Sooner or later in life, and in this game, we get to a point where we simply stop improving and it feels like we’re constantly just getting shuffled back and forth between two states. At that point, a crisis is warranted.
A crisis is NEEDED to improve. There are things we think we know which hold us back and prevent us from improving. With that in mind, here’s a literal ALGORITHM, a RECIPE, you can follow to quickly improve in anything you do.
TRUTH NUMBER 1: Thinking/Logical flaws and lack of knowledge
Question your “knowledge” of the game. YOU DO NOT POSSESS ANY KNOWLEDGE OF THIS GAME.
Start from there, and you’ll start winning with every deck you play. Except the ones you built. YOU DO NOT POSSESS THE KNOWLEDGE TO BUILD A DECK. If you want to win, take an existing, proven deck.
If you DO want to BEAT ANY challenge in your life, simply accept the truth - you think you know something which you don’t. Start from there, question everything, and win.
There are wrong recipes you can follow which will lead to your quick improvement, but in the long run, they are bound to limit you in your progress. That happens because some challenges don’t require knowing everything, but simply knowing something that you do know.
But when you’re stuck, YOU HAVE NO WAYS OF KNOWING WHAT IS THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW, and in order to find out, you have to question what you know. You have to literally become a scientist:
reach theories → test theories in practice → compare results with previous results and reach a conclusion about the theory.
Knowledge gained this way STILL WILL NOT LAST FOREVER. It is quite possible to reach “wrong” knowledge this way, but it’s a sure way to:
- guarantee progress with enough iterations,
- guarantee that you actually understand why that leads to the progress, and because of that
- help you gain meta-knowledge, or knowledge about your knowledge, which will be helpful for future learning and improvements.
In other words, YOU GET EXPERIENCE.
Now, when you finally made some progress, it means you have gained SOME knowledge and SOME experience. You can build on top of that. You can dare to build your own decks and test them. Now you know how to do that, so you’re not simply being “arrogant” for even trying. You’re being CURIOUS, and SCIENTIFIC.
TRUTH NUMBER 2: The paradox of feelings and how to deal with it
Feelings are what essentially makes us better than AI in some ways. Those ways are:
- they make us aware
- they point to what is right and what’s not
- they give us motivation
- they can give us PURPOSE.
Those are all very powerful, BUT!
Feelings can also hold you back or straight up get you killed. It is very important to use your scientific framework while analyzing your own emotions (truth number 1).
A lot of times in life we will FEEL we’re doing something right because it FEELS right to be doing so. But, doing so will result in bad outcomes, and make us FEEL BAD in the end. What this tells us, is that we shouldn’t always trust the way we analyzed our feelings to be correct. We should immediately assume we were working with wrong assumptions.
Some of the wrong assumptions in this game:
- I don’t want to be a n00b and play netdecks, it doesn’t feel right
Did you even try? How many games? What makes you think you are even competent enough to make a deck if everything points to you not even having knowledge of piloting a proper one? What makes you SO DAMN ARROGANT to think you are somehow smarter without even trying?
You are being completely delusional. You have to go against your feelings and force yourself to try netdecks. This will lead to:
- winning more, because the decks are better, thus feeling good more;
- learning more, because when you already know that the deck is good, that automatically means that if you’re not improving, you’re doing something wrong, hence, it tells you what you can try to improve; which means it gives you HOPE;
- and eventually, it WILL lead to you improving and thus, feeling GOOD more often.
As you can see, one simple decision to go against your feelings can have a HUGE impact on both:
- how you feel
- how you think
about this game, about yourself and about this life.
- I don’t want to play aggressive decks or even play slower decks more aggressively because it lacks strategy and means it’s all luck
Ouch. There’s plenty of toxic, poisonous crap in this one. Stick with me, this is gonna be a wild ride.
