Pseudo Newb - Side Events and Tilting like Whoa

"So Pseudo Newb, what did you learn this weekend?"

" I learned that I am a high strung, high maintenance bitch"

Oh Yeah. 

Just in case anyone is worried about me using the "bitch" word please understand that we raised obedience circut show dogs so I use it in the highest regard. I like most dogs better than most people. 

I'm also using high-strung in pretty much the same context.

Here is Sam the Dog Trainer's definition of High Strung Dogs ( there are different types - On Day 2 I may have been all of them) and I find it the most accurate description(s) of me. All day Sunday:

http://samthedogtrainer.com/articles/high-strung-dogs/

So I have played in one side event. I was horribly embarrassed by my extreme lack of knowing any damn thing, including what single elimination was.  It was draft,  I was kind of used to having to find my footing during or after the first round. and felt like a massive idiot when I tried to find out who I would be playing next.  Yes, it was shaming, yes it made me wonder why the heck I could possibly think I should be at a GP at all and yes, it was the day before the main event. 

I recovered and played the next day. The guy who beat me that first round came back to play a standard pickup game after he was eliminated. It was relatively quiet that night. When I went to Gencon, I didn't realize that there were rotating sign ups and they put together drafts in queues as each set of 8 signs up. But the reality is that if they are single elimination too, for a newer player they're a lot like playing a 20.00 slot machine.

Single elimination means you pay X$ to draft and if you lose you better hope you pulled a card that at least let you break even for "value" because otherwise you paid X to play one round of magic and learn nothing from it.  Because that's not enough data to evaluate your deck, your choices, or the balance against variance. But hey you did help someone else "live the dream" and the theory of a pack or so because they beat you. 

I don't gamble. Single elimination events really are just ways to separate me from my money and make me hate myself or second guess why I think I can play magic at all. 

But there might be other reasons I'm avoiding side events, and my general rule is that if I'm afraid of something that means I should do it until I understand it or at least am not irrationally afraid of it anymore. 

What I learned is that I was not "irrationally" afraid of side events. 

Let's go back to that description of High Strung Dogs

"Nervousness is a combination of traits. Part of being nervous are dogs that don’t rebound from stress very easily. In “dog terminology”, that is referred to a dog with “thin nerves”. Things just don’t bounce off of them very easily, and they don’t recover very easily when stimulated by something unpleasant: a loud sound (gunfire, fireworks, car backfiring), firm verbal or leash correction,  physical pain (such as from tripping on the carpet), or bad experience (dog bowl tips over and scares the dog), etc."

So lets review my weekend so far - I had been roflstomped ( not a magic slang term) the day before - although I held in there I was very unhappy with my own quality of play.  I was trying to be positive about it, but  actually I think that might have made it worse, in terms of letting it go because I forced it so that I didn't rain on my friends really enthusiastic accomplishments.

Not unsurprisingly a steak and a mojito did improve my mood. I'm beginning to think good food with lots of iron and protien is waaay more important to my competitive preparation than I considered previously. 

I had made enough social faux pax ( at least in my own head) that I was feeling pretty awkward about myself and life. I'm still feeling a little fish-out-of-water.  Two conversations with experienced players who were quick to shut down or deflect from conversations about teaching Magic or even the idea of coaching in a way that basically works out to "This Worked for Me so therefore it is the ONLY real way to learn" that both came from a point of privilege made me feel too preachy but also discouraged. These two people were the good guys and if they couldn't expand their empathy or even their logic to see past their own experiences I realized what an uphill battle I have without actually being good at the game.

And the subtext there is the crushing pressure to be good at the game simply to be "heard". Followed by the incredible ego destruction of being demonstrably not-good at the game. 

Let's not forget anger at myself for being not-good. 

So this High Strung Puppy was already not rebounding from stress easily.

But my win rate is generally higher in Sealed, so my Competitive Spirit Guide ( her name is Anna) took all that into consideration and suggested that we go ahead and play in a Swiss sealed event.  And I figured out EXACTLY why I had been afraid of side events. 

Here is what I opened in the sealed pool, I realized that I also had a transformative sideboard's worth of cards so I built a second side deck:

Main deck (44 cards)

2 Bellows Lizard

1 Trained Caracal

1 Drudge Beetle

1 Gatecreeper Vine

1 Rakdos Shred-Freak

1 Tavern Swindler

1 Thrill-Kill Assassin

1 Hellhole Flailer

1 Lobber Crew

1 Viashino Racketeer

1 Dark Revenant

1 Sluiceway Scorpion

1 Slum Reaper

1 Rakdos Ragemutt

1 Giant Growth

1 Abrupt Decay

1 Dreadbore

1 Golgari Charm

1 Rakdos Charm

1 Annihilating Fire

1 Auger Spree

2 Golgari Keyrune

1 Rootborn Defenses

2 Stab Wound

1 Traitorous Instinct

3 Forest

5 Mountain

1 Rakdos Guildgate

6 Swamp

1 Transguild Promenade

Sideboard (40 cards)

