IX. Teamfighting

Teamfighting

This is another large section, but don't worry, it's also the last. I've broken it into three phases, to provide a more effective play-by-play. There's been an underlying theme running through this whole blog: you are going to instantly start winning more games if you play better as a teammate and as a team. 

Teamfighting is where all the other sections come together. 

Think of your favorite teamfight memories. That chained CC where the enemy backline was on lockdown for six seconds of face-melting burst from your team's midlaner and marksman. Health bars disappearing as you all sliced through the enemy team.  

That happens when a team maximizes its synergy and everyone knows their role. It's a beautiful thing, I'd say if this were a 1950s B&W drama and not a blogspot site. Here's how you can make sure it always happens.

1) The Vision Game

Before any teamfight breaks out, a good team is going to secure vision of wherever the assault is planned. Proactive deep wards enable picks and skirmishes in narrow corridors where the team that seizes initiative can have a powerful advantage. The jungler and support should both have Oracle's by this point, and you 

can set up traps on the enemy side of the river as well as your own.

Moving as a unit is important while you clear wards during the mid and late game. Because of the possibility of a teamfight at any point, you need to be ready to react to a surprise engage. Generally, stacking your team so that the squishiest member is between one frontline tank, the other squishies and the other tank or offtank is preferable when moving through unlit areas. Know which way you want to scatter if you're facing any sort of AoE that could wreck a clumped team.

One last note on warding: don't be afraid to toss out a ward because you think someone else is about to. While it can be a minor waste of resources, there are a few situations in which it's beneficial to have multiple wards in the same location. As Sun Tzu never said, "You can't have too many wards on the battlefield."

2) The Engage

In solo queue, an aggressive, surprise engage can lead to by-the-book teamfight victories. Because of a general lack of cohesive tactics among solo queue players, the team that seizes the initiative can often springboard that into a clean ace with little more than an extra split second of entering "shit-we're-in-teamfight-now" mode. 

Having a tanky initiator who can competently engage a mid or late game throwdown is so beneficial, I'd say that learning how to do it right might have a better effect on your ranked tier than any of the other topics I've covered in what will eventually be this 15,000+ word opus.

As initiator, you're playing the minigame "catch-the-squishy," trying to create positioning mistakes with your aggressive dives and feints towards the backline. Your goal is obviously to isolate or crowd control-lock one of the opposing team's damage threats. 

But, and this part is often forgotten because it's dangerous (or useless) at the highest levels of play, there are situations in which engaging on a tank or off-tank can be the right move. For example, if a damage threat shows in a different lane, or if any champion without a teleport rears his or her head in any lane away from where your team is standing off with the enemy.

In that situation, going in on a tank is still fine, because you're 5v4, and even blowing a few cooldowns is worth making it a 5v3, which is statistically unwinnable for the downsized team (don't tell Uzi, I know).

2b) The Counterengage

As a result of the same issues I raised in the opening of the Engage section, the ability to counterengage competently and effectively is almost as valuable as being able to start a fight. It loses points because counterengaging implies that your team has already taken a substantial amount of damage after the initiation, and so the counterengage is inherently weaker than perfecting your engage. 

Still, doing it well means hitting Mikael's on the caught-out target and speed-boosting him or her to safety. Or it can mean separating the assassins and fighters from the tanks and other squishies, allowing your team to jump on isolated members of the enemy team.

Timing is everything for counterengage, too early and they have follow-up gap-closers. Too late and your carries have already been deleted. Depending on the champion you choose, your counterengage is going to be about either preventing damage (shields or heals) or re-positioning (displacement effects, crowd-control). 

If you plan to re-engage, preventing damage is usually going to be an initial priority to insure you have the health bars to brawl in a prolonged skirmish.

3) Who's the Beatdown?

I'm borrowing a concept from Magic: the Gathering of all places for this third section. This is the part where the frantic button-spamming and mouse-clicking happens, and one of the easiest ways of improving your standing is through knowing how to win once the CC starts chaining and the AoE starts raining. 

I've mentioned it over and over again, but I'll bring it up here, too. Knowing your role wins games.

Assassins and fighters built for damage need to be gapclosing to the backline and blowing up or zoning the ADC, AP or AD caster. The support and tanks need to peel and protect their marksman and other squishies. And the sustained DPS or AoE needs to position immaculately and pump out the damages.

I'll repeat this again here from earlier: if you are the marksman, or you are playing alongside a marksman, please keep in mind that the person they need to be shooting is the highest priority target within safe distance. 

Don't like that your ADC never seems to attack the enemy carries? Practice creating firing lanes or safe zones for them to position into in order to isolate those less-resilient champions. Practice peeling and bodyblocking. If they can't position correctly, the team can reposition around them, as well.

That leads into the last point. It's no one individual's fault if the teamfight goes south. That's why it's called a teamfight and not a ZionSpartan. The concept of who's the beatdown applied to teamfighting is understanding tempo and aggression. 

Does your team have an item or experience advantage? You need to be aggressive and dive harder than they are expecting. Keep in mind that a raw gold advantage that hasn't been translated into items does not signal that your team is the beatdown--you have to consider base stats and relative skill.

If you aren't the beatdown, then you need to identify defensive schemes that will minimize the opposing team's current strengths. Baiting a turret dive with a mobile damage dealer might be worth pulling the tankline back a little. 

