Ok, I went to gto check my Planeswalker Points to make sure that my memory of playing was the same as what I actually played.
In the month of July I was actively trying to get ready for the change over to the Scars block rotating out of standard.
Scars Block means that all the cards from Scars of Mirrodan, Mirrodan Besieged and New Phyrexia will be no longer be playable in standard. It also means that cards that were part of the core set for 2012 that aren't part of 2013 will also be cycling out of Standard.
This makes me very happy since a lot of my problems reading the board state of my opponent are cards that I had trouble following from those two groups of cards and mechanics that offended me at a consistency for design level are also going away.
The infect mechanic which changes a 20 point game with answers to a 10 point game that can only be answered by one card or controlling your opponent is a Scars block mechanic.
A lot of the removal, Vapor Snag, Dismember, Surgical Extraction, goes away and a lot of the things that allow you to manipulate your deck so that you can draw them when you need them will go away.
But for me the big issues is that I now have a shot a reading the cards. Literally half the competitive field was cards I could not recognize and many of which are only played against me at high speed. As I learned from the art review I need to spend time with at least paying attention to each of the cards because I don't seen to have the ever flowing encyclopedic memory to know what all the cards do.
I've been playing Delver, which in it's current competitive format is pretty heavy on functional cards from M2012 and the Scars Block. And frankly so is my white weenie deck.
I spent July trying out different deck archetypes to find out what I'd like to play after rotation because mentally "it was only a couple of weeks" until rotation but I didn't realize then that that actually meant for a 3 month window ALL THE CARDS PRINTED FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS ARE LEGAL. Sun Titan with Rancor on it is not really something I have any idea how to deal with since I never really learned anything about Sun Titan.
Here is a thing I have learned about the last few months before Standard Rotation. People will break out their favorite decks because it will be their last chance to play them competitively outside the kitchen table.
Here is the other thing I learned, I fold like a chastised puppy to titans.
5 weeks of not playing competitive standard makes me much more tentative.
I lost badly playing a deck I thought I knew well but it was running differently than i felt it should. I'd played it a couple of times in the cafeteria now that I have a glorious six hours of time to kill where I'm not required to do anything other than play magic and there is a pool of people to play magic with. But it's kitchen table style so it doesn't help with the metagame.
This should be better for me in the long run but once again too long out of the format and I lose progress that I had made in my game and my ability to react to boardstate.
Before the FNM
I went to GenCon, I went on vacation, school started up again and I took up invitations to play casual magic in new formats on the last couple of Fridays, so ironically I've been playing lots of Magic, but not in a way that directly helps me with FNM.
I have two friends visiting this weekend, both excellent players and serious competitors, one mostly out of the scene as a competitor and one active but overseas. I'll be playing in GP Philly but it's sealed, not draft so the Pre-Releases will be closer to the kind of thing I'll be trying to do than either FNM or draft. I knew I was going to FNM with them but I didn't know what I wanted to play. I have three standard decks right now that all had weaknesses, while I'd been improving with my Quirion/Talrand deck the other thing that was going to change radically in the FNM was the metagame. School started, people coming home from school, people going away to school, adults who suddenly had more time/fewer commitments were back from vacation. Our younger kids who were getting in Friday nights at the start of school before their homework loads were too heavy. and ALL the THINGS are legal right now. So I had no idea what anyone at the store was going to be playing.
One of my friends did the draft FNM and placed first, and the other placed somewhere in the top three in standard. Last FNM I'd been to I finally broke through some of the issues with my Quirion deck and won 2 out of 4 matches. But I knew that this week everyone was going to be playing their Teir 1 or last chance to experiment decks and that Quirion just wasn't fast enough.
Preparation - about a half an hour before we left I showed my friends the decks I had that were tournament ready, but honestly not Tier 1. They were Quirion/Talarand, Red/Blue Delver ( but more enchantments and fewer sorceries, and a white tokens deck splashed for Lingering Souls.
I was waffling between the R/U Delver, which I had been losing to lingering souls regularly when I played it in July and the white deck.
