Flowchart Thinking

A flowchart player is essentially an extension of the ‘scrub player’ concept typically seen in any competitive game. The simplest definition is this type of player chooses to be so narrow with his actions that it can be summarized with a simple flowchart. Every time something comes up to challenge him, he enters a simplistic thought process and responds in the same way regardless of actual effectiveness. Examples from fighting games, specifically Street Fighter 4, can be seen here and here.

Although the flowchart itself is depicted as a cartoony caricature of many players, it underlies the truth of the matter, that for whatever reason these people are failing to use pattern recognition or any real thought in their gameplay. This type of play is most commonly seen in fast-paced competitive video games, especially with a larger influx of newer players versus more experienced ones. In Magic, this type of play is less obvious due to the limited information and options* available at a given moment. That said, it still exists and is a major detriment to people advancing in skill level.

*To be clear, in Magic you’re very limited in the number of legal options you have in many situations versus say a fighting game, where nearly your entire character’s move set is usable at anytime.

Flowchart thinking affects decisions for which there’s a common answer and people simply follow that answer without thinking about why they should in a given game. You can apply this to the guy who always counters your first spell or the guy who always plays instants on end-step, but it goes a bit deeper than that.

So why is flowchart thinking a bad thing? This type of thinking is an issue, because it leads to a failure of judging the most important question in the game, “Why did I lose?” which can cascade from a single lost game into falling out of contention entirely. This type of thinking is a trap, an excuse to stop thinking critically about aspects of your play because of the belief you’ve already found the correct answer. Certainly there can be specific situations with just one proper answer, but thanks to the complexity of Magic, this is often not the case.

What causes flowchart thinking? Typical reasons include faulty assumptions, stubbornness, belief the opponent is lucky or inexperience against high level competition. One is dead-set on showing that his chosen method works and that any failure of it falls directly on an unforeseen, typically lucky, circumstance intervening. Or if combined with a particularly strong counter, the idea that the opponent’s counter-play / move is simply too broken and shouldn’t exist because it devastates your play so badly. One could easily grasp this part of the concept by going to any Magic forum and looking at the number of people who want X or Y card banned.

For the simplest example of flowchart thinking possible, take the average Red player’s reactions to basic situations.

“Is you’re opponent’s life total below 10?”
Yes: BURN TO THE DOME
No: Hmm… BURN TO THE DOME

“Did your opponent play a mana creature turn 1?”

Yes: BURN IT WITH FIRE

No: Play a guy

“I have a Jackal Pup in play and a Lightning Bolt in hand, does the opponent have a blocker?”

Yes: BOLT IT!

No: Go to life-total question.

The first example is obviously a bit exaggerated, although maybe not if we take MODO into account. Really the second and third examples may seem obvious, but that’s the point. People have convinced themselves it’s always the right move to kill the turn 1 mana accelerator, it’s always proper to destroy a blocker that could trade with your early drop and so on. For many players the biggest issue is they can’t figure out the situations where it isn’t the optimal move to do so and instead default to a singular route every time.

Another recent example and one rather notably pointed out by any number of high-level players is the Mistbind Clique timing issue. For a long span of time, a large quotient of Faeries players would only play Mistbind Clique on the opponent’s upkeep. This was regardless of the idea that people would adapt to this method of attack, since the opponent was always fully untapped and so on. Only casting it during upkeep meant many times the Clique was unsafe to play, but people always did it because they could clearly see the payoff. A virtual Time Walk is huge for a deck like Faeries and everyone knew this, so they convinced themselves that it was always the right thing to do. Opponents in turn upped the amount of instant speed removal they had or spells to sink mana into simply to make this play into a larger risk for the Fae player.

Regardless of these consequences people kept doing it, come hell or high-water; you could usually bet on the Fae player dropping the upkeep Mistbind. What happened at higher levels though were people taking advantage of the 4/4 being a very solid blocker and also the opportunity to synchronize Mistbind with the threat of Cryptic Command. Since people usually attacked first to duck Cryptic Command when facing an open 1UUU, many times they weren’t expecting the 4/4 to come down and smash a creature and potentially tapping them out. Sure, sometimes the result was the same in a sense. They would have the removal spell and Clique would die.

The idea isn’t that playing it on the opponent’s upkeep is necessarily bad, but that if you just act in one specific way all the time, you aren’t giving yourself the full benefits of a card’s power. At some point you aren’t playing with any real strategy, you’re just following the script laid out. In many games, especially with more powerful decks, this will be enough to win. With others though, especially those where the correct decision is often subjective and prone to changing with how much information you have then it becomes a bit of a brick wall to try and bang your head through.

