Scott McCord is a former professional Magic player who made the Top 4 of Pro Tour Boston as a member of Slay, Pillage, Gerard with Jon Sonne and Gerard Fabiano. He also has reached the Top 8 twice in Grand Prix competition. He sits in 80th place in Total rating and has made infrequent Pro Tour appearances on that basis. He is also a long time friend of the Top8Magic crew and one of the best Limited players I have had to good fortune to play with and against over the years.

Despite a career that involves working with words and possessing formidable Magic skills, Scott has written very rarely about the game. If you have ever watched someone better than you play a game of Magic and wondered why they made the decisions that they did, this article should provide some illumination into the higher level thinking that goes on in a game of Magic. It certainly did for me.

Material Possessions

I’m sitting around watching a draft game recently between a couple of friends.  One of them, Steve, is playing a u/b deck and has just tapped uubb for a 3/2 flier.  His opponent, Mark, is running r/w and attacking with a 2/2 flier.  Steve declines to block and falls to 16.  Mark plays a 3/3 and passes.

“Steve, why didn’t you block?” I ask.

“Pretty simple, I think; he’s got a 2/2 and my guy’s better,” he says.  “But thanks for the advice; I hear you’re the ninth-best player by rating in the world.”

“I’m not even the ninth-best player in this conversation.”

“Sad but true.”

I’m looking at Steve’s six-card hand.  He holds Living Tsunami, 2 Mysteries of the Deep, Bog Tatters, Bojunka Brigand, and Whiplash Trap.

Why should Steve have traded his 3/2 for a 2/2?  The answer comes from a concept gleaned from chess: material vs. time.

In chess, aggressive players will frequently sacrifice pieces in order to gain positional advantage for a decisive attack.  The last thing the aggressor wants to do is trade straight up without improving position, because doing so nullifies the sacrifice and gives him fewer tools with which to win the game.  Magic often works the same way.  The attacker has time; that is, positional momentum.  The defender has material resources.  Trading material decelerates the game and allows a material advantage to cancel a temporary time advantage.

In this case, Steve has a lot of potential material (the creatures and card advantage in his hand), but not a lot of time (his life total, lack of defense, a potential land shortage).  He should be looking to trade creatures so that his cards in hand can take effect; Mark should be looking to avoid trading while pushing as much damage as possible.  In other words, Steve should strive to make material advantage, and not time advantage, the game’s deciding factor.

Let’s examine some reasons and situations to consider when choosing whether or not to block:

Trading Down

Suppose it was a bit later in the game and Steve had gotten two 2-for-1s.  Maybe he had saved his guy from a Magma Rift with a kicked Into the Roil. Maybe he had played a kicked Bloodhusk Ritualist to clear a card from Mark’s hand, then blocked a bear with it.  Whatever the situation, when you are up on cards, it’s almost always to your benefit to trade material if the two creatures are close to the same value, and, depending on tempo, even if they’re not.

Seem obvious?  You’d be surprised how often quality players fail to trade using a better guy to solidify their position.  Suppose I have a Bog Tatters, am at 8, and my opponent (who’s not been touched) has just attacked with a 2/3 Steppe Lynx.  If you’re ahead in the card advantage war, strongly consider trading to stabilize the board and allow your material advantage to take effect.

Restock, Reload

This leads to the next point: be more inclined to trade if you have a deck designed to play for the long game.  This is the deck that I usually try to draft regardless of format; in ZZW it often means U/R or U/B.  Why these two combinations?  Because blue allows for material advantage in the late game with card drawing; red and black offer deep colors that allow for early trades via removal and cheap guys.  Many good players consider attrition and card advantage the most reliable way to win games based on one assumption: attrition is not as draw dependent as either inflexible speed decks or decks that rely on combinations of cards to win.  And even if your opponents get speedy draws, a deck based on card advantage can frequently stall enough to win anyway.  For this reason, I tend to prioritize creatures that are good blockers for their cost and devalue cards that aren’t: unless they are late picks, I’ll rarely have a Steppe Lynx, Windrider Eel, or Hedron Rover in my deck.

This strategy can also work with u/w, b/w, and u/g, but your deck has to fulfill more conditions, because not only does the red and black removal make it easy to go 1-for-1, it also helps to stop early evasion creatures and creatures who have been enhanced by either landfall or equipment.  Defensive creatures like Perimeter Captain and Kraken Hatchling can only accomplish so much; you’ll often need life gain and removal to weather the storm.

