Speedrunning Against the Clock: How to Play Fast

05/17/2024

With how Magic is being designed these days, playing fast is a more important skill than ever. Matches are generally just going on longer than before. If you've been to a Standard RCQ recently, you've probably had the experience of waiting for a Domain mirror to finish game 2 in turns - but even midrange decks like Esper can have matches that do not finish. I've even seen a Boros Convoke mirror almost go to time!

Of course, no one wants to unintentionally draw. It's bad for both players - instead of one player getting 3 points and the other getting 0, you both get 1; and while 1 is not nothing, it usually doesn't count for enough to be much better than a loss. So, it represents quite a lot of actual tournament equity to be able to play fast enough to finish even the grindiest matches on time.

Overall, I would say that I tend to play very fast. I don't have a spotless record when it comes to unintentional draws - I had one playing vs Analyst at PT OTJ - but they're generally few and far between.

And to give an idea of how fast I naturally play: a judge told me during my quarterfinals match at PT OTJ (after the game at the linked timestamp) that I should consider playing slower :P (for the sake of my opponent and coverage, though my opponent had not expressed confusion at any point)

So, today I'd like to go over various tips and tricks I use to play faster, and especially to practice at improving speed.

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Part 0: Other Resources

I'm far from the only person to weigh in on this topic! Also check out this video by PVDDR and this article by Ari Lax - the latter is especially extensive. I'm sure there's more beyond that too; those are just the two I remember seeing.

I'm mostly going to focus on what you can do to speed up your own play in this article. There are also things you can do to communicate the importance of playing quickly to your opponent - Ari's article talks about that fairly comprehensively, so I won't go into that as much here.

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Part 1: Speedrunner Mentality

I'd attribute some of my inclination towards playing quickly to having a bit of a speedrunner's mentality.

To give a bit of background here: I really enjoy watching and thinking about speedrunning, and have been a longtime member of the Hollow Knight Randomizer racing community (which is very close with its speedrunning community for perhaps obvious reasons). I haven't done much in the way of literal speedrunning myself - I don't quite have the patience to practice for it - but I have done a bit of casual speedrunning of various Hollow Knight meme categories, and have done a lot of randomizer racing.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, I think there's quite a few concepts you can apply from speedrunning to playing fast in Magic!

Plan Your Route, Know the Game

One key to playing fast, both in speedrunning and in Magic, is to be extremely familiar with the game actions you're taking.

Relying on muscle memory and instincts will always be faster than having to actually take a second or more to actively think about what to do. Obviously, you can't use this for every situation - Magic is way too complex and varied for that! - but there's plenty of spots that you can commit to instinct with enough practice.

In fact, deep understanding of a deck will often very naturally lead to this! As you become intimately familiar with the common play patterns of a deck, you should also become more able to just automatically execute those play patterns without needing to think about them. This happens quite a bit when I'm playing Slogurk at this point - I've just gotten extremely good at looking at my hand and board and immediately having instincts for how to sequence card plays and channel lands.

At a more specific level, some decks involve specific lines of several actions that come up regularly. This happens most often with combo decks - think of the various lines that Amulet Titan can use to kill with various board states. If you're playing a combo deck, get familiar with those lines! Trying to figure out how to kill your opponent with a complex combo deck from first principles is probably going to be too slow for competitive play; but if you're well-versed already you should be able to execute and explain even the most convoluted combo lines in just a few minutes.

This also applies to limited, in many ways. I've long claimed that one of the most important skills in limited is knowing how to use each and every card; and this also applies to playing quickly in limited. Pausing to read a card you've never drafted will slow you down quite a bit; being intimately familiar with a set will often involve recognizing common play patterns and being able to parse them easily.

Smooth Movement through Organization

You should also coonsider the above as applied to the very literal game actions you're taking - be familiar with moving around cardboard!

As you'll hear me say a lot this article, the most important tool in going faster is removing the need to think. So when it comes to manipulating physical cards quickly, it's actually pretty helpful to be very organized.

If you know where everything is, you won't need to spend time looking for anything. 20 seconds spent fishing out your tokens from your deckbox isn't much, but anyone familiar with speedrunning knows that all of those seconds add up, especially if they happen consistently. When you play a card that needs dice or tokens, you should have those objects readily prepared, so you don't have to pause at all.

