The best predictor of achievement is the amount of time a person spends actively engaged in the activity he or she is attempting to learn. For example, students in driver’s education have demonstrated that there is a strong relationship between time spent driving and the development of driving ability (per a recent report from the United States Department of Transportation). The more a student drives, the better that student becomes at driving. Practice makes perfect . . . yada, yada. We still have wrecks.

Practice Makes Mediocre

While most intensive skills require practice, you cannot always expect to practice your way to mastery. Learning research has shown that practice is a necessary—but not sufficient—component for skill development. Imagine the case of a typical player learning to play the game of Vs. System. An individual may buy a starter deck and crack open some booster packs. He or she may spend hundreds of hours piloting the struggle between the X-Men and the Brotherhood or the factions of Doom and the Fantastic Four, but may not fully develop the play skill necessary to hoist a $10K trophy over his or her head. It is unlikely that anyone could simply practice their way into a Pro Circuit championship.

Other key factors must be present before casual and professional players evolve into tournament-winning card flippers. In the case of reading, there is the requirement of teaching important steps or foundational skills related to reading. Elementary school students must learn about the relationship between sounds and letters, they must learn how to combine those sounds to form words, and they must eventually learn to extract meaning from those words. Learning theorists have spent hundreds of years breaking down complex skills into small, manageable units to help people develop those skills faster or more effectively. Theory would lead us to assume that if you master foundational units, then that will enable you to tackle more advanced skill development.

Advancing your knowledge in Vs. system occurs in a similar way. There are the necessary logistical things required, like knowledge of the rules, possession of cards, and having the time and opportunity to play, but there are also foundational concepts that must be understood to play the game. For the average player, these gaming basics come easily. Building a solid foundation allows a player the opportunity to advance. These basic skills may be considered enabling skills because once you have mastered them, you open the door for advanced theory and concepts.

The Kingpin’s School of Hard Knocks may be considered a forum in which to gain skills and develop advanced conceptual understanding. For the best grasp of the game’s basics, there are several writers on Metagame.com and other Vs.-related sites who have crafted insightful essays on concepts like keywords, offensive and defensive formations, and using various types of cards in your decklists.

Fluency: Driving a Car

Fluency refers to a person’s ability to complete a task with speed and accuracy. When I first learned to drive a car, I spent a great deal of time thinking about all of the small (but foundationally important) things. I would hop into the driver’s seat and think about the 10 and 2 rule for hand placement on the wheel. I’d adjust my rearview mirror, adjust my steering wheel, check my side mirrors, fasten my seatbelt, and look over my shoulder about ten times before I ever started the engine. After the car was moving, I’d think about how far down to press the clutch and where the next gear was before shifting, and I’d closely watch my indicators for gas, speed, and RPMs.

I spent so much time attending to the small details that I had very little time left to think about where I was going. I was bogged down on foundational mechanics. Now, I cruise down the road drinking chocolate milkshakes and power-shifting my car while talking with my good buddies on my cell phone about the hottest new tech for PC: LA. After I gained fluency in the basics of driving a car, I was able to free up my mental energy for bigger and more important tasks.

Oddly enough, most of the errors made during a typical game are errors based in foundational skills. When I began playing this game, I put characters with no range in the support row when I needed them to attack. I made formations that allowed my opponent to drill my face for huge losses of precious endurance. I attacked into characters with DEF so high I couldn’t stun them, and I consistently forgot to trigger important effects. I not only made a high rate of errors, but I also took a long time to make those errors. I would spend too long thinking through my attacks and often diverted important attention away from key conceptual issues to think about foundational mechanics.

Driving the Deck

Focusing on the deck’s mechanics was like learning to drive the car. Afterward, when I mastered many of those enabling skills, I freed up my cognitive energy to focus on more advanced play skills like board advantage and tempo. I realized that when I began playing this game I missed too many great plays. I was so busy working on my mechanics that I did not have the time or thoughtfulness to work my way out of problematic situations. You will notice that great players can play very difficult decks that require multiple decision points and a complicated analysis of many variables. Decks like New School and Rigged Elections can be very imposing to a player who has not solidified his or her mechanical foundation.

This discovery can earn a player some success early on in his or her tournament career. My best performance at a PC came with the aid of the Squadron Supreme. A quick-hitting, combat oriented deck relies on strength of cards and outstanding mechanical knowledge. That deck maximized a personal strength and minimized my own weaknesses in strategy and conceptual understanding at that time. You may notice that when you first pick up a very complex deck you have slower play, labor over every decision, and are less able to compensate for poor draws and play mistakes. Some decks require intense playtesting and practice in order to develop the higher thinking skills needed for tournament play.

Direct Instruction and Outcomes

Aside from mastery of foundational play skills and the practice that leads to fluency, you need a final component to advance your learning. Direct instruction is a concept that takes the aforementioned basic units, whether they are foundational skills or advanced theoretical concepts, and provides a sequence for acquiring those units. Before you can drive the car, you have to receive some direct instructions about how to operate the car, what processes to follow that lead to car operation, and how to problem solve once you put the car into motion. Direct instruction provides the content that should be applied in practice.

This series of articles is working toward providing you with those instructions. The Kingpin’s School has a scope and sequence designed to advance your Vs. skill and theoretical knowledge. The final component consists of application. I somewhat jokingly assign homework in the concluding paragraphs of my articles to reinforce the fact that you have to review content and then apply the content through practice.

