I build a sequential model of pre-discovery litigation and analyze it using standard game-theoretic tools. The model is rich enough to allow me to capture key aspects of pre-discovery litigation and tractable enough to allow me to yield several important results concerning the effects of the Supreme Court’s Twombly and Iqbal cases, which many observers believe raised the pleading standard in federal civil litigation. I show that the Rule 12(b)(6) motion filing and grant rates each might take on any value between zero and 100 percent. I also show that the parties' behavioral responses to more demanding pleading — what I call party selection — might cause any combination of increases, no change, or decreases in the Rule 12(b)(6) motion filing rate, the grant rate, and the number of cases filed. This analytical result casts suggests that very little is at stake in the heated debate concerning recent empirical studies of Twombly and Iqbal’s effects on the Rule 12(b)(6) grant rate. I then use the model to verify the validity of the empirical approach in an earlier paper, and I reprise that paper’s empirical finding that switching to the Twombly/Iqbal pleading regime had negative effects on plaintiffs in a substantial share of cases that had Rule 12(b)(6) motions filed (or filed and granted) in the post-Iqbal period.I then raise three normative issues related to Twombly and Iqbal. The first issue concerns the impact of switching to more demanding pleading on parties’ expected payoffs from litigation. I show analytically that, on the whole, switching to a more demanding pleading standard will redistribute from plaintiffs to defendants. Second, I tee up the question of how one might tell whether Twombly and Iqbal have affected only low-merit suits or have had effects that the cases’ authors did not intend. Third, I explore the multi-faceted ways in which pleading standards might affect primary behavior, illustrating that the choice of pleading standards involves tradeoffs between reducing unlawful behavior and chilling lawful behavior.