STAT GEEK
Adding It All Up

by Jeff Zandi

On Saturday, I reached a milestone in my personal Magic career. In a Mirrodin/Darksteel sealed deck pro tour qualifier in Austin, Texas, I lost the 2000th match of my Magic tournament career. People that know me know that I keep these kinds of statistics about my matches, and some people even knew that I was approaching my 2000th loss. Some have commented on my apparent need to document things. Some think it’s interesting. Some think I should be locked up for my own good. While many an opponent has asked me why I needed their first and last name when we played in a tournament (back in the days before match reporting slips), few know how deep the rabbit hole of my personal statistical obsession goes.

You gotta go all the way back to the beginning of Magic. I bought my first Magic cards ten years ago on Friday, February 4th, 1994, at an annual war gaming convention at Texas A&M University called, oddly enough, WarCon. Me and my Dungeons and Dragons buddies were there for a D&D tournament, as well as to play the old Battletech board game. Walking through the always amazing dealers room on Friday, we all saw this card game being sold at almost every table. The cards looked strange, like some strange tarot cards or somesuch.

Magic the Gathering. People were walking around with giant card boxes, like I used for my old baseball and football card collections. These boxes were full of just hundreds and thousands of these strange looking cards. We all shook our heads and dismissed the new game as some kind of short-lived fad.

Of course, my best buddy Kent and I were curious, we gave in and each bought one Unlimited edition starter deck. They USED to call them starter decks back then. Kent’s best card was Icy Manipulator, we thought my best card was Conservator. Our gamer friends made fun of us for being so weak and giving in to this obvious fad. One year later, we were back again at WarCon, and I was playing in my first Magic tournament. They didn’t call it Type I or Vintage or anything like that. The tournament consisted of a single elimination bracket limited to 128 players. Me and one other member of our regular gaming crew were in the 128 player bracket. He won his first round with a very simple red/green deck with Kird Ape and Lightning Bolts (but certainly no high-end staples like dual lands). I lost my first match, my first ever in tournament play, playing a five color deck with a lot of discard effects in it. I lost to a very good control deck, a blue/white deck that featured several cards I hadn’t seen before, like Timetwister and Relic Barrier and Winter Orb. Across the room, a player with a three hundred card deck lost to a mono red deck and loudly announced “that deck has NO entertainment value” while pointing at his opponent and his deck.

Starting that day in 1995, I decided to keep a record of every match of every tournament I played. At first, I kept the records in a small Franklin Planner that I carried in the black nylon computer bag that I carried all my decks and cards for trading in. That bag was called the Briefcase of Doom and I lugged it to Magic tournaments all over the place! A few years later, I moved all the records into a Palm Pilot. Ask anyone, my Palm is NEVER more than a few feet away from me at any time. At the end of 1995, my career tournament match record was 44-49. In 1996 I climbed over the .500 mark with a year end record of 273-231. That year, in 1996, I started another odd practice. I love sports memorabilia, and I have collected all kinds of sports artifacts that I display with pride in my office. I wanted to create Magic memorabilia. There wasn’t much of that kind of thing available. I decided that on the occasion of winning one hundred matches, I would ask my opponent to autograph one of the key cards in my deck. Later, I would write the date and some other details on the autographed card and put it in a special place in my collection. Fair is fair. If I was going to keep track of the good times, then I felt I needed to commemorate the milestone losses as well. Every time I lost one hundred matches, I would give a prize to the player that gave me the one hundredth loss.

