Being a scrub (somewhat localish rant report)

Thursdays nights are when the tournament generally is.  I'm not writing a report tonight, just some things.

First of all, I probably played the worst that I've ever played tonight.  Went 1-2, which is a lot worse than what I normally do.  Basically, I made flashy plays when I had game on board and it cost me a match that I should have won all 3 games of.  I'm not saying my opponent got lucky, or that if I had done moves way differently that I would have won, but these are little things.  It's much sadder actually, as what had happened was I made basic misplays that would have made players who had even the most basic knowledge cringe.  Things like not activating Dragon's Ravine before playing Heavy Storm, and making Trident Dragon (off of a field with 2 Stardusts, Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon, Mysteltainn, and a Phalanx) instead of just going for Scrap Dragon and guaranteeing a win.

Needless to say, I did these things, realized how bad they were seconds after, and basically got kind of frustrated (it doesn't involve yelling or things like that, it's just mentally frustrating, I try not to let it show).  Part of the reason was being in autopilot mode, part of it was trying to be flashy. These are all things that bad players do.  These are things I usually don't actively do, and it's annoying that I know that but it happened any way.

Guess I just consider it a bad night and move on, everyone has them from time to time.

After the tournament, we all got some food.  Red Robin is a great burger place, and it's somewhere we haven't been to in a while.  Also, it was Jake's birthday, so we got the added bonus of watching the employees sing at him.

The we went to the 24-hour coffee shop downtown, I actually just got home 15 minutes ago.  Any way, there we met up with someone else we know.  Played a bunch of games.  Jake calls dragunity decent.  Which, something you should know, Jake plays this game competitively.  Although he hasn't topped anything other than bunches of regionals (not recently, as he is just getting back into the game), he is really good.  He's played MtG competitively as well, and has had moderate success at that game such as getting top 4 at a few Starcity Games 5K tournaments, top eighting a Pro-Tour Qualifier (not high enough to qualify sadly).

Since Jake takes things seriously and from a competitive standpoint, he doesn't get behind decks that don't have results, either by his own testing or topping other larger events.  So playing a couple of rounds and him calling the deck decent means that there is something at least good-enough about it to hang with the rest of the format. I generally judge my own competitive choices (for those times were I do want to play competitively) off of what Jake's results and ideas are.  I know I'm making a big deal off of what essentially is nothing, but generally his response to if I'm playing a less popular deck is "seems really bad".

I completed Gem-Knights and Madolches tonight.  So yeah, two new decks for me to play around with.  Something I am excited for.

~E.P.B.