A Full Inventory

“Get better. Play better. Be better.”

Magic is a constant struggle to maintain consistent satisfaction with oneself. Tournaments sidetrack many players (myself included) from the idea that results are very short-term rewards that are attained through long-term changes of habit.

Sam Stoddard has a legendary article on identifying habits that need to change and trying to change them. To give the CliffsNotes version of the article, it is about creating what is called a Fearless Magical Inventory. The inventory itself is a list of your biggest strengths and weaknesses as a player and how you can apply them to each other to be the best player that you can be. The fearless part is where it gets a bit trickier. Sometimes creating an inventory can be incredibly taxing from a mental standpoint, especially if you have trouble being objective about your own habits without being emotional. Being able to list your shortcomings is very rarely easy and thinking of ways to fix those vulnerabilities can be even harder.

With the amount that I travel and play in competitive Magic tournaments being able to improve as a player is very important to me. As a result I try and make a new Fearless Magical Inventory for myself every month or so to track my growth and really see how I can better myself. This isn’t necessarily correct for everyone but was very well suited to my needs and had been doing good work, or so I thought.

Sam Henry recently reached out to me and asked me if I’d go over his Inventory and provide input on it. I was happy to oblige but asked that he also go over mine so we could compare notes at the end. What I received from him was absolutely breathtaking. The amount of work he had put into his Inventory was unmatched by any of the lists I had made for myself and it showed. Every single thing I could possibly think to attach to this person as a Magic player was written out in a neatly-formatted Google document. I sent him mine and an hour or so later we parted ways before I started thinking a bit more about everything that had been in his inventory.

I had been creating Magical Inventories for years now, but had they really been fearless? At this point I am honestly leaning towards a firm “No”. Today I’m going to try and delve pretty deeply into what I think my strengths and weaknesses as a player are and make it public (for all the lovely readers here at CardConfidants.com) in order to hold myself accountable for what I say and what I want to improve.

The Good

1. I have an extraordinary mental game.

I am very good at sequencing the order that I play my cards, tap my lands, carry myself, and so on to conceal information. I also hone in on body language and other associated tells from my opponents.

2. I am good at dictating the pace of play or attitude of a game.

Very regularly I play decks very quickly and am able to get my opponents to play quickly as well. On the other side of this, if I am playing slower to tanking harder my opponent is generally doing the same. My opponents are also infinitely more likely to joke around and seemingly take a game less seriously if I do the same.

3. I am good at solving linear puzzles.

I can proficiently pilot combo decks that have one or two distinct plans. The first two Legacy decks that I ever played were (Pre-Return to Ravnica) Elves and Mono-Blue Omnitell as a result of this. I am able to identify what types of cards and scenarios I need to set up putting X plan into motion. While playing Omnitell against Temur Delver, for example, a common line of thinking for me would be “I know they are going to have either a Spell Pierce or a Daze in addition to a Force of Will. How do I beat those cards?”. This would lead to my needing to set up three or four things to happen and trying to put all of them into place.

I need the full combo (Show and Tell + Omniscience + Enter the Infinite or Dream Halls + Enter the Infinite).
I need 1-2 extra mana to pay for the soft piece of permission.
I need either an extra ‘enabler’ (Show and Tell/Dream Halls) to eat a hard counter spell as bait OR a counter spell of my own.
I need to not die while assembling all of these cards.

Putting all of this in place would help win that particular match up and I excel at identifying these particular ‘checklists’ mid-game.

4. I can play a wide variety of decks with reasonable proficiency.

This should almost be changed to “I have played…” instead of “I can play…”. Because I have been playing Magic for a very long time I have played a very wide range of archetypes and have learned to pilot those specific decks proficiently. As a result I have the ability to switch decks often without having to worry too much basic fundamental-based mistakes.

5. I am above average at ‘solving’ complex board states.

Another way to phrase this would be “I am able to properly determine what the most important cards on a cluttered board are”. Decks that I played for a long time that lent themselves to this include Standard Mono-Blue Devotion, Modern Affinity, Modern Melira Chord, and Mardu Aristocrats. All of these decks try to do whatever they can to flood the board in order to turn on a set of synergies within the deck. Any time these decks face off in a mirror match there are going to be very long games that involve very complicated battlefields for each player. Whenever there is a board stall I find myself able to leverage small advantages efficiently and effectively.

6. I sequence plays well

Whenever I play cards that require things to be done in a certain order I am good at figuring out the order to do those things at different times. The Rally The Ancestors deck is a great example of this. When you actually resolve the deck’s namesake there are going to be a plethora of different situations in which you will want to stack triggers from Reflector Mage, Sidisi’s Faithful, Elvish Visionary, and Fleshbag Marauder-styled effects differently. These types of decisions don’t always matter but there is tangible amounts of value to be gained from being able to sequence the various abilities and spells correctly.

