Every competitive player keeps a scouting report on whoever sits down across from them. I think most of us should tear it up.

Read it one way and you wave things through: an innocent pass, a card that looks harmless, and you stop asking what it actually does. Read it the other way and you shrink: a famous name, a bad matchup, and you play like the result’s already been posted.

It’s the same mistake pointed in opposite directions, and it has the same fix: play the board, not the reputation. This week, both of our writers learned that at the table.

Let’s get into it.

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“I had already lost the match before it had even started.” A self-described 9-4 merchant on the round he gave away, and what The Inner Game of Tennis taught him about the rest.

By Dylan Hand

At the time of writing, the first full year of Regional Qualifiers for Riftbound has concluded. With the exception of a couple of Showdowns to kick off Radiance, the only large-scale events left are Regional Championships. In the west, RC Stuttgart comes in early November, followed by the North American RC at Convergence Fest Vegas in December. Outside of some hiccups here and there, Riftbound has had one of the most historic competitive card game debuts in the history of the genre, and it appears to have a bright future ahead.

I consider my time investment and subsequent performance in Riftbound thus far to be above average. Counting RQ Houston, I attended a total of seven Regional Qualifiers during Riftbound’s first competitive year. Of those, I competed in the main event of each except for RQ Vegas, where I was unable to secure a competitor badge. Of the six RQs entered, I missed Day 2 twice, and always finished with a record of at least 9-4 whenever they let me come back on Sunday. Beyond that, I attended the now-infamous Showdown in Pittsburgh, as well as the CCS Showdown in Houston last month, with 13th place and 24th place finishes, respectively. This year for me was chock-full of exceptional performances, but ones where I did no better than get “almost there”. 

As a result, I will not be playing in the first ever Regional Championships.

All things considered, I am pleased with what my skill floor looks like. I felt like I learned this game’s more challenging concepts quickly, made smart deck choices, and put in the time to study and practice to give me the results I earned. There’s certainly always more I could have done somewhere, whether it’s putting in more reps for a specific matchup, or simply properly fueling my body during an event. Alas, I am a salaryman with obligations outside of this wonderful game, and to echo the great Rocklho, there are times where I feel as though I indeed struggle to compete with the jobless. That being said, my biggest block to getting over that “almost there” hump has hardly anything to do with everything I just described. 

My biggest enemy is, quite frankly, myself. To be more specific, it’s that wrinkly organ that sits between my ears. When the pressure’s off, it behaves. It locks in, processes the right lines, and wins me lots and lots of games of Riftbound. However, the second it catches a whiff of a tournament going well, it likes to take a detour. It starts thinking about results instead of the games themselves, and that’s where the wheels inevitably fall off. It also loves to bully me for my misplays that cost me crucial match wins. My experience is not a unique one; in fact, it’s incredibly common! I have been playing TCGs for almost two decades. The games may be different, but everything pertaining to high level play and what it takes to perform remains the same. Without proper discipline and emotional control, it is remarkably easy to introduce and inevitably crumble to self-induced pressure.

For me, the most painful occurrence of this came in June, at RQ Vancouver. The first day of competition went exceptionally well: 

The second post explains itself, but doing so well on the first day, only to experience utter collapse and squander a golden opportunity to put up my first high placing performance, deeply hurt. It forced me to take a long, hard look at how I let my mental state dictate my performance in high pressure situations. 

Since Vancouver, I’ve spent a significantly larger portion of my “prep” time for events working on my mental game. I had a few people suggest to me a sports psych book called “The Inner Game of Tennis”. Frequently sold as “baby’s first mental performance book”, it breaks down head-to-head bouts into the outer and inner game, how they coexist and, at times, how they are at odds with one another. The book describes these things through the lens of, spoiler alert: tennis, but the concepts apply to any competitive endeavor. Today, I’m going to provide a high-level summary of the book through the lens of Riftbound and share what I’ve learned.

The outer game is what you see. The game itself: played against some external entity. The strategy, the sequencing, the outplays and the mistakes that usually result in a victor. The inner game is played within your mind. The nerves you feel from a high pressure match at the top tables. The self doubt you feel as you sit across a player with more trophies than battlefields in your deckbox….

…the imposter syndrome you get after you start a high level tournament 8-0.

