How to Lose at Magic

That infuriating moment when one’s opponent, ignorant to one’s plight, and despite all too often having played a technically inferior game, manages to best you, often the result of a player missing X chances at Y different outs over the course of an often excruciating number of turns and/or draw steps. We have all been there. Despite most veteran players being consciously aware of the fact that these things happen, far too many of these people allow themselves to fall into this devastating tilt-trap.

The problem, as it barrels down, is that perception is quite accurately reality in a game of Magic: the Gathering. The novice magic player is often guilty of the crime of ignorance, the veteran often guilty of arrogance. The Novice saw what he perceived as a ‘good game’. Their deck did what it was supposed to do, maybe his opponent was even able to muster a quality defense, despite a pair of mulligans, or that fact that more than 50% of his draw steps for the game yielded blanks, or lands. The novice is not only less likely to pick up on some of the subtle intricacies of the game, not only the things they themselves did wrong, but also the effort put forth by the opponent to do their best with sometimes very limited means, but is ALSO very likely, unless they’ve been specifically educated on the matter, to consider it a common, polite practice upon the conclusion of the match, to extend their hand, and say ‘good game’.

An aside: It’s rude to offer the handshake to an opponent in a match you’ve won. It doesn’t seem insulting to the unaware, until you get the ‘good game’ handshake from an opponent, and you reaaally didn’t feel like shaking their hand. It’s human error: almost every game of magic around ends with someone being the loser, and people hate to be that person. But it’s a dirty job, and someone’s gotta do it. This is an inescapable truth, and I beg you to keep it in mind. You’re going to lose. Try to be a man about it.

This is, once more, a simple matter of one’s perception of the events telling the story, often the way that makes them feel better. I have won thousands of games of Magic, and this is my testimonial. Very often the same novice player who would be quick to extend the hand, congratulating you on a hard-fought battle, where they emerged the ‘better’ mage, will sit there stunned after a loss, informing you that if they’d just gotten that little bit more advantage, it could have all been theirs. Complete denial, disconnection from reality. Oftentimes they leave the table, defeated, without a handshake in sight, as I, a veteran of my craft, would never show such bad form as to stick my hand in their face.

The explanation for this hypocrisy probably lies somewhere in human nature. But we come full circle, to the more experienced player’s burden of arrogance. Oftentimes, when matched with an opponent with some perceived lower skill level, one can be very unpleasantly surprised with a nice, humbling loss. That’s why I love Magic; it keeps you guessing. It’s not your opponent’s fault that they beat you. It’s not even their fault that they played poorly to do it, or that they don’t know the game as well as you do. Players overrate drastically how often they ‘deserve’ to win a game of Magic, because the bottom line is that you very rarely have a scope of information wide enough to even pretend you could make the call. The better prepared player generally has an advantage. It is your responsibility to make the most you can of said advantage, coupling it with other factors that are going to not only exist, but tip the scales to favor you AND your opponent. These factors, variables if you will, include but are by no means limited to: Mulligans, playtesting (in general and format/deck specific), strength of matchup, overall experience, and that old end all be all, big daddy variance. If you open on 4 spells and draw a land literally every turn of the game, you are probably going to lose, assuming your deck is legal in formats other than Legacy. We build our decks with this in mind, and very rarely draw a land during every draw step, but often have cards in our decks (at least in game 1) that are sub-par anyway. But it’s easy for the human mind to exaggerate, especially when it takes a painful, confrontational thought like, ‘I screwed something up’, and turns it into a nice, soothing, ‘there was nothing I could do’, or, ‘this was your fault’. Such attitude problems will only serve to impede one’s potential. Distract one from more pressing, or at least in the case of the children’s game we all love to play, more enjoyable tasks of being the best you can be.

In much the same way that I strive for optimism and progressive thinking to help with one’s ‘between games’ game, I am not without a solution. Dare I say fool-proof, I have not been the victim of an insulting GG handshake in a good many years. The best advice I could offer is to win all your matches (good luck). This one doesn’t work so well for me, so every time I lose a match, be it to a worse player, mana-screw, triple mulligan, can’t cast my spells, or just plain got outplayed, I exhibit a little bit of class, dare I say more than in anything else I do in life, and I beat them to the handshake. I tell them good games, I wish them luck with the rest of their tournament. This person is now my tiebreaker. I am soulbonded to them for the rest of the tournament, this person controlling a tiny bit of my fate along the way. I don’t want to tilt them, or soften them up for their future opponents, or leave a bad taste in their mouth. Take the high road (pun kind of intended). The truth is, on average you will overrate your own abilities, and underrate those of your opponent. So if you don’t think there’s any way you should have lost to that scrub that just beat you, you were probably wrong, and it will take you further to admit it than deny it.

Sincerely,

JFK