Lesson 22: Bluffing

Readers! Welcome back to another weekly article at Crit the Books. This week, we’ll be going into depth on lying to your opponents. That’s right! It’s bluffing week. We’ll be talking about what makes an effective bluff, when to use those bluffs, and most importantly, when it’s worth it to go entirely off the rails and shock your opponent into handing you the win.

Bluffing is something that is core to any strategy game. Even in games where you cannot directly communicate to your opponent – games like hearthstone with limited emotes, for example – you can still maintain bluffing even with such simple things as gameplay or strategy construction. Bluffing is the art of making your opponent think that you are going to, or are able to, take actions that you are not planning on taking.

The actual mechanics of bluffing are very simple when it comes down to it – in heavy communication games, simply speak to your opponents about what you are going to do. A bluff can be as simple as telling your opponent, “Hey, if you move there, I’ll take your piece. Do you really want to do that?” or it can be as subtle as not playing a card that you could, to fool your opponent into thinking that you don’t have access to that card.

Presenting the potential of moves is a powerful tactic and is one that you can often use in limited communication games. As an extreme example, I would suggest watching a video by Disguised Toast, of hearthstone fame. In this video, Toast plays a deck where he removes a key combo piece from his deck, instead replacing it with more cards that generate him value throughout the game. However, and this is very important, he keeps in most of the combo pieces. By doing so, he fools his opponent into thinking that he has a potential instant win, and you will see in the video that many people will concede once part of the combo starts to occur. This demonstrates the power of potential moves.

The most important part of bluffing is to make sure that you can actually take the action that you are pretending you can. Nobody is going to fall for something like “If you take my piece, I’ll just immediately win.” It’s not possible, and your opponent is not going to play around that possibility. Sure, this kind of tactic might work on newer players or players that far overestimate your abilities, but that is more a failure on their part for being able to accurately estimate your potential actions than any great act of bluffing on your part. It is important to remember, however, that your opponent does not need to see you take the action. They just need to see the possibility of doing so! In the example above, Toast cannot actually play the game winning combo, but his opponent believes he could given the information that they have. This is very important!

There are times to break this rule, and those times are mostly when you have nothing to lose. Maybe you’re going to lose anyway, but that bluff will put you into a situation where you have a 2% chance of winning. Maybe your opponent falling for the bluff will give you another turn with which you can plan and try to stabilize the game – maybe get yourself back into the game! At these times are when you can afford to make those ridiculous buffs that are almost outside the realm of believability, but not quite.

Another trick to effective bluffing is to keep the risk/reward ratio in mind when you make moves. If the move that you are bluffing is potentially risky to you, or doesn’t stand to gain you much, your opponent might not worry about it, letting the action that you were bluffing happen since they don’t really care. This is a bad situation for you – you haven’t made the opponent waste any resources, and you likely haven’t gained much from the bluff either. However, if you can make a play that the opponent knows has the possibility of winning the game – attacking with a creature and bluffing the pump spell that would give them the loss, for example – they will often be forced to play as if the bluff was true, since the risk to them is too great!

There are a number of articles and opinion pieces on the power of bluffing out there, and I encourage you as readers to seek them out if it is something you are interested in. Bluffing is a very, very deep topic, and it is one that I do not think I can even begin to adequately cover in my weekly articles. However, it is a skill that is very important to learn and can guide you to victory even when you are far behind. It’s not all mind games – it is about knowing what expectations your opponent can have of you and playing on those to get you the win.

A big thank you to my Patrons for this month: Alex, TicTac, and anonymous patrons. If there are specific subjects or concepts you’d like an article written on, I suggest you look at my patreon! For just $7 a month, you’ll be able to suggest article topics for me to write on.

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!

Lesson 21: Venues of Interaction

Another week is upon us, and that means another article here at Crit the Books! This week, we’ll look at a game design concept that I have found is core to knowing how to approach different matchups to your strategy. We’ll be talking about venues of interaction! Knowing how to interact with your opponent effectively is one of the most important things when you are playing games competitively and interacting with your opponent in ways that are inefficient or not helpful is the cause of many a loss. With that, let’s dive in!

