here's a popular Poker concept called fancy play syndrome that's easy to borrow to discuss a certain kind of mistake people make in Magic. At its most extreme, a player will make a play because it's clever or doesn't come up much and they're glad that they found it. Even though it might not actually be the best available play, often it just isn't good at all. It's easy to understand why this is bad, but today, I'd like to consider a less clear or extreme case.

A friend of mine asked about how to get to the point where you stop making plays just because they generate value or seem good at the time, and instead recognize when, for example, you can afford to let a two-for-one go to hold a removal spell for a threat you actually can't beat that might come later. I thought this was a pretty interesting question.

Fundamentally, everyone learns to play Magic one move at a time. You're presented with a game you don't have a deep understanding of, and you must decide your first action. Over time, you learn to refine some of those actions. During all this period, you're improving your tactical play.

Learning to let a two-for-one go - you block a 2/2 with a 3/3, they use a pump spell, and you let your 3/3 die because you can play another next turn instead of using a removal spell to kill the 2/2 and save your 3/3 - this is a simple example of learning to go beyond making a "good play" in the moment.

Ultimately, the best way to learn how to evaluate when to make these plays and when not to is to learn to think about the game strategically rather than tactically. That is to say you need to come up with a plan about how the rest of the game is going to go and an understanding of which cards will matter, how you might lose, and what you can do to prevent that.

A common example in Dominaria Limited would be understanding that the ground is going to get locked up and someone is going to win with a bomb or a flier, so you shouldn't use removal on ground creatures to save life, push damage, or two-for-one a combat trick that is killing your ground creature and/or saving theirs. That's not to say that every game or matchup will go this way or that this is what will always matter, but it's more common in Dominaria than most recent Limited formats (though it's very common in Sealed Deck in particular, anyway).

There's a lot of overlap between tactical and strategic thinking, and both will often lead to the same conclusion; after all, there's really one best play and both attempt to find it. Tactically, you shouldn't use the removal spell in the example above because it's a more valuable card than the two cards it would be trading with, so it would be a bad decision. At some level that can be intuitive, but ultimately, strategic thinking is what allows you to determine what it means for something to be more valuable and how to assess which things have that value.

To take an example of this kind of overlap from Standard, if you're playing Mono-Green Aggro against U/W Control, each turn when your opponent has four mana untapped you need to decide which creatures to attack with to play around Settle the Wreckage; you're generally trying to force your opponent to cast it while committing/losing minimal resources and pressuring your opponent enough that they can't just ignore you while advancing their game plan. Tactically, you're deciding about which creatures play around Settle best; strategically, you understand that your opponent has a finite number of answers to your resolved creatures and you're trying to run them out while keeping enough creatures on the battlefield to finish them off. The tactic that will allow you to accomplish that strategic goal is to force your opponent to use their spell without committing too many resources.


I can't really provide an example of times when tactical and strategically correct decisions disagree, because again, both are working toward the same end, so while the thinking is different, the conclusion is only different when a mistake is made; the concern is just that one kind of thinking may lead to making a mistake more often than the other.

I've discussed strategic thinking as being kind of on a higher order; it informs tactical choices, but that doesn't mean it's better or more advanced--it's just a slightly different way of approaching a question.

People who play very strategic games - players who focus on their game plan and possibly the way games generally play out may be more prone to missing subtle unique spots in games where what's happening deviates from what usually happens - most often show when a player with inevitability doesn't start attacking when they should. They've been crafting a strategy to stay alive, and so they don't realize when they've reached a battlefield that's safe enough that they should start ending the game. Often, this isn't a big problem, since their deck is better in the late game and so far ahead once they've turned the corner that they can give their opponent a few extra draw steps without losing much equity, but this kind of mistake can, for example, give a red deck a few extra draws to string together enough burn to finish you off.

When this happens, tactical mistakes were made; there were turns where making an attack was the tactically correct action, but what happened most likely is that the tactical question was never really asked. The player was so focused on the strategy of staying alive they didn't consider a plan that would advance what seemed like a different goal, in this case killing the opponent.

So, understanding that the kinds of thinking are different and that each are best suited to different goals, both are valuable and both may lead to oversights, how do you learn how best to think about a game you're actually playing?

As I see it, your deck probably has a fundamental strategy. You should be aware of that before the game begins, and on some level, it should inform most of your decisions; however, the nature of Magic is that there's more hidden information early, and as the game progresses, more information is revealed and you get a better sense of what the game will be about. What this means is that on average, you should be playing a more tactical early game and a more strategic late game - early on, your sequencing and card use is going to just be jockeying for position and general advantages like tempo and card advantage - whether you're prioritizing tempo or card advantage or whatever needs to be informed by your strategy, but in general, early on if you're offered a chance to make a play that gets you ahead in some way, like a two-for-one, you should probably take it. Once the game has taken shape you can start to form an end game strategy, and it can be easier to figure out the most judicious use of your cards.

