Stepping up your game: Part 6

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jacelightning

6 April 2011

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The Highway to Dallas:

The Mental Game

In my last article, I told you all that I was going to GP Dallas and wanted to bring the tapped out community along with me for the ride so after a little bit of a delay I’m glad to share with you some things I’ve learned along the way to Dallas. The delay in this article was strongly in the corner of a 0-1 finish at a Grand Prix Trial in Dayton, Ohio.

First let me set the scene for this spectacular failure, I drove over to Dayton to play at the Grand Prix Trial for Dallas. I wasn’t able to hit up as many of the GPTs in the area as I would have liked due to circumstances like a friend getting married and family gatherings so it led to me only being able to hit up the one at Bell Book and Comic in Dayton, Ohio. I went to the tournament feeling a little bit of the pressure of having to win or else I wouldn’t have byes for the Grand Prix as due to work I wouldn’t be able to get in to the tournament until late Friday night. I arrived at the GPT playing U/B Control thinking I had learned to fight against Caw Blade menace and would be able to take it out. There were only eight players in the tournament so we playing single elimination which added more pressure on mind. I started my first match against my first opponent and with a Celestial Colonnade being the first land drop I made a quick read that my opponent was on Caw Blade. The first game was a long controlling game that had me getting mana screwed and eventually just losing my Grave Titan hoard to a Gideon Jura/Day of Judgment combo. Now a very important fact is that in the first game I saw not a single sign of a Stoneforge Mystic, Squadron Hawk, or a Sword of Feast and Famine, but I still sideboarded for Caw Blade. The next game I misplayed my Inquisition of Koziliek and instead of stripping the his Counterspell out of his hand I ran the first of my Into the Roils straight into a negate which left him enough power to deal me lethal even if I didn’t attack. After I lost I was ticked and angry and started the drive home just in pissed off mood.

On the way home I was commiserating my loss and the fact that I wouldn’t get to have the three byes at the Grand Prix, eventually in the middle of my angry fog I started thinking about how I lost the match and what mistakes were made. I made many more than I listed in the above tournament summary but I’ll just list the mistakes that you can see in my above summary: I guessed at what he was running with out any sign, kept a borderline hand which led to my mana screw (island, Creeping Tar Pit, Preordain, Jace, Mana Leak, Grave Titan, Stoic Rebuttal (the Preordain turned up a Jace and Grave Titan and after I shipped them to the bottom I drew another Jace), didn’t sideboard for the match-up I saw using what I thought, on my last turn I didn’t lead with the Inquisition which would have lead to me dealing lethal damage on the next turn as he would have to recast everything and the zombies generated by the attack would lead to the victory on my next attack. I don’t know if anyone else saw it, but there is one bigger mistake that cost me more than all of the others combined as it started me towards the path on making each of the mistakes I made in the game. I was already on tilt mentally going into the tournament. Magic as a game is best played by individuals with clear and focused heads and I was no mental condition to play the best Magic I could play in order to take down that tournament. This really got me thinking about how I was preparing for tournaments mentally. I realized that my mistakes all came out of a bad mindset and if I wanted to fix that problem I needed to fix how I approached the game from a mental mindset. I want to share what I found in my game and how I fixed it in preparing for the tournament.

This isn’t a complete list of problems with my game, but this is some of the things that are wrong with my mental game in particular. First off I feel am too connected to my results, in this tournament I got too hyped up about the single elimination that I didn’t play against the deck I saw instead I tried to get a sick read. I didn’t take a minute just to survey the board and my hand before each turn, which leads to me missing the Inquisition in my hand, which produced the misplay that killed me in that game. I don’t carefully do the math on mulligans, which would produce more sure keeps. I need to more carefully evaluate not only what my opponent is playing, but also what isn’t being played and what that says about the deck and what is contained in my opponent’s hand. That is a seriously a lot of things that I have to work on and in my playtesting I’ve not only been working on the match-ups but also on the mental side of my game so that I can play the best magic I can play.

The first thing that I needed to work on was how invested I was in each game and how I dealt with tilt after a negative result. There wasn’t a clear way to work on this until I was listening to Mike Flores talking on the Limited Resources podcast and he talked about how no game of magic should impact how we view ourselves. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn from our mistakes, but instead it means that no matter how badly (or how well) we perform in any game or tournament we are still the people we are no matter what magic results in. I can honestly say that I love playing magic and that sometimes at a PTQ when I’ve been eliminated from contention that I drop and wonder why it is that I do this anyway, but ultimately the fact is I get to play magic for an entire day and hanging out with some great people and that’s a great way to spend a day. My goal is to win the Grand Prix and I’ve tested and worked towards this end, but regardless of my performance I know that this weekend is going to be a great experience.

The next thing that I went to work on fixing about myself was the taking time to survey my hand and the board before each turn. I needed to set a ‘stop’ for myself. I used my playtesting games as a chance to make myself look at the board and my hand before every turn. I used a notepad and made myself write down my hand every turn before I started playing. It made for a nice way to track my hands and look at how I responded to threats, but I don’t want to write my hands down every turn during an actual match. I then transitioned this to just tallying up the number of turns I had which forced me to sit down my hand to make a note and then look at the board state and prepare to make the correct play. I did this during playtest games and began to see plays that I had never seen before and really liked what it did for my game. I also played some games with my friend Adam; let me explain about why this helped me take my time. Adam is one of the slowest players I know and I don’t mean in the slow play (cough Pozgay cough) type of way but in the I’m not going to make a decision without considering all the options type of way. It really helped me play him as it made me focus on what I was doing and how I was going to interact with what he was playing and how to respond with what he is doing.

I then turned my attention to how I mulligan. I have to be honest when I was playing red deck wins I was much more aggressive in my mulligans and was not afraid to send back sketchy hands, but in playing U/B control and other blue decks with Preordain I was tended to lean on Preordain more to get me lands and I needed to break myself of relying on that sorcery. The thing that I used to break me of this habit was a formula that was in Patrick Chapin’s Next Level Magic, it said that you take x such that it is the number of the type of cards you want to draw and then you take y such that it is the number of cards that are left in the deck and divide x/y and multiply that answer by 100 and that’s the percentage of chance that you draw the card you need so if x is 24 lands left in your deck and you have 53 cards left in your deck then you do the math and find 24/53 = .45 or you could know it is significantly lower than 25/50 or it’s roughly 22/48 with is also approximately .45. This lets you calculate the odds of drawing specific cards and lets you make more informed mulligan decisions and it does take me longer to evaluate mulligans, but I make more informed mulligan decisions using this formula which has helped me break the reliance on Preordain.

The last thing I worked on is thinking more fully about what my opponent is playing and what’s coming and what’s not and why that matters. This is a result of a couple of things. First off it’s being prepared by knowing what the big sites are writing about and knowing what decks they are advocating and what the stock lists are going to look like. The other part of it is focusing on what’s going on because if you watch how people play their cards they will reveal some details about their decklist. This is something I thought I was good at, but actually am really bad at it. I worked on this by playtesting against different forms of the same decklists like Boros versions with Hero of Oxid Ridges and versions with Koth and Caw Blade with straight U/W, U/W/B, and U/W/R versions and just things like that so that I don’t just assume deck choice from the first land and respond to the versions accordingly.

This is just part of the work I am doing in preparation for GP Dallas. I think that I’ve really done some good work on the mental aspect of my game and have made some vast strides. I do think that every magic player looking to improve their game should take a look at how they are using the mental game and honestly assess problems they find there. I can’t wait to go to Dallas and if you are from the area feel free to come up and say hi or to get in contact with me via email [email protected] or via twitter @jarrodkwilliams.