Pseudo Newb and her own Psychosis

On Weds I played in the Draft – it was a mediocre deck I made a mistake while drafting it and never saw the Travel Preparations card I was hoping for. It turned out there was a reason – GW was the preferred pick down the table from me but there were enough cards of the colors going around that I was still able to put together a reasonable deck

Record for the Wed was

1. 0-2
2. 2-1
3. 1-2

On Friday I played my Delver Illusions Deck sans Snappy and the Aether Adepts that I put in there were really useful. I won cleanly against the monoblack in the first round, had a very competitive second round with a mirror which I lost 0-2 but really learned a lot ( and is making me think about the benefits of Runechanter’s pike) Lost badly to a stompy ramp deck with artifacts and a bunch of graveyard effects and pulled out a long win

1. 2-0
2. 0-2
3. 0-2
4. 2-1

So I played 9 games won 4. At 44 % win rate I played 4 rounds and won 2 at 50%. So my win rate went down 4% but my win rate for rounds doubled : )

Keeping track of the difference between win rates is one of the ways I keep my learning curve straight vs my competitive record – it also manages to keep me from obsessing about my losses in tournament – this is important as any chance I have to beat myself up for not being smart is an opportunity I take.

Between this week and last week I learned something new – something that could only really be noticed when I was playing better and had enough sleep: at the end of the last round when I’m playing against really good players and I’ve got a chance of winning – I kind of stop breathing – not due to nerves or games state or frustration or any of the bad things – just good, old fashioned math anxiety.

A complex board state with lots of interactions is a hallmark of a close game between either equal decks or mostly equal player skills. The primary difference between me and a really good player right now is not just card familiarity – mine is improving by drafting which honestly was not something I expected – but the ability to keep track of all other various triggers and interaction which pretty much add up to pluses and minuses caused by card effects.

So this is really the crux of the problem. When I played Magic the first time I knew about the LD and just figured “to hell with it I work as a writer anyway”. Now it’s more like “I need to work out some of the emotional baggage that came with my experience working in tech in a safe way so it stops interfering with my career and look there’s Magic where I can work out ALL the THINGS, and play magic.”

A little research on the meme shows that it really has a second part which would look like this “ I can work out all the things?”

It also mean “I can trigger ALL THE THINGS”

Not just trigger effects

So here’s what a competitor’s journal really is – it’s the place where you’re honest abut what’s happening to you in the game – so you can overcome it or work around it for a better game – but just like talking to a shrink, if you’re not honest it won’t work. I fix things better as a competitor than I do as a regular person.

It's like the famous "fearless inventory" magic article but more brutal and way more internal.

Here’s how it works. I can now play well enough to see win conditions, read my board state – read my opponents board state if I’m familiar with the vast majority of their cards. For some insane reason lately my last few matches have been with our VERY good players, probably because they are experimenting with new deck ideas or unfamiliar decks – playing against them has been really good for me because they never do things “accidentally” which makes it easier for me to break down mistakes in strategy or play.

It also means that if I’m winning it’s not usually a fluke – it’s because my level of play has improved enough that I’m a challenge (I’m still not playing with money cards). This in turn creates a weird kind of trigger related to things that I’m dealing with in the aftermath of professional situation that have left me, to put it simply – damaged.

• I play well enough to analyze what you are doing and not be completely awful when I’m playing.
• I know I’m not as good as you at this point in time so I respect what you are doing, paying attention and making sure that I take it into account.

Then the weird split between what I know I should be reacting to and what I’m reacting to instead happens:

• Magic: Opposing player won’t think about me or what I’m thinking or care as soon as it’s time to shuffle against the next round – will most likely either say good- game and mean it or be annoyed at own play
• Poisonous Work Scenario: Programmer will be holding grudge for some insane thing that I had to do because it was protecting either the project or his job and use any technical weakness to discredit me in front of anyone who’ll stay still long enough to undermine me with both team members and supervisors. When that doesn’t work (because it’s weakness not incompetency and technical execution is not my job) will then launch various complaints to trigger legally required inquiries even if they all come up dry.

Does my brain behave like I'm playing an Opposing Magic Player - why hell no! It behaves like I'm back at work.

Why is this relevant:

The problem with the poisonous work scenario is this – you begin to internalize it and so you feel like a fraud ( even though it’s not your job description) and you begin to doubt that you are worthy of your job/successes/skillset. It’s stupid – and it takes about 4 years to get that bad. But it did, and I did and here’s what happens in the last round when we’re getting close to overtime and if I play well technically I can win:

• I fight the LD to double check the board state,
• I worry I’m missing a trigger or I’ve done the additive math wrong since you can only put counters on cards not enchantment or ability effects,
• I realize how bad it is that I can’t keep track of card effects and math in a god-damned game and wonder how the hell I can manage to do the analysis that’s required in my job,
• instead of thinking how well I’m doing I feel like I’m impersonating an intelligent person and start worrying about being a con artist and a fraud,
• I knock myself upside the metaphorical head and tell myself to just concentrate on the cards and ending this game and keep the psychobabble for the therapist that I won’t go to because it was useless
• – this in turn leads to the not breathing state
• – I make all the other shit go away and concentrate as much as I can on playing the game well in those last few turns
• – apparently to make all of that shit go away I need to also forgo breathing.
• I play pretty well even though I'm not breathing because breathing might make the math too hard.

How very disturbing.

Good news – I can block out the head noise apparently caused by work related trauma

Bad news – it’s so thick inside me that it’s literally down at the breathing level – what the hell kind of field day would my new age healer friends ( or Freud based shrinks) have with that?

The first time last FNM – I thought it was just the level of the guy I was playing with – this time it recognized all the same physical tags – but the extra spicy flavor of math anxiety since I’ve decided to take and place in math classes to rebuild basic knowledge so I can test out how realistic a particular degree path is for me.

So not being able to follow the math all the way through on Phantasmal Images copying my Lord of Illusions is not simply not-playing-well, apparently it’s also Drinne-you’re-deluding-yourself-if–you-think-you–can-really-succeed-at-your-professional-goals.

I can shut it down for meetings, interviews, pitch sessions, when I’m actually planning.

It’s louder and starker when I play Magic because it’s less connected to anything else. It’s just my damage screaming at me, trying to take myself down before anyone else can.

And because I’m terrified of being a fake.

So its not like I can pretend it’s anything else- it’s not Magic, or the rules, or the learning curve at this point, it’s just me. So I know that if I can fix it here, it will give me real world tools to fix it elsewhere. Being able to shut it down and still breathe – to feel the intensity of the pressure to evaluate on the fly when I’m at the edge of my skillset – that’s why I really started playing seriously and competitively – to make sure I don’t lose those skills while I’m working at stuff below my professional skillset (small business is challenging, but not the same).

So new goal is to not stop breathing if I’m winning in the last round – because when it’s over I’m 15 kinds of wired wrong. Maybe when the math placement doohickey is done it won’t be so bad, but I’ll work on my competitive headspace – that’s much more important this last week than new cards or competitive strategies.

I’ve also decided that social anxiety is a kind of negative narcissism – you’re anxious because somehow you think you matter and you’re going to do something wrong when in reality very few people actually care about anything you’re doing, and the ones that made you that self-conscious in the first place were probably more interested in how making you feel bad benefitted them.

Reality check – bullies never cared about you unless it was really about them. Even when we’re grown up. I just wonder why being picked on in school has left me with pretty much nothing, but being bullied in a workplace has left me with a list of neurosis that would make Woody Allen proud?

Oh well, it doesn’t matter – I’m going to be all happy about Dark Ascenscion’s Jar of Eyeballs instead.