Magic, Fantasy Baseball, and How David Beats Goliath

This article will have a lot of information on fantasy baseball, some of which some of you might just not care about. If you really want to pass on it, search for “how awesome I am at fantasy baseball” and start reading there.

I’ve been mulling this topic over for a while, but I haven’t yet figured out where to begin. I’d like to be able to say that playing Magic made me better at fantasy baseball, but it still seems like a chicken-and-egg proposition to me because the developments happened at around the same time.

Actually, it’s hard to say that fantasy baseball made me better at Magic because I’m still playing with the same cruddy decks because I enjoy them, rather than winning with the tier-one powerhouses because they win.

Anyway, I’ve been in the same ESPN fantasy baseball league for three seasons now. It’s currently known as “The League of Dorks,” nee “Barry Bonds Cheats,” and is managed by my friend Matt. There are 14 teams (up from 12 at the league’s inception) each captained by one of Matt’s friends from high school, college, or law school. As it goes, I’m friends with most of Matt’s college friends, and we tend to agree that his high-school and law-school friends are douches. I’m sure they say the same about us.

There are several different scoring systems used in fantasy baseball, but we use a strict points-based performance style. Each team has 24 players on it and can choose from them every day to start nine position players—catcher, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, three outfield, and a utility slot equivalent to a DH—and seven pitchers, divided as four starters and three relievers. Players then earn points based on performance, which are tallied at the end of the week to determine the winner between two teams.

Most of the nitty-gritty scoring details will be unimportant for this blog, but for example, a solo home run earns a player and his team seven points: one for each total base (four), one for an RBI, one for a run, and one for a home run. A closer who gives up a hit and strikes out two on his way to a save earns nine points: one for each third of an inning (three), one for each strikeout (two), five for the save, and minus one for the hit.

Playing Magic has taught me to look for every weakness in a system and exploit it to your advantage as much as possible. For Vintage, that means playing as much brokenness as possible: Moxes, Lotus, Yawgmoth’s Will, Tinker, and as many restricted cards as you can cram into a 60-card deck. This power is inherent to the format; it’s programmed in; everyone can use it. Essentially, anyone who doesn’t use these broken cards is only hurting himself.

Moreover, anyone who doesn’t use these broken cards has no room to complain about getting blown-out by them. If you wrecked your opponent’s hand only to have them topdeck Yawgmoth’s Will two turns later and win the game, why didn’t you give yourself the same opportunity to crush them with a game-ending Yawgmoth’s Will. Why aren’t you playing all five Moxes to keep up with their broken mana development. And for the love of Mike, why aren’t you playing Force of Will? Idiot.

This basic idea of exploiting the system has also worked for me in fantasy baseball. Last season was marked (some would say marred) by my “cycling” pitchers. We had no limit on pickups and drops for the year, so players could change their team rosters around as much as they wanted during the week. We also had no limit on the number of starts our pitchers could make. Seven days a week times four starting pitcher slots a day meant gaining points for 28 pitchers every week if you picked up the day’s starters every morning.

I made sure I got all 28 starts. Every week.

The pitchers I had drafted were, for the most part, untalented journeymen who were at best decent in 2002. I was getting killed by my opponents pitchers, and realized that my best strategy was just to overwhelm them with points. Every morning, I would look at the pitchers scheduled to pitch for that day and pick the best of them for my team. There were several remaining viable starters available in the free-agent pool, and I would pick them up for their turn in the rotation and drop them again the next day. It turns out that 28 pitchers earning seven points per win is almost fifty points better than seven pitchers earning 20 points per win.

A good team might earn 300 points in a week. I was regularly getting 400 points, and had more than 500 points in four weeks. There was never a week where my victory was even in question.

My tactics were, however.

Everyone complained that I was somehow cheating, despite my working within the rules and despite those rules being open to everyone’s use.

My reaction was generally one of nonchalant self defense. “I’m doing this completely within the rules,” I would say. “It’s a competition, and I’m competing to win,” I would say. “You could all be doing this too,” I would say. Actually the best way to combat it would have been to have more people using the strategy. There were a limited number of pitchers starting every day, obviously, so first-come-first-serve on getting the best ones to play for you.

In the end, I lost three games all season—two at the beginning before I started cycling pitchers, and one to our league manager in the playoffs (top four) because I promised him I would play that series straight as a favor to him. I also knew that if I cycled pitchers and steamrolled through the finals, there would be enough complaints against me and my purportedly hollow victory that it might kill the league. Vintage Magic has enough players that it will survive through dominant decks and restrictions. I didn’t share that confidence in our 14-team fantasy league.

I did cycle pitchers in the third-place playoff game, to which my opponent said, “You got it. I hope third place is that important to you.” It was.

After the season, my strategy was deemed “broken” and was “restricted” as we were limited from unlimited starts per week to 10. So for the 2009 season, I had to find a new way to rack up the points fantasy points. Again I examined the format to see the tools at my disposal and the weaknesses I could exploit.

Everyone had nine position player slots, four starting pitcher slots, and three relief pitcher slots to work with every day. Obviously, you fill up your positions and your relievers and have as many starters as you can; those are the points that everyone gets. However, we have 28 starting pitcher slots per week (four per day for seven days) and are only allowed to have 10 starts. That’s 18 points-earning possibilities that go unused every week. I immediately picked up two relief pitchers that had eligibility as starters as well.

