Blog

Patrick Sullivan

Last week, I won a rather large TCG tournament.  This came as a surprise to me, because I hardly play anymore, at least the cutthroat variety I did years ago.  I attribute this lack of effort mostly to working in the game industry; once you spend your work week pouring over spreadsheets, building decks, and drafting (tough life, I know), you lose the motivation to get in your car or hop on a plane and do the same.  Still, it’s not like I’m totally out of the loop as far as playing TCGs go; I play and think about World of Warcraft TCG a lot and a large chunk of the skills are transferable.  The whole thing got me to thinking, “Am I better suited as a competitive card player now than I was when I was actually trying to play card games competitively?”

I think as a deck builder, it’s not even close.  Back when I was a TCG grinder and rolled with a pretty good team, my definition of cards was binary: either a card is good or it isn’t.  You can find the same attitude permeating in a lot of forum conversations and such.  The cards or classes that compose the upper tier are the powerful ones, and the ones that don’t stink.  That narrative is self-fulfilling and prevents people from discovering new decks, or cards that are appropriate for specific metagames.  As a developer, you are looking at the entire file, not just cherry picking the cards that appear the most powerful on first blush.  You method for analyzing cards changes from “Is Card X powerful in the abstract, or can I put it into an already-known deck?” to “What would the conditions have to be for Card X to be powerful?”, which in my opinion is a much better frame of mind to be approaching deck building.

A good example of this is Censure, the Paladin ability from Worldbreaker.  At first glance, this appears to be a weaker version of Fear, and it’s not like that card has a history of breaking down doors in Constructed.  In a lot of cases, that’s exactly what it is.  Still, against expensive Ferocity allies (especially Avatar of the Wild tokens), Censure is one of the best cards Paladin has.  Does that mean you should start cramming four copies into every deck you build?  Probably not.  But it is something that a good deck builder files away in the back of their mind, ready to bust out in case a metagame gets skewed in a particular direction.

There are also diminishing returns on time spent on any activity.  The first ten hours you spend shooting jumpers or learning how to cook is more productive than the following ten hours, which is more productive than the ten hours that follow that, and so on.  Now, you still may have to put in a large number of hours to get to the skill level you want for a given activity, but the actual improvements you make become more incremental over time.  And since there are many ways to become better at playing a game than the literal act of playing the game, it may be worth allocating your hours “improving at WoW” (or whatever) to different but related activities.

For instance, let’s say there are two WoW TCG players of equal ability level.  A large tournament is coming in a month, and both players have 40 hours a week to devote to practicing for the event.   Player A allocates his time by playing WoW and building decks for the full 40 hours.  Player B decides to do the same for 35 of his 40 hours, and spend his remaining five hours a week working out.  If I had to bet money on which player is more likely to succeed, I would bet the farm on Player B.  Stamina, mental acuity and overall health are important elements of a tournament player (ask anyone who plays in a tournament like the NACC how the feel at the end of a nine or ten round day), and Player B has shaved out the five least productive hours of his testing to improve on another element of his tournament game.  It’s the same reason athletes don’t devote 100% of their practicing time literally playing the sport in question; they’re in the weight room, watching film, meeting with doctors, and so on.  The best overall player is not created by devoting all of one’s time to a singular activity.

Could I continue posting positive results? Ratcheting up my time spent practicing from “zero” to “a few hours a week” certainly couldn’t hurt.  Still, oddly enough, I think I’m better off now than when I was putting all of my free time into consciously trying to win.  Being open minded and focusing on all aspects of your game creates the best player and deck builder, so your key to improvement with WoW (or anything else) might be to take a step back and look at all the things surrounding the game, not just the literal game itself.