"Play What You Like" — The Detriment and Destiny of Deck Feel
Written by ForceofPhil
"You have to play out every single round with your full heart, no matter how badly things are going."
—Reid Duke, Magic: The Gathering Hall of Famer
I think about Magic card interactions a lot. Being a Miracles believer requires reaching for corner cases and improbabilities because an infinite game is bound to encounter them.
I clamor to counterpunch the stack when my opponent cracks a fetchland. I have an unending urge to untap and uppercut with a Counterbalance, a tendency to Terminus, an everlasting Entreat to Angels.
I talk about Magic theory a lot. How Legacy decks are squeezed by the unfair freedoms of a confused goatee and a parched landscape, how blue collars and degenerates alike flick faeries in your slumbering ear, and modern sensibilities power up the cards instead of the players.
Despite the Sisyphian steepness of the Legacy landscape, I still believe. I play what I like.
What it do.
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Play What You Like
You've undoubtedly been told this, from pro players to content creators to car mates en route to the event you care about too much, rightly so. You bring entire long boxes filled with the cards you're not going to play, because, ultimately, you're going to play what you like.
Decks have feel. I've slung fire. I've flipped my library for breakfast and intentionally by accident. I've climbed beanstalks, swelled storms, and worn The One Ring to rule them all. I've Anor'ed flames, channeled dragons' rage, uniced Marit Lage, and brewed better than any witch or warlock. One of those might glow your soul, but to me, they all feel terrible.
Not that any of those strategies are terrible — well, maybe most of my brews are — but they all feel terrible. They don't resonate with me. If those fictitious combinations of ostensibly magical cardboard could respond, I imagine they'd say the same in kind.
Before each major event for the past however many years, I've said that I would play a competitively viable deck rather than Miracles. Miracles hasn't been competitively feasible since the banning of Sensei's Divining Top in 2017. The fragility of Miracles' reactive structure ensures it won't ever be again, barring a near-functional reprint of a recursive effect that can manipulate the top of the library.
"I'll probably cast Dark Ritual," I've said time and time again, knowing it wouldn't come to fruition. My friends know the only assured ritual is me talking about playing something other than Miracles before inevitably deciding if there should be three or four Terminus in my 75 the night before the tournament. I'm a scientist in the lab, sitting at the desk in the hotel room at three in the morning, staring at an empty petri dish.
Despite this happening in the lead-up to every event, none of those friends have ever asked during or after, "Why didn't you play ?" Everything else feels terrible. They knew I would play what I like.
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Devotion
There's a feature of an unplayable strategy with believers. The UWx Discord, the Miracles chat, and others are hubs of control players who navigate Legacy's combo/tempo waters, attempting not to devolve into the muck they contend against or the preconification that defines Wizards of the Coast's (WotC) modern sensibilities.
They believe in the Control as a macrotype. Among them are those who still look to the dark clouds above, believing they'll part, light will cast through, and a beam will obliterate the opposition as a choir of angels assesses the aftermath. Believing makes them feel something.
Some might suggest I'm twisting the truth or reframing the glory days. The high school peak, or the lone time when you felt on top of the world, before the world tethered you back to the ground. After all, Miracles was once considered the best deck, and its banning was not without the results to support it. Truth requires proof of concept; otherwise, it's fiction, lies, or snake oil.
"Remember when..." is not uncommon amongst Miracles conversations. Equally is the "Could you even imagine it now..." Though typically said in jest or in disbelief that the format could handle it, I could imagine it now. I think a lot about how to prove the concept.
The Eternal Durdle
Zeus damned Sisyphus to the eternal punishment of rolling a boulder up a steep hill only for it to roll back down when he neared the top. An Eternal Durdle, one could say.
But what would happen if Sisyphus overcame the odds and, one time, successfully pushed the boulder to the top or lurched it over the summit and watched it barrel down the other side?
That'd be a miracle.
The Infinite Game
I've spoken of infinite game theory before: the goal of perpetuating the game rather than ending it; the model for a true Control strategy. What is not necessarily apparent is the game beyond the 20 life points and 50-minute round clock.
There are two requirements to play an infinite game: the will and the resources to play. As Reid Duke said, you have to play with your full heart, no matter how bad things are going. You have to sit at the empty desk in the hotel room at three in the morning. You have to believe the boulder can reach the summit. You have to play what you like.
That's pretty much the Miracles experience. We worked extremely hard and we won half of our matches.
—Reid Duke, Magic: The Gathering Hall of Famer
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Featured image: Sensei's Divining Top by Michael Sutfin