The best way to describe a lot of people who think through every play, even if they do so very quickly and on a subconscious level, are those who described as ‘playing tight’. They don’t allow themselves to fall into the trap of just playing a game they’ve already got running in their head. A good example of this type of attention to detail can be seen when you read some Paulo Vitor (Dance Dance Revolution) reports or if you’ve read ‘One Game’ by Richard Feldman.

So how do you avoid flowchart thinking in the first place? What causes you to be more aware and considerate of your actions than you otherwise would be? Unfortunately I don’t have an amazing solution for you, but for the most part the issue itself seems connected to a few things.

1. Less than full understanding of a match-up

The ultimate goal of Magic in a competitive setting is to win; glad we’re all in agreement there. The goal of testing a specific match and trying to figure out the optimal strategy for it is to realize what the important resource is in the match at its core. What is the opponent doing that let’s them win and how can you best attack it?

In the old days with Red Deck Wins, you had a red deck with actual options available to it. Although in many red matches, the optimal strategy was to maximize damage every turn, others demanded you give up on a large quotient of damage to contain the opponent resource-wise until you could finish him off. Also, due to the nature of creature decks back then,* many times one would have to accept a controlling role until he could maneuver around the opponents larger creatures and more powerful spells. A huge number of RDW players failed in this endeavor each year, while Japanese pros and a few other skilled red players (Patrick Sullivan comes to mind) had continual success because they didn’t make stupid decisions and actively maximized their resources in each match.

If you don’t fully ‘get’ a match-up then you risk making errors because you have the wrong goal in mind.

*Pretty much every aggro deck was aggro-control of some sort and had some notable tricks in its arsenal, making things a lot more interesting than creature vs. removal fights.

2. Lack of caring / awareness

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment: although a good number of you reading articles like this want to qualify for the Pro Tour, the amount of work being put in simply doesn’t match the top tier. This isn’t necessarily a lack of desire as it could simply be a lack of time due to other obligations (job, family, other hobby, etc.) or prioritizing fun over complete domination of opponents. Regardless of reason, you just don’t care as much as someone else when you actually play and you simply do what needs to be done to put up a fight.

Lack of awareness is different from the above; while the above is likely a subconscious issue, this is typically a feeling people know all too well. Awareness of what you’re doing or even what you want to be doing is typically impacted by being tired, going on tilt or even just a distraction in your life. Mentally you start to drift off and you don’t really want to put the effort in of thinking about slinging cards 100%, you just want to play and finish whatever your doing. The less you care or attention you bring to the table, the more your mind automatically sinks back into flowchart mode, attempting to find easy answers to the questions the board poses to you.

3. The correct decision and probabilities

For most people it just makes the game easier to grasp when they break gameplay down and find an option in a given situation that’s typically right. When all probabilities say that’s a correct decision and you trust that, then I can see sticking to it to save mental energy. You’ve figured out your ‘puzzle’. However, many situations in the game have shifting probabilities and there isn’t a generally correct answer. Instead, it stands as a set of answers, one of which is correct and you’ll just always mark D because it worked the last time. People associate a lot of success with past actions and tend to overvalue their experiences over a small sample size, as a result you get a lot of flowcharts in situations with a number of seemingly valid options and you get a lot of incorrect answers.

4. Flowcharts breed more flowcharts

In fighting games there’s a reason that so-called flowchart players aren’t just on the bottom rung in rankings and you find them at all levels of play. Fact of the matter is this style of play works! Certainly it doesn’t work all the time, or at very high levels of play, but there’s a large quantity of players that rate from OK to good and will lose to this type of play. As I said earlier, just because an option may not be the BEST one doesn’t mean it qualifies as a BAD one.

What happens in Magic has also been explained somewhat by Patrick Chapin’s article, “Information Cascades”, but in this case I’m referring specifically to general plays. People get certain ideas in their head from hearing about what good players do or watching who they perceive to be the best locals are or they follow what’s popular internet strategy-wise. You end up with players who end-step every instant for no true gain, automatically keep weak hands because it meets some inane mana-spells ratio, always play spells post-combat and try to bluff every land in hand like they were imitating Matt Damon from Rounders.

I’m not always the clearest on theory articles, so I’m going to stop here and let everyone take it in before bothering to write anything more on the subject. People always ask what the takeaway is behind X or Y theory and so I’ll preemptively answer that. The takeaway here is that you should apply critical thought before you make your actions. You have so much more time to make decisions in Magic compared to the vast majority of competitive games that it’s rather boggling to observe. You don’t have to be from the Wafo-Tapa school of glacial speed, but at least reviewing what you’re about to do would be a good start and, I bet, would go a long way toward not blundering into an obviously wrong play.

Josh Silvestri

Email me at: joshsilvestriATgmailDOTcom

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