Or maybe it means investing more in wards to make picks and avoid roaming death squads.

In any case, teamfighting in solo queue is often wild and chaotic and decided as much by misplays as great maneuvers. That only increases the value of practicing and mastering the art of synergy, as you'll see results immediately, reinforcing the benefit of the work you put in. 

VIII. Baron Nashor

Baron Nashor

This section is real simple: Baron Nashor doesn't exist in solo queue. Baron, and the Exalted with Baron Nashor buff granted by defeating him, is designed to provide a strategic incentive to skirmish in the mid-late game. Specifically, having the buff allows you to push objectives and dive turrets effectively when coordinated well. That last part is important. 

When used by a team that can coordinate turret aggro, maintain their formation, and focus down squishy backline targets while allowing the marksman to whittle down the tanks and utility roles, the purple buff is really strong. Realistically, the solo queue team you're on does not have that level of sophistication. At Diamond or Challenger levels, you may have the game sense to organically orchestrate that kind of play, provided everyone has bought into their role and is equally adept at performing it.

With that in mind, contesting the Baron buff in solo queue is almost never worth it. If you've built any sort of item or experience advantage, it is definitely not worth, as a semi-coordinated five-man push is going to secure at least two turrets if not an inhibitor past the 25 minute mark. You will also normally have the opportunity to grab dragon and purloin buffs from the enemy jungle.

The exception to the rule: There are actually two. You should always encourage your team to grab every free Baron you have served up to you. That's a no-brainer enough I almost didn't include it. But I'm specifically referring to clean aces, or four-for-ones or other incredibly favorable trades that result in you having smite and the carries needed to burst down His Majesty Highness, the Baron of the Rift. A two-for-two where you "know they went b" is not the situation I'm referring to.

The other is when, serendipitously, your whole team happens to be around Baron, at full health, when you catch them with their Armor/MR shredded and health bars half-missing, still attempting to slay the royal wurm. If you can't push towers and secure inhibs, because you all happen to be on top of the enemy WHEN THEY START BARON, then you're good to go in with that Crowstorm, that Unstoppable Force, that Assault and Battery. 

But read that last part again. If, WHEN THEY START BARON, one of you is botlane or getting blue buff, or farming away at those Mini Golems, then you all converge wherever they are and grab as many turrets as you can. Period. Especially if you have an item or experience lead.

Baron TL;DR: Don't bother with the beast in his pit. Take turrets and inhibitors instead. Most solo queue teams can't coordinate effectively enough with the Baron buff, and it's more likely that they'll throw than succeed with it so long as your team is prepared for the siege.

IV. Laning

Yes. I'm aware I skipped ahead two chapters. Those are coming soon. 

Laning

Big bold letters inscribed on the sky in flaming font a mile high: NO ONE ON YOUR TEAM IS FEEDING. 

If you take nothing away from today's blog, remember those big bold letters whenever the urge to bemoan a teammate's peculiar affinity for dying on the enemy side of the river rises. Dude isn't feeding. You don't have a counterargument. He's not. He got beat. Maybe it was a lucky crit like he said, maybe he just doesn't know the matchup as well as he thinks. It doesn't matter. Maybe the jungler showed up. IDGAF. Still isn't feeding.

I'll say it again: dying three times in lane isn't feeding. You know that, I know that. It's annoying, and that guy probably feels horrible, but he's not feeding. Five kills? Approaching it, especially if he didn't secure shutdown gold in exchange for the fifth death. But probably still not feeding.

Intentional feeding is beyond incredibly rare. Thanks to Lyte's umpteen posts on the subject we all know the actual rarity, but even anecdotally, it happens less often than finding an extra McNugget in your six-piece. I've played close to 4000 games of League, and I can distinctly remember an intentional feeder popping up a total of 3 times. I've probably blocked out truly awful games, and let's say my memory is worse than Guy Pierce's at the beginning of Memento and say it's 10 times as common. That's still not even 1%.

Unfortunately, thanks to the sheer volume of games played each day, I know there are some players who see intentional feeders a lot more often than I do--and I could see it a bunch of times in a row at some point--but as a general rule, it's fair to say you should probably go back to that whole defaulting to trust thing and give them the benefit of the Yeah-I've-Gotten-My-Ass-Kicked-By-A-Fucking-Teemo-Before-Too.

Rant over.

Once you've gotten over the feeding fallacy, you can focus on the most salient part of laning. Beating your opponent in gold. That's it. Reduced to its skeleton, that's what you've got to do in lane to contribute to a win. Make more money. Warren Buffett up here in the Rift. If that means outfarming them through careful zoning and harass or just better last-hitting, great. Do that. If you can pick up more gold by counterjungling and dueling the enemy jungler 'til he's scared to set foot in his own forest, awesome. Do that. If roaming or aggressively teleporting for objectives or 3v2s means that you'll end up with a fatter stack than the guy on the other side of the river, fantastic. Do that.

We could debate how to define a winning lane along a number of different axes. But whether you think killing the enemy champion, taking the outer turret first, or having a fifty CS lead qualifies, you should know that come teamfight time, the best way for you to contribute to the victory screen is with an item and experience lead. However you come across that.

I'm not going too in-depth with each lane. Contrary to popular belief, there's a lot you need to learn organically as you play. But I have collected three tips for each lane, culled from the vastness of the interwebs in the form of pro player streams, analyst guides, and tournament reviews.

