Control: Strategy Gaming Insanity…

Do you know how it feels to lose at something? Of course you do. Everyone loses sometimes. It’s part of being a real live human being. I think that I feel that a lot lately. I’m in my forties. I’m overweight. I’m not a famous writer yet. I’ve been trying — as a hobby — to play strategy games. They seem like a good intellectual challenge. Unfortunately it means that, some of the time, I have to feel that feeling of losing a lot. I feel that feeling a lot when I play strategy games. I lose a lot. I win sometimes but not as often as I would like. We’ve all lost — it just seems like I lose more often than I win.

I, Dalton Lewis, play strategy games like crazy. Recently I’ve started playing Magic: The Gathering: Arena on my computer, and I’ve noticed some things about the game. There’s one thing in common with most strategy games: it’s crushingly difficult because the other players on the ladder are hardworking, smart, devious, and play the game a lot. A couple of seasons ago I barely made platinum, and this morning I’m struggling to get through silver — update, I made it to platinum finally. I’m using cards that I like and think are interesting and useful and it seemed at first to be useless.

First I created a knight deck: that was useless. My knights got trashed by my opponent’s decks. I thought that I would bring out a bunch of knights and that they would win me a lot of games. They didn’t: they lost me a lot of games. I don’t know why. My opponents had mechanics that had cards that built on each other and developed a central theme. I just had some knights and a smattering of cards that I liked. I brought the cards which were effective individually. I brought some cards that did direct damage. I brought some cards which attacked my opponent. I didn’t have a definite theme for my deck and therefore lost. I didn’t anticipate what my opponent would do and how to defeat it. I lost game after game. In one of the main opposing decks — a white life-gaining deck — almost every card helped my opponent’s goal to gain life and build better creatures which help him gain life. Then he had creatures which created brutally powerful angels when he had 27 or more life. The deck had synergy and a goal and balance.

Then I tried some other lists before realizing that I needed one good list and to focus on that list. I decided to use blue and black. I liked blue and black back in the day and like the combination’s card drawing and fast attack mechanics. I lost a lot more games before deciding that black and green might be even more effective. Black had discard and card drawing mechanics, and it had creature-killing mechanics which helped me a lot: I didn’t see a lot of creature-less decks in the current meta. Green, meanwhile, had card drawing mechanics, strangely, while also having the best creatures. I built a deck with eight small creatures with deathtouch to stay alive early on and defeat early opposing threats. I also added half a dozen cards to kill an opponent’s creatures to deal with those huge threats that an opponent often brought out. I then added three or four discard cards because of their obvious card advantage: they were one card that got rid of two of my opponent’s cards. That’s a win. I added four or so card drawing cards to give me more cards than my opponent by a decent number. Then I added big creatures: creatures that cost four to six mana that would pack a big wallop and wreck my opponent’s day. These creatures did really good damage and were very hard for my opponent to deal with. Lastly I stayed with the deck for several days, only switching briefly for a joke to try something else.

I made it from silver to platinum in a couple days of play. I don’t know how long I will stay in platinum, but I’m proud of my accomplishment — making it that far is a win. I sit at my computer, full of food, with a soda or a water on my desk, playing at my computer that I use most of my day and most of my night. I have a decent deck and a pretty good idea of what the opponents will play. There’s a millstone deck that’s very popular that probably wins a lot of tournaments. There’s a blue control deck that has card advantage and big kraken creatures if it survives long enough for its mechanics to kick in. There’s a goblin deck that tries to kill one quickly — it’s dangerous but doesn’t sustain itself very well. If you have a balanced deck with some small creatures you should be able to defeat the goblins. I’m a little disappointed in the small variety of decks that the opponents use — there’s a lot of people that copy the best decks.

There’s also a mutate deck that usually beats me — it creates a super-creature which upgrades itself until it’s unstoppable. I know that the theory of card advantage says that one super-card should lose, but it defeats me more often than I defeat it. I’m not certain why. Also there’s a green-blue deck with huge green creatures that can play really well. It’s smart and uses the best creatures in the game to take a mid-game lead.

All in all Magic: the Gathering is in a good place competitively, but the deckmakers need to craft a greater variety of decks. The best deck right now seems to be a white and black gaining life deck, and I don’t know how to defeat it. I just think that I need to get smarter and better at strategy gaming, and that’s one of my personal goals going forward. We’ll see if it actually happens.

Thanks, and take care, friends.