materpillar wrote: โ1 year ago
Hot take: I don't think @DirkGently is clearly in the right.
How dare.
From where I'm sitting it sounds like Jon was absolutely correct in his assessment of the situation. You got the table to gang up on him, deplete their resources stopping him and then you won the resulting scrap. Sounds like this happens a lot and Jon doesn't know how to stop it from happening. He can't simply make his decks stronger to kill you easier or it just makes it easier for you to push him under the bus. He can't match you in terms of maneuvering the table because he doesn't have thousands of hours of experience maneuvering a table. He doesn't have the game knowledge to out game you in game. He probably sees no decent way to stop these things and that's probably extremely frustrating.
I don't think I really agree with this characterization. For one thing, I had no idea that James had a board wipe in hand, and I certainly wasn't pressuring him to use it. FWIW it also destroyed a lot of my own stuff, significantly more than James' stuff (it was a
Time Wipe so it also saved one of his creatures). I wasn't trying to deplete his resources, but rather trying to do literally anything possible to stop Jon given that he had a position that was almost a guaranteed win on the next turn if left undisturbed. If it had taken every resource I had to wipe his board, I would have gladly done it. I wasn't playing Phelddagrif where I'm secretly holding a hand full of answers and hoping other people will use theirs instead. I had no answer to Jon, and (from my perspective not knowing about the wipe) nor did James. I didn't ask to look at his hand to fully collaborate or anything, I just informed him which targets were most valuable for the targeted removal he was already casting. Also FWIW, he cast a
Crush Contraband to kill greaves (I think) with Jon having no enchantments but me having two, and I pointed out that he could kill either of them for free (I don't remember what he decided to do with that information though). So I absolutely reject the idea that I'm trying to manipulate the table to deplete their resources in this case. I guess he did deplete a couple cards destroying jon's supporting artifacts (possibly unnecessarily), which I did offer advice on what to target with them, but at the time I thought that was all he had to slow Jon down. It's possible that he did topdeck the time wipe, not sure about that.
Now, that said, I think a common dynamic in games is:
I'm playing a low-powered deck.
James (or Mike) is playing a mid-low powered deck.
Jon is playing a mid-powered deck badly.
Jon gets out to an early lead because his cards are comparatively powerful.
Jon becomes an inevitable threat that basically must be stopped.
We succeed in knocking him down to a safe level.
He gets sulky and basically stops playing once he's sufficiently set back.
Once it's a 2-player game, I'm a better player so I typically win.
The rare game that Jon does win, it's usually because he gets something fairly stupid happening quickly and nobody has answers for it. The aforementioned dragon game had all the hallmarks of a "Jon just has a stronger deck so he runs away with it sometimes" game, up until the board wipe.
I do agree with your assessment of how he perceives it, but I'm not sure what the solution is. His main tactic seems to be to just buy more powerful cards/decks, which does sometimes result in the "Jon just has a ..." game sometimes, which I'm fine with - kind of a relief that he wins sometimes - but I don't feel like it's probably helping him grow much as a player, and I'm not sure how satisfying it is for him. Idk, maybe he doesn't mind.
His line should have been looking at Jon and going "Dirk is right my board state is scary but think back to the last handful of games. You'll stop me and then Dirk will kill you. It happens every time. I won't attack you until after I murder him if you don't wrath." That's what he was trying to do but communicated it very poorly because he's still bad at this.
That's an interesting possibility were Jon way more skilled at politics, though it is undercut somewhat by the fact that nobody except james knew he had the wipe. I guess he could have said it to convince him to takesies-backsies the wipe, though James tends to be fairly "nope, too late, I did it, it happened."
I do also think that's a very dangerous play for James given that he has much fewer cards in hand (post Jon's draw-12), mana on board, and a much weaker deck overall, plus Jon gets to reload first and he might have some
Teferi's Protection-type answers for the wipe to draw into. Given that a significant reason I did win the resulting game was because I topdecked the only wipe in the deck on the turn I needed it, I think his odds were significantly better against me. I'm fairly sure Jon's deck also includes
Scourge of Valkas and possibly other cards that would allow him to kill James the same turn he kills me, depending on how spirit-of-the-law he's being with his deals.
