At some point during the first year or so of Magic’s existence, the word came down that players were strictly forbidden to take notes during a game. Curiously, the most vociferous argument against this rule came not from highly competitive players who wanted to leverage the power of notes for victory, but from people who liked writing tournament reports. It turns out that it’s incredibly difficult to write a report when you need to recreate eight or so rounds strictly from memory.
Since those early days, we’ve received a number of helpful changes to the tournament rules. You can take notes during play, you can place reminders on your deck, and with the latest change you can even refer to a sideboarding plan in between games if you like. These are nice changes, as they let us apply some tools that reduce our cognitive burden and let us concentrate on the actual play of the game.
As a consequence, I’m a little confused that many players don’t avail themselves of note-taking or any of these other tools that make it easier to just play.
Standard operating procedure
If you look around online, you’ll find a couple nice articles discussing standard operating procedure (SOP) in Magic. Your SOP covers how you do things, including everything from getting to the venue with time to spare all the way through how you shuffle your cards. Here’s my SOP for PTQ or higher-level events, in brief.
The evening before the tournament I put my deck together and make sure it’s in decent sleeves. I set that out with some dice, any tokens I’ll need for the deck, a playmat, and a notebook or notepad. I also like to have a deck list printed out ahead of time. Having this all set up means no rushing in the morning, and that I’m not begging my way around the venue for those last few cards, and then hustling to fill out my deck list as round one begins.
During one of the PTQs in the last Standard season, my first opponent was rushing to fill out his deck registration sheet as the first round announcements were being made. Knowing his deck list certainly helped me decide on whether or not to keep my opening seven.
There’s a kind of cachet to rushing at the last minute, just getting your deck together, and then going on to win the tournament. Of course, as Nicholas Taleb would remind us, we only hear from the rare cases who won while underprepared and not so much from the many people who lost because they rushed. Personally, I don’t like stress. If I came to game, then I came to game in a relaxed, good mood with a bunch of materials I prepared the night before.
Once I’m in a match, I always start by shuffling my deck and doing a final pile shuffle to count out my cards. I’ve never lost by handing over a 59 or 61-card deck, and don’t plan to. I also include a pile shuffle to count my opponent’s deck as I shuffle it. I have yet to Game Loss someone for presenting an incorrect deck, but I have run into the occasional 61 and 62-card builds. During the previous Standard, a 61-card count was often enough to put the opponent on Five-Color Control, and in other cases, a higher card count can cue you to an inexperienced player.
During the games, I take notes. I track changes in life totals as well as contents of revealed hands, random reminders, and anything else that I think will help me out.
The point of doing all of these things, of having all of these SOPs, is that it means I just don’t have to think about things other than playing the game. It lets me start the tournament alert and happy, and means that I don’t have to waste time remembering things I could simply have written on a piece of paper next to me.
Let’s look at some of these elements in more detail:
Tokens aren’t just an aesthetic choice
I’m perplexed by my fellow players who bring a deck that they know generates tokens, yet don’t have any kind of reasonable item to represent that token. If you’re running Bitterblossom and tearing up little pieces of paper to represent the Faeries, you’re doing something wrong. There are two big reasons to make sure you have a nice pack of cards or plastic dinosaurs to represent whatever tokens your deck generates.
First, tokens that are distinguishable by type and that can show tapped or untapped status prevent game-state ambiguities that in turn lead to messy rulings that waste your time, stress you out, and may lose you a game. During a Lorwyn Block PTQ, a match next to me came to a crashing halt when it turned out that the Kithkin player was using the exact same token for both Spectral Procession’s spirits and Cloudgoat Ranger’s Kithkin. This led to an ambiguous blocking choice and a follow-up confused combat step and, finally, a judge investigating for ten minutes. I have no idea how that turned out, but the break clearly derailed both players. How well do you remember your game plan after a ten-minute pause?
Second, time you spend trying to find some tokens during the game is time you’re not spending playing the game. You’re distracted and may lose track of the game. You’re also wasting time in the round. If either issue leads you away from a win, you’re going to feel awfully dumb that you didn’t just grab some tokens or rule insert cards and keep a pile of them handy for your game.
My preference is to use fun tokens, with visually distinct variations for each token my deck generates. Lately, I’ve been running decks that can make beasts, soldiers, and gargoyles, so I need to have three types of tokens handy.
For anyone who’s watched me play and asked, “What are those?”, my current tokens are Citadel Combat Cards, circa 1989.