7. I mulligan well

I very rarely lose games due to bad keeps. I have no problems mulliganing down to 4 or 5 cards (I actually won a game on a mulligan to 4 in Columbus) and generally know how an opening hand needs to look for the first few turns of a game to be reasonable or conducive to what the deck’s game plan is. I have also memorized a good number of statistics to know what my odds of drawing a land in X turns based on Y number of lands remaining in my library. This goes a long way in helping decide if you know a hand is a sound keep or if you just feel that it is a safe keep.

8. I am a mechanically proficient player and am comfortable playing at a very brisk pace

Part of my success with the Rally The Ancestors archetype can be attributed to the fact that I have zero draws with the deck and practice a number of short cuts. If I figure out what particular line of play I need to pursue I can play very quickly to that particular line of play with a very high number of plays coming almost automatically. This makes me able to reduce the number of games that I go to a draw and focus on other parts of the game that are less tangible (bluffing, tells, card placement on the battlefield, etc.) while sacrificing less time on the clock.

9. I can understand roles in matchups and how games will play out after playing a small number of games.

This is to say that I can generally play a set of five to ten games to understand how cards will interact with one another in a matchup and have a basic idea of how games will play out. This helps a great deal when it comes to sideboarding in uncharted waters. It also makes it much harder for me to explain what cards to sideboard in and out against certain archetypes because my reasoning will regularly devolve to something along the lines of “You just don’t have time to do X” or “It is unlikely you’ll find a pocket to resolve a valuable Y”.

10. I am good at de-tilting and detaching myself from results.

I am good at not letting a loss get to me or preventing bad beats from affecting my future play between games. When I came in 9th place at #SCGATL earlier this year I was disappointed but was overall happy with my results and technical play over the tournament, electing to celebrate with the car I’d rode with rather than lament my poor tiebreakers. This helps a significant amount when the time comes to be objective about results or decks and is a major factor in convincing me to put down pet-decks, even when I am succeeding with them.

The Bad

1. I have problems becoming tunnel-visioned on a single plan.

There are a number of times where I will have an overarching plan for a game or match up and will fail to deviate from that particular plan, even when it is correct. The most recent example I can think of came while I was playtesting my Melira-Company deck against a friend’s U/W Emeria deck. Normally in these particular games you just want to amass as many cards as possible so you can play through all of the Wrath of Gods and Supreme Verdicts they can throw at you. I missed an opportunity this particular game that involved me using Eternal Witness to get back Wall of Roots in order to trigger my Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit enough times to deal exact lethal damage. I took a Collected Company out of the graveyard instead of the Wall because it was the plan that I was on and I became tunnel-visioned.

It’s entirely possible that I am too confident in my abilities to play at a brisk pace, even when it is unnecessary. Identifying pivotal turns is important in Magic and I could do much better in understanding when these crucial turns come up.

2. I can be miserable to playtest with.

There are times when I completely lack tact when offering criticism or asking questions, so I will come across as snarky. I really need to work on my phrasing when trying to understand somebody’s thinking or when trying to find why they didn’t take a certain line of play.

3. Tournament results can greatly affect the way I treat others and interact in the community.

I have a horrid habit of not being able to assert myself properly if I have been on a losing streak and becoming arrogant whenever I’m running hot. It’s hard to be confident when it feels like everything you do is the ‘wrong’ thing or that you don’t have anything recent to show that you aren’t just talking out of your ass. Conversely, it can also be hard to take other people in the same position seriously when they lack the results that you have. I need to become more leveled in my thinking and not take myself so seriously. It’s incredibly hard to just break a sort of paradigm that has been going on for so long (and honestly shows up a bit among Magic players much more respected than myself) but precedence doesn’t make something right. It just makes it more common or accepted.

4. I worry entirely too much about my appearance while at Magic tournaments.

Due to my status as a transgender person I very regularly worry about how people perceive me and it shows. After publicly transitioning my win-rate at competitive REL tournaments went up almost 20% and there was an enormous shift in how I composed myself at Magic tournaments. This shift in mentality is not without its drawbacks. I had trouble watching certain feature matches at tournaments because of how masculine I perceive myself in certain camera angles (a lot of them aren’t even matches that I’m playing) and it isn’t healthy. This more related to some of my personal struggles with Gender Dysphoria and Depression but certainly affects my Magic playing at times. I need to focus more on the game itself and not if I slouch or speak a certain way mid-game.

5. When it comes to deck-selection I am incredibly lacking.

I jump from deck-to-deck too often for tournaments. To use the my decks that are on SCG as a reference, there are 17 decks with 15 different styles of lists across 12 archetypes. I try too hard to metagame instead of just playing decks that I know are good/play to my strengths and am regularly punished for it. A step I’ve made to try and fix this problem is I limited the Modern decks that I can play in 2016 to Infect, Affinity, and Tarmo-Twin. Naturally I changed the third deck when Splinter Twin got the ban-hammer but the idea is still there. I still get to try and metagame (by choosing which of the decks in my arsenal is the best) but am not treading too far into unfamiliar territory. This is a bit harder in other formats (I’m making a major metagame call for SCG Philly) it is a step in the right direction in the form of a compromise.

