SCGINVI Interview - Patrick Sullivan

Back when I was a kid, my mom used to get me and my little brother a game every year for Christmas, usually some sort of board game. We got Battle Masters one year, which was totally sweet, and a couple things like that. One day she went to the local shop and they had a couple of the two-player starter decks for Magic, so she got one for me and one for my younger brother. We spent some time trying to figure out the rules and stuff. A couple of my other friends—I was in the seventh or eighth grade at the time—were also playing, so I had a little circle of people to play with, one of whom was Eugene Harvey, who went on to have iconic success playing Magic competitively. It's sort of stuck with me ever since.

If people appreciate the decks that I build and they like that particular style, that's cool for me. What's most important is there's definitely a stigma about red decks being easier to play, or decks that people of a lower ability level gravitate towards. What I hope is that I can show there's a ton of space to play those decks at a higher level.

Yes, it's a lot about timing, and you are walking on a razor's edge the whole time because the power level of your cards are relatively low. Generally speaking, your opponent's playing more powerful cards than you are, so your margin for error is actually a lot lower in my opinion than it is with other decks. If people can take away something from that and apply it to the decks that they build, or show that beatdown decks can have a lot of skill involved with them too, I think that's a good thing.

Yes, I'm a game designer—mostly trading card games, but I do a little bit with board games and some digital stuff as well.

It gives you a way different perspective. Both things make you better at the other—I think working in game design makes you a better Magic player, and being a Magic player can help you be a better game designer because your perspective is just broader. Something that is a challenge for a lot of Magic players who try to get into game design is they have a very tournament-oriented focus, and when you're working in game design, you have to be thinking about the bigger picture, including casual play and all the kitchen table type stuff. It's easy to lose track of that perspective, but once you're in the industry for a while and you see how a lot of different people handle the product and interact with things—and going to these kinds of shows where even at an event this competitive, there's still a pretty healthy amount of casual players who are here just hanging out and playing games or playing Commander—having that broader perspective on things, I think, makes you better at both things.

The first thing is that there's a lot of work that happens before the lights even go on. There's a ton of prep work in terms of studying the metagame from the SCGs and the Grand Prix from the previous weeks, getting an idea of what name players are going to be in the tournament and what their recent track record has been. Then when the show is actually running—12 or 14 hours of talking, as you know, is not the easiest thing to do. Fighting the mental and physical fatigue is, for me at least, the biggest challenge. Fortunately, I've been lucky enough to have people like Adrian Sullivan and Cedric Phillips in the booth with me, who are very knowledgeable and are good at keeping my energy level up. But the fatigue, both mentally and physically, is by far the biggest challenge.

Fortunately, most of the people on StarCityGames' roster of commentators are people that I've known for a very long time through tournament Magic—so Adrian, Cedric, and later this year I'll be doing a show with Mike Flores in Las Vegas. Those are friends of mine for the last 10 years, and so we already have a pretty natural chemistry being in the booth with one another. When I am in the booth for the first time with someone I don't know, that'll be a new challenge, but I haven't had that experience yet, so I can't really say.

Obviously the reprinting of the dual lands is hugely influential for the way that mana bases are going to be built. As a red player, the name is escaping me, but the red 2/2 first striker is clearly way above the curve. I think not quite as powerful as Goblin Guide, but probably just a half step below that card in terms of overall power level. And then there's the one-cost 2/1 that can't block and so on. As far as mono-red cards go, there's plenty of power. As a whole, the keywords seem like much better executions than the original Ravnica, and the power level seems to be in things that are ultimately relatively fun—not super grindy or super lock-outy, but pretty proactive, back-and-forth cards. I'm definitely excited to get to play with the set, both for limited and constructed.

I think the upside that card can potentially provide is the fact that it's a first striker. Goblin Guide is actually often bad in some of the creature matchups because it's pretty easy for them to trade or otherwise invalidate it. Having first strike is a huge deal in terms of how it operates against other creature decks, so in some matchups I could actually see it being significantly better. But I think in Legacy, the way the format is so fast, the difference between one and two mana is a huge jump, and so I would be surprised if it ultimately made the cut—but I would not rule it out.

