Tip of the Day #7: Nuts and Bolts

I'm a tinkerer, by nature, especially when it comes to building my own constructed lists or refining decks I dredge up from the corners of the internet.  In general, many competitive Magic players are constantly adding and removing cards from builds they find through coverage of professional tournaments.

The thing is, though, this is rarely the best course of action.  I never fully appreciated how well-tuned most winning decklists are until I finally gave up messing with what was working.

The truth is that a deck that takes down a Pro Tour is a honed machine, comprised of dozens of parts, assembled in such a way that it can repeat the task it was designed to do as many times as necessary.  If you imagine a deck like an engine, you'll understand that unscrewing one nut could lead to one hell of a Michael Bay style explosion.

When you are tempted to add just one Grave Titan because it should theoretically be good in the metagame you are expecting, you need to remember that you are taking something else out that had a purpose in the first place.

It can be even more problematic if you were not part of the team that originally built the list, and you swap in Rune Snags for Mana Leaks because of "the late game."  Sure, you might get away with it, and sometimes, your change may even end up being for the better, but more often than not, you just messed up the deck's basic plan.

The tip of the day is to be careful when you are re-wiring the security system of Bill Gates' house, you don't know which wires control the pirate-ninja robot butlers.

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.

Preview Article #1: An Introduction

               Before you continue reading, for the purposes of this introduction (and, indeed, in many ways, in order to appreciate the guiding principle behind this website) it is necessary to walk through a very simple thought experiment.

                Consider that you are thinking of something right now.  Now, consider that (to simplify) 7,000,000,000 other human beings on the planet also just thought something a second ago.  What are the odds that someone thought that exact thing (say, peanut butter-covered Sour Patch Kids).  This is a multiplicity that could stretch infinitely, but, again, we are speaking broadly, so a reasonable estimate is 1 in 7,000,000,000.  This is, of course, not true, because they would have to be in the same situation as you, say, in America.  Now you are at 1 in 300,000,000.  Following that logic, they’d need to be in the same city as you (for our purposes, say, Lafayette, LA).  1 in 100,000.  Continuing, they’d need to be in your house.  1 in 4.  Your room.  1 in 1.  So the odds actually get smaller, until it is almost a certainty that at least one person had the thought that you just had.  Which, since you did just have that thought, someone did.

                If you understand what just happened, the rest of this will make sense.  If not, we are pretty sure that Cracked.com could always do with a few dozen more readers.