I made a huge mistake when I was running through the white deck. I thought it was one build, and a quick scan showed the cards I expected to see, but the deck had been altered because it was a deck that I handed other people to play against me when I want to play a tournament level deck at home. The build wasn't horrifically bad but it moved my mana curve from 1-2 to really 2-3. I did not realize this until Round 2 when I needed to sideboard.
Comfort Level - I went in knowing that I have skill loss when I don't play standard, my goals were actually presentation/mindset goals. I wanted to play clean, focus on board states, maintain equilibrium and readjust to the fall LGS environment.
Round 1 - there is one person who puts me on "tilt". "Creepiness" in sexual harassment in the geek community is a big thing that's in discussion right now and a lot of guys are saying that "aspie" or other non-normative conditions or illnesses will read as "creepy" so you should give all guys who are socially invading your space the benefit of the doubt. The counter argument is that "no aspie or autistic doesn't mean sexually threatening or creepy in the sexually discomfiting kind of way".
But it does mean stuff like my first round.
In practice aspie or autistic far enough on the spectrum that you can't read or give off interactive social signals means that the affected adult (even more than the child version) send off signals that create other reaction to the non-affected person. That results in this guymaking me tilt. I'm not saying this to be cute or funny. He tries real hard to socialize and give the right small talk. I had played against him and thought of him as "mildly entitled, sort of shady on the rules, obnoxious guy who invades my personal space and talks about what people have in their hands during tournaments"
He is bigger than me, younger than me and has committed several cheating-like in game actions in games that we have played against each other. I've always let him roll them back but when he is within arm's reach of me without a table between us he is always too close, too loud. He is not threatening to me despite all of that. What he is, is someone sending off signals that make me want to physically remove him from my personal space, which I don't do because he hasn't really done anything bad and he doesn't understand, or adapt to very clear instructions to please take a step back.
There are things he does that are his fault, but not all of them. It reads different than "creepy" but it still doesn't help. I work with people with disabilities so I've got a bunch of tools to deal with my reactions, but he of all people should not come up from behind me. When I explained slowly to him why it was a bad idea, he admitted the problem. We worked out how far a boundary was, I told him that if it was too hard for him not to talk or look at people's hands and say things he needed to not be standing at my table.
So here's the point of all that - he doesn't read as "creepy" but he does read as unpleasant and unlikely to be able to adjust his behavior and creates a gut reaction in me to get him away from me so I don't lose my temper. All of the responsibility for good behavior then rests on me when my lizard brain is like "this dude just doesn't fit, take him down or get way". If he were trying to hit on a girl, and the girl politely and firmly told him she wasn't interested, he'd be hurt, but he would adjust and stop. She might be freaked out by him but he wouldn't be creepy, his condition would be sending signals that are "off"
Because I know this, and my reaction, I am always polite when I play him, but I stare straight at the cards and the mat during the game. I don't make eye contact until the game is over. He can't help the fact that he creates that reaction in me, and I can only moderate my reaction to him. But playing him when he's playing a more effective deck than me and casting a primeval titan and some other thing happening on the board state that I didn't follow or understand was not the greatest start to my FNM.
That reason I went into this amount of detail is to illustrate that when someone has something actually wrong with them and isn't just using it as an excuse their presentation is wrong in ALL sorts of ways, not just being sexually creepy. This guy sets off response in me because of many things, but is not creepy, I would not try to conflate his problem understanding rules or boundaries with stalking. We can tell the difference, the biggest difference being that when confronted with the " please don't do this thing" he adjusted it as best he could.
He still puts me on tilt though. It's a lizard brain thing.
0-2 him - I was running on 2 land in the first game and the thragatusk he cast and and no removal in my hand along with direct burn fueled by primeval titan killed me quick.
The second game I sideboarded in more oblivion rings kept a mana heavy hand and we played a very close game that ended with him winning when I was at 1 and had gotten him down to 2. Also I learned how ratchet bombs work to take out tokens with a converted mana cost of 0. I had two thoughts about this:
1. if anyone else had done that in play I would not be upset yet I was, so put a cap on that.
