Pseudo Newb - One Female's Reaction to the Avacyn Card Art and you can find the other links in the sidebar
You'll be able to bounce around if you're interested
This is actually just my competitive journal where I'm keeping track of results and hashing out things about what's working for and interfering with my game - it pretty internal ( like a fearless inventory but continuous) so there's no real reason to read it - it's pretty long winded. So feel free to just stick with art reviews. : ) .
_________________________________________________________________________________
Last night was my second FNM with the new archetype. I started playing a red/blue with delvers and the first time I played it I pretty much played it in a block format.
Here's what the metagame at my local store looks like:
- Variations on Kessig's Wolf Run
- Blue Black Control
- Zombies
- Reanimator with Gisela
- Stuff with way too much Scars block artifacts doing weird combos that make me want to do nothing but play oblivion rings and diving offerings with some burn. Maybe I should make that deck.
How the Art Review Made Me look Hard at Play Choices
I didn't write up the results of last week's FNM because I was working really hard to get through the Green review and seriously confronting the fact that I didn't play green because the art was unappealing to me for the most part.
Doing the review really highlighted to me the fact that many of the cards in green and red seem to follow a formula visually that makes it not only boring to me but also tends to make me glaze over the cards and sort of mash them all up cognitively together unless I play them. While the art review was just really a way to address and mentally release all the noise that gender issues in gaming are throwing my way it does end up being something I might want to keep doing because if forces me to address the functions of each card. I know the Avacyn Cards by ability MUCH better than I do either Innistrad or Dark Ascension even though I've played them less.
I can also tell that my understanding of the game has taken a better turn because I can now take brief notes during the games. Before it took all my concentration to work with the cards and learn and read the board state. I could still verbally analyze what my mistakes in play were but my retention was spotty, adding note-taking to the kinesthetics of playing would have been too much processing with the other compensation strategies I was using but now they are actually ingrained, and I've come up with the best ways for me to track counters and board states so I'm not simply intaking and reacting. Now I have successful and less successful strategies and can choose based on who I'm playing with.
My goal is not to make anyone uncomfortable but I do find the whole asinine "Jedi Mind Trick" aspect of the game means I have to "out" myself as being learning disabled more than I have anywhere else in my life. Ever. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
The First Time I had to Out Myself In - Tournament and It's Gameplay Effects
The primary issue is of course counters and tokens. I like playing tokens and I have a box of very pretty dice and I carry a binder full of tokens. When I first encountered the person who was being an ass about it I was originally using dice to mark the total of the buffs on each card to track the full total buff on each card. Since I was running Honor of the Pure and the +1/+1 isn't a +1/+1 counter he told me to take them off the die. That did indeed freak me out because I was mid game and had never heard any kind of anything otherwise and had been doing it this way since I'd started in September, having been taught it by someone else.
Let me just break to say that this is one of the reasons that structured coaching is a much better idea to move into tournament play - these methods of finding out you are not doing something tournament legal are humiliating and in my case actually meant that I went from being able to play without thinking of my disability needing accommodation to OMIGOD UNTIL I FIGURE THIS OUT I'M GOING TO LOOK LIKE A STUPID GIRL MAGIC PLAYER WHO CANT DO BASIC MATH. I was already dealing with Stern's List's worth of barriers to entry but that really was one of the lower points for me. Because I'm actually really good at math but the LD is a symbol processing disorder and until I construct a compensation strategy to work around the fact that the symbols can't always be recognized as what they are. Think of it like you're reading along here in English and then אז כל משפט הפתאומית באותו נמצא כתוב עברית but nothing has really changed and you're expected to just go on because no one else is having that issue.
You figure out what is happening from context or you ask someone to explain it to you because when they say it even though you're seeing אז כל משפט הפתאומית באותו נמצא כתוב עברית, they are saying "everything suddenly changes into another language with a different alphabet"* And you probably knew that because you could figure it out from context and the symbols (alphabet) that your brain was still working and playing well with.
I can do the math. I can play this game. The learning part will take me longer that's all.
So I am relatively proud of the fact that I did not cry or actually "tilt" as the kids say because when this happened I was also taking an advance object oriented programming class and a database SQL query class and so having one more thing in my life where I had to create a compensation strategy around the stupid LD was not really on my "I have emotional resources left to deal with this" list. At that time the person who was doing it to get under my skin for "Jedi Mind Trick" reasons neglected to tell me that I could take notes during a tournament and I just looked at him and said "Would it be OK for me to continue doing it this way for now because I have a symbol processing disorder."
We all have triggers, he is a debate coach in school and I'm pretty sure in the land of special snowflakes and lawsuit panicked administrators just saying it that way threw HIM out of Jedi mind trick land and back into educator coach land. His compensation was to let me continue it so that I could finish out the match and then to lecture me on the "why" of why it wasn't really legal and some nonsense about board state confusion, and like I said - he neglected to offer any suggestions to HELP me get to a better tournament state.
So I looked up the rule and it's a little less cut and dried than presented and when I play in different groups they handle the counter/buff count and what can be a token very, very differently even in tournament play.
I did not put it into the Competitive Journal for 1000 Reasons but that was a Mistake
I am perhaps not the most accepting person of my own limits. I do not want to compete and have to address something that I almost never address directly every time I sleeve up for actual points.
So I discovered something interesting - this happened. It bothered the hell out of me, I had to start working around it and it changed the way I played this game and I thought I had actually written about it here in the journal ( where I'm supposed to) but I didn't - I wrote about the game itself ( it was on Dec 9) I actually came in second, I wrote about the one guy I lost to, but I did not write about the Jedi mind tricks and the token thing.
Even though I specifically worked on that skill from that night forward.