While many games have interaction as a core part of their mechanics, not all strategies care about these methods of interaction in the same way. For an example of this, let’s look at Magic: the Gathering. The strategy we’ll be looking at is one that is popular in modern and legacy, and has left a mark on Magic’s future regardless of the fact that the core mechanic hasn’t been printed in a number of years. That’s right, folks. We’re talking about Storm.

For those of you who are not familiar, a Storm deck is a deck that plays a number of spells in a single turn, eventually able to turn those spells into a game-winning combo by dealing their opponent upwards of 20 damage on turn 3 or 4. Storm is one of the most polarizing strategies in the game, since it can often take a new player by surprise. In addition, there are very few ways to interact with the deck. Many colors do not have strong answers to storm, and perhaps have one or two soft answers. Storm, therefore, does not have many significant venues of interaction.

A strategy’s methods of reducing venues of interaction can vary heavily. We’ll continue to look at decks from Magic: the Gathering to discuss these different methods. Storm is special in that it takes advantage of two of the main ways to reduce the venues. First, it plays with a set of cards that have a limited amount of answers within the game. This is called answer limitation – it limits your interaction by using game components that you simply cannot interact with in some cases. Storm also limits venues of interaction by attempting to win the game as early as possible, ideally before the opponent has time to amass the resources and cards to interact with it effectively. This is timing limitation – it limits your interaction by reducing the amount of time that your opponent has to interact.

When playing your game, try your best to reduce the venues of interaction that your opponent has. If you have a plan that relies on your opponent not interacting with a specific piece that you will be using, wait as long as you safely can to implement that plan. By giving your opponent as little time to react as possible, you can increase the odds that your plan will go off. Similarly, it can be to your advantage to figure out what pieces of your strategy are the most difficult for your opponent to interact with and focus on using those to their best ability.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are playing a game of Magic: the Gathering draft. You are playing a Blue/White deck that has a number of fliers, and one or two hexproof creatures. You also have a few spells that can make your creatures larger or counter your opponent’s spells. If you are playing against an aggressive red/black deck that you notice has a lot of targeted removal, it can often be beneficial to use your flying creatures to block your opponent’s early aggression. The field will then be clear for you to play your hexproof creature and use that to win the game, since your opponent will not be able to remove it easily. You’ve limited your opponent’s ability to react to your plays by emphasizing threats that your opponent can’t answer. You’ve used answer limitation.

On the other hand, perhaps you will play against a green deck that has a number of large creatures that can profitably block your hexproof creatures but have a high mana cost. Here, you probably want to drop your fliers as fast as possible and swing in, keeping your opponent on the back foot and ideally defeating them before they have the time to play their large creatures. In this case, you’ve used timing limitation – you’ve done your best to make sure your opponent didn’t have the time to respond to you.

These are only basic examples, but you start to see the idea. If you can limit your opponent’s ways to interact with you, you will naturally find yourself in advantageous positions. Similarly, identifying the ways that you can interact with your opponent, and taking advantage of them, is key to finding yourself in a strong position in games. Interactivity is key and learning how to manipulate it in your favor is one of the best ways to put yourself at an advantage.

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!

Lesson 20: The Mental Game

Hello, readers, and welcome to another week on Crit the Books! This week, we’ll be departing from our usual direct strategic discussion and move into something that is a little bit more abstract. We’re going to talk about mental pressure, and the idea of “playing your opponent.” While some people might believe that this is a “cheap” or “unsportsmanlike” method of gaining an advantage in the game, the truth is that every game, on some level, is a mental game. If you can make your opponent start to go on tilt, it will be much easier for you to win the game.

At the core of the mental game, in my opinion, is the idea that you are in control of the game. When you are in control of the direction of the game, you will find that you can manipulate your opponent into playing less optimal moves out of fear that you have a response to them. In general, players try to avoid making moves that they believe their opponent has predicted. This is typically because they believe their opponent will have a strong countermeasure to their move and will therefore not want to put the game into a state where those countermeasures will be effective.

Stay calm and collected. If your opponent believes you have predicted their entire gameplan, then you are in the advantageous position. Sometimes, in fact, you can convince your opponent not to make their ideal play by spelling it out to them. I can’t tell you how many times I have half-jokingly said something like “So you’re going to attack for lethal now, right?” and stopped my opponent from doing just that when I had no response. My relaxed attitude led them to believe that it was the wrong play to attack, even though it was the correct play.