2. I am really glad Ratchet Bomb is cycling out and destroy that sommabitch immediately if you're playing a token deck. That's the kind of mistake I'll only make once.
Round 2 - Awesome Eric and his brother had been playing at the more competitive store because they wanted to actually have some competition and it was great for decks but not so great for having fun. The more competitive store had better payout but only played 3 rounds and no one hung out afterwards so they were back at my home base LGS because they wanted to play. Awesome Eric was playing his beloved Tezzeret infect deck before it cycled out. His brother was playing some form of pod.
In the first game I drew one land in the wrong color and did not see another land for the remaining 4 turns it took him to kill me. Something was wrong with the deck. I had a hand that if I had known what was going on would have at least been competitive, but I mulled it because I thought my curve was lower.
The second game I side boarded the Oblivion rings back in and a bunch of specific artifact hate. My mana was better because doing that and looking for what I normally remove to sideboard I found out that it wasn't the build I thought it was and my mana curve was higher than I though it was. I was able to adjust but not enough to win. We had plenty of time and I played him with my red/blue delver, it was much cleaner and faster I didn't win that game but that issue was simply the creature that would have backed up my opening Stromkirk noble with Furor of the bitten on it never showed.
Round 3- By this time I was aware of what was in my deck, he was playing some sort of build where he played cavern of souls for Angels and demons and ran geist of St. Traft and Sun Titan phantasmal image. With which he slaughtered me even though I could take care of his his geists, I couldn't follow what was happening with the sun titans.
Here are the several mistakes in play I made even though I was literally stuck on two lands for 4 turns and 3 for the rest of the game.
I focused too much on his board state because I knew whatever the hell sun titans did they could only do it on attack and started to play defensively when there were two of them on the baord. this is a mistake and I should have stayed in the aggro mindset.
I was concentrating so hard on his board state that I misread mine and id not realize when I had numerical superiority and could have attacked for the win.
I completely forgot AGAIN that Intangible Virtue gives token creature vigilance (and would not have caught that error is my houseguest hadn't pointed it out to me after the game, I would have caught that I should have been attacking but not HOW much I should have been attacking or why)
No matter the fact that I knew when he was casting the same spells I was and making the same tokens, even though I told myself that his spirits were not the same power and toughness as mine, i couldn't make myself react that way and kept treating his tokens as an even exchange when I was taking actions.
At least two of the times that my observer's pointed out that I should have attacked I had actually felt the impulse to attack and squelched it. At least some of this is because I fold to Titans. However the other part is something that I am highly trained in as an actor which is following and trusting the impulse to act. I also know from my project management experience that even if my conscious mind is having trouble processing and communicating exact symbols my secondary processes ( possibly out of some meeting survival instinct) are doing some fairly complex analysis and math to come up with reasonable estimates. I have great faith in my ability to to that and no difficulty following up with or announcing those estimates on the fly. I need to trust those impulses the same way I would in a business meeting. They're right more often than they're wrong and I'm getting too caught up in the things at the front of my head.
I have more confidence in my ability to handle business needs and money projections than Magic but they shouldn't be that far off. I'm being to cautious.
Round 4 - bye-
I got to do a bit of analysis and even with 0-3 and the bye I was still 4 from the bottom of people who paid in. The tiebreakers must have really sucked for them.
Takeaways
The first and most important one is that the biggest mistakes I made were mistakes I couldn't have made four months ago. I couldn't spare enough concentration on my opponent's board state so I wouldn't have had the opportunity to concentrate on it so much that I missed aspects of mine. This is an error in play that could only come about because of a basic improvement.
I know I was picking between tournament legal decks, but knowing that I had been handing the deck to other people to play against me I should have checked the build.
I need to remind myself that I warn other people against playing defensively because defensively is a trap and I don't build/play defensive decks. I don't know if it was insecurity because I'd been away from FNM too long or what but it cannot abide.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I think I was playing around potential removal by my opponent a little too much.
Even though last night I was really bad at Magic. I had a really good time. ( Except for the first round).
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