My round 9 opponent at RQ Vancouver was Alanzq. I was on LeBlanc into his Diana, an already challenging matchup. None of that mattered, however, because I had already lost the match before it had even started. I remember having roughly this thought:

“It’s alright if I lose this one. Best player in the world and my worst matchup. I’ve got one to give.”

The insidious part about this line of thinking is that it isn’t inherently wrong. I was 8-0. Going to 8-1 and winning out was a perfectly reasonable outcome. I would still even be live to make top 8 in this scenario! However, that’s not what I had come here to do. I had beaten notably stronger opponents than me in the same tournament not 24 hours earlier. Why is my brain trying to justify tapping out and giving this guy the match? 

The Inner Game splits who you are in the heat of battle into two selves, intuitively dubbed Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is your conscious mind. They’re the one running the numbers, and the playcaller calling the shots. The one who analyzed the popular matchups, wrote the sideboard guide, and tirelessly studied the core concepts of Riftbound. Self 2 is your subconscious mind. They’re the one making the mulligan decisions, executing role assessment in every game, and sideboarding properly in between, all via instruction from Self 1. 

When things are going swimmingly and the pressure’s off, the two work like two peas in a pod, or like a world class offensive coordinator working alongside an elite quarterback. When things don’t, however, Self 1 quickly turns on Self 2, and this shakes Self 2’s confidence immensely. Let me try to illustrate with an example:

Self 1 tells Self 2 to mulligan Falling Star Game 1 against a Sivir opponent in the blind, because it’s not a good card against a likely Sivir Aurora deck. Self 1 is also the one who then subsequently berates Self 2 because the Sivir opponent was in fact an aggro build deck, and the game was lost because of the decision to mulligan the Falling Star. Self 1 has sowed doubt and confusion into Self 2’s subconscious decision to mulligan the Falling Star based on the analysis and direction that was, ironically, provided by Self 1. It is, 99.9% of the time, correct to mulligan a Falling Star against a random Sivir opponent with no other information available. The likelihood of them being an Aurora deck is statistically very high. Now, when this scenario presents itself again, Self 2 is going to look back to Self 1 like a confused puppy, scared to do it again and draw Self 1’s ire despite subconsciously knowing it should anyway. 

When I sat across from Alan, my Self 1 immediately told my Self 2 that, due to his prestigious accomplishments and the Diana matchup being poor, my win rate was not the ~40% it realistically was, but 0%. I had handed my opponent a 40% increased probability of winning a match already tilted in his favor without even so much as taking a card out of my deckbox. The match, in actuality, ended up being a close three game set. It is even distinctly possible that the Baited Hook selection I stressed over in Game 3 had a better option that would’ve won me the game, but since I had spent the entire match not believing I had a realistic chance to win, I made an error and subsequently lost. From there, Self 1 had already oh-so-slightly killed Self 2's confidence for that day, and I proceeded to lose the next 3 rounds as well, cementing a failure to even qualify for the RC after an 8-0 start.

Since that event, I have made solid progress in my mental game, but still have a lot of work to do. Truth is, mastering your Inner Game is at times much harder than mastering your Outer one. You can shortcut a lot of Outer Game work by buying a sideboard guide, or getting the rundown on a matchup you’re a little underpracticed for by talking to someone more knowledgeable. But only you know you enough to improve your Inner Game and survive the intense pressure of high level competition. Taming your Self 1 is crucial to becoming an elite player.

With that being said, let me reward you for listening to a sob story turned psychology class with a few important lessons I try to internalize when it comes to my Inner Game:

I hope this article resonates with at least some of you. If it has, feel free to reach out to me on social media and share your stories, as this topic is very near and dear to me. It can be tough having the drive, technical talent and time to perform at a high level, only to let your own psyche get in the way of accomplishing your goals. That being said, we all possess the ability to overcome. Thanks for reading.

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“Everything it’s capable of is face up, at all times.” How a four-mana cat breaks parity in cEDH’s longest games.

By Jase Sanders

It’s been a couple months since you first took a dive into the world of cEDH, and you’ve gone from an established casual player at your local game store to a confident multi time cEDH player instead. You sit down round one, unsuspecting of the chaos that’s about to unfold. You’ve done quite well for yourself this time, Rhystic Study AND Mystic Remora as well as enough mana to keep up with the rest of the table. Victory is in your grasp, and a smile creeps across your face. That’s when it happens, your opponent plays an unsuspecting card. Displacer Kitten hits the stack and you flip it around to read, your eyebrow creeps upward and you question that player’s intentions. “I’m passing after this, going to discard.” they say with enough innocence to spark joy. After all, you are untapping with an absurd amount of cards. You snap pass with glee, what’s this stupid cat gonna do anyway. 

