Hmmm… This reminds me of a time I was trying to decide what Magic deck to play in an online tournament...
There was the one popular deck, Psychatog, that everyone said was the best, and the pet deck, Clerics, that I designed myself and liked a lot. When I tried playing against myself, the Psychatog deck won a lot. I threw deck after deck against it, but it beat everything. I didn’t really trust these results because, when playing against myself, I know everything both players know, which would bias the results in favor of Psychatog because it would be unusually good at exploiting this information, but the results of the test games were so lopsided that it shouldn’t matter. It seemed as though if I wanted to do as well as possible in the tournament, the right thing to do would be to play the popular Psychatog deck.
Now, I could go through a laundry list of reasons why, in theory, I’d be better off playing a deck that wasn’t that one: people will be prepared to play against it and will make fewer mistakes, I don’t have that much practice with it in real games, etc., but all that assumes that my alternative deck was actually good enough to win games at all against the deck I expected to be the most popular one among the other tournament players. Which, as I had just proven to myself, it couldn’t.
The thing is, though, the actual bottom line was that I just hated the Psychatog deck and couldn’t stand the thought of spending six or seven hours playing it in a tournament that night. So I said “screw it, I’m going to enjoy myself” and played my “bad” Clerics deck, fully expecting to do poorly. What actually did ended up happening is that I got the most unearned tournament win in the history of all unearned tournament wins. Several of my opponents had technical problems or otherwise couldn’t continue on in the tournament, so I made the cut to top 8 on the back of wins I didn’t earn followed by intentional draws. I got lucky in the quarterfinals and semifinals because my opponents were playing a deck that Clerics actually was good at beating, and then I lost in the finals, went to sleep, and woke up to discover that my final opponent had been retroactively disqualified for lying to the judges about an incident in the quarterfinals, so I was declared the winner and was awarded the first place prize.
What’s even crazier was what happened in the tournament the following week. After my “win”, I kept warning everyone that my results were a total fluke (which was true) and that my deck was actually terrible, but when next week’s tournament came around, I made a few minor changes and played Clerics, once again expecting to do poorly. What happened this time was that I won five straight matches—by actually beating opponents at Magic—and then took two intentional draws, giving me my second top 8 appearance in a row, but that’s not the crazy part. The actual crazy part is that, after my five round winning streak, I was one of only two players that had gone undefeated—and the other undefeated player had copied and played my “winning” Clerics deck from the previous week!
Hmmm… This reminds me of a time I was trying to decide what Magic deck to play in an online tournament...
There was the one popular deck, Psychatog, that everyone said was the best, and the pet deck, Clerics, that I designed myself and liked a lot. When I tried playing against myself, the Psychatog deck won a lot. I threw deck after deck against it, but it beat everything. I didn’t really trust these results because, when playing against myself, I know everything both players know, which would bias the results in favor of Psychatog because it would be unusually good at exploiting this information, but the results of the test games were so lopsided that it shouldn’t matter. It seemed as though if I wanted to do as well as possible in the tournament, the right thing to do would be to play the popular Psychatog deck.
Now, I could go through a laundry list of reasons why, in theory, I’d be better off playing a deck that wasn’t that one: people will be prepared to play against it and will make fewer mistakes, I don’t have that much practice with it in real games, etc., but all that assumes that my alternative deck was actually good enough to win games at all against the deck I expected to be the most popular one among the other tournament players. Which, as I had just proven to myself, it couldn’t.
The thing is, though, the actual bottom line was that I just hated the Psychatog deck and couldn’t stand the thought of spending six or seven hours playing it in a tournament that night. So I said “screw it, I’m going to enjoy myself” and played my “bad” Clerics deck, fully expecting to do poorly. What actually did ended up happening is that I got the most unearned tournament win in the history of all unearned tournament wins. Several of my opponents had technical problems or otherwise couldn’t continue on in the tournament, so I made the cut to top 8 on the back of wins I didn’t earn followed by intentional draws. I got lucky in the quarterfinals and semifinals because my opponents were playing a deck that Clerics actually was good at beating, and then I lost in the finals, went to sleep, and woke up to discover that my final opponent had been retroactively disqualified for lying to the judges about an incident in the quarterfinals, so I was declared the winner and was awarded the first place prize.
What’s even crazier was what happened in the tournament the following week. After my “win”, I kept warning everyone that my results were a total fluke (which was true) and that my deck was actually terrible, but when next week’s tournament came around, I made a few minor changes and played Clerics, once again expecting to do poorly. What happened this time was that I won five straight matches—by actually beating opponents at Magic—and then took two intentional draws, giving me my second top 8 appearance in a row, but that’s not the crazy part. The actual crazy part is that, after my five round winning streak, I was one of only two players that had gone undefeated—and the other undefeated player had copied and played my “winning” Clerics deck from the previous week!