Yeah, the game can definitely be over. And on top of that, there's cards like Daze and Spell Snare. Spell Snare is very explicitly good against two-cost things, but with Daze, your one-drops can get in play on the play before Daze is a thing you have to worry about. Too many two-drops—Daze is always a live card you have to worry about. So besides the format being very fast, there's some subtleties to a couple of the cards that cause the jump from one and two mana to be a very significant thing.

It's a tough question to answer now because my arguments are definitely colored by being a game designer. There's cards that I enjoyed a lot as a player 10 years ago—something like Rishadan Port—that I enjoyed a lot as a player 10 years ago, but that I would say is a totally heinous design and in my bottom 10 cards now. I would say Birds of Paradise is, I think, pretty close to the perfect Magic design. It's powerful but high variance, and when Birds of Paradise is being powerful, the other player doesn't feel like they're losing the game to Birds of Paradise—it's powerful without being frustrating. High variance, super sweet. That one's probably number one. Number two I'd have to go probably with Lightning Bolt—again, super clean, super simple, resonant design. Players of all ability levels are drawn to it, attracted to it. So those are one and two, and then after that the list gets a little bit hazier.

Yeah, and that's so powerful that you can expect it to show up in a lot of decks. So as opposed to something like when Pyroclasm or Shock is the card in the format—certainly the jump from two toughness to three toughness matters, but a lot of your opponents aren't going to have those cards in their deck, so you can still play with two-toughness guys and some of your opponents will have Pyroclasm and some won't. But Lightning Bolt is so powerful that it's going to be in a ton of your opponent's decks, and so then that flash point is very significant.

The best game I ever played—maybe it's because it happened recently—but the game three of the quarterfinals against Ross Merriam last weekend at the Star City Open in Los Angeles is near the top of my list. In terms of how well I played a game, that might be number one. In terms of my favorite game or match as a competitive player, I would say it was against Gary Wise, playing for the top eight of Grand Prix Philadelphia in 2006.

I think Gary sort of unfortunately caught a bit of a stigma where, in the early 2000s, most of the very good Magic players were from some sort of poker or other serious background—they were very serious, stoic, not friendly at the table, that kind of stuff. Gary wrote for the main website and he was very gregarious, and so I think a lot of people marked him as being a little bit on the softer side because he didn't fit the image of what a competitive player looked like. But if you just played against the guy or you've seen this guy's tournament results, there's no question he was one of the very best players at a time when—in my humble opinion—the Pro Tour was a more competitive environment 10 years ago than it is nowadays.

I actually have a very specific answer for this. It would be Urza's block–Masques block Standard. I'm playing mono-red Ponza and Osyp Lebedowicz is playing mono-green Stompy. I say this because Osyp and that time period were the two things that were most influential in me becoming a competitive Magic player. I had the luck of going to high school with Eugene Harvey, but he sort of went away to college in Pittsburgh at the time, where I was still hanging out in New Jersey. Osyp was the first extremely good Magic player that I got to be around a lot, play games with, and get better as a result of being around him. I credit him more than anyone else with whatever success I've had playing Magic competitively. We had a lot of battles at the Only Game in Town on Friday nights of that format—we had like $250, $500 F&Ms before that was really a thing. That's really how I cut my teeth playing Magic competitively, so I would like to give that match one more spin.

Yeah, he's certainly in the conversation. I think he's probably a top eight short. But there was a span of time where not only was he one of the best players—I mean, he won Pro Tour Venice, he has numerous other top eights—but he was also one of the best deck builders in the world as well. And very rarely have those things overlapped with a player—usually players are either deck builders or players, very rarely are they at the top in both things—and Osyp was for a little while. Beyond that, his writing both for the Only Game in Town's website and for StarCityGames years back were hilarious. No question the funniest Magic writer/personality that's ever been. He's sort of in the background a little bit now, focusing more on his career, although he still shows up—I think he actually won a PTQ in the last six months, so he's still involved in the game on the side. But people have short memories with this stuff, and if you weren't around the game seven or eight years ago, you really missed out, because Osyp's influence on gameplay and deck building and his humor were incredible and are sorely missed.

Yes. Robert Martin, Patrick Sullivan. Thank you for watching.