Which also means I didn't have a reference when I looked up the rules to see what they were about counting things on cards for this journal entry. It's also important to note that when he told me this I thought he was a ranked judge, but he's not even a rules advisor.
I don't think he's wrong necessarily but I really do need to double check this with a Level 2 judge because it's starting to become an issue in the other direction. I need to ask people to adjust things they are doing to fully represent their board state.
As I become better at reading the other person's board states I am OK with any number of things being counters or tokens on their side, but there are some forms of it that become near impossible for me to track. I've spend the months since that draft practicing with white decks with lots of mixed effects to train myself to keep track of the buffs if you can only track "counters" on a card, but what I've learned since then is that a number of "shortcuts" have to only have mutual agreement ( and that I could take notes) is that there is a small group of people that put out a random card ( that isn't the kind of token they are playing) and stick some kind of die on it at the number of tokens it's supposed to represent. so if the die is on 4 there are 4 2/2 zombies on that single card that are also +2/+2 because of diregraf captain and have some actual counters on them because of something else and then Gisela can come out at any time.
And all of that is represented by a six sided set on 4 on a card from a portal game that has nothing to do with zombies. And no- I don't need to "beat my disability" that bad. You can have 4 six sideds all set on 2 to rep their power and toughness, you can have 4 Hello Kitty cards to represent them as long as they are all the same. You can borrow my dice, you can borrow 4 zombie tokens from me, but you can't have one card with a die on it because I will lose track of what the hell is there when you use the same die as a regular counter on your other things. And to prevent the argument or the tilt on the other person's part I ask them if they would mind borrowing these things since I have a symbol processing disorder and I need the creatures/tokens to be separate items.
It's happened about three time in the last week for different reasons, one person just didn't have tokens or dice and two people had both and really were just trying to use them to keep a possible extra processing item for board state advantage and were clearly put out by not being able to come up with a good argument for keeping it that way based on the various other things they used to try to muddy up the board state or "Jedi mind trick" me after.
Steps to Learning - Needs analysis breakdown for learning + competing
At these last two FNMs I was playing a new archetype, I was specifically working on something that limited my removal to red burn which was instant and sorcery heavy to deal with my fear of timing and instants and I had only put the deck together an hour before the first FNM. So I was already working on specific areas that my LD made me weak. Although I probably had realized it at a kind of macro level X(color) spells were something I avoided because of the layers of processing and being afraid I would mess it up or miscount, it was only after having to "come out" those three times that I wasn't using the spells because I would be ashamed of myself for screwing them up and at the total honestly level; that not being able to figure them out and use them properly would mean that I wasn't going to be able to learn the game well enough to be competitive. Much easier to play decks with no X costs.
You have to read the card, calculate what you would like to do, calculate your available mana and their ability to counter and then actually turn and use the cards which you did not touch before hand or you'd be signaling your intent to your opponent and they would know what was in your hand.
And apparently you have to get over your very own subconscious saboteur telling you not to bother using that card - go for something more defined instead.
At FNM last week I went 2-2 and lost both matches to lingering souls because I really had no board sweepers.
This week I was looking to add Corrosive Gales and did add Slagstorm to the side board to deal with the souls. I won against a green red build that I wasn't sure what it was doing, and then lost respectively to Naya Pod, Zombies, and Wolf Run
Results
Record for last night was
2-0
0-2
1-2
0-2
So played 9 games and won 3. That's a big drop in performance. The second match I lost because I just didn't have the right removal and he ramped insanely fast into everything ( and he's a much better player than me) the third was pretty much mana screw and the final was a mono black infect deck that had some insane thing that as soon as he got out a single creature that stuck he could do something that could make it swing for 15 infect on the second turn it was out. Both of those games ended by turn 3&4. We agreed to play for fun afterwards but only if he played a different deck. This build doesn't have the amount of removal I normally play and as far as I'm concerned Infect is basically cheating, even if Mark Rosewater loves it. If I were going to build a deck for a 10 point game it would be a different deck, because it's a different fucking game.
Plus the reality is with the LD I can't learn the cards I wasn't playing with easily which means birthing pod and infect have a huge advantage against me. I'm hyper aware of it because as I get better I recognize that I have to just "trust" my opponents on card interactions that I can't process fast enough.
And when I look at my record that's what I lose to every time.
It complicates things when I'm playing decks specifically to work on weaknesses since I'm in effect choosing to overload the processing before I walk in door. So silly mind games are unnecessary on my opponents' part and I do need to be able to track their board state. I really don't consider the LD part of my identity and don't enjoy being public about it. It feels like both attention whoring and yet another way to be taken less seriously, but it's a game, and if people are going to use these things as tricks it's probably best for me to pre-empt the ridiculousness of that with something real.
But losing while I'm doing all of this makes it pretty challenging to keep with the analysis of why - playing red the LD is a much bigger part of the learning curve than it has been and it's massively undercutting my confidence. I think the only answer is to keep playing red until I've got it down.
Just wish the art wasn't so boring and the good cards weren't so damn expensive.
Note for reality check - Everyone I lost to I played "just for fun games" with afterwards with the same decks and won consistently with the exception of the infect deck. Actual errors in play were made during the tournament games and part of the issue is definitely just becoming familiar with the deck and moving through the skill curve. Infect isn't even playing a game. This ended up being more about hashing through the actual LD issues - do an actual game analysis now and put in the part where you don't play something from your hand because your read the symbols wrong and lost the game advantage because of it ( which happened with lightening prowess)
*Note: this is not actually what the Hebrew I wrote says - it's the way an english speaker would explain it. I also chose hebrew specifically because the reading order moves right to left instead of left to right in English because that's a lot closer to the level of cognitive dissonance the symbol processing disorder causes - you can actually get physical vertigo from it.
No comments:
Post a Comment