The phrase goes that “there is nothing new under the sun”, but never was that more true than during the era where everything was new: the 1960s.

Yes, the bellbottoms and paisley, the era of free love, free drugs, tune in and drop out, the stereotypical hippies. But that wasn’t as new as they thought.

In 1987, the essayist Tom Wolfe wrote one of the more influential essays of his time in The American Spectator entitled “The Great Relearning”. In this essay, Wolfe pulled together a few anecdotes to make his point, but I’m going to focus on the hippies as my jumping-off point to encourage you to relearn the Magic: The Gathering basics that you might thing that you can ignore in the age of Arena, wild cards, and something called “Friday Night Magic” (wait, you want me to use my HANDS to play Magic? Like a sucker?).

Wolfe noted that in 1968, at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic (a medical facility created to serve the huge number of hippies and recent arrivees to the “Summer of Love” the previous year), there was a sudden spike in diseases that had not been seen for decades or even centuries before. These diseases were so old that they hadn’t been given official Latin names during a period of modernization in medicine, and thus could only be named through the slang of the streets. People were being diagnosed with the grunge…the twitch…the scroff…the rot (needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend getting any of these). So as these outbreaks were investigated, doctors found that they were the unintended consequence of “year zero thinking”. Many at that time thought that an integral part of the hippie movement was a throwing-off of old norms and societal rules to cause a kind of rebirth, where every action could be learned by experience and experiment. But, as it turns out, there are downsides to attempting to naively relearn things that had already been discovered. There’s a reason that you’ve probably been taught since you were small that you aren’t supposed to share another person’s toothbrush…that it’s a good idea to put sheets on your mattress before you and twelve of your best friends sleep on it…that you need to bathe more often than once every two weeks. And thus The Great Relearning happened…because people ignored the lessons of the past, they were forced to learn again through the direct consequences of their actions.

Writer GK Chesterton said the same thing about society through a fable known as Chesterton’s Fence. He imagined that a person had bought a large piece of land, and in the middle of that land was an old stone fence…a long stack of boulders that stretched across part of the land that the owner would like to use. Chesterton argued that there were two possibilities for the owner’s next step. On one hand, the owner could simply decide that the fence was old, outdated, and in the way, and thus promptly tear it down. On the other hand, the owner might think, “I don’t know why the fence was built here, but stone fences don’t build themselves. Someone in the past thought that it would be good for this fence to be here, so I should probably figure out why it was erected before getting rid of it.”

Ultimately, old yarns about how the world works are often old because they have passed the test of time. We are handed this knowledge by those who have gone before us because it is useful. But it’s so easy to ignore them and just YOLO whatever decision we want to make, ESPECIALLY if it involves less study or less work.

The same holds true in MTG. It’s easy to feel like we’re playing the same game, doing the same things, and therefore don’t need to review the knowledge that really smart people have passed on to us through their own labors. I’ve noticed this in my own play, and so at the beginning of 2022 I’m heading back to the basics in two specific areas that will hopefully keep me from catching the MTG equivalent of The Rot.

First, I’m relearning what it means to build a mana base. This is an especially easy trap to fall into on MTG Arena, where the program will “helpfully” plug lands in to finish any deck idea that you might have. Just toss whatever spells you desire into a deck and >poof< you’re ready to go. Of course, if you’re at a slightly higher level than Sparky, you’re not going to run with that. But the NUMBER of lands, I fear, is a huge influence on a lot of players. Every deck gets 24 lands, more or less, so you end up replacing a bunch of basics with shocks or Pathways or whatever other relevant lands there are in the format, maybe toss in a couple of MDFCs because they’re good, right, and call it a day. But then you get mana screwed in three out of the first four games of testing and you start to wonder if you’ve been bamboozled. It turns out that building an optimal mana base isn’t all that easy and relies on a lot of factors. They’re factors that you can calculate and determine, but they exist.

Luckily, you don’t have to do all of this work yourself, because that stone fence in that particular field is there for a reason. Frank Karsten is the current reigning heavyweight champion of mathematics in MTG, and he’s done several incredible articles on Channel Fireball about how to build the optimal manabase. As a fellow mathematician, it angers me how smart he is but I’m going to rely on (read: steal) his calculations much more often than I am now. For real: I’ve gotten six pages of notes already out of five articles, and I don’t think it’s going to change any time soon. His articles are under a paywall at CFB, but it’s the cost of a couple of rare wild cards in a month. If you’re going to improve your craft, you have to study your craft.

Second, I’ve resolved to spend more time studying the best decks in the formats that I play. If you know me, you know that I’m not happy unless I’m playing jank. Hell, if a deck or a card gets TOO popular to play (looking at you, Inquisitor Captain, I’ll stop playing it for a while. I express my personality in my play by concentrating on the offbeat, the different, the wild. But there’s a reason why those who play for blood and money stick with a small number of the best decks. And regardless of why or how you play, we don’t look down our noses at “netdeckers” around here. But you are being 100% irresponsible in your play if you don’t take some time out of your “jam games” quota to figure out why the best decks are what they are.

There are two different ways to look at this particular task, and they’re both slightly different. First, you should be able to summarize in one to two sentences what a deck is trying to do. And yes, it wouldn’t hurt to write it down. On paper. Yes, there are things that you hold in your hand that make marks on said paper. Trust me. For example, if I go to the top Alchemy deck on untapped.gg, Boros Dragons is attempting to leverage the power of Fearsome Whelp to play dragons ahead of curve and quickly beat down an opponent. I did not take a great deal of time to come up with that insight, but that alone has value. Because if you actually read the text of Fearsome Whelp, you see that the discounting effect happens on endstep. So the second way to study good decks is to determine how to fight against them. There are two things that are really good against Boros Dragons: instant-speed removal that can remove the Whelp before the discount happens, and either removal or counters that deal with the big dragons themselves. Does your jank let you do one of those two things? If so, good. If not, you have to either add it or accept that you’re a very low percentage to beat the best deck in the formal.

But you have to do this AWAY from the matches themselves. There are too many variables that go into the matches themselves to do this on the fly. If you lose to Boros Dragon 90% of your limited amount of matches against it, it might be because of the above reasons. You might also just be flooding or getting mana screwed or just getting unlucky in really close games. But you can’t effectively figure this out if you’re not taking the time to consider the basics…the first things that anyone who builds a deck decides that they want to do in a perfect game. This is a relearning as well…you probably knew this was a good idea the second you got past the “I’m playing this deck because my favorite two cards are in it and they look cool” phase of skill development. But it’s easy to forget and think that you’re too smart to take basic steps towards improvement. Time to relearn.

In the end, nothing is new under the sun. There is a cost to ignoring the first principles. And I don’t want you to needlessly forget why that stone fence is there when the bull who lives an acre over gores you in the butt. Stop, breathe, and relearn. You got this.