I can only assume, based on the fact that I wore sunglasses the whole walk home in somewhat-heavy rain at 11pm at night, that I am on some inevitable trajectory towards becoming a Wong Kar-wai character
This past weekend at Pro Tour Thunder Junction I went 9-7 in the main event, one win short of qualification. I'd already internally accepted before this PT that if I didn't requalify then that was okay and it just means my life would go in a different direction instead (more time for streaming, coaching etc, being able to focus on other interests, less having to test for tournaments and run around the world), and whilst not requalifying in the Pro Tour did hurt I feel like I handled it okay. The next day I played the Pro Tour Qualifier, lost my first round, and then won six rounds in a row - playing largely incredibly throughout this - to make it to my win-and-qualify round. I won game 1 in a favourable match-up and then proceeded to lose both sideboarded games, and I feel pretty confident I could have won either of those games with tighter play. I can make up whatever excuses I want about playing poorly - being exhausted from the whole weekend, running on very little sleep due to jetlag etc, being stressed about potentially missing my flight (which ultimately I did miss) - but the reality is I made a handful of bad plays.
So I went 9-7 (one match win short), into losing the finals of the PTQ (one game win short), into missing my flight and being out $600 as a result, for basically the maximum pain PT weekend as far as results are concerned.
I think I also found it hard from the perspective of how much I enjoyed the company of my teammates leading up to this weekend. I think this iteration of Sanctum was really great and is the most I have enjoyed being on the team, and the first time I have ever enjoyed being in a testing house (a concept I had very much sworn off for several years now). I still find the intensive testing grind and the travel that follows to all be very draining and unappealing to me, and I'm not going to miss that aspect, but knowing I'm not going to be around a lot of these people I enjoy and/or care about for potentially quite a while is sad.
Before I get into my broader point though, I want to talk about Mythic Championship Cleveland (the Mono-Blue PT I won). There was a period of a few months after that tournament where I replayed every error I knew I made in the finals over in my head. Sure I won the tournament, but I could have played better, I still made wrong decisions at various points in those games (albeit ones so subtle that no one has ever correctly called me out on any of them). It was hard to let go of this feeling of dissatisfaction that despite literally winning a Pro Tour I still didn't feel nearly good enough, could still see all the ways I had to learn and improve for next time.
Learning was for a long time a big part of my motivation with engaging in competitive Magic. When I started going to PTQs I didn't really care at all about qualifying for the Pro Tour, I just knew I was starting to get stronger than some of the people at my LGS and that if I wanted to keep learning and improving I would have to find stronger opposition. Likewise when I won my second ever RPTQ getting on the Pro Tour was somewhat exciting but like, the whole reason I was even at that RPTQ was it felt like the best way for me to find tougher opposition in a way that would be accessible to me, and tougher opposition is how you improve your understanding of the game. And again my first ever Pro Tour - where I somehow came 11th - I entered not caring if I didn't do well, and only really caring about winning matches because it would mean more rounds of playing against the best in the world and so more rounds in which to improve. My ultimate aim was never to win a Pro Tour, and if I had some aim like that I would have been satisfied long ago, but instead to just become the very best I can be, to play the best I can, and to recognise I can always always become better (we all can) and to try my hardest to follow through on that. That's why those mistakes against Ikawa in 2019 lived in my head rent-free for months after.
I think more than anything that's what stings about how I lost the PTQ yesterday. If I'd just queued into an awful match-up, or drawn badly or whatever, I think I would have moved on quickly, but I could list off several mistakes that I made in that match - some of which you might not even see as mistakes but that seem clear as day to me - and it hurts knowing that I am capable of playing so much better than that. I just expect better from myself, and it's hardā¦
I think 2020 was the peak of my Magic skill. Obviously everything surrounding the pandemic outbreak sucked, but despite that and despite being very depressed because of that it was still that case that my winrate in the online SCG tournaments was kind of obscene, and that in the online PT-equivalent events I came second place in one and Top 8'd another. I became very big on this theory at the time that competitive Magic actually has way more agency in it than anyone ever gives it credit for and that most people just weren't willing to do the hard work of letting go of their ego so that they can truly engage with it on this level. Because like, acknowledging how many mistakes you make and how many different ways you could have approached things in brutally hard, it means taking responsibility for your losses and it also means your wins often being tainted by the knowledge that you could have approached things better in who knows how many ways. It means acknowledging that however good you are right now is nothing compared to your potential, and then forces you to ask yourself how much you want to live up to that potential, how much effort you're willing to put into that. It is much easier to blame your losses on bad luck, to say you drew a couple too many lands and so never stood a chance, than to seriously interrogate your choices and their consequences and accept culpability for small errors. It is easier to blame the game than yourself.
For a while in more recent tournaments I feel like I did blame the game instead of myself, trying to put everything down to bad luck (and sure I did get unlucky in some spots at some points, but as long as I could have won a single game by playing better then that excuse doesn't really hold). Yesterday in the PTQ was the most tuned-in I've felt with Magic in a long time, I was in flow state for a good chunk of it, and then the final round hit and I crumbled. And again, I'm trying to be kind to myself, I recognise I was exhausted and running on fumes by that point, but I also recognise I started caring too much about winning, about what people were thinking about me etc etc, when the reality is the only thing you're meant to care about is active reflection, learning, and attempting as best you can to repeatedly make the best decision in the moment. Whether you win or lose doesn't matter, but whether you are making the right decisions really does, and I lost sight of that.
I guess I say all of this partly hoping that maybe this helps someone out there reckon with their relationship to competitive Magic and helps move them to a space where they become less success-orientated and more improvement-orientated (which is both much healthier and much more likely to lead you to doing well), but also I say this because I guess I'm trying to figure out my own relationship with competitive Magic. Because on some level I felt like before yesterday that I'd finally started to move on, I hate all the flying and travel and long days of testing and preparation, but after yesterday I can't help but finally see my potential again, to see how much better I can become at this game than how I am now, and I recognise that the only way to meet that potential is to keep fighting to be in environments where I get to play against the best in the world.