Psychology of Magic

[RaleighNCTourneys]

I noticed something the other day just messing around with my Drain Tendrils deck. At end of turn, sometimes I will have an Underground Sea and an Island with Dark Ritual and Thirst for Knowledge in hand and other times I will have Underground Sea, Island, Lotus Petal in play and TFK in hand. In the latter case with the Lotus Petal, casting TFK at EOT always seems like it's a pretty decent play; nothing wrong with that. In the first case, whenever I can Dark Ritual into a TFK it seems terrible in my head. It's probably better to cast the TFK with the Ritual because it leaves an extra artifact in my deck (Lotus Petal), which I can possibly find and pitch to TFK.

Does this make sense to anyone else? Both are non-permanent mana producing cards and both let me cast the TFK, but the Dark Ritual just seems like a bad play. I have 2 theories behind why this may be: Dark Ritual's intent in the deck is not to be casting spells like TFK; it's there to enable the Tendrils and Will, so it feels out of place when I do it. Second, you burn for one mana with the Dark Ritual, which may have some strange psychological influence. Am i crazy?!

[zeus-online]

I think it's pretty common to have mental mind blocks...A couple of examples:

In Type 1, i always use my draw spells before casting a land (If we assume that i play the draw spell on my own turn, that is).
However, for reasons unknown in Type 2 i do the opposite, which is really stupid since i might just draw the last urzatron piece - I've been trying hard to get rid of this bad habit.

When i go swimming i can't do a head dive, its not that i'm physically unable to jump in with my head first, but for some reason i just can't. It's like my entire mind is fighting the rest of the body.

I'm unsure how to fight mind blocks.

/Zeus

[Matt]

I suspect that what's keeping you from Ritualing is the knowledge that you're "wasting" a mana more than mana burn. If Ritual said "Add BB to your mana pool, lose 1 life" you would probably not have this problem, since you would not be wasting a mana.