“Cast Grand Abolisher?” you speak with a cheeky smile. Priority gets around the table to the player before you, and as suspected they have an answer. “Force of will, displacer kitten trigger target cloud of faeries.” That’s okay, you’ve prepared for this. A sculpted hand of counterspells sits ready to fire at will and surely for what your hand lacks your draw engines will account for. You loudly declare that you have a rhystic study AND a mystic remora trigger. “Can I draw my cards?” you ask smugly. “Does that mean my Displacer kitten trigger resolves?” the player before you snaps back quickly. You pause, and think. For a moment everything clicks into place. You have lost, and before you even know it you’re back to scrolling your phone wondering where it went wrong. Never before now have you wished Feline Leukemia on another being. How could you have forgotten about active non active player? 

This is the experience all too familiar for a select portion of cEDH players who are now, “In the know.” Displacer Kitten as a card looks rather unsuspecting, just like its appearance as a baby cat. Everything it’s capable of is face up, at all times. You have non-land permanents on your board, and Displacer Kitten can flicker said permanents in and out of play. At face value, this allows you to retrigger enter the battlefield abilities of permanents on your board. In extension, this allows you to effectively untap your mana rocks by having them re-enter play untapped. So there you go, cast spells, make mana, amass value, but it's not quite that simple. 

If you’re at all familiar with the current cEDH metagame, a specific style of deck will have one way or another come into your play group unconsented. Referred to as “slop” by a majority of the playerbase, this type of deck tries to create a very large resource intensive game with the goal of eventually outmaneuvering its opponents in the late, late game. The reason this style of deck is so successful is because as long as two or more players at the table are dedicated to extending the game, it is almost impossible for the other players at the table to make that otherwise. “Slop” decks prey on midrange players because they too have a common interest in extending the game, but aren’t entirely dedicated to playing into the Late-Late game. The slop player benefits from the midrange player keeping the game from ending, and then dominates the endgame with no problems. 

This is all well and great, or very not great as some may agree, but what happens in the mirror? What happens when multiple decks are extending the game to its limits and looking to duke it out for potentially hours? Well for one, draws are what happens, but usually in order for a game with three or more late game dedicated players to end someone has to “Break parity.” Otherwise the stalemate will continue to drag games on, and resources at the table will be kept in check by a flowing supply of slop’s favorite resource, counterspells. 

There are a few ways to break parity in these late games, and I could realistically go on and on and on about each and every one. To summarize though, everyone is looking for an edge in these large games that will turn the resource balance on its head in their favor. Usually it isn't very apparent how someone is going to break parity until it all blows up in your face, and oftentimes it feels like a sneaky magic trick was played on the rest of the table. Displacer Kitten enables these types of plays, most often through its most underrated ability; Resetting clones. 

Enchantment clones and creature clones have been a huge part of the meta for a while. They allow decks to play an exorbitant amount of extra copies of broken cards like Rhystic study, Smothering Tithe, and Necropotence so long as an opponent has one in play. They are limited by the fact that they are what they are when you play then, and if a better target hits the field you are out of luck. Displacer Kitten eliminates this weakness, allowing you to flicker and reset your enchantment and creature clones to the most relevant target at the most relevant moment. The only requirement being your triggered ability resolves, which is much harder to interact with than an actual spell on the stack, 

Picking your moment is the most important part of winning the large game, and Displacer Kitten allows you to position yourself perfectly before you “send your win.” Another angle to which Displacer kitten breaks parity is that, in the stack battle you really want to pick carefully what spells you interact with. Removal spells being pointed at your important permanents are annoying and a common way to draw out counterspells from a given player. So long as you have instants in hand, Displacer Kitten can flicker your targeted permanents and fissle any incoming removal. Not having to care about a whole category of card in a stack war saves you counterspells, and you’re quite encouraged to nickel and dime those. This in my eyes makes the card an extremely underrated option, and it will win most games you can get it to resolve. So long as you can get it to resolve.

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