1 Righteous Authority

1 Hallowed Fountain

3 Avenging Arrow

2 Runewing

1 Soul Tithe

1 New Prahv Guildmage

1 Selesnya Sentry

1 Skyline Predator

1 Nivmagus Elemental

1 Aquus Steed

1 Inspiration

1 Concordia Pegasus

1 Hover Barrier

1 Dispel

1 Arrest

1 Knightly Valor

1 Isperia's Skywatch

1 Seller of Songbirds

1 Tower Drake

2 Voidwielder

8 Island

8 Plains

Non-Transformative Sideboard (31 cards)

1 Goblin Electromancer

1 Lobber Crew

1 Stonefare Crocodile

1 Cobblebrute

2 Korozda Monitor

1 Ogre Jailbreaker

3 Street Sweeper

1 Tenement Crasher

2 Terrus Wurm

1 Worldspine Wurm

1 Dynacharge

1 Mana Bloom

2 Grisly Salvage

1 Selesnya Charm

1 Aerial Predation

1 Common Bond

1 Mind Rot

1 Essence Backlash

2 Launch Party

1 Slaughter Games

2 Destroy the Evidence

1 Skull Rend

1 Survey the Wreckage

1 Rites of Reaping

Results:

0 - 4 

1 Bye

Oh.My.God.

No Seriously.

Round 1

Sleeving up and Round 1 went fine it was 1-2 the game was legit he drew better than me  for one and I had a misplay and that was all she wrote. It actually felt better than playing in the main event the day before. But after that round was when the tilty chaos started.

I chose the cards I chose because of Abrupt Decay, Two Stab Wounds and Dreadbore. I had been avoiding Rakdos cards and kept loaning or giving away my Abrupt Decays and I wanted to practice removal with those colors. 

The loss felt like a bit of a bump but I felt neither helpless nor incompetent, then I learned the difference between side events and main GP events.

Like - even if you sit right in your assigned seat - you have no idea how everyone knows the next round is starting meaning because you didn't hear "end of round" announcements you are caught up unaware ( and shlepping around all the stuff you have with you that you couldn't leave with the hotel concierge)

Round 2

You scramble up to the pairings - see your number  in bright pink (13, no lie) and turn around to look for it at the two or three tables where you were playing a minute ago and find the number.

There it is! Bright Pink sign on the table right behind where you're looking at your posting!

You know you're behind so you drag your two things to the table, sit down and start setting up.

Opponent smiles, takes your apology and asks if you signed up late for the tournament.

No? it's a first shot across the bough - you have accidentally sat down at some sort of Modern Constructed thing. 

Confused and disoriented now you try to figure out where the hell you are that you could have gotten so lost as to end up in a different side event simply by turning around. (Remember your high strung bitches do not rebound quickly from stress.) You start where you know you were sitting before and try to find out which version of the snake they used to organize the numbers and then you find your table. Your Opponent is not there. the sign says 13 - it's in blue. You feel stupid and flustered but you can recover.

Opponent finds you. He apparently made the same mistake about two minutes after you - poor Modern Players. He had to find the seat the same way. OK at least you are not crazy.

You're concentration is off.  You know it but you figure it's OK you can recover. At the end of your table a Judge starts bellowing - loudly giving instructions. Knowing that missing judges instructions can currently cause all sorts of havok you stop what you are doing and your opponent does too. It takes about three minutes into the very loud bellowing to realize he is not addressing your side event even though he referenced it. But he's at the end of your table - you and your opponent are both looking around WTF? Why are the sudden loud noises ( with the fear of punishment if you miss them- remember how not to train your high strung bitch?) being blasted at you. Your Opponent looks and points down the end of the table - at the top of the table is the bright pink table numbers - we can both clearly see the #13 we both sat down at. 

We are at the same table at the other end. 

The not-our- judge barks an order as I'm trying figure out where I was in the game. I literally startle. I cannot remember who had priority or what turn it was before we started trying to find out what not-our-judge was announcing. I do something stupid I am pretty sure because I am feeling incredible burning shame and tilt for not realizing that it had nothing to do with us and now not knowing WTF I was doing. 

This game is a wash - I can't get basic reading skills down let alone acutal focus - I think not-our-judge barks twice and then new people come up to congratulate him for barking so well - he is one chair away from us.

My Opponent is at his first GP he is a lovely human being - this is important. He wins the first game because the only thing playing against him is a vibrating string trying to figure out why she is vibrating and why can't she read the words on the cards anymore. 

He wins the second game because I read his board state incorrectly and I can feel the tilt rising up but it's not against or about him. I chat with him a bit and make sure I am carefully packed and ready to go. I still don't hear any type of end of round announcement - in retrospect our judges probably just hovered over long games and informed them individually. 