Using reminders
Courtesy of the Future Sight pacts, we can now place reminders on the top of our decks so that we don’t miss upkeep effects. Even in a post-pact Standard, there can be any number of reasons that we might want to pause during our upkeep to take care of something. We’re also going into another Extended season, so it’s not out of the question that you’re going to find yourself running Slaughter Pact yet again in the near future.
I know some players think it’s a scrub move to put a marker on top of your deck. At Pro Tour Hollywood, Charles Gindy made a very nice play with Slaughter Pact to kill off Sygg, then placed a marker on top of his deck. When an audience member sitting next to me called Gindy an “amateur,” Zvi Mowshowitz turned around in his chair and said, “When you’re playing for $40,000, you put the marker on the deck.”
It may be exciting and challenging to play with a handicap, but it’s also kind of dumb. If you lose because you could have used a reminder but didn’t, you’re suddenly that football player who injures himself not during the game, but during his endzone celebration.
Take note
How do you track your life total? With a twenty-sided die? Do you let your opponent track both life totals? Both options are suboptimal, and the second one actually violates the Magic tournament rules. We have a lot of power available to us by dint of our ability to take notes, so it’s worth getting into the practice of using them. Before I go into how I like to use notes, here’s the text from the January 1, 2010 edition of the Magic tournament rules concerning notes (under section 2.9, Taking Notes):
Players are allowed to take written notes during a match and may refer to those notes while that match is in progress. At the beginning of a match, each player’s note sheet must be empty and must remain visible throughout the match. Players do not have to explain or reveal notes to other players. Judges may ask to see a player’s notes and/or request that the player explain his or her notes. Players may not refer to outside notes during games. This includes notes from previous matches.
Between games, players may refer to a brief set of notes made before the match. They are not required to reveal these notes to their opponents. These notes must be removed from the play area before the beginning of the next game. Excessive quantities of notes (more than a sheet or two) are not allowed and may be penalized as slow play.
Players and spectators (exception: authorized press) may not make notes while drafting or registering a card pool. However, they are allowed to do so when constructing a deck.
The most basic thing you should be doing with your game notes is tracking life total changes and why they occurred. This means more than just writing 20, then crossing it out and writing 16, then crossing it out and writing 18, and so forth. Instead, you want to actually write in the changes while tagging them with the source. That might look like this:
20
-4 2x pumped Lynx
16
+2 Gladehart
18
This is nice if you want to reconstruct your game for a tournament report, but it’s also an important element in avoiding incorrect life total changes and winning those occasional disputes over reality. This is especially key whenever we’re playing with fetch lands, as those incremental points of life loss can mean the difference between winning and losing and are really easy to miss.
This is also why it’s a good idea to read out both life totals every time you’re marking a life total change. The above sequence might sound like this:
“Lynx hits me. Sixteen to twenty.”
“Cast Gladehart. Play a land. Gladehart triggers, life totals at eighteen to twenty.”
Assuming your opponent is still at twenty life, of course.
Just as I recommend tracking life total changes in this way, I also recommend tracking game state changes. My own interest in reconstructing games after the fact led me to start noting things like, “Blightning kills Nissa,” but you want to track this information as well so you can demonstrate that, for example, that Blightning did not deal three damage to you. Similarly, just scribbling “Deathmark kills Knight” means you’re rather less likely to have a future dispute over which creatures should or shouldn’t be dead. You especially want to note “invisible” state changes, such as an Elspeth having been cashed in for her ultimate ability, since these abilities have no other marker that they’re in effect.
All this discussion of disputes may make it sound like I’m expecting us all to run into a parade of cheaters. I’m not. However, any two people can easily disagree on reality when it comes to a combinatorially complex game like Magic. Like the token example above, we want to make our lives as easy as possible. Why rack your brain trying to recall where damage did or didn’t come from when you can just scribble “Catacombs” on that -1 and know?
Having the ability to write notes also gives us some additional in-game options. Did your opponent ambush you with an unexpected card in game one? Go ahead and write the card name across the top of your notepad as you go into game two. I like to head my notepads with reminders about cards that I think are critical in the matchup – basically, the stuff I want to play around. You might be concerned that this means your opponent will know what you count as important, but if they’re spending that much time reading your upside-down notes, they’re not concentrating on the game.
I also like to record when each game ends just in case my opponent ends up taking forever to handle their sideboarding. It hasn’t come up yet, but if someone decides to take six minutes to sideboard, shuffle, and present, I’m going to call a judge and point at that time on my notepad.
