A couple of friends and I started discussing a while back whether there was any point in playing for second place in multiplayer. Basically, if you have a couple of options in the end game, none of which will actually result in you winning, should you choose the one that gives you the highest probability of coming second, should you take consolation in the fact that you might be able to choose which of your opponents comes in first (king-making), or should you just stop caring? My position has always been that winning is good and that second is generally better than third, but my friends didn’t see it that way.

One of my friends even posed the question to the good folks at CommanderCast, and they did a segment on it for Season 5, Episode 9, but I felt that the perspectives they represented there were only half the story. One of them (a fellow Kiwi, I’m sad to say) even pulled out the old second-place-is-the-first-loser’ anard; that’s fine if you’re selling basketball shoes, and it might be acceptable if you're a high school gym teacher trying to motivate your students, but in the real world, and in multiplayer Magic, it is simply a crock of shit. Let’s look at what winning, losing, and in between really mean in multiplayer Magic.

What Is Winning?

What does winning mean in a game like Magic? Well, in a tournament, winning a game brings you closer to winning a match, which brings you closer to winning prizes. Assuming that your goal is to win the whole thing (and even I know that going in with the intention of sucking is a bad plan), every win is an important stepping stone to be striven for and celebrated. Winning best of three against an opponent might even suggest that you and/or your deck is better than him and/or his deck (although there are so many other variables involved that I suggest keeping that to yourself). In a duel, second place is exactly the same as losing.¹

What does it mean that you won a multiplayer game? Well, there’s no prize, no screaming Magic groupies to shag, and no accumulation of Planeswalker Points—whatever the hell those are—so in concrete terms, it doesn’t mean anything. Does it mean that your deck was better than everyone else’s or that you’re the best player at the table? Of course not; we’ve all seen enough games decided by luck, treachery, or complex, strategic interactions to know that multiplayer games often don’t work that way. What it should mean is that you played hard, made good decisions, and most importantly, had a ton of fun playing with your friends.

But, in the immortal words of Wolverine, “Any game worth playing is worth winning, bub.” You came to play, and you played well enough to win, so you can feel good about your performance (unless you’re dirty combo-lovin’ douchebag . . . sorry, it still hurts). The pride of doing well comes from within, bolstered by the respect of your opponents/friends, but the fact that it’s intangible doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Call me Spike, but winning is fun; it isn’t the only goal, or even the main goal, but it’s something we work for anyway, for our own sakes and for the sakes of our opponents.

I’m going to repeat that last bit: We try to win for the sake of our opponents. That is counterintuitive, but it’s true. Let me give you an example. Many years and many love handles ago, I trained in karate, and part of the grading that you had to go through to earn a higher rank was a series of defenses against simulated grabs. I remember once being partnered with some useless kid who didn’t so much grab me as slap his limp hand on my shoulder and leave it hanging there like a wet noodle. By not putting any strength into his grip, he made it impossible for me to do any of the techniques I’d been trained to do; even moving to grip his wrist sent that boneless limb flying away out of reach, and whenever I went to do a takedown or some other technique, he collapsed into a fetal position. Eventually, he was dragged out of the line and replaced by a surly black belt who fought me every step of the way, and when I got him to submit, the judges knew that I’d earned it.

In the same way, whatever satisfaction your opponents may take away from a well-earned victory is largely proportionate to the effort you put into resisting them. Nobody wants to be given the game, and if you suspected that someone gave you the game out of sympathy—or whatever—it would reduce your enjoyment of the win. That’s why "u" ber-Timmies like me are still able to have a great time playing against much Spikier opponents; win or lose, as long as the game progresses past the early game, we can usually enjoy the challenge of striving against better players and stronger (albeit wankier) decks and managing the occasional win.

So, winning is just one of the many good things that a game of Magic has to offer, but it is still a good thing, and playing to win can (within reason) make the game more enjoyable for your opponents as well as you, so it stands to reason that playing to win is a good idea.

At the same time, we know that only one person can win a multiplayer game, so this introduces a relative element to winning that duels don’t have. If winning the whole game means that you somehow did “better” than your opponents, and you consider that to be a good thing, coming in second means that you did better than most of your opponents. How is that not a good thing!?

In multiplayer, the old adage that “You can't win ’em all” is absolutely true. If there’s no prize for winning, but you still like it, ceteris paribus, you have to prefer coming in second to being the first to die. Saying otherwise is just completely illogical. Either you don’t care about winning, in which case you don’t see any difference between first, second, or x place, or you care about winning, in which case you prefer second to third, third to fourth, and x-minus-one place to x place. The only other option that seems to make sense is that you're such a narcissist that you can’t stand to live in a world where you aren't the best at whatever you do.² Admittedly, you might like winning a lot more than coming in second, but it is logical to prefer second place to last place if winning has any value to you.

Ceteris Paribus

Of course, not all second-place finishes are created equal. The CommanderCast crew discussed the possibility that you might only come in second because your deck stumbled and wasn’t an immediate threat to anyone else, so you avoided negative attention until the end game. That’s a fair point; we’ve all had games in which we came in second on the back of a slow start, and we all know that that isn't as rewarding as losing a hard-fought battle for first place.

