A matter of mindset
Listening to an album I have no idea how to share. Some people are calling it "Wingdings" . You know, by the artist ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ. (It's nice that our world still has some things that are hard to define.)
I played in the prerelease sealed event for the Hobbit last night. My plan was to go in with a lot of intention. I had a note on my phone with all of my goals. As we kicked off, I focused on trying to thoughtfully evaluate my whole pool and I worked to build my deck in the allotted 30 minutes. Do I have enough two drops? Do I have enough removal? What am I leaving out of the deck and why? I used the tactic of putting all of your fixing, removal, and decent cards into a single pile and shuffling through them. What color combos are here? How could I use them?
I settled on a black/red goblins deck, which was a little on the nose for me after doing the deckbuilding exercise I referenced in my last post (which was also black/red). But I think it was legitimate for my sealed pool. I had a few strong removal spells, multiple of a duress stapled onto an enchantment (Down, Down to Goblin Town), and a huge pile of aggressive two drops. Possibly too many actually.
I played against a Green/Black deck in round one and it wasn't close-- my goblins just overran his deck before there was a chance for him to get going. My removal showed up when I wanted it to and Menace once again proved to be a powerful keyword that I underrate until I am using it.
Round two was against a Red/White dwarves and equipment deck. I was able to hang, but eventually, I was ground down. Dwarves are stout! My opponent had a single dwarf with 5 equipment stacked on it and doublestrike. He had protection spells for each time I tried to remove him. I lost game 2, swept in 2 games by the sturdy dwarves. Perhaps one little difference here that I noticed though: I could see what I needed to turn the tide. My deck didn't have it, but I was able to recognize its deficits. This feels like something I can work on. The dwarves won the day, but the goblins will return, and in greater numbers.
Game three, I played against Blue/White humans. My opponent had a lot of counterspells and big ward creatures led by Gandalf. I had to play in a much more heads-up way and eke out smaller bits of damage until I could get my goblins rolling. I was proud of these games. My deck was clearly the beatdown, but I knew I needed to settle in and be slower than pure aggro — to turn my deck into a better midrange deck than my opponent's. I baited some counterspells to make sure I got to cast what I wanted. I pushed through two damage at a time. I was not a glacier, but each raindrop can erode the rock just the same. I won 2-1.
So I ended up 2-1 on the night, and I was happy with it, but the record was really the smallest part of why. We all have ways we want to show up in the world. In Magic, what I'm working on lately is making smart plays, having a plan and following it through, and being a gracious opponent. The third comes easily but the other two are my work, and last night I could feel myself getting better at them.
The mindfulness of planning and following through is a throughline that I continue to work on in all aspects of my life. I have been trying to meditate daily recently, even if for 5 minutes at a time. It's hard to settle in, but I am always happy to find the time for it. It's often harder to do things mindfully, but I can feel the payoffs. Leigh Alexander wrote a story a long time ago about "hacking her personality" through learning to play the card game Netrunner (also designed by Richard Garfield). I think about this article all the time. I've always been someone who quietly avoids the things I'm not immediately good at. Lately, working at getting better at Magic, I recognize the fear she describes more than I'd like to.
I have always feared losing. To be seen to be struggling — to experience frustration, to have to say, numb in the face of overwhelming information, things like "I don't get it" — disrupts me bodily, disassembles my composition. Even the prospect of failure is humiliating. I can do anything, I am good at everything except for all the things I am not good at, and I've always managed to avoid those things as if they carried germs.
Here is a thing about games: they write you and rewrite you, like the flecked arm of a dot-matrix printer, inking your image in one stroke after another, there to be read. People love Dark Souls because it helps us answer a question about ourselves: what are we made of, if everything is bleak and futile? Finishing that game is more than just finishing a game: it's proving to ourselves we have what it takes to whittle down, claw away, gnaw to the marrow of futility and surpass it. Once you've learned that, you can't unlearn it. You've changed.
That's the part I keep circling: I'm not always as mindful as I'd like to be. I get sucked into bad patterns, I struggle when I am not in control of a situation, and I have a hard time faking it when I am not having a good time with something. But I am always able to show up as a better version of myself when I am aware of myself, not acting from a place of fear or indifference. and this is where I think these mindful Magic events can help. Take something you care about, something you want to do well, and be intentional about how you practice it. Make sure it's working for you and you aren't becoming a worse version of yourself when you engage with it. My good pal Trent always says "practice how you want to play."
Thinking through these events also makes them more fun. There's more juice when you keep examining your games and your mindset in your head after you leave the store.
For some people, Friday Night Magic is the best thing they have going in their life, and when it goes sideways, they struggle. They feel bad. I'm lucky that Magic is just one small piece of a wide landscape of good things for me. But I like to think that approaching it mindfully makes the rest of that landscape better too. It's never over, but it's fun to keep working at it.
The road goes ever on, my friend.