Was I happy to just be playing "for money"?
I read an article by PVDDR (a famous/good magic player), where he was listing out his strengths and weaknesses, and one of them hit me. He said that one of his weaknesses was "he was happy to get top 8's", but then he'd end up never winning. The top 8 was his goal, so he did that, and then didn't have the drive to go on and win.
(Whole article, for reference) http://www.channelfireball.com/home/pvs-playhouse-strengths-and-weaknesses/
I was pretty happy to be playing when I was playing. I've played hundreds of test games in the TPR, and I finally got up the nerve to play "for real", and not feel like a jerk. I jumped the hurdle, and feel like playing more (despite having a strong losing record), so maybe with time, I won't be happy to play, and my goal will be more to win.
I made some stupid mistakes.
I need to rewatch as many of those games as possible, today or tomorrow, just to observe what I was doing, and if there was anything I could have done better. My best matchups were control and aggro, and I didn't have a winning record against either. I didn't win a GAME against ramp.
I may have gotten overconfident.
Its hard to believe that I may have been overconfident playing these games, when at no point during the 20 games did I have a winning record. But I felt like I was going to win (or should win) a particular match/game, and that led me to do things in a non-amazing way. Assuming that you're going to win is rarely useful, and I often did assume that I was going to win.
This especially comes into play with the next point.
I need to mulligan more.
If I feel like I'm in a good matchup, or if I feel like I'm in a bad matchup, or if I feel like I don't know what the matchup is, I never feel like I can mulligan.
If I feel like I have a good matchup, I feel like I can beat them without having amazing cards in my hand off the start. When in fact, I need to have some amount of useful cards in order for it to be a good matchup. So, the Halimar Depths + 4 land + Treasure Hunt + any spell hand, while awesome at playing out lands, and drawing alot of (land) cards, is going to result in a loss against an aggro deck. (Even if I have 4 pyroclasm, 8 1cc instant bolts, and 4 staggershocks in my deck somewhere)
If I feel like I have a bad matchup, I feel like mulliganing puts me even deeper in the hole, when mulliganing is exactly what I need to do to have a fighting chance. Keeping my first 7 and being near-guaranteed of a loss is no more likely to win a game than trying for 6.
If I don't know what the matchup is (game 1 for example), I tend to keep pretty much anything that is lands and spells. I think this is okay, but once I understand the meta a bit more (or know what decks people are playing), this will come up less often.
When I rewatch the games, I'm going to pay particular attention to my mulliganing. I could not have had worse luck on keeping an anti-aggro hand and having them play control, or vice versa.
I need to concentrate while I am playing.
This is an obvious one, but one I feel like I need to state anyway. This is the time when I need to be paying attention, if no other time.
Edit: Turns out, of the 47 games I played in these 20 matches, about 8 were recorded. So that took me about half an hour to go over, and I wasn't able to learn much. Looks like a problem with MTGO.
No comments:
Post a Comment