Someone windmill slams something over in the Modern tournament and calls out "I can't believe you did that" in the way where you can't really tell whether they're upset or amazed, but it's too late: I'm in fight or flight mode and the startle reflex has the adrenaline going anyway. 

I jumped up from my seat - and "flight" is not where my adrenaline was going even though the rest of my body was going with  - "nothing to see here move along adrenaline"

Tilt at +2

But luckily the pairings were up. and because I was 0-2 I had the bye. 

OK good, Walk around the event. Drink your coffee, see the vendors you missed. Shake it off. 

Round 3.

There were a bunch of vendors at GP AC and they all reminded me of what it is that I don't really like or understand about vendors at GPs.

If I want to buy cards for anything other than the event I'm playing at - I will honestly buy them online because most of the pricing seems predatory. 

What I would be looking for and buy at a GP is one of a kind stuff, cool T-shirts and Hoodies, Bags, 

I do buy sleeves and playmats. I might by old sets boosters. But there is literally no "shopping" to be done at a GP and thus no way to "bond" or decompress while shopping. There is very little sign of Magic Culture . But I walked it off, Checked out everyone in case there were cool life counters or three d alters or something that was at least fun ( nope) 

I went back to where my Competitive Spirit Guide was playing my last opponent. I built a second deck out of my sideboard and checked with a Judge about the Competitive REL (regulation* enforcement level) rules on sideboarding. I have to present the original deck I registered but I can indeed switch the whole thing for another one. My first round opponent came to hang out while I was doing that in the clear space while my Competitive Spirit Guide was moving into her 3rd game with a 1-1 record when a judge came over and asked to see her off on the side.

We were all confused - no one had asked for a judge, Anna is a high level player and I was worried that she was in trouble because of a trigger rule or some other piece of esoterica. Then they called the very Nice Canadian Man who was my last opponent over to get "his side of the story" . Anna is keeping it close to the vest but he comes back and they discuss things and think they know what's going on and prepare for either a warning or a game loss.

But they call Nice Canadian Man over again and a judge comes back and tells Anna that he's going to be disqualified. 

I cannot begin to tell you how nervewracking and upsetting this was to everyone involved, but in many ways mostly the observers, because there is long term fallout - way past what happened to me - but I will be trying that's going to be what the blog is about. 

Anna is a level 1 judge but she had really not been keeping up because she only played casually anymore eventually she and the judge spoke so she understood what exactly had happened - the judges observed a misplay - it equated to "fraud" and DQed him even though they both thought it was a misplay - yes it did happen around a trigger - but no one had called over a judge and the judge ruled it unintentional. - I'll go into clearer detail when I write the real blogpost about this - the bottome line was 

We all felt awful - and now we were nervous - and because we were making misplays on and off all day everyone in radius was also feeling scared.  I had never heard of anything like this. 

The tilt was rising. 

Round 4.

The postings were up - I realize now is that from the first disruption understanding where I was when the sign seemed to show I was in the right place but I wasn't followed by the very loud and sudden auditory stimulus in round 2 my learning disability ( which is a symbol processing disorder) was triggering some major neurological effects, but at the time the only thing I realized was that I was having trouble reading the pairings sheet, finding my name and seeing which table I was at. It is significant that I don't remember the table number.

I sat down - made sure the number was blue. Started unrolling my playmat - my first round opponent had the bye and sat next to me - this would eventually be a good thing. 

Three judges where sitting or standing and watching our side of the table. 

I couldn't read the words on the cards. Really. 

My opponent flew to the table late. She ran a constant hyper chatter, her board state was a constant mess. When she first put her unsleeved and yet curved cards down I was wondering how the heck they could look that way. I found out - she compulsively shuffled, fidgeted with her cards kept asking what cards I had as though I could or would tell her while she made the decision. I made a misplay and used Abrupt Decay on something that had regen. That was kind of it for me. Her deck was better than mine but I could also tell I was probably her first win of the day - because I'd made the misplay (which was because I couldn't read her card & wouldn't have been able to even if I had asked to see it - my visual processing was gone. I was having to pretty much play the cards from memory and was nervous because of the observed misplay DQ that had happened before. 

My opponent was literally sitting at the edge of her seat bouncing with a continous barrage of high pitched questions which I am culturally conditioned not to leave hanging in the air - but answering would have probably opened the door to some unpleasant put downs. But I was desperatly trying to relate what what in my hand to what was on her board having just asked a judge to confirm something I already knew looking like the stupidest newbist kind of player in scrub history when I realized that she was FLICKING HER CARDS SO LOUDLY THEY INTERRUPTED EVERY THOUGHT I HAD. 

Full tilt. 

" I need to ask you to stop making that noise with your cards right now. It's very loud."

She freaked out. Like she was caught. 

