Life is full of questions. Literally full of them. There might not actually be infinite things to know, but there’s enough that just thinking about the unfeasibly large amount of things you could learn about will probably spark a never-ending spiral of extra things to think about. Eventually, you’ll die, as our lives are much shorter than the amount of time it takes to work out what all the questions are.
Don’t even get me started on the answers.
Information is an amazing thing. With knowledge, apparently, comes power. With power, apparently, comes responsibility. Responsibility, as I am increasingly learning as I get older, is bloody boring. Suddenly, learning more things in fact makes my life more boring.
Case in point: Magic tricks. I have loved magic for as long as I can remember. Some of this is the “coin appearing from behind your ear” uncle school of magic, while other bits of it might be the way that, without any strings or wires, hundreds of tons of airplane manage not just to hang in the sky, but also cut through it at speeds beyond the fastest achievable on land.
I’ve had both of these things explained to me at length, and I still don’t feel that I fully understand either. But with each, I am a little disappointed that somebody spoiled the secret for me. When you know where the coin is, things are a little less fun.
In Vs. System, there is definitely a lot of information to take in at any time, and you have a disconcertingly large amount of decisions to make.
I have a suggestion for you.
You do not need to think about everything.
The brain might well be the most mysterious and powerful thing in a world full of mysterious and powerful things. You don’t need to be smart for your brain to be clever. I don’t understand how it does much of what it does (which, when you stop and think about it, is kind of funny, given that my brain is doing things that it itself doesn’t allow me to understand), but I don’t need to. It just does them anyway.
Your brain makes all sorts of decisions for you without you having to do any thinking at all. If you are about to cross a street, and suddenly you see a car coming and stop, you will not have had a little internal monologue such as the following:
This seems like a good little spot of road to cross. I wish to be on the other side of it, and the only way to get there is to walk forward now. Left foot, right foot, just like that. I don’t see any impediments to my way, so I’m just going to go. Left foot, right foot. Maybe right foot, left foot, it doesn’t really matter.
Oh my, a car is coming. If it hits me, given the speed at which it is traveling, I would probably fare very much the worse. It seems doubtful that if I kept going, it could stop in time and not hit me. The driver doesn’t appear to be the sort of person to possess superhuman breaking powers. I had better put my own breaks on with regard to my walking. No more walking for me.
More likely, you would stop without being aware of any thought going on whatsoever. Subconsciously, though, a little monologue like that will have happened. But it just went really, really fast and your brain didn’t feel like sharing it with you.
As your brain gets used to more and more situations, it will just start doing things for you so that you don’t need to worry about them. This is how both good and bad habits start. It is also the forming of experience and “gut feelings” for things. When you get a feeling in your gut about something with which you have a fair amount of experience, it is your brain’s way of saying, “You might not need to think about this particular problem quite so hard; here’s the answer. Don’t worry about how I got it, just trust me.”
So how does this apply to Vs. System? Well, it seems to me to be the best endorsement for getting in as much practice as possible with whatever deck you intend to play or Sealed Pack format you intend to indulge in. In a Draft situation, there are between two and fourteen cards to consider in any individual pack, but the context for the decisions will include many hundreds more cards that you have seen floating around the table and your knowledge of what is good in that particular Draft format. Being able to let your brain handle the more straightforward bits and pieces so that you can concentrate on the important bits seems like a very good plan.
Limiting what you need to learn is a good way to build your experience faster. When testing in groups, there are normally two stages that I want to see. In the first, everyone plays a different deck, but plays that deck more or less exclusively. This way, you only need to worry about learning the nuances of a single deck. The sooner you know such tricks, the sooner you can worry about matchups and such. You cannot do meaningful testing until you can play your deck reasonably against a random opponent.
The second stage is for everyone in a testing group to select what they deem to be the best deck and then have everyone play it. Perhaps take it to a PCQ. With a whole group playing the same deck, you get a much bigger sample size of results for the deck. Tweaking for bad matchups then becomes less of an art and more of a science. Making changes to a deck after three or four games is probably not a great plan. After twenty or thirty, though, you may well have a pretty decent idea of where your deck should be going.
Finally, in terms of limiting your information to make better-informed decisions, there is the studying of the metagame. By this, I mean decklists. Decklists are everywhere. You have already proven that you have access to the Internet by the act of getting this far in the article (unless you have articles printed out and sent to you by carrier pigeon, in which case I’m afraid I cannot help you). A quick search on various Vs. sites (starting with this one) will give you a whole bunch of lists to look through and think about.
Knowing lists means that when you’re playing against opponents, you have a much better chance of being able to “read their minds.” If I’m trying to work out my play in a tricky spot, I will be thinking about what my opponent could conceivably do. This working out is made a whole lot easier if I can accurately estimate what cards he or she could realistically be playing. Suddenly, I am playing around four or five cards, perhaps, and can make more daring plays as a consequence.
In many respects, this is proof of the power of a “rogue” deck. Rogue decks force opponents out of their comfort zones, making them go back to all the possibilities. This is a horrible thing to do to opponents. I try to do it at every juncture, but that’s just because I’m mean.
Finally, if you play enough matches with your deck, you will start to notice patterns in what happens on the occasions where you lose. This is the first step in forming a game plan to stop those things from happening. Games cease to be a collection of individual decisions and instead become stages in a sequence of events where you are only really fighting to ensure that very specific things do or don’t occur because you can say with some accuracy that if these things go your way, the rest of the game will sort itself out.
The next Pro Circuit is approaching with surprising rapidity. I strongly suggest that you pick your deck nice and early and just practice with it a lot. Believe it or not, having the best deck isn’t the be-all and end-all of Constructed Vs. System. Having a good plan and focusing on what matters to your deck can take you a very long way.
Have fun and be lucky.
Tim “Head Case” Willoughby
timwilloughby@hotmail.com