Top Lane

1) Know if you are building for diving the backline or tanking on the front, and know before the game even begins. Don't just assume the jungler or support is going to be able to peel and soak damage. And if you do plan to build for dueling and split-pushing, make sure the team is onboard. If they aren't, none of you are going to have a good time.

2) Focus on farming and winning skirmish trades, but if you have to prioritize one, concentrate on the CS. With the buffs to Teleport and the general level of sustain among viable toplaners, you can afford to come out on the losing end of trades--especially if they are missing minions to hit you. Whether you're going damage or defense, your build is expensive. Farm up.

3) Pay attention to the rest of your lanes. If dragon is a possibility, you'll separate yourself from other toplaners by knowing when to be around the pit and managing your lane minions to avoid missing crucial gold.  The same goes for countering 2v3s in bot with Teleport, or roaming mid after shoving for a surprise gank. Your team's top lane champion is often thought of as an island, and that's true to some extent, but it's actually more like a lumbering, floating warship that can make its presence felt well inland from the coast.

Bot Lane Support

1) Zoning. The act of positioning your champion in such a way that approaching the minion line to farm results in your opponent getting zapped with a fusillade of damage. Proper zone control can make a lane considerably easier (or considerably more difficult, if the enemy support is winning the zone war).

2) Vision control. Fortunately, the actual warding part of the vision game is usually helped out by the rest of the team in the 2014 season. But you can get a leg up on other supports by practicing de-warding, and using dangerous deep wards to carve out small advantages for your team

3) Building for utility can make a huge difference in solo queue. Some supports still try to build like an off-lane AP carry. Zyra, Morgana and Vel'koz can pull it off, but it still means sacrificing the ability to turn a teamfight with a well-timed Mikael's, or chase down fleeing foes with a speed bump from the Talisman of Ascension.

Bot Lane Marksman

1) Positioning is a real thing, but it's widely misunderstood. For one thing that hardly ever gets pointed out, positioning is highly relative. As you climb while playing marksmen, you'll hear about "bad positioning" and "great positioning" in somewhat disproportionate numbers. The TL;DR of positioning as a marksman is that you need to stay out of range of assassins/dives/burst while still DPSing as much as possible. Finding the right angles and maneuvering with your team instead of trying to force them to work around you will lead to more victories.

2) When your team is shouting about focusing the right target, they are not talking to you. This is an important lesson to learn as a marksman but it's equally important to understand no matter what role you play. 

Remember the first tip? You can scroll up about a millimeter on your mousewheel if you've forgotten already. Because positioning is paramount, you need to shoot the things that are safest for you to shoot. Is that backline Tristana shredding your tanks? Well, the team can try and rotate around to get you an angle on her, but it's still the responsibility of the assassin/AoE/fighter to take her down. If you try and dive in because everyone is screaming to "focus the ADC," you're going to die, and then Tristana is going to finish what she was doing.

3) It's damage per second, not damage upfront. If you're playing marksman as if you were an assassin or mage, you're not right-clicking enough. Learn your animation timing, practice kiting as often as you can, and don't ever forget to right-click on bad guys.

Mid Lane

1) There are a lot of mid champions, and even more midlane strategies. Understanding your goals entering into the laning phase, however, is a universal boon. Always have one. It can be to keep your opponent heading back to base every three minutes. Build a fifty-CS lead by twelve minutes. Whatever your goal is, modify it for the matchup and adjust your tactics accordingly.

2) Take Wraiths. If it's the enemy Wraiths, that's even better. Investing in a ward for the Wraith camp bush on the enemy side is always worth it, even if you never steal the gold. If you have to, take your own Wraiths. Most junglers have very fast clear times now, and with an additional camp on the far side of the map from the Wraiths, with careful timing, you can make sure you get a Wraith camp for every Wraith camp your allied jungler smites down. The extra gold is relevant, but even more relevant in mid-tiers is the extra ticks on your CS count. Building up 4 bonus minion kills on your score every 55 seconds can make it look to your opponent as though they are falling even further behind than they actually are.

3) Make the effort to understand how much damage your abilities do, especially in terms of a full rotation of skills. You don't have to get to Faker's Zed level, but basic calculation of approximately whether or not you'll kill your target in a teamfight or duel can boost your mana efficiency and cooldown management. The good news is that you probably already have an instinctual understanding of the damage you do, so it's just a matter of converting that to real numbers you can subtract from your enemy's health total until you've got enough damage to reduce it to zero.

Jungle Tank

1) The two main styles of jungler are different enough to warrant two sections here. As a Tank, the jungler is still responsible for objectives and crowd control. Because you will most likely have less damage than a carry-style jungler, knowing your opponent's "Smite+X" combo is even more important than it is for Jungle Fighter champs. You or someone on your team needs to hit the bad smite-wielder with CC the instant the objective hits that number, so you can pile on a bit of extra damage and use your weaker combo to finish it off.

2) Mobility boots are your best friend. Tanks who play in the jungle are much slower than their Fighter counterparts. That goes for movement speed and the time it takes them to kill off monsters. For that reason, ganks and the resulting gold are crucial for Tanks. Investing in mobi boots means getting around the Rift faster and creating more opportunities to killsteal your carries.*

3) Bringing that chainable CC hugely benefits your team if you can do it. If you're more of the meatshield-type, don't neglect picking up extra health. Ruby Sightstone's stats are a lot more attractive when you've got the Spirit of the Ancient Golem.

