Hitting a Wall and the Value of One Tricking

A few days ago I had one of my newish players(he started playing 4 years ago with MHA) reach out to our playgroup about hitting a wall and not feeling like he was progressing. After giving him the best advice I could, I felt it was probably something other people could gain from. I hope this is helpful to other players who also feel like they have hit a wall on improving in the game.

I started playing UFS in 2011 but only started going to competitive events in 2015, for the 2015 World championship. I had a respectable showing for a newcomer competitive player ending at a record of 3-4. I loved the experience of going to the major, and felt I was learning something at each event and improving my skill at the game, and was slowly inching up my record getting X-3 or X-3-1 and most events always sitting around the middle of the pack. That was until the 2018-2019 season,  gameplay wise everything fell apart for me that year. I ended in the bottom half of every PTC I attended, even going 0-5 at one event, and my trips to majors didn't do much better, ending both with a record of 2-5. It was not a good year for me. 

The Sunday of 2019 Worlds I was walking to the convention center with one of my locals and talking about how my event had gone and trying to figure out what had gone so wrong. He brought up a very good point to me, I had been jumping from deck to deck all year. The deck I had taken to Worlds I had all of 3 weeks of play with before the event, a little less then I would normally have but far from an abnormal thing for me. I had always been someone who enjoyed playing a lot of different decks and strategies, constantly building new decks to take to my locals, but I had been especially bad about it this year never sticking with a deck for more than a week or 2. Up until then my goal for every event was just do my best and have fun. So I set myself a new goal, I would spend the next 6 months doing what I always did playing around with whatever caught my eye but now taking note of what worked well, what didn't, what I enjoyed, and what was miserable to play. Then 6 months out from the next Worlds he would make me pick a deck, and that would be what I would stick to playing until the next Worlds.

In the end I picked Remiliss and those 6 months of playing 1 deck and 1 deck only did more to make me a better player then 4 years of competitive play ever did. I played the deck on every symbol, I tried every tech option, constantly tinkering with the list trying to find just the right ratio of cards to make it as good as it could be. I learned every line the deck could produce and how to play with whatever hand the deck gave me. And it got me some of the best results I had ever had at the time, I ended 2020 Worlds with a 5-2 record and a spot in top 16.

The most surprising thing about it, I found the skills I had learned 1 tricking the deck made me better at every other deck I picked up. The familiarity of the block math in the deck got me to do it more often making me better and faster at calculating blocks in other decks. Learning the deck so thoroughly I was able to spot what my outs were in a bad situation and how to play to them, this in turn made me better about thinking about my outs and spotting them in other decks I played. Because I had to spend less time thinking about my own deck in a match, I could devote more time to thinking about my opponent's deck and what its threats were, what its game play was , and how best to counter them, this led me to a better understanding of the flow of the game as a whole and a broader understanding of how to play against certain types of decks.

You can get a lot from trying a bunch of different decks but there's only so far that can take you. At some point you'll gain a lot more mastering 1 deck and I think you’ll find you will gain a log more insight into how to play the game going forward doing it. I really hope this advice can be helpful to other players out there who, like me, feel like they've hit a wall with the game and aren't improving anymore.