"Oh I didn't know I was doing that. I'm sorry it's a nervous habit. I'll try to stop."

I did not flip the table. I did not kill my opponent. I did not believe for a minute that this was the first time she had been asked to stop that behavior and that the "wounded scared kitty" routine was real.

But then she proceeded to suddnely seem to lose the abiiity to keep a clear board state.

Lands were all over the place, attackers weren't tapped in order, actions taken on the stack weren't clear. I stopped worrying about the game and started worrying about not fucking up the game by accident in a way that was going to get me DQ'ed

I switched to the blue white deck on Game 2 - the cards were more familiar to me. I was comfortable with the rules that governed them. She had to be told not to flick with the power of a 100 suns again and although I died to Vraska we still had to call the judge over three times because of unclear lines of play. The judges could tell something was off but the point at the end, the point where I lost it was when one of them asked: "But you were having fun right"

My honesty meter was too high and I was on the verge of tears. Hyperkinetic Girl was psyched because she had actually won a match and pretending that it had anything to do with fun was simply not on my list of things to do.

I smiled vibrating in my seat trying not to break out into soap opera dramatics and simply said

" No. Not at all, but she did."

Funny how oblivious she was to me before but all of a sudden she got the idea that even though I was smiling encouragingly at her telling her "It's OK enjoy the win" she should probably go run off and tell her friends. I think it was that she might finally have made eye contact.

I don't cry when I'm sad. I cry when I'm full of rage. It's better for everyone that way. I don't like being violent. It makes me feel bad. I don't like being public with emotions either, it doesn't really work out for me so I was trying to squelch it.

But Anna came over, and the first opponent did the best thing anyone could have done at that time - "want to just play for fun?"

Oohh was I mad at myself for letting Hyperkinectic Girl get to me, but I was still surrounded by judges, Anna was over and found out that at the end of the table the loud flick/flapping sound that was distracting her was hyperkinetic girl and was shocked that it carried that far. It did. Frankly for that much echo effect it seemed practiced. Whatever.

I was still smiling, still polite but had to admit that No I was on the verge of absolute hysteria - and no I wasn't going to drop - although I might have if it had just been another loss. I needed to at least be able to recover enough to read English words again.

First Oppenent and I played for fun. He did not take pity on me and I lost our first game and then things went a little more like normal and we ended up playing 4 games 2-2 oh yeah, Magic is fun. No I didn't forget who I am, I don't need to win to feel "right" I just need to be playing as cleanly as I could.

They called the pairings Round 5

only one goal. Play calm. Stay Even.

Round 5

I lost. Clean Play. Stayed Even.

It was 6:15. I hadn't eaten much and realized I hadn't touched my drink since round 3 before the DQ - that might have helped.

Take Aways

The worst part for me was knowing that I wasn't going to retain any of the details from any of the games to learn from them. The only thing I could take away from that was that I don't quit. I won't quit.

But what I really needed in a Day Two event didn't really exist after a stiff day of competition and competitive goals the day before which is something REALLY SILLY.

Like an alter contest with spare commons

Or bringing in your theme deck judged by Vorthos Judges on themeyness and having to explain each of your choices to the assmbled competitors

Or Unglued cards mixed in sealed or draft.

Commander is not " light fun" the people who play it there with the 1000.00 decks and broken combos and foiled out everything are not "silly" they're just as intimidating to new players as competitive is, but at lease I understand how competitive works.

But I'm too competitive to follow up a disappointing competitive performance without something to really break up the mindset and have fun with Magic. I need something really silly, something cultural, I need a safer space.

Everyone in my crew had a very successful weekend and a good time, a friend went infinite in draft, Anna placed 7th, the friend I went out to meet got to judge at a GP. I squelched all the frustration down because I didn't want to be a bigger pill than I already was and I was glad for them and wanted them to be uncomplicated happy.

Right now though - I think side events are too high in distractions and neurological triggers for me. Of course this means that I will most likely be trying again.

Because I'm apparently too competitive not to. In the real sense, not the "i need to win" sense, but the "I need to overcome this obstacle" sense.

*******

* A friend corrected me on REL being "rules enforcement level" instead of "regulation" - while this is correct it is not true.

ALL of the RULES are enforced at FNM the regulations on how you enforce them changes as you increase, Missed Trigger Warnings and DQs being a specific example of the regulation for what you do changing while the rule remains the same. 

It is not the first and will not be last time that the proper title for something misrepresents the effect of what it's really trying to say. This is my competitive journal and I need to keep the meanings straight - there is only one set of competitive rules for Magic there are several different RELs for playing Magic. I am sure that the Judges chose the acronym because they were focused on enforcement and level as opposed to implying that there are different rules at different levels.  I'm not changing the way it is typed because while I'm sure I've read it properly many times at this point it still didn't stick - so that's something to record here too.