Jungle Fighter

1) So, when the Live Design team stated their intention to bring back carry-style junglers in the preseason, I'm not sure they envisioned Feral Flare's broken release state. But the item has stabilized now, and junglers who want to be clawing and stabbing their way in to the back lines have some solid build paths and strong options that include or ignore FF as needed. That's not much of a tip though, so here's one: many of the strongest duelists and damage-based junglers don't even use FF. But if you are going to, make sure the team is onboard with the plan in champ select. At the very least, explain how you'll use the Feral Flare to secure objectives and map control, along with swifty or mobi boots to wreak some turret-pushing havoc in the mid and late game.

2) That was a little long. When building damage, know your role in teamfights. You'll likely pick up some tank stats along the way, and you need to use those to initiate and burst the opposing carries with your AD as fast as you can. You need to count on your team to follow up. As a reminder, when it comes to your team, default to trust.

3) You are building for counterjungling, so make sure you do it. Opposing jungler shows bot and you're near upper red? Snag his wraiths or wolves, because you're not making it down there in time to contribute. Always leave a ward. When counterjungling, if you can, it is usually better to clear the camp entirely so that you have the timer and your counterpart doesn't. If you remembered to leave the ward, you can time the camps respawns to initiate a duel, or just take advantage of his poor positioning.

*KSing

Worthy of its own section. The infamous killsteal. Whereby a champion blows all of their abilities to secure a +1 to the K part of their KDA. Oh, you thought I meant whenever a champion that isn't thought of as a primary carry kills an enemy that other allies were attacking?

Yeah. Hate to break it to you, that's not KSing. It's probably not the best strategy, either, but the vitriol spewed in solo queue should the support dare to press Q one more time while the opponent running away is at low health is astonishing.

In general, it's better to get extra gold on to champions who are going to be dealing damage in mid and late game. The addition of assist streaks only magnifies the effectiveness of this. But, damn. Gold in lane is gold in lane. Remember what I said way back at the beginning of this section?  Each lanes' goal in the early game is to generate more gold and experience than the opponents in that lane. Gold on the support still counts for bot lane, and gold in the jungler's purse still counts towards gold from the jungle.

If you're playing one of the non-damage roles, then by all means try to avoid getting kills that could be taken down by damage-dealers. But don't make it a bigger deal than it is. We've got more important things to do, like win the fucking game.

A Different Take on 'The Thesis That Launched a Thousand Sitcoms'

The quarter-century that has passed since Nora Ephron's classic means that any number of When Harry Met Sally... thinkpieces now litter your interwebs like husks of failed rom-com writers. Of course, I also have a take, but I wanted to try something a little, different.

EDIT NOTE: So, I actually published this under a different title first, so if you saw that version, I'm sorry. After hitting the go button, I stumbled across a tab I'd opened while researching and never actually checked. Mark Harris, over at Grantland, wrote a mind-numbingly brilliant thinkpiece on the film here: "When Harry Met Annie". Not only is that article neuron-melting, it also included the gem of a phrase I'm quoting in my new one.

You Know That Scene in the Game of Thrones Season Finale You Really Hate? It's actually awesome. Here's why.

The Bear and the Maiden Fair

We're in that fallow period between seasons now, when winter looms but we've left Westeros behind until the snow melts in the spring. And with the threat of a hiatus on the back of everyone's mind, it makes even more sense to savor what we've seen thus far.

Sometimes, with Game of Thrones, it's the sweeping spectacle that sets your imagination soaring. Other times, you crash harder than a Stark kid thrown from a window, your spirit pulped like so many swollen heads in King's Landing. There are a few scenes, though, that raise the hackles of casual fan and Martin connoisseur alike. In the season 4 finale, "The Children," amidst daring escapes and far-less-cliché privy piercings, an enormous, hulking knight faced off against a hideous, loyal guardian in an impromptu dance-off to the death that felt as visceral as watching one of those "how McDonald's makes their beef" shock vids.

Widely derided, the scene sparked a brief tweetplosion that was quickly forgotten once Tyrion tracked Tywin to the toilet. Still, ask just about anyone their impression of the scene and as soon as they picture it, they'll make a face like someone just offered them raw seaweed from the Hudson, and grumble some monosyllables.

But those people are idiots. Here are five reasons why.

5) The scene is the culmination of a dozen allusions and symbolic foreshadowings.

Because the scene departs dramatically from the books, it actually came as a bit of a surprise to some tome-knowledgeable viewers. But within the show itself, there were several references to what was going to happen.

You can guess from the title that the repetition of the ballad "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" throughout the credits and closings, and as one of apparently the only two songs any bard in Westeros knows, are all interpreted as hinting towards the showdown of scary swordmasters.

But there's more, circumstantial, allusions as well. The long Samuel Beckett homage where the Hound and Arya met a dead man in the road directly mirrors the way Sandor meets his own unlikely end (and yes, I'm aware "we didn't see him die" and things-and-stuff-books-but-and). Waiting for Godot is many things, but a typical aside in a high fantasy murderfest it is not. All the more reason for us to have paid better attention to it.

4) Benioff and Weiss take great pains to show off scenes of Westerosi brutality, this short encounter does it better than any of them.