Finally, remember that your notepad only needs to be blank at the beginning of the match. Did you scout your opponent’s deck and see some key cards? Draw your opening seven, then write those cards on your notepad. Once your match has started, it’s game on and you can write pretty much whatever you want on your notepad – it doesn’t just have to contain current game state information.
Those sideboarding plans
The change that allows written sideboarding plans is recent enough that I don’t have extensive experience with it. The window for sideboarding, shuffling up and presenting is narrow enough that you don’t want to spend a lot of time consulting notes when you really should be swapping cards in and out. You should also have spent enough time practicing with your deck that you have a good, intuitive feel for how to switch cards around depending on the matchup.
On the other hand, why not?
Given that we’re allowed to have sideboarding notes and that even the best players find themselves locking up mentally from time to time, there’s no reason not to just have some sideboarding notes along for the ride. If you never need to consult them, that’s great. However, you might find yourself, like Andre Coimbra at Worlds this year, pulling out a little piece of paper to remind yourself how your deck is meant to work in a specific matchup.
If this feels amateurish to you, I can only refer you back to the Zvi Mowshowitz quote above. Losing is pretty much always more amateurish than anything else.
More structure, better play
The overarching goal of all this structure that we can build into our SOP is to remove cognitive load. The less random trivia we’re trying to float in our mind, the more we can focus on game play elements such as the game state, our opponent’s actions, our cards in hand, the opponent’s demeanor, and so forth. It may seem like a bother to scribble down a word next to a life total change instead of just marking the change, but the ability to shortcut a potential disagreement over life totals by just reading the causes from your notes makes it totally worthwhile.
In other words, the effort we put into developing these structures pays off in letting us simply sit and play our best possible game of Magic. Regardless of what mix of “fun” and “winning” constitutes your goal for a given game of Magic, that goal is best served by setting things up so that you can just play the game.
great article.
I see waaaay to many people making these types of mistakes
especially ones with tokens
and hoping that their opponent will keep track of life totals
its pretty pathetic actually.
Also i used SB nots during a few matches during states
very helpful indeed
great article
Comment by kev genocide — December 22, 2009 @ 9:19 pm
Great article, it is very helpful and articulate. However, I expected to not like this article based on its title, and I think it is misleading. If I understand correctly, the whole goal is to spend time more thinking about what matters, and less time thinking about mundane things like pact upkeep payments.
I know a title needs to be catchy, but aren’t you technically promoting thinking the same (limited) amount, but just applying that focus to aspects of the game that you wouldn’t have had the capacity to pay attention to before?
As I said, great article, but your title suggests that your article belongs in the recent series of articles about playing “Zen” or “Flow” magic when it obviously does not.
Comment by Jeff G. — December 22, 2009 @ 10:49 pm
i always make sure to have tokens of some sort. But i pretty much only make Soldiers and Birds. so i use Stormtroopers and TIE Fighters from the old Decipher CCG. But at higher up events i tend to want to use the Official Tokens that come in packs so there is absolutely no chance the TIE Fighter on the board is mistaken for somethings its not.
But nice article. Very informative and great for pretty much any game you want to play.
Comment by Jake — December 22, 2009 @ 11:29 pm
Tried the SB notes thing. It honest to god felt like cheating as someone who’s been in this thing since the beginning.
I tend to want to get creative and do oddball things a lot. The notes kept me honest and I feel like I sideboarded more correctly than I would have otherwise.
Magic is a game of TONS of complex decisions. ANYTHING you can do to take the layer of abstractions out of it is beneficial.
To that end I only use the PRECISE tokens that I need - the printed ones from packs. I don’t want to have to remember anything. My memory is horrible. Its amazing that I even know when my own birthday is, but if my token says 1/1 Black Faerie Rogue token, then I know it’s a 1/1 Black Faerie Rogue Token. If it says flying, it flies. I don’t have to remember.
Now, maybe the godly of you all with big fat working memories can remember all kinds of stuff, but I can’t. I just know how to play a tight game and anything that pulls my attention away from that for even a second is a detriment to my game.
Comment by Kelly B Reid - www.quietspeculation.com — December 23, 2009 @ 12:26 am
I agree with most of this, but I find writing “2x pumped Lynx” to be a pretty significant distraction, of exactly the kind you’re saying to avoid. I tend to confirm life totals with my opponent fairly frequently, and life total disputes (that aren’t resolved quickly and definitively) come up very rarely.
Comment by Phil Y — December 23, 2009 @ 12:50 am
Maybe so, but on the other hand, it’s nice to be able to reconstruct the game later. I know I don’t have the memory to look back after a match and critique myself, but it’s one of the best routes to improvement.
