You win some, you lose more

Opinion

Servo_Token

30 December 2016

1078 views

I play a lot of Magic. For the last five years, i've played Magic basically every day. Of course I don't have time to go out and find a real human opponent every day, but you could be considered playing the game even without an opponent. Brewing with a new card, Opening packs, Deck building, Watching MTG related Youtube content, Pouring over decklists on TappedOut, Reading MTG articles, these are all ways that one could supposedly be 'playing' Magic. Magic is much more than the actual game, There's a near-infinite number of things you could be doing with it, and every day i've been learning just how deep this rabbit-hole goes. In my experience, Magic is not a game that anyone can play. Well, they can I guess, but not everyone can play well. You can't just sit down at a table and expect to win with 100% certainty. There's variance, everyone's best friend, that usually gets in the way of this. Whether it be mana screw, threat drought, or just a poor matchup, variance causes the large majority of losses in the competitive and casual environment alike. Variance says that "Sometimes you’re going to lose". As I play more and more, this is just something that I've kept rediscovering. I play a lot of Magic, and I lose a lot of Magic. And that's ok.

So as 2016 comes to a close, we should take a look back on our previous year's experience and try to take what we can from that to apply to the next year. For me, I had a few memorable experiences that i'd like to bring with me; I went to my first GP, I day 2'd my first SCG Open, I top 8'd my first event with more than 50 people, and I got 1st place at my first non-FNM event - A modern preliminary PTQ. These are all things that I'd wanted to accomplish at some point, and finally having achieved them is a real blessing and comfort knowing that I have bigger and better things to look forward to. On the flip side though, there's also a few things that I kind of want to leave back in 2016. I 0-3 dropped my first large tournament. I let my saltiness get the better of me and didn’t shake my opponent's hand for the first time, instead choosing to curse under my breath and otherwise totally disrespect both them and this game. I treated Magic as though it were a job (I mean, working at an LGS means that it is, but I always tried to keep my work-experience and my play-experience separate). I allowed myself to suck all of the fun and meaning from this amazing game. I dropped playing for a month. These are all things that I'll just let 2016 hold on to. I have learned and experienced so many good things in this game and I don't want to sour my patch kids by holding onto some painfully poor choices I made. We all probably have those moments that we'd like to leave behind, but at the same time we can’t leave behind all of the negative stuff. As a Magic player - or just decent human person in general - we need to carefully observe and criticise all aspects of our past and take the lessons we learned from that and bring those into our future.

At the beginning of the month, I decided that it was probably about time I try out Magic Online. I had just bought a new computer and what better time to test the waters? Well, immediately I figured that i'd just grind modern queues all day forever, and after purchasing a relatively cheap RW burn deck this seemed like it was just the plan. I started to go pseudo infinite, winning enough play points to keep signing up for more queues. Well, time goes on and after playing against the same 12 opponents all day I got a bit bored. I thought i'd go and play a different deck, so I tried out 8 rack. Bought up all the pieces and it went fine for a bit, but I found myself losing more games than I was winning. "Obviously it’s the deck" I thought as I clicked submit purchase on soul sisters. Same story, after 2 days and a 40% win rating, the deck must just not be good enough to compete even in this meta filled with burn and grixis delver. So I take the next logical option and build up GB Rock, obviously. I've never played this deck before, but it plays good cards, it must just be generally good, right? Ha! How about that 3-10 match rate. Ok, well that deck obviously wasn't good either, so I sell that off. But as I'm scouring MTGGoldfish for another cheap top tier deck, I have a realization. Call it an epiphany at my drownyard if you will. Anyway, the thought crosses my mind that "Wait, maybe it isn't the deck that's losing the games. I always tell people on Tappedout on their bad decks that they post that any player using any deck can take down any tournament… so what if i'm just kinda bad?" That's when I decide to take a step back, really examine myself and how i'd been playing that week and a half or so. I was always in a rush. I felt like I was stuck in traffic whenever my opponent didn't make the most optimal move immediately. I found myself making obscenities at my computer monitor whenever something didn't go my way, blaming top decks or the opponent just getting lucky. Really, I was swimming in the salt, and I was letting it get the best of me. And unfortunately my wallet and personal experience were the ones taking the brunt of it all. It was time again to change. Magic is just a game, I needed to stop taking it so seriously because when I did that, I started losing, and would get caught in this self-fueling cycle of generally bad feels. I needed to realize that losing wasn't the worst thing that could be happening to me. Losing is part of the game. That even when you're losing, if you take something out of it you're still winning.

I play a lot of Magic. Sometimes variance gets the better of me and I blow up on an 0-10 losing streak. Other times, my opponents happen to get mana flooded for the fifth time in a row and I take home the trophy. But most of the time I end up on the loss. And that's ok. It's ok to lose in this game. If you can look back on a match that you lose and identify some key points of that match, really find the places that decided the game and caused you to lose, then play around those events happening in your next game, you are the winner. You are the winner if you can take a negative situation and learn something from it. You are a winner if you don't let variance get the best of you. You are a winner if you can take your losses as well as you take your victories. You are a winner if you can step back, and after some careful examination find the lines you need to take to make yourself the winner you want to be. I’m trying to learn to do this myself, and let me tell you, it’s anything but easy. There's days where the salt is the only thing I know. There's days where the loss comes down to variance and I just have to accept that. There's days where I can't tell if it was my mulligan decision or when I tapped my mana wrong that lost me the game. But all these things are making me into a better player, and I'm learning to use those to become the real winner. As 2016 comes to a close and 2017 has us all starting fresh, my hope for you is that you can start to look back at all that you've done - good or bad - and that you can find yourself as the real winner.

Thanks for reading.

-dm