Just like how you can bait your opponent into making suboptimal plays by predicting the optimal ones, you can also do the opposite. If you act surprised or taken aback by bad plays that your opponent makes, they will be more incentivized to make similar plays in the future. A simple, “Oh crap. I didn’t see that coming.” can go a long way against a lot of players. Maybe they’ll be more incentivized to commit more resources against a piece that you pretended was very important, when you have actually made game plans around that component being expendable. Maybe they’ll think they can make a similar move, planning on you not predicting a move that you actually know is coming.

These tips might seem to give you a very minor advantage. You might say that in many games, the amount of hidden knowledge is so low that your opponent can tell when you are bluffing. However, it is important to remember that there is a part of the game that is always unknown to the opponent: your thoughts. Your opponent will never have the exact same thought patterns that you have, and you can take advantage of that by making them think that you are ahead of them. Like I said earlier – you should always act as if you are in control of the game. Fake it til you make it!

Another part of the mental game is patterns and upsets. Patterns refer to the common sequences of play that you will develop naturally as you play a game. Many players believe that they do not fall into patterns, but I am here to tell you that they are probably very, very wrong. Every player has play patterns that are more comfortable to them. Upsets, on the other hand, are times when a player goes against the patterns that they have established throughout a game. Knowing when to foresee upsets, or create upsets of your own, is one of the things that distinguishes players who are experts at the mental game.

I read an article by a fighting game player the other day – Unfortunately, I can’t remember the article – that said that one of the most important parts of the neutral game is establishing those patterns and preparing to create upsets once your opponent has started to recognize those patterns. Using the times when neither player has an advantage to start to lay mental traps for your opponent is a very smart idea! I found myself immediately making use of that idea when playing games myself, letting myself create play patterns that my opponents could recognize, then letting them figure out strong responses to it and use those responses once or twice.

Once they had a counterpattern set up to deal with my pattern, however, I struck. I changed the way I approached my opponent, going for a path that they did not expect. Not only was I able to avoid their counter by doing so, but I was also able to predict their response, countering their counter. It can get ludicrously deep at some point, but what the idea boils down to is this: create patterns for your opponents to predict, then include upsets to surprise your opponents and take advantage of your opponent’s reaction patterns.

When talking to expert players of many games, you’ll often hear them talk about the flow of their opponents and disrupting it. In essence, this is what patterns and upsets are – it’s about taking the flow of your opponent’s game and turning it against them. This is the mental game at the core of it all: use what your opponent knows and thinks to turn the tides against them. Next time you play a game, try to identify patterns your opponent falls into and try to disrupt those patterns. You might surprise yourself!

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!

Lesson 18: Forking

Welcome back, readers, to another lesson here at Crit the Books. This week, we’ll be looking into one of the most important tools in the strategy toolbox: forking. Mastering the art of forking your opponent is one of the quickest ways to improve as a player, and it is a strategy that can be used in nearly any game effectively. We’ll learn what forking is, how to set up forks of your own, and how to deal with forks that your opponent has presented to you. If you haven’t yet, I suggest reading last week’s article on threats and answers – we’ll be using that terminology often throughout this article.

So, what is forking? Put simply, a fork is a place where you present multiple threats at the same time, choosing your opponent to choose between one or the other. The term originates from chess, where a fork is used to refer to a single piece threatening 2 or more pieces at the same time, forcing the opponent to give one up. However, when distilled into the most basic form of the concept, forking is a technique that can be found in a number of games and will often be key to the success of a top player.

Why is forking helpful? The answer is quite simple. Like we said above, when a player is put into a fork, they are often forced to give something up. Similarly, it is one of the best ways to deal with an opponent who has managed to present more threats than you have. By using your threats to threaten multiple opposing ones, you can gain in efficiency what you have lost in pure numbers. Forking is also very effective when you are on the back foot – by forcing your opponent to choose between 2 options that you have presented, you can take the tempo of the game back into your own hands and work towards a game state that is ultimately advantageous to you.