6. I try to be prepared for everything when it isn’t realistic

Story time! Towards the end of last year I had agreed to go to an Invitational Qualifier with some friends and forgot to build a deck for the tournament. I woke up the morning of the event and checked to see what had recently done well at Modern Opens and saw that an Abzan list had Top 8’d an event. I threw the deck together in the car en route to the tournament and ended up winning the IQ. The next weekend I was planning to go to Grand Prix Pittsburgh (which was Modern) and was now faced with wanting to play Abzan at the Grand Prix because of my success at the IQ. This made me try to tune the deck to be ready for everything (as the field for a Grand Prix tends to be far greater and more diverse than a single Invitational Qualifier). This let to me having a sideboard with 11 one-ofs and a pair of two-ofs and a decklist with a spattering of one-ofs as I lowered the consistency of my deck to try and prepare for every possible archetype in Modern. As a result I ended up losing a lot at the Grand Prix and finishing in a very poor position. This could have been prevented if I had just kept the deck as streamlined as it had been previously and been more focused on my game plan instead of trying to answer what everyone else was doing. This in and of itself taught me a great lesson on fixing this particular issue but I still make the mistake when building sideboards.

7. I don’t play enough Magic

This may come as a shock to some readers but I very rarely playtest with actual cards. Part of my lack of playtesting can be attributed to my having a very busy schedule most of the time but that is little excuse for the omission playing real games of Magic. Most of my preparing comes from reading everything from every writer on the internet each week and thinking about whatever I need to in order to prepare for that weekend. There are tons of different things that I do in order to prepare for a weekend that aren’t just playing games of Magic. Just a handful of things that have been great for me as a player are:

Writing down my thoughts on paper. This way I can see what is conflicting and what doesn’t. This also helps with streamlining ideas and finding hypocrisies within my own thinking while categorizing thoughts about decks or matchups.
The sheer amount of reading that I do. For reference I generally check Starcitygames.com, TCGplayer.com, Channelfireball.com, MTGCardMarket.com, and DailyMTG.com every other day or so. Some things are not necessarily ‘for me’ (I don’t read Commander articles) but the information is golden. You can find nuggets of unique perspective in most written pieces about Magic.
Reach out to people who specialize in an archetype I’m looking to start playing. This saves a LOT of time when it comes to learning subtle nuances of a deck.

While all of these are fantastic steps to take they would be more useful if I used them to augment what I found in playtesting or to make the testing better itself instead of eschewing games in favor of the aforementioned list.

8. I have trouble evaluating my opponent’s skill level in a tournament setting.

I treat my opponent in Round 15 exactly as I do in Round 3. This is sometimes great and keeps me on the proper level of thinking against great players that I face early but other times is detrimental. If you give a player too much respect you may end up making plays or decisions that are detrimental. This may seem strange but I’ll draw off my experiences with Rally the Ancestors as an example. At the SCG Circuit event in Atlanta there were a handful of people that were playing Mardu Green and sideboarding Infinite Obliteration for the Rally matchup. As a result I would bring in a pair of Anafenza, the Foremost in the matchup to make sure that I would still be able to kill my opponent once we had both been ground down to very few cards. The strategy was fantastic against Chris Andersen when I played against him. Her ability to close out a game in a short amount of time was crucial while we were both in top-deck mode. Later in the tournament it was significantly worse because a different Mardu Green opponent wasn’t sideboarding any copies of Infinite Obliteration and I made my deck weaker overall while trying to compensate for a card that wasn’t there.

All of these points add up to an overall feeling that while I consider myself a very above-average player, I am one with a significant number of detractors. Luckily I have the ability to make changes and become even better. At the end of the day I am the one holding myself back in a lot of ways, changing or removing those ways is instrumental in taking my game to the next level. This article is one that I will be sure to look back at frequently in order to stay dedicated to making the change that I want to see in myself.

Any Magic player would benefit from making such a list If you have any suggestions on ways that you overcame some issues that I am struggling with or want some help with your own ‘Inventory. The key aspect to really drive home is that honesty is so important when making a list. It’s easy to sugar-coat things or downplay other aspects of yourself in order to feel politically correct or modest but that won’t always lead to the best results. Trying to make changes to problems while maintaining strengths is incredibly relevant and using them to play off of each other is a great way to expedite the process of improvement. Feel free to reach out to me on social media or leave a comment here with any questions about your own inventory or tips you may have for mine!

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Emma Handy

A self-professed Mario Kart 8 master, Emma Handy is an up-and-coming grinder from Western North Carolina.
With an excellent mental game and the rest of Team Disciples of Bolas on her side she's quickly making a name for herself on the SCG Tour