Comment by Deuce — December 23, 2009 @ 2:03 am
Great article!
My favorite kind of disputes are the ones where both people actually agree, but don’t realise it.
“I have you at eighteen.”
“No, all I did was crack two fetches so I just lost two total!”
“No, but you went to 19 on your first turn, then 18… oh.”
“Oh.”
…
Comment by Boland — December 23, 2009 @ 2:24 am
when you pile count your opponents deck and it is over 60, do you ask the opponent or call a judge? what is your SOP on deck counts???
Comment by Stan — December 23, 2009 @ 5:13 am
The last constructed PTQ I went to, I used a printed copy of my sideboard as my sideboard notes. It allowed me to shuffle all 15 in and didn’t give any clues to my opponent aside from sideboard cards I may have. No ‘what to side in and out’, just the full sideboard.
I was able to fold the small piece of paper so it stood up facing away from my opponent, making it much harder for them to take advantage of my additional information I had written.
If you are not taking advantage of these types of legal assistance, you’re short changing yourself. You don’t get a special prize for playing without any notes, just like you don’t get a special medal for being able to drive with a covered windshield.
Comment by Fenaris — December 23, 2009 @ 5:31 am
@Stan: if you count your opponent’s deck and it’s over 60 cards…you do nothing seeing as there is no maximum deck size. If it’s under sixty (or 40 if you’re at a limited event), then yeah, call a judge.
Comment by zealot452 — December 23, 2009 @ 7:26 am
If you count your opp’s deck and it’s 60, you then ask your opp “How many cards are supposed to be in your deck?”
That eliminates the possibility of them lying to you if you just ask “61?”
Comment by Odi Et Amo — December 23, 2009 @ 7:51 am
@zealot452: Not entirely true. If you count 61 cards, it is still possible that your opponent has shuffled in a card from his/her sideboard. Like Odi Et Amo said, you want to enquire about deck size in this instance. If they reply 60, and you count 61, definitely call a judge. Also, you can ask about deck size before even pile shuffling.
Comment by jb — December 23, 2009 @ 8:31 am
In Development - Think Less and Play Better…
Your story has been summoned to the battlefield - Trackback from MTGBattlefield…
Trackback by MTGBattlefield — December 23, 2009 @ 8:38 am
Thanks for the article. I should start doing this. I ran into an issue at FNM last week where my opponent and I disagreed about how much life I was at. Having those notes would have resolved the whole thing.
Comment by Jack — December 23, 2009 @ 8:54 am
Thanks for all the comments, everybody.
@Zealot - You do what Odi et Amo said and ask the opponent how many cards they think their deck has. Every time this has come up so far in my life, they’ve said it correctly (even the dude running the 62! card Goblins deck in an Extended PTQ), but if their number doesn’t match what you’re holding, it’s judge time.
@Kelly - It’s honestly probably best to use the precise tokens, but that’s where my aesthetic sense does take over, so I use tokens that are mnemonic, if not precise. I’m tickled by having my Elspeth make Space Marines or little Imperial tanks, so that’s what she makes.
@Phil - Definitely Your Mileage May Vary territory, but I don’t find those notes distracting, and they often help me stay focused on the actual game that’s happened. It can even be handy to be able to look back to one or two turns earlier to see how your opponent has been playing (”Okay, they keep attacking with Lynx and nothing else…”).
Comment by Alex — December 23, 2009 @ 9:42 am
Although this is a pretty worn topic, I think it’s a good one to repeat and you did a good job at doing so!
But!
This is the second time a channelfireball writer goes against another writer on the subject of keeping life-totals. In one of my favourite articles on this site, Tim (and LSV in the comment-section) advices AGAINST the procedure you’re recommending http://strategy.channelfireball.com/featured-articles/the-dope-show-why-you-aren%E2%80%99t-winning/
Personally, I’m on Tim’s side of this debate as I think it will be relevant so rarely that it’s hardly worth the effort to write those excessive notes. As is, I think it’s a big enough of a distraction to write life totals down (although I do so of course).
Comment by Summa — December 23, 2009 @ 10:05 am
@Summa - I take it as a good sign that we disagree over these things.
That said, I find this level of minimal note-taking keeps me focused on things (Magic games, work meetings, conference talks). I think this is a clear YMMV area. If notes keep you focused, then you get to be more focused /and/ have a valuable gameplay record. If notes distract your tremendously, then it may be too high a cost. If notes exact no cost and impart no focus benefit, then I think you still want to take notes for all those reality disagreements.
