A Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday to you all! It’s the time of year to make some unkeepable promises to ourselves. We aren’t going to use that gym membership, we aren’t going to read more or learn how to play guitar, but we can do something a little more realistic than completely revamp our lives and that’s to take a look at how we play Magic and try to improve. Honestly, this is cheating a little, as it’s something that most of us are trying to do all year around, but in the spirit of the time of year I thought I would look at areas that I could improve. These styles of articles often give you some overall advice on how to improve but, as there are a lot of extremely good pro players giving out that kind of content, instead I’m going to look at my own weaknesses and by holding up a mirror to myself hopefully it will help you to find and fix some holes in your game. Above my computer screen on my desk I have four sticky notes, four reminders of how I can improve my play and my streaming content, four, if you will, “Resolutions”. These are the things these notes remind me to do.

Focus and Slow Down:

I’ve always played Magic way too fast. This has been something I’ve struggled to unlearn. Certain members of the playing group I was with when I was younger really disliked being “slow rolled” and thought it was rude so I always played a little faster to ensure I wouldn’t be seen to be slow rolling people. This has been amplified in recent times mostly because of my streaming and MTGO play. As I’ve spoken about before, it’s really easy to go into auto-pilot in these instances. While streaming I talk to the stream chat a lot so I just make instinctual plays. A lot of good players can play well on instinct, however I feel like I don’t and end up missing a lot of plays that maybe I would see if I took my time. This goes hand and hand with lack of focus. This is a problem that again is really highlighted by MTGO. It’s pretty easy to be watching YouTube, talking to friends or have the TV on in the background while playing MTGO. This leads to obvious misplays and is an incredibly bad habit. Not doing this seems easy to implement, but overriding learned behavior can be very difficult even when we see it. This said I’m going to try my very best to listen to this note, focus and slow down.

Learn As Much As You Can:

Every game of Magic should be a chance for me to learn something new. I know I’m not good enough yet to be playing high level Magic but my goal is to get there. A huge part of that is being very critical of plays I make and analyzing my mistakes. In order to do this I need to be engaged in my games (see above: FOCUS) and look for those mistakes. A problem here is Magic and MTGO both reward grinding and that grinding isn’t always conducive to learning. When I’m trying to get through as many games as I can, as fast as I can, I don’t stop and really look at what caused outcomes. In doing this I don’t commit mistakes to memory and they soon get forgotten. We are quick to remember when our opponent drew runner runner outs to beat us but significantly less quick to take note of how much the wrong land drop on turn two really cost in the long run. This is one that I’m going to try and fix during streaming and something that I think would be easy for anyone that plays MTGO to do. I’m going to watch replays of games that I feel I could have won (or sometimes made closer than needed to be). Those types of games where you feel like your cards should have matched up well against your opponents but lost anyway, these are important games to learn from. They help us learn holes in our play patterns and from small mistakes that would be really hard to us to see without knowing the context of the whole game. I’m also going to try to read more articles. I had stopped doing so over the last year cause I found a lot of them repeated and I wasn’t getting much out of them, but I’m going to go out of my way to put aside time and read more Magic content and this time try learn from it too.

Always Be Positive:

This isn’t a new age message to remind me to smile all the time but rather a mindset that I want to change. Being negative during a game of Magic or coming up to an event is a waste of mental energy that could be better assigned to something else. Each situation in a Magic game is like a puzzle, which we are constantly trying to solve. When you spend mental energy on thinking about how lucky your opponent is, or just how dead you are if they get lucky, that’s time and energy you’re not putting toward finding solutions. There have been many times on my stream that I’ve conceded games that I’ve had outs to, they weren’t high percentage outs but I let negative thoughts occupy my time instead of solving the puzzle. Coming up to tournaments this can affect how your testing goes or even your demeanor going in to the event. I can’t remember where I heard, this but the best kind of explanation I heard was that when you tilt (or have a negative attitude) you’re giving up EV for free, you’re giving your opponent an edge without them having to work for it at all. I won’t give my opponent anything else for free in a game, why am I letting them have this edge? This I think will be the hardest thing for me to work on for two reasons. I’m a pessimistic person generally and need to try hard to be positive about bad situations. Also, and I’m sure this is my pessimistic side kicking in, but the Magic grind can really be soul crushing at times. Failing to reach goals again and again and not being able to reach the level of play you want to can be frustrating at the best of times. I’m going to try my best on this one and hope that it also reflects in my content, especially my streaming.

Lose Weight:

I’m not here to judge people for their weight nor say that this is mandatory to being a good Magic player but being more comfortable at Magic events and having better stamina can only be a positive thing. Some people also find it easier to focus when they weigh less. This doesn’t affect everyone in the same manner and studies have shown that weight is a lot more likely to affect older people’s cognitive function opposed to younger peoples but I feel this is something I want to try more. Another positive to this, and I think all MTGO grinders can learn from this, is it creates better routines. If you’re planning on eating and working out at very certain times it will stop you from being up at all hours or being online for 8-10 hours in a row.

Resolutions are hard to keep but these ones seem essential for me to become a better magic player and reach the levels and goals I’ve set for myself. So that’s me for 2017. It’s been quite the year with extreme highs and lows for me. All the way from the Pro Tour, to failing to get a single pro point from multiple events at the end the year. My first event of 2018 will be GP London at the end of January. I hope my resolutions help me get the one pro point I need to be a bronze pro player for the rest of the year. I also hope they help you look at your game and come up with a few of your own. Lastly, I’m going to leave you with my goals for the New Year –

1. Captain the Irish WMC team
2. Play on the Pro Tour again
3. Top 8 a Pro Tour
4. Make silver level pro player

Thanks for reading. From me and all of us here at troll trader games have a very happy New Year!