Plan update, MOCS 7

Technically, MOCS season 7 started on thet 16th and is very short.  I felt, however, that I needed to touch base with the overall status of the project.   I’m not really doing weekly status updates anymore, and discussing the goals and plan for the upcoming season seemed like a good basic subject.

Before I talk about season 7, a lot changed about my approach in the past month, and It seems valuable to evaluate how that worked out in the previous season. At the start of season 6, I posted that my old VS playtesting partner had suggested that I do more tracking concerning how many tickets / packs / rating points I’m gaining and losing as I try to improve. So, here we go:

Tickets = -48
Packs = -1
Constructed Rating = +25 (1565)
Limited Rating = +5 (1616)
Sanctioned Constructed record = 15 Win, 19 Loss
Sanctioned Limited record = 2 Win, 1 Loss

It’s kind of tough to look at.  In the 3rd month of this blog, I have posted fairly poor results thus far in terms of winning prize, and win/loss record.   Let’s try to look at why that’s happened, so that I can try to address it.

Being Rogue:  My first takeaway is that I’m not yet ready to tune or make my own decks.  My pet version of 5cc was just not a successful deck.  I 4-0′d a tournament last month with a list that was very close to what better players were playing, and collected 1-3 and 2-2 results with my own deck.  It made my games much harder for me to analyze as well, because sometimes I couldn’t tell if I lost because I made a bad play or because I played a bad card.

I need feedback: I need both feedback from myself in the form of reviewing my losses more thoroughly, and from others in the form of posting my losses and letting other people help me see the mistakes that I can’t.  When I was playing a lot of games, but drawing my own conclusions about them without putting a lot of thought into it, I wasn’t really doing anything to address improving my playskill.

Tight play: The way that I can improve my results the most dramatically is just by focusing on tight technical play.  While everyone makes mistakes all the time playing magic, currently when I play I am giving up the most percentage simply because I have not yet learned how to play the game well.  Turn by turn, I don’t make very good choices with what to do with my cards, and I lost a lot of matches because of this.   I do like the idea of playing towards my strengths by trying to learn to build and tune decks that are not heavily played eventually, but now is not the time.  The amount of advantage that I could gain on my opponents by learning to do that well just doesn’t compare to how I could help myself by closing the gap between my playskills and the average competitive magic player.  While I have previously tried to stress metagaming, card evaluation, deck building, or any number of other things, it’s just not in my best interests right now to focus on any other aspect of how I interact with magic.

So, moving forward, what am I going to do?

The next MOCS season is only 3 weeks long, and I believe it is the last one for the year.  So, for the time being, I’m more or less suspending even caring about QP points.  I want to focus on getting better, and while MOCS was one way to measure that, I’m accepting that I’ll be a better player next year.   With that said, now that there are online PTQs, I certainly have some big tournaments to try to use as a goal.  While I don’t think it’s likely that I will be prepared as a player to win a tournament like that yet, I will certainly enter them with the intention of winning.

I feel like the most important thing I can do moving forward doesn’t really have anything to do with what format / deck / kind of tournament I’m playing in.  It’s more about continuing to be analytical about reviewing my matches and asking for feedback on my play.  It’s been about 2 weeks since I changed the direction of my posts towards eliciting feedback on my play instead of reporting my results.  I’m very thankful to both AJ and Dee for their comments and the time taken to make them, and I fully buy into that sort of interaction as the best way to get better right now.   I encourage anyone reading to offer their thoughts on my mistakes.  My only worry is that I will fail to internalize the lessons contained in those losses and I will continue to make the same mistakes.  I think I just need to assume that I will get there, and recognize that playing magic well isn’t something that I do intuitively now.  I’m just going to need a lot of practice, but there’s no reason to think that that practice won’t pay off.

With that in mind, after I finish this blog post I’m going to go back through the matches that people have commented on, and try to remind myself of the mistakes I’m making.

We’ve established that I need to focus, essentially, on playing the same decks that everyone else is playing, getting a lot of practice, and being dedicated to understanding my mistakes.   But I would like to try to address the fact that I can’t play in as many tournaments as I like by continuing to be open to expanding the formats I’m playing in.  I’ve decided that going forward there are 5 different ways I’m going to try to play the game.  I’m hoping that I can find successes somewhere in this spread, because winning more often would really help to defray the cost of doing this in the first place.  I hear a lot of stories from pros about how they got shown magic by a friend, a week later made a cheap aggro deck online, and they’ve never spent a penny on magic since.  I’d like to get a little of that action.

So here’s what I’m going to try for the next couple of months:

Standard Dailies: This is what I already do a lot of, I have a deck that works until rotation and it provides me with valuable lessons.

Alara Block Dailies:  Yes, I posted earlier about how I hate the format and playing the aggro deck makes things seem really luck based.  But I’m willing to admit that that’s an excuse and that I need to give this more reps before deciding that it can’t teach me anything.  I own the cards for a tier one deck and I should use them.  While I will continue to prefer standard tournaments, this should mean more opportunities to play in events, given that my schedule is my worst enemy.

Zendikar Sealed Release Events:  I’m going to need to buy Zendikar cards when they come out.  A couple of weeks ago an author on channelfireball (I don’t remember who) wrote an article basically claiming that these are the softest possible tournaments out there.  Sealed is a skill I don’t really have, and would like to learn, and I want to give a shot at trying to get a bunch of cheap packs this way.  If it doesn’t work out, then I’ll stop, since I can’t just throw 6 packs away over and over, but I’d like to see how I do.

Zendikar Block Constructed:  Brad Nelson recently wrote an article about how playing single set block can be a great way to grind your way to constructed riches, as well as explore the fundamentals of a format and get better at playing in a less complex environment.  So, I want to give it a shot as well.  I’ll start playing this instead of Alara block when we rotate, obviously.

Drafting: I just really like drafting.  I’ll make sure I don’t get too distracted with it, but I can’t resist the occasional draft, and it’s not a bad skill to continue to develop in general.  I won’t let it get in the way of anything else, but pretending I won’t draft sometimes will just make me hate magic.

I guess that’s really it.

• Buy completely into the analysis / review of my play and focus on that.  Fewer matches is fine, so long as I get something out of the ones I do play.
• More formats means more ability to play consistently, even if it may subject me to a steeper learning curve in general.
• Play in PTQs with the intention to win them

This post has been a bit of a ramble, and maybe a strange read, but it helped me refocus on what I need to do to make this project more successful, I think.

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