If you watch the pace of Luis’s play, it’s clear that he has no time for notes (and this is why narrating to the audience in his draft videos leads to him making errors he wouldn’t otherwise make). My pace for play is not quite so brisk, so notes keep me on-track rather than pushing me off. It all comes down to attention styles and (as always) what works for each of us.
Comment by Alex — December 23, 2009 @ 10:10 am
Guess that makes sense
Comment by Summa — December 23, 2009 @ 11:04 am
great article, Alex.. some people may not like pieces like this as they feel they have been overdone, but I really you did an excellent job of putting this one together.
i always keep paper notes, but adding the reason why life total changes is something i should start again, especially since i plan on writing tournament reports this coming Ext season…
great article! keep up the good work!
Comment by Jeremy Fuentes — December 23, 2009 @ 11:14 am
@Alex What are you focusing on when you make these notes though? Knowing which creatures brought you from 20 to 16 is generally irrelevant for your future decisions. It goes against the “focus on what matters” message. I can understand if it’s part of a larger plan to use that info after the game for analysis or writing, but just in the context of a particular game, after you’ve been hit by three creatures, you’re better off focusing on what your opponent is doing post-combat.
I’m all for taking notes for relevant info though, like tricks you’ve seen in a previous game, cards you know are in your opponent’s hand, etc. Those things actually affect your game plan.
Comment by Phil Y — December 23, 2009 @ 2:27 pm
@Phil - I think writing down your life total is completely “something that matters” because when your opponent Bolts you when you’re at four but you’re actually at three because you forgot about that fetch, you’re going to feel pretty silly. Every bit of damage is relevant. Maybe not right this second, but four turns from now, after many heated combat phases, it might be.
To everyone else with the “distraction” argument - you don’t have to write an on-the-spot feature match report. Use abbreviations or initials for sources. Chances are pretty good you’re only going to be taking damage from a few different sources, so you’re rarely going to have to write out full descriptions.
Clear life totals, proper counters, and upkeep reminders are a simple way to save yourself a much *bigger* distraction: stopping the game because nobody’s clear on what’s what. Or worse, having to call a judge to sort out the situation. And even in that case, the guy with the notes is going to have a much better argument than the guy who showed up with a spindown.
Comment by Rick — December 23, 2009 @ 3:18 pm
@Rick What? Of course you should write down your life totals. It’s just that four turns from now, after many heated combat phases, it doesn’t matter whether it was a Steppe Lynx or something else that hit you from 20 to 16. It just matters that you had gone to 16.
You can avoid life total disputes by confirming life totals with your opponent upon changes, like “you go to 16?”.
Comment by Phil Y — December 23, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
It very well *might* matter, and I’d rather err on the side of caution.
Seriously, it takes two seconds to make a shorthand note to yourself about what attacked you. I’m not going to throw a game that matters to my memory when I have the ability to write things down. It might come in handy, say, after a game, if my opponent accuses me of being shifty when I actually wasn’t.
Comment by Rick — December 23, 2009 @ 4:41 pm
I used to take such notes during games (about what causes life loss) and such then I got lazy
I guess I should start it up again…
Very nice article, though. It’s always good to read stuff like this once in a while. Keeps us grounded.
Comment by Lauren Lee — December 23, 2009 @ 5:57 pm
I think the issue is how good your shorthand is.
If you don’t already have, like, a glossary in your brain for each card in Magic and appropriate abbr’s for each, it actually is WORK to try to figure out a good shorthand while you’re playing.
I think my brain just… isn’t good for that kind of thing. Bleh.
Comment by Lauren Lee — December 23, 2009 @ 6:03 pm
I know what works for me personally, and I would find it distracting to mark why life totals changed, especially since just the numbers usually allow me to recreate the changes if necessary. I think Alexander should definitely be doing what he is doing though, since the whole key is finding what works best for you.
I also rarely bring specific tokens, even if I’m playing a deck with Bitterblossom or the like, since I prefer to use the empty extra sleeves that are always in my sideboard. Sometimes even just having a bunch of tokens gives your opponents clues to what deck you are playing, so be careful of making that public information.
I liked this article, and agree with the conclusions, if not necessarily the specific procedures (again, which will vary from person to person).
Comment by lsv — December 23, 2009 @ 6:11 pm
[...] did quite well, though, so you can be happy. For the record, here’s the deck that I (in line with my own advice) had sleeved up and ready to go the night before I learned I wasn’t [...]
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