It's Not Over Until The Last Creature's Turned Sideways

"You must have a lot on your mind."

The words of Anthony tonight when I got home as we discussed my increased blog output in recent days. That wasn't a complete sentence. Sue me.

One of my favorite things about Magic is how many comparisons you can draw between the game and real life. "Well yeah, you can draw comparisons between any game and real life." Sure. But Magic, like real life, involves equal elements of skill AND luck. Most sports, for instance, revolve mostly around skills and techniques that have been honed and perfected over a long period of time, but don't require tremendous degrees of luck. It usually comes down to purely how good you are at the sport or how well your team functions as a whole. A game like Monopoly, on the other hand, which certainly contains an element of skill, is mostly determined by the luck of the dice rolls. With Magic, not only do you have to be a skilled player, know the game, the techniques, the strategies, the tactics, be able to weigh the possibilities and the outcomes, but you also have to rely on the luck of the draw. Sure, you can increase your chances at having a good draw by building a good deck, but again, just another parallel to real life, where you can increase your chances of success in a given scenario by preparing yourself for it. Even then, no matter how prepared you are, you still have to play with the hand you draw. Plus, unlike sports (and like most aspects of life), there isn't a key physical aspect that needs to be mastered. The closest game I can think of to being as much like real life as Magic would be poker (another card game, incidentally), and even then, you don't build your own deck, so it's not quite as tight of a comparison. Plus, Magic is cooler.

The remainder of this post may not make much sense to you depending on your level of understanding of Magic, but then again, this particular post is probably more for my own benefit. If you do know Magic, and I know at least a few of you do, then maybe it'll mean something. I just know that even if I could spend a lot of time trying to explain it I still wouldn't do a very good job, so I'll just throw this disclaimer out there now.

My main point here is this: if you scoop, you have no chance of winning. "Scooping" is conceding because you know you've already lost. The problem with doing so is that even if you're dead on board, your opponent might not see it, and you could be one turn away from victory. If he misses something and gives you one more shot, you've got it. But if you scoop, then you've got nothing. You can't make it easy for him. This is why I wait until the last, lethal points of damage are coming at me before I say "yeah, you've got it."

Like I said, there's an element of luck to Magic. Topdecking, or drawing exactly the card you need exactly when you need it, is not by any means a skillful maneuver, but it's often necessary, and it happens frequently. If you give up, you lose your chance to topdeck. If you rage quit because your strategy keeps getting disrupted, you won't live long enough to topdeck that Boundless Realms and landfall for 12 bird tokens to keep you alive for a few turns. If you say "well, this game is locked up, I just lost" when your opponent miracles Entreat the Angels for 9 tokens, you won't have a chance to put Verdant Embrace on your Emeria Angel and start popping saprolings into play to gain enough life off of Leyline of Vitality to stabilize. Don't quit the game until the game is over. Dig for an answer. Put all your resources and all your focus into finding a way to get back in the game. Lock the board down so you can survive long enough to draw Vigor and go on the offensive. Because no one blocks your creatures when Vigor's out unless they have to to survive.

I understand most of that last paragraph was likely indecipherable to at least a few people, so I'll distill it down to this: do not quit. If you've got something you're after, keep at it. Persist. You may not have a chance, but if you quit, you certainly have no chance. Sure, it may come down to luck... but who knows, maybe luck will be on your side. And yes, that exact scenario did happen the other night during a game. I almost quit in the face of overwhelming odds, but I played it out, and I won.

Yeah, Magic is a game. It's designed to be fun for the players and profitable for the designers, and it is both of those things. But I think anything that can help sharpen my perspective and outlook on life is more than JUST a game. There are other aspects of Magic I might touch on in the future, like knowing your opponents' play styles, playing around counterspells, head games, slow rolling, etc., but one of the most basic and universally applicable principles is that of never giving up until you're absolutely certain it's over. If you wanna win, you gotta keep playing, and that's all there is to it.