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You are: Home -> Articles -> Feature Article | Editor:Staff 6th November 2007

This Community in Need, has few friends indeed

By The Co.

Greetings and salutations my hearty readers! After an extreme drought of writings from me I’ve decided its time to get this site some articles that aren’t 400 words long. Well actually that’s not entirely true, a certain person/s on this forum keeps repeatedly bashing the play skill of the average Australian, not that I care very much about that, but when I become one of the accused people, I feel the need to defend why perhaps I and others aren’t 100% at all times in magic.

To begin, the most pressing issue at hand is the relatively low level of skill in the Australian competitive arena. To put it simply, players in Australia care too little, or in some extreme cases, too much.

Caring too little causes players to stagnate at the same level they have been at for years, constantly assuming that each play they made was the right one, never questioning their game plan. These people lose the game with a bad beats story to tell their friends. Sometimes these stories are true, and there was nothing more they could have done. But often there is a little mistake they may have made beginning from as early as turn 1, which slowly eats away at their game plan until they have no chance of winning.

They could have played the wrong land, not factored in what they could draw, what their opponent has played or could play on the next turn. Each one of those things will inadvertently affect how the game progresses and indeed the outcome of the match. Failure to take note of the above can lead to anything from the opponent resolving Blanchwood Armor on their elf on turn 2, getting under removal because you didn’t play the Mogg Fanatic turn 1, or you failed to leave mana up to use Tarfire, thinking the worst was a Call of the Herd token. Simple mistakes like this are made at all levels of the competitive scene in Australia all too often. The simple reasons being players don’t care enough and will only put their losses to the same old bad beats story of mana flood, mana screw or their opponent luck sacking.

How can players solve this? Simply pay more attention to the game. Think for a second before each move If you do this, factoring in what answers your opponent has in their decks, it might save you from running your Tarmogoyf into a Tendrils and instead playing a troll ascetic, even though there could be a 4 point power difference.

Another technique is to stop letting yourself have ‘backsies’ when you’re testing for an event. Even if it’s constructed testing or just a match for fun, if you’re serious about getting better you’ve got to accept you made a mistake and learn to correct it in the future. Otherwise you’re just going to let yourself go back on the same bad plays over and over, then come tournament day you won’t be looking at all the options, simply the one you used in testing.
I would love to go deeper but the topic of play mistakes, where they originate and how little or enormously they affect your margins in any one matchup is simply too large to cover in an article that I can write at present.

The other type of problem is small but present amongst the Australian playing community. The player will simply care too much for his own good. This situation is very common in Tasmania and causes a lot of players to leave the game or go on tilt quite savagely. For those of you who don’t know what going on tilt is, its basically when you stop caring for one reason or another and resign yourself to losing as a result.

These players automatically assume they are the best, or that they should be. They put in an average amount of time and are often no better then the average player. But in their minds they are the greatest thing known to the magic community and if they lose it’s surely not their fault, but the deck under performing. Should they lose by visible mistake they will become angry at the game and themselves, often ranting on about how they will quit, and in some cases quitting because they couldn’t win for the simple reason that they are who they are.

Quitting simply because you lost an important match or can’t quite win a PTQ or failed to day 2 a PT/GP is one of the worst excuses possible. You could quit and chalk it up to the world’s hatred of you, or you could make note of the mistakes you made, perhaps how you could have 2 for 1’d the opponent to give you that extra turn to draw out of mana flood. More often then not these players will quit and rejoin the game at a later date assuming that they will somehow be better than they were earlier for no actual reason or they will keep playing the same unquestioned game they’ve played for a long time, slowly stagnating their ability to get better.

As you can see, the key here is the fact that people just automatically assume they will get better. Communities are plagued with people who think that simply because they have played for a year it should make them godly at the game. The result of this is arrogant scrubs only analysing the parts of the game they want to see, and then chalking the match up to luck on the opponents side.

On the weekend I won the Tasmanian state championships with what I would call a terrible U/W control deck. Big deal you might say, the co. lives in Tasmania; there isn’t anyone good there. In saying this you would be half right, we have our fair share of casual players who just like to play the game for fun now and then. However, we also have what I believe is one of the fastest improving player bases, skills-wise, in the country. This is achieved by our tight-knit community and small player base. Everyone helps everyone, even in tournaments such as states, PTQ’s and especially Pre-releases.

When our opponents make mistakes, we point out what he did wrong and how he could change it in the future. In sealed events, we sit down between rounds and point out what cards could be changed between the deck to make it better, both for future reference and sideboard games. This is the kind of thing that is lost on a national scale often because of the size of the events and the pressure to perform well.

That kind of situation leads to closed testing groups and lack of interaction in the community. This will lead to a select few good players, such as Rhys Gould and Steven Aplin rising from the bunch, with a few great players such as Tim He and James Zhang appearing. So while there will be players benefiting from these groups, it will in no way increase the overall skill of the nations players, it just lets a few sit at the top of their game playing only worse players and winning due to a better knowledge of the game. While the rest sit below never becoming better until one of these groups accepts them in after they may have fluked a win, or spend infinite hours on magic online.

There are players who pick up upon others’ mistakes, and sit atop their throne as a self proclaimed Magic genius. They will consistently whine about how bad the state of magic is and will never actually do anything relevant to help the situation improve. This is often simply because they have won a big event or placed decently at one reasonably sized event. They think they are God’s gift to the game, and all people should follow their doctrine despite them never actually doing anything to help players improve.

The irony of this is, that their skills usually stay at the same level they were the last time they made a decent finish, with nowhere else to go but down. This is because they cut off interaction with the community because all the players are simply ‘too crap’ to be worth their time. So what, you nearly won a GP, win multiple PTQs, its only in the same community that you continue to paint as a bad one, which means your only beating bad players, which often means you yourself, despite victory after victory, are getting no better. So not only are you doing yourself a disservice your damaging the whole community at allowing it to remain at the same level its always been.

The lack of skill in Australia is, however, not entirely due to these top end players and their poor excuse of an approach to helping the rest of the community, the rest of Australia and its mentality is also to blame. As a nation we are very sports minded and often shy away from the intellectual aspect of life. Where as in France you will have a school with a magic club that will bring in people like Raphael Levy to talk to the students, in Australia this is unheard of and openly discouraged as being smart isn’t viewed as something ‘cool’. This mentality in the country leads to players being unwilling to devote the time they need to in order to actually get better at this game. This rather unsavoury culture in the country really can’t be tackled by a forum or even a series of articles, its something that requires years and years of change, even though we know its here people still choose to go for mind numbing pursuits instead of something that could potentially mentally enhance them, thus slowly degrading their possibility for better employment. But that’s entirely not the point of this article.

I’m not here to argue cultural precedents or stereotypes, I’m here to tell you to get off your arse and improve your magic game. If you fit one of the above niches, you most certainly will, you need to break it. Not because it will benefit you, which it will, but because it will benefit the whole community around you. Ultimately the only one to blame for you failing at Magic is yourself. If you want to get better, put in the time and do so instead of whining about constantly failing. As for your community and the overall skill of the nation, the onus for the increase of this statistic is entirely reliant on the individual increase of skill and the willingness of the better players to help the less talented.

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