As we progress through the thick of the Redemption road to Nationals season, I wanted to share what I have learned over the years on what I call the competitive mindset. First off, I am in no means an expert on human psychology. Nor would I consider myself a “great” card game player and am far from perfect. I’m simply sharing my attempted mindset (as I fail it all the time in practice) when playing card games (or most pursuits where I’m aggressively trying to win) competitively. Now that I’ve qualified my human failings, let’s jump in!
The competitive mindset can be broken down into three parts: before, during, and after the game.
Before the game
Before we get to the start of the game we need to briefly touch on pre-tournament prep. I don’t want to get into all the details of deck building and identifying the metagame and stuff like that but do want to touch on the immortal words of Mr. Tyler Stevens, “know your deck.” It’s important to know what cards are in your deck, what they do, and which ones can answer what situation. Pre-planning of what you want to do when certain situations or board states arise is important to being able to make the best decisions possible during the game quickly.
As a dad, I feel obligated to mention that it is greatly helpful before a big tournament (and pretty much everything in life) to take care of your body. Make sure you are hydrated, nourished, and well rested before the big day.
Before playing my first game I’ve found it helpful to get a test game in ahead of time. If I’m not able to get a game in with someone, I usually try to, at least, “goldfish” a couple turns with my deck. Goldfishing is when you run your deck against no opponent just to familiarize yourself with what your starting hands tend to look like and what some of the prep phases and play patterns are. This gets my brain firing in the ways it needs to before a tournament and helps me get ready to pilot my deck.
The final, most important thing I like to do before a game is say a quick prayer. Nothing fancy, but making sure I give thanks to God for the opportunity to play and compete. Something like, “Thank you Lord for the opportunity to compete today. Thank you for the abilities you have given me to play this game. Help me to praise you with my best. Help me to respect my opponent and to be the type of person I want to play against. Help me to perform my best and to be gracious in victory or defeat, content with whatever outcome. Amen.”
During the game
I play Ultimate frisbee competitively. In the sports world you are taught during games to have the memory of a goldfish. This means when you make a mistake on the field/pitch/rink/etc. you need to forget it instantly and get right back to whatever you need to be doing in the moment of your game. In Ultimate, when I make a bad throw or drop the disc on offense I can’t get mad or disappointed in myself and hang my head or my savvy opponent will take advantage of my lapse. I need to immediately transition my mind and body to defense and be thinking “what do I need to do to get the disc back for my team.”
In Redemption when I make a misplay, like block with an evil character forgetting that they are being negated or attack with Matthew into hand protection, I need to immediately forget I made that mistake and then re-analyze what I need to do from there to win the immediate battle, the turn cycle, and, ultimately, the game. If I let myself dwell on my mistake it can cause me to lose focus on what is happening, lead to anger at myself for missing something obvious, and often spiraling into more mistakes. This is what is commonly referred to in card games as “tilt”. Where one mistake leads to multiple others because you allow yourself to focus too much on that one error causing your future thought processes to be clouded.
At all points in the game, but especially after a mistake that could lead to tilt, you need to be thinking on three, escalating levels:
- Immediate: What can I do to potentially get the rescue/block in this battle?
- The turn cycle: What can I do to best set myself up so that my attack/block on the next turn has the highest likelihood of succeeding?
- The game: How can I use this battle/turn to best set myself up for the rest of the game? What main strategy is my opponent’s deck trying to utilize and how can I best counter that and achieve my own strategy?
I’ve found that this is usually the biggest differentiator on levels of players in card games. As you start playing a card game you tend to think in only terms of immediacy, throwing all your resources into one battle without, potentially, realizing that you might lose the battle regardless or are not setting yourself up well for the next battle.
As you progress, you start thinking in terms of turn cycles. You think about how to best set yourself up for the current battle and next battle/turn. Deciding on how best to use your prep phase and trying to weigh what is worth using now and what is best saved for the next turn.
As you master the game, you add on focusing on the overall game strategy. You can quickly identify your opponent’s deck and know how they want to win and work out your strategy to counter that.
After the game
Once the game ends is the time to stop being a goldfish and start being an elephant. My wife was a teacher for 20 years and is now a teaching consultant. She travels around the state coaching and educating teachers on best practices and classroom management. One thing I learned from her is what is called the “growth mindset”. The growth mindset is looking back at an experience, identifying what parts of it were in your control and what parts weren’t, and then asking yourself how you can improve on the parts that were in your control.
This can be a daunting task as, if you’re me, there can be soooo many things that you can improve on from any given game. So, one thing I have tried to use for myself, and has proven extremely valuable for teaching this principle to my kids, is to identify one thing I did well during the game and one thing that I can improve on. This helps the psyche in not getting too negative on oneself and makes the potential improvement more bite-sized and palatable.
Conclusion
Let’s break this all down into a real life example I had at a MN tourney recently. It was the final round and the winner would take the tournament. I was playing against Maxwell, a great local middle schooler/now high schooler, who I knew was on a Joshua/Thieves build.
I prepped myself to play against a Joshua deck thinking, “try to kill Joshua himself to hamper the offense, get hand protection down, attack with heroes that can mitigate/invalidate large thieves’ bands and them attacking my hand.”
He got to go first. I drew no lost souls. He put down a Storehouse and then attacked with a triple band of heroes including Captain and Joshua trying to generate resources to get me a lost soul he could rescue. No souls came out, so now I had the choice of accepting his battle challenge. I had Entrapping Pharisees in hand and thought, “Great! He has Storehouse down, I can achieve one of my pre-game strategies and capture his Joshua, taking it out of the game for good!”. So I slammed down my ‘Trappers to block. However, I failed to realize that capturing Joshua would give him a soul to rescue, turning his battle challenge into a rescue attempt. I captured Josh but promptly lost the battle, giving him the first soul.
To my credit, I managed to put this mistake behind me, mentally moving on, and playing a clean game the rest of the way. To his credit he played great all game. I lost 5-4.
Post game, both my positive take away and improvement came from that choice I made to block in that first battle. I correctly identified the importance of Joshua and identified an opportunity for me to take him out instead of just snap declining the battle challenge. I was analyzing the game state and thinking big picture of the game as a whole instead of just that first battle.
For improvement, I just blanked on the potential consequences of my ‘Trappers’ block so missing that caused me to not have the full picture with which to decide if the block was worth it or not. Me failing to fully read and understand the consequences of the ‘Trapper block stemmed from me letting myself get too married to the idea of taking out Joshua without fully analyzing the immediate game state. It all comes back to Mr. Stevens’ “know your deck” (and cards in it).
Oof! That was a lot of info. Hopefully you were able to glean some insightful nuggets into how to approach Redemption games with a competitive mindset so you can prep on your road to dominating at Nationals!