Overrun with Threats

I remember talking to a downtrodden friend after he lost a close game 3 to Overrun at a PT.  Now he wasn’t the first to take 12 damage for 2GGG, but in this case at least, he could have lessened the effect of his opponent’s bomb in the deciding game.  How?  My friend had a u/w build (a man after my own heart) and had decided to race his opponent’s cheap r/g deck with fliers.

Here was the problem: By the time game 3 started my friend knew that he faced not only Overrun, but Lava Axe as well.  And by aggressively trading those fliers, he could have used an uncluttered board to nullify his opponent’s finishers.  Given the late-game superiority of most U/W decks over fast R/G (e.g. counters, card drawing, life gain), playing this way would have increased his chance of winning.  Similar finishers exist in today’s limited environment, like Mark of Mutiny, Unstable Footing, Windborne Charge, and Eldrazi Monument.  Blocking in the early game and maintaining a clear board with high life totals makes all of those spells much less useful.

Trading can make tempo cards less effective as well, which is why controlling r/b decks tend to have an easy time with blue tempo decks.  Trading early via removal or blocking makes it far less likely for that Whiplash Trap or Permafrost Trap to secure a victory.  Due to cheap removal blue decks should, in the mid game, have fewer creatures on board to capitalize on the one or two-turn damage window that bounce provides, and the trap ends up being, at best, an expensive way to counter a removal spell, and at worst, a way to delay losing by a turn or two.

On the other hand, trading against black decks can cost you.  How often have you held a Dead Reckoning or Grim Discovery while cursing your opponent for attacking with fliers and never blocking?  Often, I’ll bet.  It’s easy to play around conditional removal like Dead Reckoning or Paralyzing Grasp if you suspect your opponent has them.  If you hold a couple of Grasps, for example, your opponent might trade early and often while waiting to draw Mind Sludge or Kor Sanctifiers before attacking.

So trading material or refusing to trade material can nullify entire classes of cards.  In ZZW blocking can drastically reduce the effectiveness of two archetypes in particular: Allies and Vampires.  When facing an Ally deck, trade when you can, before Join the Ranks becomes Overrun and Bojunka Brigand becomes too giant to handle.  When you do this, cards like Hagra Diabolist become subpar instead of game changing.  Achieve the same effect by blocking against a Guul Draz Vampire with your 2/1 creature so that those Vampires don’t clock you for 3 unblockable later.

Handouts

Though you should always consider your opponent’s deck when deciding whether or not to trade, your focus should remain on your hand.  Do you have life gain or bounce that will help you win the damage race?  Do you have a Trusty Machete or Vines of Vastwood that only work well with creatures on your side?  Or is your hand packed with more creatures and reanimation spells that will help you win the attrition war?  Strongly consider how the game will progress based on your hand before you commit.

One of the easiest and best ways to determine whether to engage in an attrition war is to count the number of lands in hand and your capacity to deploy your resources effectively.  The general rule is this: if you are tight on land, try to trade often so that your resources don’t sit in your hand at game’s end.  If you are flooded, try to race, because your opponent presumably has more action than you.  When you have a smooth draw, use knowledge of your opponent’s deck and early development to put yourself in their shoes.  Wouldn’t your opponent want to trade after missing a crucial land drop?  Do you eventually want to use that Windborne Charge to fly over for the win? Then use that turn to drop a Goblin Shortcutter to make blocking impossible and get closer to making your finishers matter.

Let’s look at Steve’s hand from his game with Mark.  Clearly, not blocking put him at a disadvantage.  Granted, he’s in serious trouble if he doesn’t draw a land next turn; playing Living Tsunami retards his development by land locking him at 4; the Brigand won’t help him on defense; and two of his spells won’t affect the board the turn they are played.  But blocking here makes the best of a bad situation by giving Steve more time to draw the fifth land, extending the game, and allowing the strengths of his deck to shine.

Steve’s is a clear example.  Lots of times, deciding whether or not to block involves weighing subtle factors differently depending on the situation to form an educated opinion.  Just keep in mind your hand, the decks involved, the board, and the life totals.  Make sure to know how you can incorporate trading into your winning game plan.