Talking about playing slowly

In my last two PPTQ reports, I've mentioned my struggles to avoid draws. This is something I've come to terms with recently and I thought I would write about it.

Hello, my name is Ty, and I play slowly.

This wasn't always the case. When I first started playing competitively, I was very fast. I also wasn't nearly as good as I am today. I would try to finish my FNM draft round as quickly as possible in order to playtest block or extended or even my draft deck in between rounds. Routinely at PTQs I  would be involved in concurrent money drafts to be completed in between rounds.

I didn't play quickly for any particular strategic reason. I wasn't trying to rush my opponent into making a mistake (though that happened quite frequently). I wasn't trying to "show off" or "intimidate" my opponents either (this also likely happened). Mostly I did it because I would get bored thinking about the game at hand. This was combined with a desire to play as many games of Magic as possible, because I really loved playing Magic. Probably my favorite aspect of Magic is the ability to play many games over and over in a relatively short amount of time, especially when compared to other strategy games.

Playing so many games made me better at Magic. It also made me faster at Magic. A sort of feedback loop existed, like the guy in the old anti-drug commercial talking about why he does cocaine. I wasn't trying to be the fastest player, nor was I trying to be the best player, I just wanted to keep playing. I knew lots of players that were good played much slower than me. Players like Trent Boneau and Kelly Wichert would take minutes on what I thought were simple decisions. In my youth I assumed it was because they were older than I (I don't like thinking about how much younger they were then than I am today). It was meeting two players close to my age that also played slowly, Taylor Williams and Taylor Webb, that I started to see how actually taking time could help.

The biggest game changer was when I joined the U.S. Navy. Before boot camp, I was a player that had good instincts for the game. I would avoid common mistakes by playing so many practice games and making them all before hand. Boot camp taught me to focus. The feeling that I only really experienced before hand while taking exams in school I was able to apply to other endeavors. Right after boot camp, I was in extensive nuclear power training that involved multiple written exams every month. This involved memorization of large lists of related things, explaining complicated processes step by step, and some basic (to me) math. This all helped me rapidly grow as a better Magic player.

One of the first times I distinctly remember taking my time to work something out in a game of Magic was an RRG draft where I needed to draw my one copy of Pyromatics to win the game after getting my opponent to exactly a life total that I could kill him from. This was the first time was thinking about a long term plan in draft. Normally I would just make the "best play" every turn and hope to win, but this involved not making the best play, and instead saving cards for when they were crucial to the plan. When it worked and I won a game I knew I couldn't have won a year earlier, I began to see a change in how I played.

Magic Online also changed the pace I play. It taught me to play constructed Magic more thoughtfully. At the time I mostly played purely aggressive decks. My constructed PTQ top 8s were with Goblins, RDW, and Affinity. The decks do require thought to play, but there are also many games where you just would roll over your opponent. As I began to build more of my own decks and learn some nuances to how cards line up in constructed, I played fewer aggressive decks.

All this is to say, for many of my successful Magic playing years, slowing down meant playing better. This is very much a good thing. There are two other factors to playing slow that are not as good.

This first of these factors is thinking way too much about things that don't matter. I enjoy finding new things to think about, whether its which land to play on turn 1 or which counterspell to lead with in a potential counter war. This things are relevant, but only some of the time. Sometimes your turn 1 land doesn't matter at all. Sometimes the counter war you expected never happens. While its good to be prepared for things, Magic is a complicated game and there are way more things to think about than you need to. This is where playtesting is most helpful for me these days.

The second factor is age. It is sad but true that I can't think as quickly as I used to, for as long as I once could. The fatigue after tournaments is close to the hangovers I feel from a night of drinking. A recent Twitter conversation summed it great:

This is compounded by not playing nearly as much Magic as I used to, especially IRL Magic. For whatever reason, I need to play IRL to keep certain skills sharp, especially avoiding slow play. So many things are done for you online that you forget how important it is to do them quickly IRL. Shuffling, fetching, shortcuts, life total adjustments, adding counters to your creatures, all of it can bog down a game and take you to extra turns despite the fact you never stopped doing things.

When I first moved back to Texas from Hawaii in 2011, I played in a SCG Open in DFW. I was playing a Boros Landfall deck with Squadron Hawk, Stoneforge Mystic, Plated Geopede, and Steppe Lynx (I had yet to figure out that CawBlade was the best thing ever). I had played the deck quite a bit online, and won an untimed GPT in Honolulu. In round 1 of the SCG Open, I drew playing against CawBlade. I realized I wasn't ready for IRL timed Magic when I sacrificed a fetchland, searched, shuffled, marked my life total, presented deck to opponent, then realized I wanted to play a fetchland for the turn and also sacrifice it. This was the correct sequencing to play around something I'm sure, but it's perfectly reasonable to shortcut if they don't have whatever that something was. A few turns later I played a SFM and searched, only to realize after presenting the deck that I also wanted to play a Squadron Hawk. Predictably, we didn't come close to finishing.

So yes, I am a slow player. But unlike the many of other slow players out there, I know that I am slow. I try to play fast, and occasionally I even do! I try to hold my opponents to a reasonable pace, but when I'm my own benchmark, many times that isn't fast enough for us. I think this was an interesting look at the causes of it to hopefully better help me going forward.

Thanks,
Ty