From the pilot to the season four finale, the showrunners behind our annual excursions in the wilds of George RR Martin's imagination avail themselves of nearly every opportunity to remind us that in this world, life is not only brutish and short, but as much of both of those things as possible. Regicide, fratricide, patricide, good old fashioned homicide, a hint of suicide, and tales of infanticide cover just about every Latin-inflected word we have for killing people.

But so many of those scenes hinge on a kind of violent voyeurism. Shock porn for the sake of social media impressions. From the first surprise beheading to the last bolt-interrupted bowel movement, the torturous eviscerations and bloody conflicts and headzit-poppings all elicit gasps and groans but go too far to linger beyond a graphic, crimson-smeared image.

When Brienne of Tarth and Sandor Clegane, the Hound of House Lannister face off in the rocky outerlands of the Lords of the Eyrie, over a not-nearly-helpless Arya Stark, they do so with the words of heroism and glittering knights, but wearing the ill-fitting armor of soldiers aching their way through the last years of a war. The lack of music, the heavy clangs and thuds as the titans clash, the scene finds its song in the roughness of its intercourse. There is no great triumph to be found here. No medals or gold for the victor. Just two tortured souls battling each other and themselves while clambering over the boulder-strewn heather.

3) It freed Arya to become herself

The Arya Stark who turned over her coin with a quip and a wink and found herself sailing across the Narrow Sea is not the Arya who served Lord Tywin at Harrenhal. Nor the Arya who watched her direwolf die at the hands of a cruel butcher. Nor the Arya who looked on in horror from the crowd when her father was slain by an even crueler mockery of a king. In all of those situations, she was under the "protection" of someone. 

Only through Brienne's errant gallantry was Arya freed of her final captor.

Inversely, by failing Arya in her duel with Sandor, Brienne was chained by the oath she'd given Catelyn Stark. Yes, the scene labored on long enough to be uncomfortable, and it's true that dying atop a jagged piece of granite was a death unworthy of the Hound. But it happened in a way that allowed Arya to recover from the untimely passing of her aunt and the morbid catharsis she'd giggled away in the canyon during episode eight. It happened in a way that severed the shackles around Arya's wrists. She has no more ties to the Seven Kingdoms, only a life she has to figure out how to live.

2) It's aesthetically beautiful, the perfect microcosmic summary of the entire western storyline.

Yeah, this is the art-house, slightly pretentious entry. But, you can't ignore the symmetry in the scene. Or you could, but that'd make it infinitely harder to prove this point. Podrick and Brienne; Sandor and Arya. A Lannister and a Stark-by-oath, a Lannister and a Stark-by-blood. An ugly lady knight against an ugly male ex-knight. A young boy who thanks to Tyrion's pampered-at-least-before-prison lifestyle acts more like a lady-in-waiting. A young girl whose unfortunate circumstances and karma-stockpiling left her pretending to be a squire. There's also the parallel, probably inappropriate anywhere-but-Westeros tension in each pair.

The mortal combat adds another dimension by symbolically reflecting the plot of the show thus far. The older Stark narrowly defeats the Lannister only to lose what she was fighting for. Like every victory we've seen up to this point, this one rings hollow in the end. The giant was defeated, the Mountain toppled, the Lion put down on his throne. As Daenerys freed Slaver's Bay,  Arya was freed. She'll sail upon the waves, albeit headed in the opposite direction.

The cinematography frames the fight perfectly. Eschewing the hectic jump cuts from Mance's assault on the Wall, the ponderous, lumbering camera clunks along with each crushing blow. There's no commentary, just a glum, almost voyeuristic look at the kind of ordinary violence that happens every day in the world of ice and fire. It's pretty much the best "Previously on" ever.

1) It was two monstrously strong fighters beating on each other like a platemail-clad heavyweight main event at Wrestlemania

So what if it was more late-career, less-agile Undertaker versus never-agile, somehow-late-career-only-like-two-years-in Brock Lesnar, and not an epic Warrior vs Hogan clash. The fight, for all its tracking, silent cinematography, bears rewatching for how intricate the choreography is.

If you've never tried to duel with broadswords before, you probably don't appreciate how much harder it is to fake a realistic showdown than to perform a swooping, leaping blade-ballet. Dirty, rough; lit with the grime and grit of the barren Eyrie-environs, the plodding pace of the confrontation underscores how banal one on one combat can be. There's no weeping orchestral score or blazing-white Gandalf charging down a hill. Just two herculean soldiers, smacking each other with swords and spilling black blood on blacker soil.

Ben Snyder is a writer at Riot Games who spends most of his time trying to master the dying art of calligraphic Sanskrit. That's not true at all, and he's even pretty sure that's not even a thing. Follow him on twitter, @RiotExLibris, or find him on the Riot community sites with the same tag.

Clone Wars: A Standard Magic the Gathering Decklist

Who doesn't love playing with Relentless Rats?  Only the Spikiest of Spikes can deny the allure of enormous sized Grizzly Bears, made better with merely the presence of a critical mass of their similarly named friends.


In a tragic oversight, Wizards declined to add the "A deck may contain any number of ~these~" text to my new favorite two-drop, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun with what we do have.  Namely, lots and lots of clones.  


What are we cloning?  Wolves.  Of course.  Tony Stark would be proud.

There must always be a Stark...ah, this joke is getting old, eh?

