The Benefits of Observation and Trial

Today's post is a reflection on a time when I failed to observe a nuance in the rules that rendered my deck useless.

Magic requires a good amount of pre-game planning. The 'generic' victory condition is reducing your opponent to zero life before he/she does the same to you.  There are several 'gimmick' cards, however, that present alternate victory conditions- one such is below, called Near-Death Experience.

A few years ago, I decided to make a deck based around this victory condition.  I decided to go with white/black for my colors, as they (especially black) had a number of cards (examples below) that enabled me to lose  life (which normally is a bad thing, but here was desired) while doing something cool, or profited from me having low life (Death's Shadow, for example).

So far, so good.  I needed some more ways to lose life, and certain lands helped:

I was well on my way.  But I needed a way to get down to 1 life without getting to 0.  Here's where these two cards were key- I'll call them my 'lifelines':

With these in mind, I made my deck.  The lifelines plus the victory condition were a pretty cool combo; if I could use the other cards to decrement my life total, I figured I had a good shot.  I was excited to try it today . . . and got destroyed, twice, because I failed to heed the wording on my lifelines.

In any game, failure to comprehend the nuances of the rules can be catastrophic.  In this case, I neglected to realize that losing life and taking damage are not inherently the same thing.  From the comprehensive rules (found here):

• 118.2. Damage dealt to a player normally causes that player to lose that much life. See rule 119.3.
• 118.3. If an effect causes a player to gain life or lose life, that player’s life total is adjusted accordingly.

If you look at my non-land cards above, their effects say 'lose X life' and not 'take X damage.'  But if you look at Angel's Grace and Worship, they say "damage that would reduce your life total to less than 1 reduces it to 1 instead."  Damage causes loss of life (rule 118.2), but loss of life is not necessarily caused by damage- you just adjust the life total (rule 118.3).  My entire deck was based upon a misunderstanding.  My cards worked well in the early game, but once I got down to a few life, there were cards I couldn't play without destroying myself.  Sheesh.  General life lessons:

• the details matter.
• trials/play-testing are necessary to determine the quality of a design.

I did a similarly foolish thing in 2008 at a Star Wars Miniatures tournament in Germany.  I had misunderstood the targeting rules, and my friends shared my confusion.  We were summarily destroyed as a result.  Pay attention, folks!  And test, test, test.