First of all, playing aggressively sometimes is the only way of winning the exact matchup you find yourself in, no matter the decks involved. In time and with experience, you get to realize that truth. In those scenarios, being more aggro is your literal win-condition, the only winning strategy. Yes, it’s an actual strategy, because it’s decided after considering MANY different variables:
- which of the two decks involved is stronger the more cards get drawn, mine or theirs? If the answer is theirs, aggro is your winning strategy;
- which of the two decks involved is stronger in EACH of the phases of the game (early, mid, late) - now this is where things get slightly more complicated, but still quite logical - if your deck is stronger early to mid game, your winning strategy is to play aggressively, if not, play defensively and look for answers.
- which cards are key cards in my opponent’s deck and how much mana they cost - sometimes you need to play around them, which means either playing aggressively before they can come up and change the course of the game, or you have to “tempo your damage out” in intervals which avoid the impact of the card. In either case it means putting more pressure at some points in game, and relaxing it in others, as part of a strategy.
Now, we’ve proven that AGGRESSION is, in fact, a strategy, quite often a winning one. Let’s unravel the rest of the points. It might feel like it’s “braindead easy to play aggro”. You could not possibly be any more wrong than you are, and the key to understand why that is so lies in the fundamentals of economics and management.
It lies in the concept of “diminishing returns/diminish marginal values” of resources and capital.
In this game, your resources and capital are cards with their values and costs, and amount of mana you can play each turn. What the concept of diminishing returns states is that
> the more resources you have, the less each additional unit of that resource is worth to you because you would rather give that away for some other resource instead.
(this is actually my own amalgamation of 3-4 different economics rules, to simplify things and make them easier to apply to this game)
Other resources in this game are:
- value,
- tempo,
- drawing into answers.
The more mana you have, the more you have to think about converting your mana into other resources, depending on the matchup and your winning strategy. In that sence, playing control, slower decks, is inherently harder to pull off strategically.
Now here comes the ironic part of the diminishing returns:
The less mana you have to spend, the MORE important is each decision you make.
Think about only having 10 euros to spend and so many options. You obviously have to prioritize and pick what you need or want the most. Whatever you do will impact EVERY OTHER DECISION you make AFTERWARDS. In that sense, the MOST IMPORTANT TURNS YOU WILL PLAY IN A SINGLE GAME ARE TURNS 1-4. ALWAYS. that includes Mulligan.
(not actually always, but thinking it’s always is a damn good heuristic to simplify things until you get enough experience to discern when it’s not).
That means that some of the most important decisions you have to make are operational/tactical, and NOT strategical at all.
> YOU HAVE TO BE A GOOD AGGRO PLAYER TO EVEN BE A STRATEGIC PLAYER BECAUSE IF YOU LOSE EARLY GAME THERE IS NO LATE GAME AND THERE IS NO STRATEGY.
Only the lack of knowledge of opponents can give you a chance to play the control game you oh, so want to play, but until you accept that aggro is a key, fundamental part of game knowledge, you will not learn anything and you will not improve at all.
This tutorial was written by an Aggro player - I call myself a Guru or Maestro of aggression because that’s the only thing I play. I like doing AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE and with that DOING AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, and if you’re like me, you’re an aggro player.
But, I have seldom played control decks. My control game is on the level of top 5k. While my Aggro game is on the level of top 1k. How such a small difference?
That should tell you enough about how important “aggro” skills are in this game. It’s a necessary step to even reach the control stage of the game. I’m sorry you had to learn this way, but I’m glad I could help you.
Stay safe.
P.S. I forgot to exapnd on the “luck of the draw” part of the thing, but by now, it’s very easy for me to do because I’ve explained everything else. The key lies in the Mulligan.
Mulligan is your bridge between aggro and control AND the biggest influence on the game BECAUSE first 4 turns are so damn crucial. That’s why you feel like every game is decided by luck - to you it feels that way because the game often gets decided in the mulligan.
Now, since a Mulligan tutorial would warrant at least as much of text as this, I will skip that part and simply recommend you to buy a Premum subscription on a deck tracker to gain Mulligan strategies for each matchup and follow them.
If it works for me, it will work for you.
Peace.
EDIT 2: Tracker devs, if you’re reading this, I’m ready to listen to your offer, but don’t make it less than 15% of the increase in the amount of subscriptions you get from now on xDDD