Clone Wars:

4 Timberpack Wolf
4 Phantasmal Image
4 Phyrexian Metamorph
3 Cryptoplasm
2 Clone

17 Creatures

3 Cackling Counterpart
4 Mental Misstep
4 Mana Leak
4 Ponder
3 Revenge of the Hunted
1 Gut Shot

19 Spells

4 Hinterland Harbor
3 Evolving Wilds
2 Alchemist's Refuge
10 Island
5 Forest

Decklists, Decklists Everywhere

Potting Soil:

4 Delver of Secrets
4 Quirion Dryad
4 Snapcaster Mage

12 Creatures

4 Gut Shot
4 Mutagenic Growth
4 Ponder
4 Mental Misstep
4 Vapor Snag
4 Mana Leak
4 Gitaxian Probe
2 Apostle's Blessing

26 Spells

4 Hinterland Harbor
3 Evolving Wilds
6 Island
3 Forest
2 Cavern of Souls

18 Lands

Sideboard:

3 Beast Within
1 Cavern of Souls
2 Talrand, Sky Summoner
1 Island
1 Forest
4 Devastation Tide
3 Temporal Mastery


Casablanca:

4 Restoration Angel
4 Snapcaster Mage
3 Thragtusk
4 Avacyn's Pilgrim
1 Phantasmal Image
2 Fiend Hunter
3 Cathedral Sanctifier

21 Creatures

4 Cloudshift
1 Ghostly Whispers
4 Ponder
2 Vapor Snag
3 Gut Shot
1 Beast Within

16 Spells

4 Cavern of Souls
3 Hinterland Harbor
1 Shimmering Grotto
1 Razorverge Thicket
3 Seachrome Coast
2 Sunpetal Grove
4 Forest
3 Island
2 Plains

23 Lands

Poem of the Day #4: Also, #5 and #6

A trip away from the pleasant glow of computer screens, accompanied only by an sadly wireless-less iPad and a growing sense of ennui left me unable to update for entirely too many hours.  Fortunately, no one seems to read these poems.  Still, 30 poems were promised, and 30 poems will be delivered.


#4

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies

Exists as a pleasant yet spiteful lie—

A smear on a window—

Fog on the sea—

Unchanged but always changing

Like a lie

Evolves in telling—

Always rearranging—

Until the truth at last resides—

Only in the

Honesty

Of fading, at last, to die.

#5

I take no sordid story with—

No tales of woe shall pass these lips—

When any ask who did I kiss

I shall speak only of fleeting bliss—

And tell them that I did love thee true

For that is all that I could do—

Though thou didst injure me

I would cause thee no injury.

Nor would I slander thy lovely name

Or spill ash over thy lonely grave—

When they ask who, I shall say 

That she is the beautiful Annabel Lee—

So, from now till the last break of day

Men and women whose hearts will fall

Can know the truth: love conquers all.

#6

Into the night we fly

On strong whispering wing

My memory touching yours

But never here—

We are always some other where—

Where they cannot come

We are together, you and I,

In the russet-clad evening sky,

The morning coming but the night young,

Making music with the moment

You grab and hold it

I struggle not to let go

But I cannot hold because though 

We fly so high above everything

We fly with thick, heavy, lead-filled wings

Burdened by the brevity of the past and the longevity of the future—

We cannot be together while we are held apart

By the force of ten thousand parting words

So we fall back down to Earth—

Two soaring, yet Icarian birds.

Poem of the Day #3: "Butterflies"

The heart of poetry is in the universality of its imagery.  We understand, now, that a globalized world means that culture will eventually become homogenized.  (If you don't believe this, get lost in 9GAG or reddit for a few hours)  Because of this, the only truly successful poetry will be written by those who are willing to dig deeper into the core of their conceits.  

A fox ran through a

Meadow—his coat

And face aglow—

Chasing riches I could not see—

Perhaps could never know—

Yet well do I recognize

The joy in his toothy smile—

A feeling like seeing you again

When it has been awhile—

Poem of the Day #2: "Endlessly Rocking"

Poetry is powerful emotion recollected in tranquility, certainly.  As the world continues its inexorable evolution, and poetry dies for the millionth time since humanity first scribbled words on clay, the shifting definitions must allow that Wordsworth's is entirely true.  The all-inclusive descriptions of "what makes a poem" are fantastic for their democratic nature, but useless in defining an art form.  I recognize the authenticity of the attempt, but I reject the utility of it.  For me, poetry is like pornography, you know it when you see it, and the vast majority of what we now see would have been better left rotting in the corner of its author's mind.

I saw a face deep in the crowd—

A face without a name

A face that—time ignoring—

Might—in my mind—not change—

And though oft I swear I can forget

It is true I never do—

Though that moment has long since passed—

I swear that face was you.

Poem of the Day #1: "Cold Eyes"

The "Poem of the Day" is a new feature that will appear, you guessed it, daily.  All are original works and may be accompanied by short essays or random thoughts about either the poem itself or the nature of poetry.  This one isn't, because you get this instead.  Whoohoo.  Aren't you excited?  I know I am.

And the men--

All shrouded grey--

Did through the mist appear.

And though the fog hangs heavy there

Their forms seemed all too clear—

The memory of faces

Shrouded cold

And those grim visaged eyes

Strike terror

In my bones

Their frozen laugh still makes me cry.

Though many years have passed since

Last I saw that host

I shall, I fear, never forget

The time I saw those

Wicked ghosts.