I would also highly recommend having very clear tokens on-hand. Face-down cards are an okay stand-in for FNM, but every second spent thinking about or asking about whether the face-down card represents a 2/2 or a 1/1 is another second lost on the match timer. Being able to recognize a token at a glance also just helps your brain parse board states much easier - again, the goal is to offload thinking wherever possible.

Infinitokens and other dry erase tokens are okay on this front - but the act of writing down the token does take time. It's probably better than a facedown card, and might be your best tool for limited; but if you know your full set of tokens, consider a different alternative.

All of these things might seem small, and they are! But don't mistake "small" for "meaningless"; everything adds up in the end. A bit of preparation beforehand can do wonders for performance on tournament day.

Implementing Skips and Shortcuts

Unlike speedrunning videogames, Magic doesn't really have glitches to exploit - and if it did that would almost certainly fall under cheating. But it does have plenty of shortcuts that you can leverage for speed!

Shortcuts are a great tool. And even if you don't realize it, you use them all the time! The most common examples are going to combat, and passing the turn; you almost never do all the priority passes for those, because why would you? Instead players almost always say "go to combat" to mean "I'm passing priority up until after I attack", and say "pass the turn" to mean "I'm passing priority for the rest of my turn".

But shortcuts can also do so much more than that. You can propose any kind of shortcut whenever you want, as long as you and your opponent both understand what's happening and agree to it. For example, in the Standard Aftermath Analyst deck, you often have a bunch of

fetchlands entering, sacrificing themselves, and fetching basics all the same time. You should absolutely just be fetching all of the basics at the same time, and shuffling once at the end - it's extremely unlikely that either player will respond between two fetches, and if your opponent wants to they can just let you know as you go to shortcut.

Shortcuts exist because humans can pretty easily batch actions together. And in fact, processing batched actions can be easier than trying to go through every single action explicitly! So don't be afraid to use them quite liberally.

The next tool we have is also very useful, especially when executing longer sequences of actions: Out-of-Order Sequencing (or OOOS, as I'll refer to it). This, again, plays into the idea that we really don't need to execute the whole game engine formally, and can instead rely on intuitive batching to get something that arrives at the correct state.

Together with shortcutting, this essentially means that if you have a bunch of triggers for which order doesn't matter, just do them all in whatever order is most convenient. Again we come to Standard Analyst for an example: if you're stacking a bunch of triggers from

fetchlands while you have Nissa, Resurgent Animist in play, you technically get Nissa triggers weaved in-between the fetchland searches. But it's much easier to just summarize it all by saying "I'm going to find these basics and get this many Nissa triggers"; your rarely need to know the exact order.

Finally, there are loops. These generally only happen in combo decks, and are a pretty well-known part of Magic. Still, they have one aspect that can be optimized: can you explain the loop clearly and concisely to your opponent and/or a judge?

Some loops will be quite simple: "I tap my Splinter Twin'd Pestermite to make a copy, the copy untaps the original. Repeat a million times." But some are quite complex, like Slogurk's mana-neutral channeling loop, or Spelunking's... everything. The difference between a good explanation and a bad one can easily be several minutes, which could be several precious minutes you don't get for game 3.

If you're playing a combo deck with a complex loop like that - or really any complex interaction! - you should make sure to have practice explaining that to someone who is unfamiliar. Perhaps recruit a friend to play dumb.

Make the Most of Downtime

One of the worst feelings in speedrunning is being stuck in place without being able to do much. Maybe you're forced to sit through a cutscene you can't skip, or you're in a slow autoscrolling section - or maybe you're simply forced to do some menu/inventory manipulation and can't otherwise move.

This is what it feels like to me when a game of Magic is stuck waiting for someone to shuffle their deck. Sometimes this is necessary - for example if you search, and then immediately after want to draw a card. But very often you can cut out some of that downtime!

If you have actions to take that don't involve your library, then you can announce and/or take those while shuffling. If you aren't going to shuffle your library before passing the turn, you can even figure out what you're searching for, play the rest of your turn, and then finally start shuffling after passing!

It just doesn't matter whether when your library is physically shuffled, as long as it happens before you interact with it in some way. So you can often effectively use OOOS to push that shuffle back until you're not actively taking your turn, and so have your hands free.

This advice also applies to other forms of tedious actions. If you're making a whole mess of tokens or counters, don't pause in the middle of your train of thought just to rummage through your token stack.

