deck or that you really should net deck instead of building? Sometimes changing just one card will help the deck. Suddenly it soars like a golden phoenix instead of crumbling to ashes as it did before.
A big factor can be that you don't like the deck. A deck can't be expected to behave or win for you if you don't like it. Confidence may also be an issue. You don't think the deck can work for whatever reason so it refuses to behave.
Lets face it - Magic is a game of skill but it does rely heavily on luck. If it's not your day, it's not your day. Even the pros have bad days. You could play a tournament and happen to hit every deck that will hose you all day although there are few of those decks in the field.
How can I get My Blue/Green Baby to like me?
I could abandon it and move onto something else. I can keep trying until it wants to win for me by changing the line up. Ultimately I'm not going to know if the deck likes me until I play it a few times.
I'm not sure if this article has proved anything or has any meaningful message. I don't even know if it should. All I know is My Blue/Green Baby does not like me but I'm going to take good care of my baby until it does. That or until I crack from the insanity that must be there for me to think a deck does not like me in the first place.
Take good care of your babies
Joe Tobin (Aytakk2)
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