Specifically, many of your classmates have asked some pretty intense and well thought-out questions concerning the content of this series. In most cases, it seems that the greatest understanding is gained when a student tries to test out the theory presented in an article. Your homework for this week it to contrive various scenarios in which you test some of the advanced content presented up to this point.

Invent situations in which you have ten ATK pumps and a single character against five characters and no attack pumps. Prove or disprove the tenets that I have laid out. Take a late game stall deck and blow all of your defensive plot twists to save your 3-drop character from stunning and send me some emails about the importance of understanding the relationship between a deck’s win condition and its accompanying tempo.

To reinforce your academically engaged time, practice, and good work, I felt like it was time to field some questions and comments from the class.

Q and A with the Kingpin

Jacquay Williams, “The Ham Sandwich”:

I don’t eat ham sandwiches, but I sure do like turkey. I’d say that you won in the fight against the almighty, all-powerful, all-knowing turkey sandwich. I never thought that board advantage and character advantage were so closely related. It makes sense to me now because of cards like Children of the Atom (best recovery card ever) and Phoenix Rising. I’m glad that you decided to write these articles because they help me gain the confidence to go pro. Thanks again.

KP:

Jacquay, I am glad to hear that you are enjoying the articles. This game appears to favor board advantage over many other factors. In some games, you feel pretty strong when you have a hand full of cards no matter how many characters are down in the field. In this game, there are times when I would empty my hand to keep key characters around.

It should be noted that you mentioned some recovery cards in your comment. Recovery cards may help with board presence—look at powerhouse cards like Panacea Potion. But board presence can be established by dropping a high number of characters (via weenie rush or use of the press mechanic) or through the use of advantageous attacks and combat pumps. Thanks for reading. I am sure that you can go pro by mastering the golden rules and key concepts.

David Hsu, “A Hard Knock Life”:

I guess I have two main comments in this email. One is that I sincerely thank you for all the time you put into the articles, and although I have seen some of it before, it is always nice to have a refresher. The other is that I can’t completely agree with you about the loss of importance of hand advantage. It is very difficult to beat a person who has his or her whole bag of options. When you are playing a person with no hand and a whole row of face-up resources, it just doesn’t seem that intimidating because that player doesn’t have anything but the numbers and the characters you can see. That’s just my two cents. Thanks for reading.

KP:

It is important to note that hand advantage is a major factor in any card game. To clarify, I wanted to make the point that board presence may be a more important factor than hand advantage in this game. As soon as you try to identify a universal rule, there will be several non-examples of your rule that come to mind. Some decks thrive on having no hand and some decks try to give the opponent a giant hand, but there hasn’t really been a widely successful deck that relies on having no characters or a single character on the board. The Kingpin likes the Keeb but does not share his affinity for deck choices. Thanks for your readership and opinions.

Cameron Vesper, “Smashed Faces”:

Hey, Jeremy, this is Cameron Vesper (from DiceFreaks).

I skimmed your new article on Metagame.com, and I thought that these were some real words of wisdom: “I enjoy losing on a regular basis. It is important to have your deck smoked, your errors exploited, and your face smashed by superior players.”

You know, I don’t play Vs. much (or well), but I play quite a few other games and that is certainly true for all of them. Catch ya later.

Cameron Vesper

KP:

Thanks for checking out Metagame.com and looking over some of my articles. When you write articles about playing a game or talk about decklists, theory, or card technology, you should always come from a place of total humility. As soon as you think you have the keys to the proverbial kingdom, you end up scrubbing out of a tournament or going X-drop. My best cardplaying experiences have involved what I like to call “learning losses.” I can think back to certain key games in big tournaments in which I made a fatal mistake that resulted in a loss. Often, I use those losses to help improve my game play. The best practice for professional play incorporates those learning losses into an environment of prevention. Rather than losing games that cost me championship trophies, I would rather learn my lessons at the dining room table or local card shop.

Ian Vincent, “One British Citizen”:

Jeremy,

I thought you might find it amusing to know that the one British citizen just happens to be a statistician. I’ve been enjoying your articles. You’ve tried to tackle some difficult topics and done a much better job than most. Is lesson eight about disruption, by any chance? Keeping your opponent away from his or her win condition (long enough to reach yours) is a key part of all but the fastest decks, and it’d be interesting to see your take on it.

Keep writing,

Ian Vincent

KP:

Thanks for your comments, Ian. Ironically, my next article has a very specific discussion on disruption. Most professional players are dealing with the current Golden Age metagame and are looking for a way to disrupt the win conditions of powerful decks like High Voltage and Teen Titans. That discussion will review the successful but underrated nature of disruption and will provide some hints for the upcoming PC. You may not have to pack Mutant of the Year in your next deck, but you might want to consider Fizzling your opponents’ chances at snatching the victory.

Ian, I am not surprised to learn that you are a master with numbers, because I believe that there is a lot of power to be gained through the greater understanding of statistics in Vs. system. I’ll keep writing if you all keep reading. Thanks for all of your comments and questions.

Don’t be late for the next class and keep those cards flipping! Class dismissed.

Jeremy ”Kingpin” Blair (7-drop, TAWC) is a psychologist and aspiring Pro Circuit Champion from Tampa, Florida. He bought Shane Wiggins his very own small horse and may share his generosity with you. If you have constructive comments or questions, feel free to contact him at Tampakingpin@yahoo.com.