©2003 by Benjamin Snyder

Tip of the Day #5: "Why Delver is a Banana Deck"

For those of you living under a muggle rock these days, there is a bit of a debate growing about deck classification.  If you are trying to improve your game, knowing your plan is ridiculously important, for those of you who question why deck classification even matters.

Over the whole argument, one thing that stands out to me is that everyone seems to be ignoring one of Adrian Sullivan's most important points.  In their haste to mark their own stamp on Magic theory, several writers are forgetting the point of theory in the first place.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find Adrian's tweet to quote directly, but he said, approximately, "What you are doing when you choose to classify Delver as Aggro is not theory, it's empiricism."  In the writer's mind, Delver is Aggro, because what he calls Aggro, is actually something else entirely.  That's empirical thought, and the danger is that empiricism cannot be taught.  Theory succeeds only because it is codified terms with defined parameters that can be passed on.

When you have a public platform such as a webpage or article series, it is crucial that you do not fall into the trap of attempting to communicate your empirical thoughts.  While your strategy may be sound, it will fail for someone who does not properly integrate your "theory" with existing theory.  And they have practically no way of knowing whether or not they need to do so.

Magic continues to evolve, and there is a need to update the fundamental theories we use to operate our strategies.  But that update needs to come in terms of logical interpretations that expand or extend the current model, not reconfigure it completely.  

That is the tip of the day.

Lady in the Street: The "Chasing Amy" Problem and Modern Relationships

The blood-spattered camp satire Red State is a gore-stained polemic that takes aim at just about everyone, but Kevin Smith's most enduring commentary is actually found a good fifteen years earlier, in his oddly poignant paean to geek love everywhere, Chasing Amy.

Tip of the Day #4: "Playing Around 'It'"

Players serious about developing their game eventually become obsessed with "Jedi mind tricks", bluffs, and representation on both their side of the table and their opponent's.  What I want to address is the minor fact that for every Mike Long combo-ing off without a win condition, or Zach Hall foiling Mike Flores' dastardly plans with a well-timed "#showme", there are hundreds of thousands of examples of completely ineffective angle shots.

Being able to rationally determine the likelihood of a specific card in your opponent's hand is a valuable tool.  But I prefer the golf bag analogy.  When it comes to our game, you have many different skills and abilities that you need to develop.  Understanding card advantage, proper role identification, card evaluation, and careful attention are all clubs in your golf bag.  The point of the game of golf, though, is not to use every club on every hole.  You want to get there in as few strokes as possible, which isn't going to happen if you spend time trying to convince yourself a flop shot over a towering pine tree with your new lob wedge is the right play.

In Magic, you will encounter many situations where your opponent could ostensibly have something in their hand which will affect your board position or plays.  In fact, those situations come about literally every turn.  


I used to enormously enjoy the old Magic Academy and The Play's the Thing series and other articles that focused on the same sorts of things.  When someone whose opinion I respect very highly is explaining that playing a Razorverge Thicket instead of a Forest before casting Llanowar Elves is just like taking a baby cat outside and kicking it against an electric fence because you want them to believe you do not have access to white, I try very hard to pay attention, but, ultimately, not every play on every turn is as crucial as you want to believe it is.

To summarize my occasionally incoherent thoughts on this subject, I'll say that I very rarely play around Rebuke in DII drafts.  If my opponent has it, it isn't going any where.  Whether I attack this turn or six turns from now, I'm going to lose a guy to it.  If it's early in the game, I can be fairly certain that whatever I'm attacking with is going to be worth less than the better cards I'll have access to later.

In conclusion, the pro tip of the day that I'm referring to is "In the early game, play as though they don't have it, and in the late game, play as though they do."  I'm merely adding that in most actual situations, it doesn't matter either way.

Magic and Immersion

Depending on what numbers you use, the average Magic player is between 16-24 years old.  I will have given 19 years of my life to this game in one way or another in August of this year.  That means that I've been playing the game longer than a huge portion of its audience has even been alive.  When I look back, there is nothing I would change about the role the game has played in my life.

Darwin Kastle recently shared his own Magic story and I want to continue to explore mine.  But my story doesn't involve any Pro Tour Top 8s or GP near misses, and there are barely any adventures involving beautiful women throwing themselves at me.  So instead of boring you by using an Amis-style objective correlative to build a narrative, I thought it better to tackle the subject more seriously.

Why in the name of all that is good and decent in the world have I spent so much time on a hobby that in case of a zombie apocalypse will only leave me with a rather large pile of kindling?

I would guess, three days of continuous burning.

The Notebook

I love a blinking cursor and a blank page, but sometimes I wonder how pretentious my notebook appears whenever I'm sitting in a bar or a coffee shop, nursing a glass of whiskey or a hot chocolate I pretend is a macchiato if anyone asks--even though I don't even know what a macchiato is.

This, apparently.

It sounds vaguely like the sort of thing that gets bricked up in someone's wine cellar.

It's Not Just Words on Paper

Another piece of advice I hate almost as much as sparkly vampires is when I hear or read someone telling their "students" that all they need to do is "just write."  This is akin to telling a scrawny kid that all he or she needs to do in order to be Lebron James Jeremy Lin is go outside and shoot mid-range jumpers until his or her fingers fingers fall off.

Like this, but with more blood.

