Every Decision Matters: Why You Should Complain Less and Optimize More

Complaining about your opponent's slowness/malice when they play slow won't add anything, their pace isn't within your control. Badmouthing the time format adopted in competitions isn't effective either. Knowing when to scoop, correctly measuring your chances of winning (both in a vacuum and in a specific game scenario), not giving up precious seconds performing unnecessary actions in favorable matchups, and identifying and adapting to your opponent's pace, whether out of inexperience or intent, are factors that, when added together, considerably increase your win rate at tournaments and are things that can be executed.

Deckbuilding: be reasonable with your own choices

Of the infinite list of complaints the TCG player has, the ones tied to ignorance about the basic characteristics of the deck or list they chose are some of the ones that bother me the most. Many of them could easily be avoided if the person making them simply thought for a moment about the fundamentals and quirks of the strategy they picked.

It should be obvious that, when choosing excessively aggressive strategies like the ones based on Big Basics (Miraidon ex, Raging Bolt ex, Roaring Moon ex and the like), your board becomes extremely vulnerable and fragile. Trading early-game power for the inability to turn games around and being the target of every kind of disrupt out there is an intrinsic characteristic of this type of deck, it comes with the package. Taking 4 prizes with Wellspring Mask Ogerpon ex in the first few turns has its price, you'll be vulnerable to hand disruption for having been so aggressive and spent all your resources on a single plan. Using 4 Meowth ex and 4 Mega Kangaskhan ex as your only engine to access the deck will leave you hostage to an Unfair Stamp + Team Rocket's Watchtower, just as running 30 items in your deck leaves you vulnerable to cards like Budew and Garbodor. The same also applies to decks that choose to fall behind and attempt the comeback. It's very naive to think that Roxanne, Judge or Reset Stamp will work out every time and you'll manage to turn every game around.

Knowing what you're getting into when choosing your own strategy is basic, a prerequisite for good performance. Considering the weaknesses of your strategies and being able to handle the dynamic of recognizing who's the aggressor and who's defending in the matchup, understanding who has to chase the win and who just wants to consolidate what they've done so far, is fundamental to understanding game states and win/loss conditions. There's no point complaining that you lost once again to the play you chose to neglect when building the deck, that was your choice. There's also no point complaining that the opponent drew the perfect 2-card combination out of the 3 they had access to, winning them the game; you're the one who chose to give them the time to burn all their unnecessary resources and make that play plausible. Sometimes we'll just get unlucky, that's part of the game. Knowing how to weigh your chances and understanding that, if you're actually doing everything correctly, in the long run you'll win far more than you lose is fundamental to having some mental relief when things aren't going our way.

Knowing how to work around the design flaws your deck has by nature is another huge challenge to overcome. Cards like Cornerstone Mask Ogerpon ex, Snorlax, Crustle and Iron Thorns ex can be extremely limiting for certain strategies, since the decks we choose often aren't properly prepared or aren't able to deal with cards like these, even if we wanted to. Still, it's important to always play to your outs, no matter how small they are. Recognizing patterns and unorthodox lines of play are fundamental attitudes when dealing with unfavorable/auto-loss matchups. In this kind of scenario, the loss is already certain. Why not try the impossible? Sometimes you'll be rewarded.

On top of that, knowing how to adapt to the meta's moment and being flexible about deck and tech choices is another very important fundamental. Even the most neutral or dominant decks you can think of have weaknesses in their composition, big or small, that can be exploited with the right choice. This is especially relevant for the local scene, where knowing the players and the deck-choice tendencies at each store is fundamental. If you're one of those who thinks you always get unlucky and only draw bad matchups, you probably fall into one of the following justifications:

1. Your deck isn't a good choice for that moment;

2. Your deck isn't as good as you think it is;

3. You aren't as good with the deck as you think you are and/or aren't approaching the matchup correctly.

This last point is particularly easy to identify and fix. Following what the pros think and do, absorbing concepts and plays made by them on the official streams, can be the missing factor to understanding a matchup. Tools like Play Limitless, Labs Limitless and Trainer Hill can be useful for getting a general overview of how a specific deck is behaving in the meta right now. However, you always need to be very careful when analyzing these numbers, since they may not actually indicate how the matchup really is when pushed to the limit by both sides and, many times, they only serve as indicators of how the deck behaves on average.

