It’s one thing to win a tournament once. It’s another to keep winning time and time again. The best of the best win more consistently than others. The question is: how do they do it? How does Theerasak Poonsombat or John Jensen keep winning? It’s not just a matter of being good at the game. I’ll tell you the truth here: it’s not a hard game to be good at. There’s a certain breaking point you reach when you go from “amateur” to “darn good”. After that, it’s not that hard to win matches a little more than 50% of the time. The funny thing about anything competitive in nature is that you have to constantly prove that you are as good as you say you are. That’s not a bad thing at all. In fact, that’s largely what makes this game so fun. New ideas, new strategies, new cards . . . it’s all in an effort to keep the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG interesting. Isn’t that part of why you love this game?
The competition never really ends.
How To Go From “Proven” To “Consistent”
As I said before, if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. In my personal opinion, there is no such thing as limbo in this game. If you’ve ever taken a break from playing for a while, you probably noticed how much better everyone else got while you were away. The metagame in your area probably changed a great deal. Old paradigms are regularly shattered, old strategies are eventually put to rest, and some cards just don’t cut it anymore. Whether you’re playing or not, the metagame keeps on going. You’ve got to keep up with it if you want to get ahead of it. The best of the best recognize that they must constantly get better or they will progressively get worse.
There’s no reason why you can’t do the same. Let’s say you were to win the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship. That means that you are the best player in the world. However, a misconception that most players have is that once they obtain that title then that’s the be all, end all. You have no reason to play anymore. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. You were crowned the World Champion at only that specific time. You were the best player in the world at that time. Starting tomorrow, you have to defend that title and make your way back to the top yet again.
That’s where the fun begins. You’re essentially a “proven” entity. You showed your stuff and have a championship under your belt. Let’s see what you can do now.
Don’t get me wrong. Winning any kind of tournament is an achievement no matter how big or small it may be. Just because you have to defend the title tomorrow doesn’t mean the victory was worthless. But the fact that you have to defend the title should inspire you to keep going and improve your skills. The victory is a reminder that your efforts are paying off.
Now, to the million-dollar question: how do you go from proven to consistent? Let’s make a list:
- Practice, practice, practice.
- Make it a habit to find players who are better than you are.
- Always defend your title.
- Stay up-to-date with the latest dueling news.
- Playtest new booster sets when they are released.
- Try new deck ideas and dueling philosophies.
- Go to as many tournaments as you can reasonably afford.
Why Practice?
Practice makes perfect, right? There’s no substitute for it. You don’t have to do it every day like a madman—you just have to make sure you’re improving. That’s what practice is for: to improve your skills in a stress-free environment. It also helps if you practice with players who are a tad better than you are. Don’t be afraid to try your skills out against some of the greats if they happen to be in your area. What you get from that experience is more valuable than a thousand matches with players you can easily beat.
Why is the experience so valuable? To answer that, let me ask you this: why are they better at the game than you are? You have to find out for yourself why the greats win more than you do when it really counts. Sure, you can ask. They can talk all day, but what matters are their actual dueling skills. That’s what wins the games. It’s important to hear what they have to say about their philosophies, but you have to see it in action. Pay attention to their match descriptions during tournament coverage, or better yet, see if you can’t sit down with them a play a few duels. The more you learn from the experience, the better you’ll get.
The Art of Defending Your Title
So, you’ve won a tournament. Now what?
It’s fun to defend your position at the top. There’s always someone to challenge you out there. It’s not like every player in the world gets worse. Some get better. Even players you thought were incapable of getting any better at the game can surprise you and knock you down a peg, and that’s good for the growth of your skills.
Stay Up-To-Date
It’s critical to stay up to date and bring in new knowledge. As my favorite personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki says, “You have to constantly expand your context and upgrade your thoughts.” The same applies to anything skill related. It’s a disservice to you, the duelist, if you stay complacent and expect to achieve spectacular results with obsolete ideas and strategies.
I’ve said this a million times to my friends: the metagame renders your deck obsolete after every three Shonen Jump Championships or every two to three months. To me, that’s fun. I don’t like it when things stay the same. I side with the old saying, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” It really does. When things get stale, you start to enjoy those things a lot less, right? Truthfully, familiarity breeds all sorts of problems. Things get boring after a while. You have to be dynamic, not static.
Take for example, a website. Static websites are more commonly known as plain old HTML websites. They don’t change much and they don’t update data on a real-time basis. They just sit there. They’re not “alive” like dynamic sites. They’re not linked to a database or anything. They’re just a plain website . . . like a blog. Most blogs are static websites. A dynamic website is a site that has all kinds of interactive features. It’s connected to many different databases, it has real-time content of some sort, and it changes frequently. It stays fresh and up to date: it’s alive. A good example is a website of one of the major news networks.
Summing It All Up . . .
This week, I went over four of the seven keys to staying ahead of the game. Next week, I’ll delve a bit into Yu-Gi-Oh! history to illustrate the next three. They’re big ones, so you’ll want to keep up with us here at Metagame.com for my next installment.
I’ll leave you with a quote:
“Every great success is an accumulation of thousands of ordinary efforts that no one sees or appreciates.”
—Brian Tracy