First off, sorry to mods if this isn't the best place for a conversation about tilting with respect to deckbuilding. I feel that this is a good place to bring up the discussion since this is the forum that most brewers lurk on. Anyway.
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who not only has experienced tilt in general - during an unlucky game, or when you're losing games to a favorable matchup, and so on - but I am a bit curious about if fellow deckbrewers on here have experienced tilt about their deck in particular. I'm not talking about coming to a realization that a deck just isn't as good as it seems to be, but rather about when you lose a few games in a tournament with a deck you've been brewing and expending your own limited resources of money and time on, and just feel frustrated and depressed about the actual viability of the deck you've placed so much effort into. I've experienced this in the past both with my brewing for Ensoul Artifact decks and lately with my Jund Dragons deck. I'm wondering if other people on here have experienced the same.
In particular, I'm curious about:
- How to resist/prevent tilting on your deck?
- How to tell whether you're tilting, or if the deck idea genuinely isn't working out?
- When is the correct time to give up on a particular deck idea?
Again, I'm not (primarily) trying to start a discussion about when to determine if a deck is just turning out to be bad in testing and in events through the course of many games, but rather to talk about how to deal with the emotional frustration that happens in the process of deckbrewing. I love trying to think up new and interesting - yet competitively viable - decks for Magic, but I sometimes experience it being emotionally draining. While the most success at events I've had have been on straight netdecks or netdeck + tinkering, I tend to get the most satisfaction about designing a strong and interesting deck. I just sometimes find it difficult at times to continue working on the same deck if/when repeatedly facing defeat in events, even if testing is promising.
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Standard: Currently messing with U/R or Mono-Red Artifacts, following Origins.
Modern: Budget U/R Burn
Legacy: LOLnope
Vintage: See previous
Commander: Scion of the Ur-Dragon
Tiny Commander: Shu Yun, the Silent Tempo
On topic though, there is generally a few things that I do to keep from going nuts trying to make brews work. First you are going to have to accept that losing is part of the building process. If you can't accept that then you will never be able to make a successful brew. When I first started to really try to brew decks that could compete with Tier 1 decks the emotional reaction to ANY loss was that I needed to start changing things before I kept playing. This reaction is wrong on two levels. First, if you got beat by a rogue deck or another brew then there's really no reason to start making hasty changes because you will in all likelihood be making your deck worse against the more prevalent decks. Second, one game or match is not enough to diagnose what isn't working. Making changes is about finding the patterns of what isn't working rather than this specific card didn't work in this game. Finding those patterns of bad, good, and needed cards will tell you what to cut or add. When you keep all of this in mind it's easy to not tilt because in the grand scheme of brewing it's about incremental steps of improving. There will very rarely be an add x card and boom your golden moment.
As for the second part of your question of when to call it quits on a deck, that's just intuition for me. There's sort of that gray area in games where you may be losing the game but you are in it. Basically you may have lost but you didn't get steamrolled. After a good amount of games and some changes to improve the deck I step back and ask myself if I feel like that I am in this area even during losses. Kind of a, am I competing in the games or am I just throwing some cards on the table? If I can honestly look at the games and tell myself that I am in games then it's worth it to keep working. If the answers no, then it's time to hang it up because the deck just isn't working. This kind of judgment can't be rushed. If you play a few games and make no changes to improve and then say it's not working then you aren't brewing. You are just throwing some cards together and hoping for the best.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Modern xWBreakfast at Urza'sxW UWGBantUWG GWRNaya ZooRWG
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I'm sure I'm not the only person here who not only has experienced tilt in general - during an unlucky game, or when you're losing games to a favorable matchup, and so on - but I am a bit curious about if fellow deckbrewers on here have experienced tilt about their deck in particular. I'm not talking about coming to a realization that a deck just isn't as good as it seems to be, but rather about when you lose a few games in a tournament with a deck you've been brewing and expending your own limited resources of money and time on, and just feel frustrated and depressed about the actual viability of the deck you've placed so much effort into. I've experienced this in the past both with my brewing for Ensoul Artifact decks and lately with my Jund Dragons deck. I'm wondering if other people on here have experienced the same.
In particular, I'm curious about:
- How to resist/prevent tilting on your deck?
- How to tell whether you're tilting, or if the deck idea genuinely isn't working out?
- When is the correct time to give up on a particular deck idea?
Again, I'm not (primarily) trying to start a discussion about when to determine if a deck is just turning out to be bad in testing and in events through the course of many games, but rather to talk about how to deal with the emotional frustration that happens in the process of deckbrewing. I love trying to think up new and interesting - yet competitively viable - decks for Magic, but I sometimes experience it being emotionally draining. While the most success at events I've had have been on straight netdecks or netdeck + tinkering, I tend to get the most satisfaction about designing a strong and interesting deck. I just sometimes find it difficult at times to continue working on the same deck if/when repeatedly facing defeat in events, even if testing is promising.
Modern: Budget U/R Burn
Legacy: LOLnope
Vintage: See previous
Commander: Scion of the Ur-Dragon
Tiny Commander: Shu Yun, the Silent Tempo
On topic though, there is generally a few things that I do to keep from going nuts trying to make brews work. First you are going to have to accept that losing is part of the building process. If you can't accept that then you will never be able to make a successful brew. When I first started to really try to brew decks that could compete with Tier 1 decks the emotional reaction to ANY loss was that I needed to start changing things before I kept playing. This reaction is wrong on two levels. First, if you got beat by a rogue deck or another brew then there's really no reason to start making hasty changes because you will in all likelihood be making your deck worse against the more prevalent decks. Second, one game or match is not enough to diagnose what isn't working. Making changes is about finding the patterns of what isn't working rather than this specific card didn't work in this game. Finding those patterns of bad, good, and needed cards will tell you what to cut or add. When you keep all of this in mind it's easy to not tilt because in the grand scheme of brewing it's about incremental steps of improving. There will very rarely be an add x card and boom your golden moment.
As for the second part of your question of when to call it quits on a deck, that's just intuition for me. There's sort of that gray area in games where you may be losing the game but you are in it. Basically you may have lost but you didn't get steamrolled. After a good amount of games and some changes to improve the deck I step back and ask myself if I feel like that I am in this area even during losses. Kind of a, am I competing in the games or am I just throwing some cards on the table? If I can honestly look at the games and tell myself that I am in games then it's worth it to keep working. If the answers no, then it's time to hang it up because the deck just isn't working. This kind of judgment can't be rushed. If you play a few games and make no changes to improve and then say it's not working then you aren't brewing. You are just throwing some cards together and hoping for the best.
Modern
xWBreakfast at Urza'sxW
UWGBantUWG
GWRNaya ZooRWG