Setting up forks is difficult to distill into easy advice, simply because every game has a different way of setting them up. Ultimately, you want to be positioning your game components into positions where they provide as much threat as possible. In order to do this, it is essential that you look ahead in the game. Do not simply look at the state of the game in the moment, but rather work on predicting your opponent. Every now and then, you’ll be able to predict what your opponent does to the point where they will move themselves into position to be forked. Being able to predict how the movement of the game will go is crucial.

Another way that you can set up forks is by making sure that you are threatening your opponent on multiple axes of attack. If you are following a linear strategy, it is easier for you opponent to have answers that will deal with your main method of attack, which makes it difficult for you to fork effectively. Even in situations where a given line will be less efficient, it is important to consider that the effect that a fork can have on your opponent may outweigh the loss of efficiency. Many of these situations rely strongly on the context of the situation, so perhaps the most important skill to refine when learning to put together forks is reading the game accurately.

When you are put into a fork, it is important to note that it is not the end of the world. While you will often have to give something up, that choice of what to give up is yours. You still have agency in the position, and if you can consistently choose the loss that is less impactful to the overall game, you will find the impact of your opponent’s forks to be lesser than the worst-case scenario. Perhaps you’ve been put into a situation where you are guaranteed to lose one of your game components. Which one of those components will end up being more crucial to the game as a whole? That is the one you are concerned with. In fact, many times you can place a weaker piece in a position to be forked so that you can exchange a piece that will not be very effective with one that will matter a lot over the course of the game.

The other way that you can challenge a fork is to challenge the component creating the fork. In many games, threats are mutual – if their piece is threatening two of yours, it is not unlikely that you are threatening the forking piece as well. It is important to not be intimidated by the threats your opponent has presented! All too many times I have seen players wilt in the face of a piece that, while it had a high output, did not sufficiently defend itself. By attacking the forking piece, you can turn the situation on your opponent’s head, and put them into a position that they were not prepared for.

The final way to deal with a fork is perhaps the simplest: cut your losses. In a situation where you might have invested many resources into one of the threatened components, perhaps you will want to split those resources between the two, so that no matter which piece your opponent chooses to inevitably take, you have not lost all of your resources for the turn. When you are on the losing side, this is often the best way to mitigate your losses from a successful fork.

Let’s look at an example from a game that I’ve played quite a bit recently – Guild Ball. My opponent has won the first move of a turn and has spent the final move of the last turn moving Fillet – his captain – into position to threaten two of my models. Fillet is a very powerful killing model; the two models she is threatening are each likely to die if she gets a full activation on them. However, she is not in a position where she can kill both of them this turn. How do I deal with this?

Well, my first mitigating technique was to move my captain, Hammer, to threaten Fillet on my final activation last turn. Threatening Fillet meant that my opponent had to spend resources to assure he was going first this turn, resources that he would have spent elsewhere had I not threatened her. The second mitigating technique is to split my influence – Guild Ball’s main resource – among the two models threatened. There is a cost to this; I am very likely to lose at least some of those resources. However, Fillet is not able to invalidate all of my influence, because she cannot reach both of my models. By doing this, I present my opponent with a question: Do you want to trade Fillet’s full activation for a small amount of influence? I’ve turned the fork on its head by making Fillet a less efficient threat than she normally is.

Forking, as you can see, is a valuable technique in gaming. By forking intelligently, you can put your opponent into bad positions and make sure that your models are able to make relevant moves in the game. However, forking is not a free win; there are a number of techniques to mitigate the effectiveness of the forks. By learning these techniques and mastering forking, you’ll find yourself putting opponents into more and more no-win situations. As you know, any no-win situation for your opponent is a winning situation for you!

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!

Lesson 17: Threats and Answers

Welcome back, readers, to another lesson here at Crit the Books. This week, we’ll be looking at the old gaming adage, “There are no wrong threats, only wrong answers” and dissecting it piece by piece. You’ll learn what a threat is, what an answer is, and why one can be “wrong” while another can’t be. It’s an important part of constructing your strategy and learning how to maximize your ability to win.

First off, we’ll start by looking at threats. Put simply, a threat is any component of a game that directly contributes to achieving your win condition. We use the term because these components threaten to win the game on their own. Threats pose a question to your opponent: Can you either win the game before I do, or prevent my threat from winning the game for me?” Because of this, you’ll often hear threats called “question askers,” especially in tabletop miniature gaming.

