Automatic Magic

Have you ever been tired after a long day at work, and have gotten halfway home without thinking about it? Perhaps you've gotten showered, dressed and your coffee made without being properly awake. Our brains are wonderful things - when we set a habit in motion, we don't need to actively think about it - we can go on auto pilot and focus our attention on something else.

Likewise in Magic, the more you do something in a certain way, the less you'll have to think about doing it. This frees up brain capacity to do something else. That is, the more you do the simple things, the less you have to think about them, and the more you can focus on the complex board states and big decisions.

If you've ever watched coverage of the Pro Tour, you see players make complex decisions when the stakes are high without a thought, where I would be totally confused about the best line of play. They are able to understand enough about their deck and their opponents to quickly assess the board state and make the next move that fits with their plan, whatever that plan might be. Repetition and learning the game has taken them to the point that they don't need to focus on the basic pieces of the game, but can focus on the more complex parts.

However, because your decision making isn't engaged when you're acting automatically, you can make silly mistakes such as missing a trigger, assuming you can play another land in a turn, or attacking with your big creature that fought another creature this turn and it dying due to it being blocked, as you've forgotten about the damage already marked on it.

Automaticity is a really useful concept to get your head around in Magic - to understand the best way to practise, as well as recognise when your brain has gone into automatic mode and you need to stop skipping past automatic parts to make vital changes to your gameplay to get the most benefit.

As a newer player, dipping your toe into FNM level magic can be really intimidating. I found something that really confused me was remembering the steps and phases of a turn. Playing We can play more magic to get past that, and you should, but you can also use automatic memory and learning techniques to step things up a notch.

Say, for example, Elspeth is playing FNM standard, and the deck she's running has Starfield of Nyx. She's got a Pacifism in her graveyard which she wants to fetch out to shut down Ob Nilixis' Ulamog, but she forgot that the Upkeep step comes before the Draw step. She drew a card before saying that she was going to fetch her Pacifism.  As the ability to fetch the enchantment from the graveyard is a may ability, once she's drawn her card, she's forfeited the ability to get Pacifism back from the graveyard.

Crap.

Elspeth is running on autopilot. She's acting automatically, drawing the card and moving into the turn. She's used to doing this every turn so she isn't really engaging her brain when she does so. However, in this case, the automatic reaction (draw a card at the start of your turn) is causing a problem for her: she's forgetting her trigger.

So how can Elspeth avoid this? She picks up a dice and puts it on top of her library. It sits there as a visual reminder for her that before she draws the card, she needs to engage her conscious thought processes - in this case put her Starfield trigger on the stack and get Pacifism back before Ulamog nicks 20 more of her cards.

There's a bunch of tricks you can use to override automatic reactions, and if you want to know more please check out AE Marling's Foolproof Magic series, as he has lots of practical hacks to stop you from making silly mistakes.

However there's something else going on here, which is Elspeth also struggles to remember the steps and phases of a turn. Halfway through the game, she's neutralised Ulamog with Pacifism, but now she wants to use a combat trick to attack in withCitadel Castellan. Her opponent has a blocker, but she has an Awaken the Bear in hand which will allow her to punch through her opponent's blocker and trigger Citadel Castellan's Renown.

She knows that she needs to wait until the very last moment to play her Awaken the Bear, but she's nervous about known just when that moment might be. She knows that if she understood the steps and phases of the turn automatically, she would be more confident in planning out her line of play, and more focussed on anticipating her opponent's next move while pushing her game plan forward. 

In the past she's been pulled up for getting thing out of proper order and casting spells in the wrong time in her turn by her opponent or a judge, she gets flustered and on tilt. She wants to make sure she can automatically know what is the right time for her to cast sorceries or activate her combat tricks.

What Elspeth needs is some homework and preparation, to help her recognise the steps and phases of the turn, and identify the best moment to fire off her combat trick. The more she plays, the more automatic her understanding of the game will become; however she can speed up the process. She might choose to say the steps and phases ofthe turn in her head as they happen, using a small cheat sheet to remind her until she's confident and the knowledge is cemented. Elspeth might also display the steps and phases of the turn in a prominent place, (I recommend the toilet wall) where she will see it on a regular basis. One of the best paths to automatic knowledge is to test yourself - you're going to take this stuff in 50% more effectively.

Over time, without even thinking about it, Elspeth's not having to think through exactly when she needs to play her Awaken the Bear - she automatically and instinctively knows that it comes after blockers are declared.

Next time you finish a game, have a think about whether you had automatic actions that you should have ignored, or whether you would like to become more automatic in other areas, and see how you can make your autopilot work for you.