ONE HUNDRED MATCH LOSS MILESTONES

On March 16th, 1996, Jason Lee gave me loss number 100. He was perhaps the top Dallas player, as good or better than the great George Baxter in the days just before Wizards of the Coast began the Pro Tour that year. He beat me with a mono black deck and I gave him a Beta edition Black Knight to replace a white bordered Black Knight in his winning deck. Loss 200 came on August 4, 1996, against Phong Huynh, a quirky yet skilled player that called Games Galore in Arlington home. 300 came from one of my high school buddies and WarCon regular who FINALLY came around to Magic. His name is Donny McGill and he handed me my 300th loss on January 28th, 1997. My 400th loss came to a teammate and pro tour veteran, Cortney Cunningham, who beat me in the first round of a Type II tournament in Fort Worth on May 24th, 1997. At that time, neither of us had been to the pro tour. In just a few months, he would make his first pro tour appearance at Pro Tour Chicago and I would travel with my wife (no kid yet) to Pro Tour Mainz in Germany. Big match loss number 500 would come to none other than big Dave Williams. He handed me a 1-2 loss in the first round of a booster draft on November 2, 1997. I think I gave him five booster packs as a small treasure for beating me. My 600th loss is memorable because it came in my third trip to the Big Leagues in Pro Tour New York on April 17th, 1998. After losing my 599th match in round four that day to Matt Boettcher from New Hampshire, I bought a Magic t-shirt and wrote “Jeff Zandi 600th Match Loss” along the very bottom edge of it. I put it back in the bag it came in and announced to each forthcoming opponent that he would win the t-shirt if they were the player to give me loss number 600. My next round opponent was my teammate, the man that had given me my milestone 500th loss, Dave “Tiger” Williams. I beat Dave 2-0 in what remains the only time two players from our team have had to play each other in the pro tour. The next round, I faced the very talented pro Matthew Vienneau. He said he would be happy to take the t-shirt after defeating me, except that he didn’t manage to beat me. Winning 2-0 in back to back rounds in the second Tempest/Tempest/Stronghold booster draft pod of day two, I was now in position to either win my last match, and the draft pod, and go on to day two, or lose and deliver my commemorative t-shirt to its rightful owner.

That would be Brook North, who won very quickly in games two and three after failing to draw much land against me in game one. It only took two years for me to lose another five hundred matches. I lost the milestone 1000th match of my career against Shawn Pustilnik (no relation to pro tour champ Michael Pustilnik). Shawn beat me 2-0 in an Invasion booster draft at the once-mighty Rama Llama Comics in Plano, Texas. To add some idea of proportionality to the story, that 1000th match loss came in a booster draft that represented the 712th tournament of my career. For a match to be recorded in my journal, it does not need to come in a sanctioned tournament or any particular type of tournament, for that matter. To be recorded, the match must occur in an actual tournament, typically an eight man draft at the very least. Match loss 1500 arrived on August 27, 2002, against teammate and multi pro tour veteran Bil Payne in an Odyssey/Torment/Judgment booster draft, the 1277th tournament of my career. One and a half years later, and there I was again, facing another milestone, my 2000th match loss. San Antonio’s Roy Baran, packing a so-so limited sanctioned rating of 1688, beat me in the third round of last Saturday’s PTQ in Austin. Roy’s prize package for this historic event (historic for me and nobody else I’m sure!) included a new-in-bag full sized playmat from 1996. Two 10th anniversary life counters (the ones WOTC gave away last summer for the 10th anniversary of
Magic: the Gathering). Two draft sets including four Mirrodin booster packs and two Darksteel boosters. Fifty unused blue sleeves because, hey, everybody needs new sleeves now and then. The final item in the 2000th loss prize bucket was one of my last Magic commemorative poker decks, new in wrapper. This is one of the decks of regular playing cards with standard
Magic: the Gathering card backs that WOTC distributed to DCI members in the summers of 1996 and 1997. The PTQ on Saturday was my 1645th career tournament.

What comes next? Probably a lot more match losses. Losing is part of winning. Barry Bonds hits A LOT of home runs, but has also collected A LOT of strikeouts. I’m proud of my 2000 match losses because almost every one of them helped me become a better Magic player. Virtually every one of my two thousand losses has helped me to win over 2800 other matches. Going into the PTQ in Austin last Saturday, I was 15-2-3 in my three sealed deck PTQs using Mirrodin. I have now played in 130 pro tour qualifiers where my overall Swiss record is 331-267-47. I have made the top eight nineteen times with a top eight match record of 22-14, winning five of those PTQs. I have played in all five pro tours that I won qualifiers for. Unfortunately, I don’t have a very good pro tour performance record, but at the same time, I’m proud to say that I HAVE a pro tour performance record. My pro tour appearances include Mainz 1997, Los Angeles 1998, New York 1998, New Orleans 2001 and Amsterdam 2003. My overall match record in The Bigs is 12-21. I plan to turn those Pro Tour numbers around some day.

I’ve played in Regionals all eight years that it has been held, including the first one in Texas back in 1996 in Lubbock that The Mad Hatter ran without a computer with 186 players. (Yeah, I keep a record of how many people were in every tournament I play). I’ve never finished in the top eight at Regionals and have thus never qualified for the U.S. Nationals.