Playstyle doesn't exist

The concept of playstyle is, in my view, misapplied in the context of the Pokémon TCG and matters little in practice. Unlike sports or other games, I think in part due to the lack of interaction during the opponents' turns, correct Pokémon isn't based on concepts like proactivity and reactivity. Mathematically, there will always be a correct play, the one that will lead you to victory more often than the others, and that's the one we should be after.

Tying yourself to constraints and making a certain play because you're "an aggressive, fearless player" or things like that adds nothing. There are many situations where keeping a low-cost attacker like those of Cleffa and Frillish or simply passing is the correct decision. There's a moment to be aggressive, there's a moment to be passive, and they have nothing to do with your individual character or playstyle. The correct play will always be a single one and the search for it should be relentless.

Pulling the trigger and starting the prize race, using one supporter over another, going for a board disrupt instead of a hand disrupt. All of this could be tied to each player's style, to the way they chose to approach a given game situation or matchup, but it's more productive to just ask whether it was the correct play or not, whether it was the move that would bring you the highest win percentage in that scenario of cards.

The most iconic case of decision-making in the game's history certainly happened in the 2014 World Championship final, played between Igor Costa and Andrew Estrada. Anyone who's never watched that game should do so as soon as possible, it's one of the few genuinely well-documented World Championship finals.

The most interesting moment happens right at the start of game 1, where Estrada opens with Jirachi-EX, his worst starter. On top of that, he's bricked, with no possible play to make. The mirror of Virizion-EX and Genesect-EX was heavily based on the initial energy attach, with whoever attacked first with Virizion being far ahead. Igor effectively starts the game after a dead pass from Estrada, but misses the turn's energy. And it's on this third turn of the game that Estrada pulls the trigger and decides to give himself Colress for 1 card, having cleared only 2 dead cards from the deck, a play of pure desperation. The chance of drawing any useful card was extremely low, and that's exactly what didn't happen. Igor proceeds with his turn normally, loading 2 energies onto Genesect with his Colress Machine, threatening to end the game next turn with a Megalo Cannon instead of keeping the routine plan of setting up energies with Virizion's Emerald Slash. Andrew draws a Genesect-EX and passes once more, now effectively 3 turns behind.

And it's then that the most controversial play in the game's history happens. Igor decides to use an N, resetting both players' hands because he had neither another supporter in hand nor an energy card to attack with Genesect. This decision allowed him to make the knockout but also gave Estrada the chance to play the game and develop his board. The game went on and, as in many formats where good hand-disruption cards are present, Andrew managed to pull off the comeback after combining an N + G Booster.

This is an extremely debatable and controversial play. Some are on the side that the N was correct and that the chances of losing a game with such a large advantage were marginal, others claim Igor should have waited at least 1 or 2 more turns before pulling the trigger and giving his opponent a lifeline. I personally don't know what the right play was in that scenario, but I think I would have waited a bit. Even if Estrada got lucky and drew a supporter, being able to play the game, he'd still be behind on energy attaches and Igor would have the N follow-up.

Analyzing it with the game's result in mind isn't quite fair to the decision that was made, but Igor certainly opted for the more offensive route because he thought he already had enough of an advantage to close out the game, not based on a thoughtless decision grounded in an aggressiveness stereotype.

Final Thoughts

The draft of this piece came about in a moment of boredom during a Regional and Urban Economics class back at the end of April and I dragged my feet a lot before finishing it. In the meantime, several tournaments happened, Dragapult ex still dominates the game and the aforementioned Azul had a reaction-cut to a viral regional that basically sums up everything I wanted to say throughout the article.

I hope I didn't come across as too condescending or pretentious throughout the text, that wasn't the intent. Everything I wrote is based on the discomfort I feel watching people tie their mistakes and losses to irrelevant things. Like everyone else, I also get frustrated when I brick in a game, when I run into an auto-loss, but above all it bothers me when I make a misplay, when I don't see a play that would win me the game 2 turns later, when I discard an important resource without noticing or when I simply wasn't good enough to convert a game. The random factor is part of the game, it's just not nearly as relevant as some people believe it is.

Training, dedication and effort will always be rewarded in the long run, and some of the things I wrote here I still have to remind myself of every now and then to make sure it's always possible to make a more optimized decision, choose a deck more appropriately, learn a little more about a matchup or an out-of-the-box game scenario or whatever it may be. The blame for a loss or bad result in the moments that actually matter will almost always be yours, and it's refusing to settle for false pretexts that makes us improve as players.

It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've played your whole life.