In contrast, an answer is any component of the game that neutralizes a threat. Related terms include removal or control; all of these terms point to the same core idea. An answer is how you stop your opponent’s threats from winning the game for them. While sometimes you are able to present threats that win the game faster than your opponent, answers are more reliable, since they don’t depend on the overall tempo of the game moving in your favor.

It’s important to realize that, in many strategies, a single component can serve as both a question and an answer in given scenarios. Let’s look at Magic: the Gathering. A 1/4 creature can serve as a threat, albeit one that will not win the game quickly, because it can attack your opponent 20 times to put their life total to 0. That same creature, however, can block a 2/1 creature and kill it, removing the threat that the 2/1 presents. In this way, that 1/4 creature can serve as both a threat and an answer, dependent on the situation and the threats your opponent is presenting.

To look back at the phrase we mentioned earlier – There are no wrong threats, only wrong answers – let’s examine this same situation but with some of the variables changed. Let’s say we have that same 1/4 creature, but this time our opponent has a 4/4 creature on the board themselves. Our 1/4 is still presenting the same threat to our opponent; it still has the ability to swing in 20 times. However, it is no longer an effective answer to the 4/4 threat. While it can block and prevent the damage once – a point that could still be very relevant! – it will no longer destroy the creature. It does not answer the threat our opponent is presenting.

In addition to this, all but the most simplistic of games will have answers that are limited in some way. If a game has answers that are too efficient or universal, the game trends towards a static state, where neither player can maintain a threat long enough to achieve their victory condition. Because of this, answers often trade situations where they are useful for efficiency vs. threats, or vice versa. Answers that are efficient and useful in a variety of situations tend to be the cream of the crop when it comes to answers or can even present powerful threats themselves. The Magic: the Gathering card Lightning Bolt, for example, is both an efficient answer and useful in nearly any situation in a game. Even when there are no threats for it to remove, it can still deal damage to a player, moving the caster closer to their victory condition.

This is where the phrase we mentioned earlier comes from. Threats, no matter what, will always apply pressure to the opponent that they must respond to in some way. This is very important – by applying that pressure with threats, you maintain control of the game and can direct it to flow in your preferred way. However, there will be situations in which nearly every answer is all but useless – perhaps it is not able to deal with the threats your opponent has presented, or perhaps it is so inefficient that playing it would be an active detriment to you. This is how we come to the phrase that is central to this article: There are no wrong threats, only wrong answers.

When constructing a strategy, be it building a decklist, putting together a team composition, or deciding which class features to take on an RPG character, it is important to keep this adage in mind. In general, your strategy should be more focused on threats then on answers. While there are strategies that focus more on answers than threats – control archetypes of most games being the most well-known example – these strategies tend to be more effective in stabilized metagames, where the ability to predict what your opponents will bring minimizes the possibility of wrong answers. Even then, those decks can sometimes flounder by facing a number of threats that outweigh their answers.

When using strategies you have constructed, it is also important to keep this adage in mind. When your opponent presents a given threat, your first instinct may be to answer it as soon as possible. This is a mistake that I see many new players to control archetypes make. They will see something and acknowledge that it is a threat to be answered but will spend resources or answers that would be better spent later on to answer a larger threat, or more than one threat at once. Remember that your answers are not universal, and sometimes should be saved for threats that are only answered by a smaller set of the answers you brought.

Another point to remember is that if you are trading threats and answers on a 1 to 1 basis, the player who manages to have access to more threats over the course of the game will most likely win. Because of this, it is important for heavy answer strategies to have some way to make their answers more efficient or meaningful than the threats presented. Many ways that these strategies do this is by looking at 2 for 1s – using an answer to deal with 2 (or more!) threats. Answer-based strategies will have to keep this in mind and will sometimes make sacrifices in efficiency or universality to achieve this.

When constructing a strategy and when piloting that same strategy, it is important to keep in your mind which components will be answers and which components will be threats. It is important to have both and finding the correct balance between the two is often the most difficult part of constructing a strategy! However, by learning the differences between the two and keeping the strengths and weaknesses of each in mind, you can put yourself on the road to gaming mastery.

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!