However, in the eight Regional championships, my overall match record is 32-19-2. Regionals have gotten a lot bigger down here in Texas since 1996.

The largest Regionals in this part of the country was in 2002, where tournament organizers Edward Fox and Tim Weissman teamed up to handle 452 players.

Now days, I keep score in every match on a pad of paper that I carry with my cards in a much smaller kit than the ponderous Briefcase of Doom. After each tournament, I move the tournament information into my Palm Pilot, where I keep EVERYTHING. In my Palm, I simply keep the records in memo pad items that I create myself (I don’t use any special software for the Palm to do this). The PTQ last Saturday looks a little like this in my Palm Pilot:

040214 SD 61 Y 1656 49
PTQ-SD Austin Mirrodin/Darksteel BG+R
2-1 Brandon Bryant
1-2 Paul Hagen
0-2 Roy Baran
2000TH MATCH LOSS
0-2 Benjamin Wells (I should have dropped) 2-0 Cameron Crawford DROP

The information in the first line indicates the date of the tournament in YYMMDD format, followed by the type of tournament (SD for sealed deck), the number of players in the tournament, whether or not the tournament is DCI sanctioned, the number of the tournament in my overall tournament career, and the number of the tournament for the year. Saturday’s PTQ was my 1656th tournament played EVER, but only the 49th tournament for me this year. When I synchronize my Palm with the Palm Pilot software on my computer at home, I dump all the statistics into an Excel spreadsheet where I can play MORE fun games with the stats.

It’s a lot of fun to have all the stats. It’s very fun to be able to know that, for example, I have played my friend and business partner Edward Fox
89 times with a match record of 57-32 against him. I have a current win streak of one match against him, and I’m 5-5 against him in our last ten meetings.

MORE WACKY PERSONAL STATS

>From the first time I played in a Magic tournament, my vision was that
>it
would be really great if every Magic player could know everything about his playing statistics, just like a baseball player or any other athlete. If I had it my way, the kind of detailed statistics that I have on myself would be easily available for every player in Magic. The Duelist Convocation International (yup, that’s what DCI really stands for) does a great job with statistics for sanctioned matches. You can get there with a little navigational help at www.MagicTheGathering.com. Here are a few more wacky statistics from my little black book.

My best match win streak is 18 matches, which took place over nine tournaments from February 20th to February 23rd in 2002.

The most match losses in a row for me is 11, taking place over seven tournaments from January 26 to February 7 in 1999.

My best game win streak is 18 games over four tournaments from September 29th to October 3rd in 2001.

My best monthly match win percentage was 13-4 in March 2000 followed closely by 33-11 in May of 2003.

My worst monthly match win percentage was 1-10 in August 1995.

The most matches played in one month was 146 in January 2002. I have played one hundred or more matches eight times.

My best annual match win percentage came in 2002, when I was 622-369.

I have had a winning monthly match record for 47 consecutive months since March 2000.

TEXAS GUILDMAGE MEETING STATISTICS

One last area of statistics that I stay interested in is the attendance at our team’s weekly practice session at my house on Tuesday nights. These practices are open to all team members and non team members that we specially invite. There have been 352 practices since we started in November 1996. We have called off the practice less than twenty times in more than seven years. Of the twenty-three players on the lifetime roster, Scot Martin has made it to the most practices, 149 of them. Jonathan Pechon has the record for a consecutive appearance streak of 66 that ran from July 23rd,
2002 to December 9, 2003. Along with the 23 Texas Guildmages, the 352 practices have included 56 different non-team member guests. We have had as many as 23 players at one practice when we celebrated the 200th team practice several years ago.

WHAT IT ALL ADDS UP TO

What all the numbers add up to is fun. I enjoy the game of Magic like nothing else that I have ever been involved in. It has been such a blast to get so involved in this amazing game that Dr. Richard Garfield invented more than ten years ago. There’s casual players and there are tournament players and every kind of mixed up Magic aficionado in between. Sometimes you hear someone say “it’s just a game”. You’ll hear some other guy say “if it’s JUST a game, then why do they keep score?” I agree with both of these points of view. To me, statistics are part of the fun. The score just keeps adding up every day, no matter what you do. As the total number of words that I have written this month approaches twenty thousand, I have to admit that I love the numbers.

Jeff Zandi
Texas Guildmages
Level II DCI Judge
jeffzandi@thoughtcastle.com
Zanman on Magic Online