Crystalized Thought

Sometimes reading through articles on Magic is good brainfood. The competitive edges that players try and work through don't exactly apply to my metagame but they do help solve mental problems. For example, this article at Channel Fireball contains this gold nugget:

Now, when I come to Jon with a list, the first thing he asks me is, “What do you want to beat?”

Dead on. No deck or strategy can beat everything and I don't use sideboards, so the question is: What strategy is this deck meant to beat. 

It is why I have created a mental subcategory of decks called "Jason decks"; ones that are meant to defeat his strategies (frequently milling or thievery ones.) When I don't play a Jason deck against him and I lose, I take what I can and learn from that. When I win and I do so because of a well executed strategy, not because of bad/good luck, then maybe I'm onto something.


However, I need to view all my decks this way: What is this meant to beat? The answer to that question takes a bit of the sting out of a loss when I'm playing a strategy that is just flat out unworkable given my opponent's strategy. That doesn't excuse bad play or poor decisions but it might allow me to remove a bit of ego from the equation and see situations for what they are, instead of just feeling bad because I lost.

Forgiveness

Game situation: Sensei's Top telling me Plains, Plains, Swamp is in my future, while I'm facing double Ankh of Mishra. So things are bad.

I have a Seal of Cleansing on the board to take care of something, only question is what, of course.

Then the worst happens; I shuffle my deck when I meant to draw. This fucks the whole game really. There's no way for me to properly reset things-you can't un-shuffle a deck (although it wouldn't be a problem if the Shuffle and the Draw commands weren't right next to each other...design fail!)

I'm given a forgiveness token and we just keep going.

It's good to play with friends.