His board state gave you literally no alternative but ganging up. It sounds like James could have sandbagged that wrath until after you were dead as it basically killed Jon.
Maybe James couldn't have killed John after he drew 12 cards with his dragons even with his wrath. Maybe not. I'm very unaware. But he had that option and you steered him away from it and instead weaponized him towards killing Jon.
To clarify if it wasn't clear already, I didn't tell him to cast the wrath. The first time I knew he had a wrath was when he said "I'm casting
Time Wipe."
I might have said something along the lines of "I think if we don't topdeck a wrath this turn, Jon is going to win the game on his next turn." I dunno, maybe that's manipulative on some level, but my intention was to help them develop some degree of threat assessment/prioritization. A lot of new players will do things like attacking random opponents even when one player is clearly nearing a win - i.e. well, I can't attack through 3 ur-dragons, so I guess I'll smash the other opponent in the face because fewer opponent life points = good for me, which is obviously faulty reasoning when the board state is that skewed. I think it's important to be able to look at a board state and see that, based on the information at hand, the game is essentially 2v1. There was practically nothing James could do at that point that would cause me to target him, and similarly practically nothing I could do should cause him to target me, until Jon was brought down somewhat (given the power level of both our decks - ofc in a higher-powered game there are combos etc that might make another player an even bigger threat than 3-ur-dragons-mcGee, but afaik neither of our decks were remotely capable of anything that explosive, so Jon's board state was several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we had or could develop anytime soon, or possibly ever). It was also to inform Jon how strong his position is, just so HE'S clear about it, because he does frequently go "why are you so threatened by me? All I have is (very powerful board state relatively to everyone else)." And so he doesn't fart around attacking with 1 ur-dragon so he can block with the other ones, just in case he's dumb enough to do that (I don't think he is, but you can never be too sure).
What's your winrate with these guys sitting at now Dirk? Sounds to me like you're unintentionally downplaying your own threat level pretty hard. You're a force multiplier on top of your cards while they're the opposite. You can look at a board state and say who should win if everything is played optimally so you point that out. The thing is no one is playing optimally in your group so the information you're giving out is technically true but in practice is wildly inaccurate. My impression is that James and Jon should basically just kill you at the beginning of every game independent of boardstates if they want to maximize their winrate.
@TheAmericanSpirit Winrate depends somewhat on who's playing and which decks we're playing, but the relevant bit is that it's typically quite high. I don't think it's that different from what it is for LGS play where everyone is playing stronger decks, but it's at least 65% I think. After winning two games that particular night, I lost the third one (primarily from color screw, crappy 90% basics manabase...). At a certain point I am rooting for them to win, but I'm not going to hold back - though I might give them increasingly more advice.
I think it depends on the game state whether you can plausibly make the argument that my information is "wildly inaccurate" based on assumed opponent competence. Jon is a terrible player, but I'm pretty sure even he could figure out how to win with 3 ur-dragons and a miirym. If the game is close enough that plausible misplays could determine who comes out ahead, I usually don't bother saying anything and just leave it up to them. Again, I think the only point at which I said how much of a threat Jon is, was when he started getting huffy about getting targeted. Partly because I didn't want James to feel like he was making a mistake in targeting Jon when he clearly wasn't.
I think if I get deleted from the game at the start, Jon wins 95% of those games against James just based on card power (with these decks, at least). So great for Jon, probably not so much for James. My path is frequently (as somewhat detailed above) to help James stop Jon, then win the 1v1 against him. If James spurns my help, we both just lose.
My opinion is that one of the biggest issues Jon needs to deal with in order to win more often is to stop completely giving up as soon as he encounters setbacks. So many games he just shuts down because his big cool engine got blown up, and if he just sucked it up, dusted himself off, and got back into the game he'd realize that he still has a perfectly reasonable chance to win. I've had games where he concedes, and I'll show him how his hand has all the tools to mount a comeback. But he didn't get to win exactly the way he wanted to with no pushback, so he sulks.
My parents are in town so I had to wait all day to respond to this
![ROFL :rofl:](./images/smilies/4-rofl-fb.png)