However, that doesn’t change the fact that second place is generally better than last for three reasons. First, that kind of game dynamic only describes a fraction of game outcomes. We're mainly talking about two types games: the ones in which one deck fires on all cylinders, another deck completely misfires, and all other decks are significantly weaker than the strongest deck; and the ones in which one player deliberately stays under the radar and then pounces on his final, exhausted opponent, guaranteeing either a first- or second-place finish. Is second place less meaningful in those situations? I would say “yes,” but these are not the majority of cases unless your group as a whole is doing something very wrong.

Over the long term, you’re going to see two things happen in most playgroups: a convergence of power levels and a greater awareness of the long-term potential of each deck and each player. Both of those factors make it less likely that you'll be able to snatch the game simply because of a slow start, and even less likely that you’ll be able to do so more repeatedly. In Tokyo, we had one guy who always built his decks for the long game, accumulating powerful, but modest-looking cards and avoiding too much attention while building up to an overwhelming endgame.³ He often came in first or second because he never got pounded on until it was too late. Eventually, we realized what he was up to and started hammering away at his value engines while they were still relatively innocuous, and he had to start earning his victories in different ways.

Second, the same dynamics that might make a second-place finish less satisfying are just as likely to lead to a win; would the players who argue that second place is nothing accept that winning is nothing because sometimes you don’t earn your victory by being the strongest player throughout the game? Of course not. Sometimes, you win a game because your deck peaks later than everyone else’s, and that might make a win less satisfying, but that’s the nature of a complex, strategic game with multiple opponents. There are even some games in which you can draw satisfaction from being the first one out because of how powerfully you started the game.

The flipside of aggressive play is sometimes having the rest of the table rise up as one and kill you preemptively, and even though you died first, it means you're doing something right; be proud of that while working to do more things right next time and win the whole game. In most cases when you go out early, you could have survived longer if you’d played better, and since we’re playing a game of skill, smarts, and strategy, we should feel good about making more good decisions and surviving further into the game.

Third, winning a strategy game means making the most of your opponents’ plays—and their misplays. If your opponents are distracted by a flashy card or a strong early play and can't see the potential threat that your deck represents, that’s their strategic error, and winning because of that is just a part of any strategy game.

For example, I was first out in a four-player game recently, and by using all of their resources against me, the two guys who killed me ended up giving the game to the new guy, Brady. Did Brady luck into that victory? Should he feel bad for winning in that way? No, absolutely not! When the guy with the most aggressive deck, Brent, was pounding on me, and I was struggling to keep my head above water, my other opponent, Simon, hit me for lethal right out of the blue. I'm pretty sure that if Simon had taken a wider, more long-term view of the dynamics of the game, he could have kept both Brent and me at each other’s throats for a few more turns. That way, he would have had more time and resources to trim down Brady, making Brady less able to explosively take over the game, and Simon would have had more potential allies if Brady did get out of control. Plus, of course, if Simon wanted to seize control of the table once I was dead, which he tried to do, Brent would have had fewer resources with which to stop him.

Let that be a lesson to those of you who suffer from what The Ferrett called Second-Place Sucker Syndrome; if you find yourself battling for supremacy in the early game and ousting your first couple of opponents before losing to someone who didn’t look like a threat last turn, it’s partly your mistakes that gave that player the game. Spread the love around a little more, store the hate, use your limited resources a little more judiciously, and you’ll soon find that people aren’t stealing second—or winning the whole shebang—from out of nowhere.

Aiming Higher

So, winning is a goal that we all share. Don’t be a jerk about it, but play to win—if you win, you’ve done well, and if you lose, the winner will have earned it, which is good for him. Playing to win means playing for the best position you can earn, and if that means playing for second, so be it; if first place is worth the effort, so is second, and so is third.

Having an impact on the game is all well and good, but it doesn’t usually make sense to sacrifice your finish in order to decide who finishes above you. In sports, there’s a difference between playing to win and playing not to lose; the former is a much stronger motivation (which is why come-from-behind victories are much more common than we’d expect). In multiplayer, you aren't playing to deny other players the win so much as you're playing to come as close to that win as you can. Keep your focus on that, and avoid plays that would spoil someone else’s night or relegate you to a king-maker at the expense of your own achievement . . . Play to do as well as you can.

¹ This also applies to casual duels. I love casual duels with friends, especially my Johnniest friends, because we get to pit our decks—and by extension our deck-building prowess—against each other. When my buddy Stephen and I used to meet for an afternoon of gaming, he always kept a running score of our wins and losses as we cycled through our various homebrews. Casual doesn’t mean non-competitive!

²I’ve met that guy, and he’s an unmitigated asshole. Don’t be that guy!

³ The kind of plays I’m talking about are Journeyer's Kite and Thawing Glaciers, especially when combined with Rings of Brighthearth, Pilgrim's Eye, Jens, and Myr Retriever as non-threatening blockers, especially when combined with Nim Deathmantle, and in the midgame, cards that could potentially inflict a lot of pain on a single player without winning the game, which are enough of deterrent to keep you safe a little bit longer.