You see, in our league, there’s a distinction between relievers (RP) and starters (SP). Most pitchers start as one or the other, but players earn eligibility at a particular position by playing 10 games at that position, and that eligibility carries over from the previous year as well. So a player who might have been a starter in 2008 but got demoted to the bullpen would still have SP eligibility despite playing most of his games as an RP.

The mechanics aren’t all that important. The key to understand is that my team has five relief pitchers every day, where most teams have three. I also use 15 out of 17 available points-earning slots per day, where most people are using only 13. This might not sound like a big difference, but when my two extra relievers earn about four points per game and pitch three times per week, that’s an extra 24 points on my side of the scoreboard, almost 10% more than my opponents earn.

This strategy has so far earned me a 12-game undefeated streak, which ended, sadly and coincidentally, last night. I have been waiting for my opponents to catch on and start using a similar tactic, but so far none has.

(If you’re wondering what happened this week that caused my defeat, the reasons were myriad and mostly stemmed from fantasy baseball’s biggest fault, which is that fantasy managers have no real hand in the outcome of any particular player’s performance and are subject to the whims of the real-world baseball schedule. Basically, I guessed wrong about who would perform well and left more than 80 points sitting on my bench between Friday and Sunday. Oops!)

Anyway, the point is not how awesome I am at fantasy baseball (though I am awesome at fantasy baseball – recognize). The point is that fantasy baseball, like Magic, like other games, has areas built into its rules and structure that can be examined and exploited to maximize your gain. Playing Magic taught me to look for these areas when I really want to compete with people.

From my experience, the key is to not fall into the trap of believing the status quo. Last fantasy baseball season, I could have followed the crowd and not cycled pitchers. This fantasy baseball season I could follow the norm of carrying two extra position players on my team as insurance against injuries. They’re perfectly serviceable strategies, but they don’t give you any advantages.

One example of this is the stubborn acceptance of Null Rod as the base of the Vintage Fish strategy. For years, Null Rod has been the go-to card for hosing artifact acceleration, and it’s gotten even more attention since Time Vault and Key became the win condition of choice for pretty much everyone. Not to mention that Null Rod also shuts down the random Mindslaver, Triskelion, Sword of Fire and Ice, Goblin Charbelcher, and Memory Jar. This is established success (never mind that Fish rarely performs very well).

I sometimes get the suspicion that Drain and combo players like to say that Null Rod is such a backbreaking card against them, “the card they dread the most from Fish,” just so that opponents will continue playing them, only to see them bounced and won through at every turn.

Today the Tezzeret deck is fast and resilient enough to ignore Null Rod. When the restricted-list deck du jour was Gifts, for example, the win condition cost at least seven mana – four for Gifts Ungiven and three for Yawgmoth’s Will. Now, the win condition costs four mana – two for Time Vault, one for Voltaic Key, and one to activate. The lengthy set-up process isn’t there, so there’s not enough time to play Null Rod, especially when Fish decks are eschewing Moxes in favor of cards that won’t get shut off by their own disruption.

I’m just not convinced that Null Rod is that good anymore. As such, I present this Fish list which passes on Null Rod in favor of being able to play more answers early:

4x Force of Will
1x Ponder
1x Brainstorm
1x Ancestral Recall
1x Time Walk
1x Sensei’s Divining Top

4x Chalice of the Void
4x Aether Vial
3x Pithing Needle
3x Standstill

4x Meddling Mage
4x Cursecatcher
4x Voidmage Prodigy
3x Erayo, Soratami Ascendant
3x Rootwater Thief

4x Tundra
4x Flooded Strand
1x Tolarian Academy
1x Strip Mine
1x Island
1x Plains
1x Mox Sapphire
1x Mox Pearl
1x Mox Jet
1x Mox Ruby
1x Mox Emerald
1x Lotus Petal
1x Black Lotus

This deck is built specifically to combat Tezzeret. Running cheap artifacts like Pithing Needle and Chalice of the Void alongside Moxes allow more disruptive pieces to hit play sooner. This list also attacks Tezzeret from several different angles – negating the utility of Mana Drain with Aether Vial and Voidmage Prodigy, stealing the deck’s few win conditions, and of course the traditional Fish arenas of countering and mana denial. With this list, it’s not uncommon to open with multiple avenues on attack on turn one, and still have Force backup.

I don’t believe this deck is cure-all for the Tezzeret-fueled Vault-Key metagame (actually, I don’t think any Fish deck will ever be better than Restricted.dec), but I do think it has some legs. It remains to be seen whether those legs hold up under a Staxier metagame, should one develop from the unrestriction of Crop Rotation. In the meantime, don’t forget Stax in your sideboarding plans, right?

Anyway, if you’re interested in the theory, if not the practice of exploiting a system’s weaknesses for fun and profit, I still have to recommend reading “How David Beats Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell, printed in the May 11 issue of the New Yorker. I will conveniently link to it for you. Right. Now:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell

The article explains several factors that go into a weaker combatant’s triumph over a stronger opponent: flexibility and speed, changing the rules, even changing the definition of victory. These factors, and the historical and real-world examples that support them, have applications in Magic for sure. You may even come to completely different conclusions than I did. Who knows? Maybe you’ll lay the foundation for the next great Vintage innovation.