#howtopractice

—Yehudi Menuhin

Happy New Year 🎆🎈🎊 🥂

Just my thoughts on 'talent' in art while I do a picture in my new style. Actual paint time was 1hr but I sped it up to match the audio. Sorry if it's a litt...

This seems like it's about art, but it's actually about a lot of stuff. Including Magic. Think about the importance of copying, setting standards, and especially about the difference between practice and performance.

This is why 9/10 times when people see me playing at my shop, it looks like garbage, but then I can show up at something "more important," like a tournament, and my game looks totally different.

I used to not do this intentionally, but over the past several months I've been play-testing with a willingness to make mistakes, or playing looser, or allowing myself to fall into uncomfortable in-game situations. This is not to say I'm intentionally making mistakes, but playing at a speed and paying a level of attention to the game where they inevitably occur. The reason for this is three-fold.

One: when I practice, my focus is so far-flung from what my focus is like under pressure that acting like they're similar or trying to focus like I would in a tournament feels like a kind of false god. By making mistakes and playing loosely/instinctively, I can up my investment in a match by finding new ways to play from behind. When I'm invested, my drive to win goes up, which helps recreate a situation of pressure. In addition to being more invested, I've gotten very, very good at playing from losing positions, but more importantly...

Two: Before I show up for an event, I want to have already made as many of the mistakes I can possibly make. I've discovered that any mistake I've made and identified as a mistake is one I'm extremely unlikely to make again. I'll isolate some particular line which made me lose a game, like being able to do things other than crack fetches with a Miracle trigger on the stack (such as cast Vendillion Clique to rob them of the counterspell you know they have). Once I've isolated and extracted the core of the mistake (in this case, being able to play at instant speed during times which you're not normally accustomed to doing so), I can slow down during a real match and take this new line (or conversely, avoid this old mistake), and not lose the game on the spot.

Three: If you are practicing with a focus on experiencing new situations, even if they're losing ones, your knowledge accumulates much faster than it does if you play with the intention to win every practice game from the outset. Magic is a loser's game: it is most often decided by the player who makes the most mistakes as opposed to brilliance from the winner. (Most brilliance in Magic is simply not making a mistake that was hard to avoid, anyway.) If you can identify a plethora of ways you can lose a game of Magic, that knowledge is going to help you improve far more than doing anything else, like getting really good at exploiting your opponents' mistakes. You'll eventually get to a point where your opponents make infinitesimally few mistakes, and then where will your strategy be? Conversely, imagine being a player who knows how not to make mistakes in a meta defined by players who prey on mistakes. That would be an extremely good position to be in.

This is not to undervalue the importance of exploiting mistakes, but when you know how to not make your own, taking advantage of someone else's missteps is usually trivial.

What do y'all think?

<3

Thanks dude!! It has slowly taken over the role of my old composition books, haha.

I guess, because I can see my progress so much more easily, it doesn't feel like I'm wandering down a dark tunnel that goes on for fucking EVER...I mean, I see the light of the tunnel a little ways down. Even if it's a thousand miles away I know I'm getting somewhere, so if I keep moving I'll get there :D

wanting to practice = practicing more = improving = wanting to practice!

My cello teacher rescheduled our lesson today (her daughter's going through some health stuff :/), which means the practice time I was going to squeeze in before dashing off to her place is... expanded.