Dropping the Banhammer, Part One: Under Hot Lights

There has been a trickle-down effect since the announcement that #twoexplores is no longer a valid excuse for rampant cheating.  The most noticeable is the intensity of the community's vigilance when it comes to policing high level play on camera. 

I try to add something to the discussions that take place away from the tech and video media centers of the Magic universe online.  With that in mind, here are five things that you will do on camera at some point if you attend enough events, along with what might happen when you do.

History Lesson #2: Where is Magic Going? (Bonus Post-Script Rant)

Starting this off, here is a list of the double-faced cards in Innistrad as if they were cards with no transform capability. (This list is in alphabetical order)

Bloodline Keeper, 2BB, Flying, T: Put a 2/2 Vampire into play with Flying, 3/3

Civilized Scholar, 2U, T: Draw a card, then discard a card, 0/1.

Cloistered Youth, 1W, 1/1

Daybreak Ranger, 2G, T: ~this~ deals 2 damage to target creature with flying, 2/2

Delver of Secrets, U, 1/1

Gatstaf Shepherd, 1G, 2/2

Grizzled Outcasts, 4G, 4/4

Hanweir Watchkeep, 2R, Defender, 1/5

Instigator Gang, 3R, Attacking creatures you control get +1/+0, 2/3

Kruin Outlaw, 1RR, First Strike, 2/2

Ludevic’s Test Subject, 1U, Defender, 0/3

Mayor of Avabruck, 1G, Other Human creatures you control get +1/+1.  1/1

Reckless Waif, R, 1/1

Screeching Bat, 2B, Flying, 2/2

Thraben Sentry, 3W, Vigilance, 2/2

Tormented Pariah, 3R, 3/2

Ulvenwald Mystics, 2GG, 3/3

Village Ironsmith, 1R, First Strike, 1/1

Villagers of Estwald, 2G, 2/3

I didn’t include Garruk since for the purposes of this article we don’t need to talk about Planeswalkers.  You can probably guess where I am going with this, but if you didn’t, here is another sort of list:

Krovikan Vampire, 3BB, At the beginning of each end step, if a creature dealt damage by ~this~ this turn died, put that card into play under your control, Sacrifice it when you lose control of Krovikan Vampire, 3/3

Krovikan Sorcer, 2U, T, Discard a nonblack card: Draw a card, T, Discard a black card: Draw two cards then discard one of them, 1/1.

Hipparion, 1W, ~this~ can’t block creatures with power 3 or greater unless you pay 1.

Pale Bears, 2G, Islandwalk, 2/2

Balduvian Shaman, U, T: Change the text of target white enchantment you control that doesn’t have cumulative upkeep by replacing all instances of one color word with another, that enchantment gains Cumulative Upkeep 1, 1/1

Balduvian Bears, 1G, 2/2

Folk of the Pines, 4G, 1G: ~this~ gets +1/+0 until end of turn, 2/5

Barbarian Guides, 2R, 2R, T: Choose a land type, Target creature you control gains snow landwalk of the chosen type until end of turn.  Return that creature to its owner’s hand at the beginning of the next end step.

Goblin Snowman, 3R, Whenever ~this~ blocks, prevent all combat damage that would be dealt to and dealt by it this turn, T: ~this~ deals 1 damage to target creature it’s blocking, 1/1

Balduvian Barbarians, 1RR, 3/2

Balduvian Conjurer, 1U, T: Target snow land becomes a 2/2 creature until end of turn.  It’s still a land, 0/2

Freyalise Supplicant, 1G, T, sacrifice a red or white creature: ~this~ deals damage to target creature or play equal to half the sacrificed creature’s power, rounded down.

Mountain Goat, R, Mountainwalk, 1/1

Flow of Maggots, 2B, Cumulative upkeep 1, Flow of Maggots can’t be blocked by non-Wall creatures, 2/2

Mercenaries, 3W, 3: The next time ~this~ would deal damage to you this turn, prevent that damage.  Any player may activate this ability, 3/3

Tor Giant, 3R, 3/3

Lhurgoyf, 2GG, ~this~ power is equal to the number of creature cards in all graveyards and its toughness is equal to that number plus 1, */*+1

Orcish Librarian, 1R, R, T: Look at the top eight cards of your library, exile four of them at random, then put the rest on top of your library in any order, 1/1

Dire Wolves, 2G, Dire Wolves has banding as long as you control a Plains, 2/2

Again, if you couldn’t tell, the second list is from Ice Age, arranged to correspond with the first list by rarity and/or at least casting cost.  What is humorous, and the goal of this juxtaposition, is to demonstrate that by and large you would probably rather play most of the creatures on the first list, despite the fact that they have been effectively neutered in terms of the modern game by having their transform sides taken away.

The history lesson for today is that even crappy, untransformed versions of creatures from 2011 are leaps-and-bounds better than the creatures of 1995.  So what does this mean?  Well, in this article, we will be discussing how much the game has changed, not only in the power creep attached to creature design, but the actual play of the game itself.

"Canned Ham and Oysters" Part One of A Short Story by Ben Snyder

                I was taping a family of four on an afternoon picnic when it happened.  One of those $50 an hour jobs that you pick up from the bulletin board outside the labs in the community college.  Tell a few stories about some weddings and that reunion when your buddy Jack got back from Afghanistan and its pretty easy to convince a forty year old white guy with a permanent five o’clock shadow that you can shoot two and a half hours of an idea three reality show producers had rejected a half dozen times a piece.