It's becoming an old example at this point, so it's probably before many readers' time, but it's such an ideal example that I must go to it: When playing Faeries in Standard a decade ago, on turn four you would often pass with some combination of Mistbind Clique, Cryptic Command, Spellstutter Sprite, and some kind of removal spell. You wouldn't know exactly what you were going to cast, you'd just react to whatever your opponent did with the play that generated the most value for you. This would be a tactical decision. After you got ahead early by making advantageous tactical decisions, at some point you'd reach a turning point - the point where the deck "turns the corner" - this is the point where you begin to deploy your end game strategy; you've traded off enough resources to get the game small enough that the amount of hidden information is manageable and with the end in sight, your actions are now guided by a strategy about how you can close out the game, instead of simply making the play that generates the most nebulous value.


So we know how tactics and strategy are different, how they're differently suited to lead us to make different kinds of mistakes and find different types of correct plays, and we know that, as a guideline, games move from tactical to strategic (although it's possible that the opening turns specifically, before you really know what your opponent is doing, can best be thought of as strategic--you're just executing your strategy, and things only really become tactical decisions once the game starts getting interactive, but this early strategy I think is generally sufficiently "auto-pilot" that it's not terribly interesting or important to think of it a strategic in nature). The next question is probably how to improve as a player at thinking in ways you might not when you should.

Another quick example: A tactical player may be good at figuring what trick their opponent is representing in combat and how likely they are to have it. A strategic player will be able to figure out how much that trick matters and whether it's worth running into. Basically, I think a lot of mid-level players - players who have gotten good enough to identify when their opponent has something and narrow down what it could be - may be too prone to "play around" the trick by not blocking a smaller creature with a larger creature; a worse player might just block because they don't understand why their opponent would make such an attack that looks so good for them on the surface, and a better player might also block because, despite knowing that the opponent has a trick, they recognize that the trick is a card that has value and they might be happy to trade their creature for the trick now to make their opponent spend the mana and the card and not have to worry about it for the rest of the game. Not blocking just because you know they really have it is essentially fancy play syndrome.

Incidentally, early in the game, I think blocking in that spot is almost always right, because later the trick will threaten a more powerful creature and early it's more likely to take their entire turn to cast a trick. Also later they can probably do it with mana they weren't otherwise using, and you also just don't take damage that turn. The most common exception is if you'll be able to leave mana up after that turn for your own counter trick that will generate a lot of value if your opponent tries again the next turn and you might not otherwise find a great use for, especially a card like Befuddle.


Next level reaction to that understanding: If your opponent took a hit and then didn't tap out, you should probably give them credit for something if you respect them enough as a player to think they're good enough that it's most likely that they took the previous hit for a reason like that, which, if they didn't block and now they've left a creature back to threaten to block, is almost certainly what's going on.

Anyway, back to the question at hand: How do you improve on this front?

Whenever you pick up a deck, make sure you know what its plan is. I may be biased here. I have a strong aversion to midrange decks because they don't have a satisfactory answer to this question for me. Similarly, I like to draft decks that have clear plans rather than just midrange collections of good cards. My decks tend to be a bit more focused than average, and I'm willing to get more extreme in my focus, using cards that are only good in a strange niche strategy I've found. Either way, I'm pretty sure more conventional decks can probably also be understood to have some strategy. After that, just kind of let that percolate in the background while you play your game, but try to come back to it when you reach a decision point.

This is another interesting topic. Every action in Magic is a decision, but most of them don't function as decision points because your action wasn't a question; you don't have to figure out whether to play your land on the first turn or not, so that's not a decision point even if you did technically make a decision. Decision points are when you must consider two options. It's great if you can set up an internal warning system that notices when you're making decisions so that you can double check them. The harder the decision feels, the more you should be inclined to double check, and that double check should ideally involve asking how this play will fit into your larger plan.

The hardest mistakes to fix, as a bit of a tangent, are the ones that never register as a decision, the kind of thing where when someone else asks why you did or didn't do something, the truth is simply that you never considered the alternative. My best guess for fixing that is to look for patterns in the kinds of things you overlook and try to build mental alarms around them.

If you have issues with thinking too strategically, which would best be identified because your mistakes come when you should be doing something that is outside the typical goal of your deck, is really just to try to slow down and take stock of your options.Try to pay careful attention when something unusual has happened in a game or when you're in a spot you aren't normally in.