Allocate Time Efficiently

So far, I've focused a lot on the concept of offloading your need to think, whether through relying on instincts and ingrained familiarity, or relying on other preparation like being organized.

But you might be thinking: Magic is a complex game! Can you really afford to not think? How can you rely on instincts, when they can easily lead you astray? How will you see the non-obvious lines without spending time thinking?

The thing is, the point here isn't to never think. The goal is actually one of triage - try to avoid spending time thinking about simple things that can be offloaded, so that you can focus thinking on the difficult decisions that can't be!

Yes, games of Magic are complex and have many important decision points, but many situations are simple, common, or unimportant enough that you shouldn't need to dedicate much thought to them to get to the right play (or something close enough to the right play). Instead save that time and energy for the unique pivotal moments in games.

Knowing When to Reset: Garbage Time

This concept of triage leads to another concept I have yet to bring up - garbage time. This is an idea that comes up a lot in testing: many games will have a point during which the game isn't quite over yet, but one player is so massively unfavored and unlikely to win in a way that makes many decisions not matter very much. This happens a lot with control decks, where they will have effectively won several turns before they actually manage to kill the opponent.

The reason this comes up in testing is that garbage time is generally fairly unproductive to actually play through in testing games. If the game is a foregone conclusion, then it's usually more efficient for testing purposes to just move onto the next one.

Of course, when you're actually playing a competitive match, and not just testing, there is a lot more incentive for the losing player to stick it out through garbage time, as usually there is a sliver of hope left that is worth real equity. But it's still useful to recognize when you are in garbage time!

If you're on the losing end of garbage time, be cognizant of what your chances are realistically, and of exactly what your outs are. If your chances are low enough and you're also low on clock, don't be afraid to concede that small sliver of equity and trade it for clock time!

If you're on the winning end of garbage time, you can probably start playing faster! If you're in a massively favored position, there can be many actions that don't really matter, and many actions that don't need to be optimized. Focus on what's important - what are your opponent's outs, and how do you narrow those down? - and you can speed through the rest.

As an example: a friend of mine has expressed to me many times in the past that unintentional draws with UW Control are just skill issues. I'm not surprised that fae would say that - I've seen faer play blisteringly fast through garbage time, declining to activate planeswalkers when they don't matter, just going "draw, attack, go" for literal seconds per turn.

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Part 2: Practicing, Fast and Slow

Knowing how to play fast is just one part of the picture. There are some parts that can be pretty easily applied (like being organized with your tokens), but a lot of it is a skill that needs to be actively trained.

Again we come back to the idea of offloading your thinking. Any time that I talk about building your instincts, a good way to think about that is offloading thinking time from in the moment to your testing and experience. "Instincts" are just a shortcut for "I've thought about this exact situation or ones like it many times already, I don't need to think about it now".

So how do you train this? Well, perhaps counterintuitively, my biggest advice is to take it slow. Methodically going through and thinking deeply about gamestates is very important, as you need to do that thinking at some point to achieve a deep understanding. So, it's important to get that thinking done during practice.

Don't be afraid to slow down during practice! When you're still learning a deck or limited format, trying to immediately play fast isn't going to help you at all. Start slow so that you can build understanding, and then only once you have that understanding should you actively try to speed up your play.

At the end of the day, there really isn't a replacement for getting in reps. But at the same time, you also have to make sure to get in good reps. Autopiloting through practice games won't be very productive at all.

So, this is a great place to make use of gameplay logs! Online games have match clocks too, so you can't take forever in them. And of course it can be tiring to be dialed all the way in for every match; sometimes you want to just relax and play Magic. But you can still make good use out of those games by later going back and putting focused effort into reviewing every decision made in those games.

It's also quite useful to source opinions from others as part of this process. Magic is a hard game, and other people will probably have different perspectives on it that can be useful to you.

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Conclusion

To some extent, the uptick in longer games and unintentional draws is largely attributable to WotC's design decisions. But at the same time, I would still say that getting an unintentional draw is very much a skill issue ("skissue", if you will). Often a very understandable one, for sure - expecting a Standard Domain mirror to complete three games is a pretty high bar - but still very much something that you can put effort into controlling.

And while it may not be the most compelling part of Magic gameplay, it is inextricably part of competitive play, both in paper and online.

So go out and save those frames match points!