Don't Look Good, Be Good
This article discusses the common player tendency to prioritize appearing skilled over actual performance, using personal anecdotes and examples from Goat Format.
Riddle me this: If you could boost your winrate by 10%, but it would cause some of your peers to think that you were worse at the game, would you do it? Given that conscious decision, I think nearly every competitive player would say, “Hell yeah I would.” And yet, everyday I see many competitive players making the unconscious decision to prioritize looking good to their peers over being good.
A Brief History of ACP
In my breakout era as a competitive player (2010-2011), most of my work was very well-received by the community, but at the same time my tournament results were lacking. I was frequently in discussions of “best players who have yet to top32 a YCS.” By the time that I retired from the YCS circuit in spring 2013, my results were quite strong. In the last three YCS tournaments that I had attended, I had made top32 in two of them, with the other being a near miss (7-1 into 7-3). In the last year of my career, I was one of the most controversial players in the game. People online were insisting that my performance was a fluke, and I was frequently in discussions of “most overrated players in the game.” What changed?
The Curse of Playing to Win
Unfortunately, decent performance is rarely controversial. I was exceptionally good at doing one thing at YCSs in the 2011 era: making day2 with an 7-2 record and then barely missing out on the top cut. This was the sweet spot in terms of peer acceptance; my record was strong enough that it demonstrated that I was clearly a skilled and knowledgeable player, but my performance wasn’t strong enough to elicit backlash from how I got my wins. All of my best YCS performances were built upon a foundation of fairly innovative but also very simple theories.
- Use Asceticism of the Samurai to summon Six Samurai Shien more often than everyone else (Asceticism Samurai).
- Flood the board with a bunch of monsters in the early game and run over everyone (Chaos Dragons).
- Play a combo deck that’s nearly impossible to interact with and just FTK everyone (Gishki FTK aka Gishkill).
- Activate Domain of the True Monarchs and win. Cut hand traps for Upstart Goblins to further streamline this strategy.
I never got any feature matches with any of these decks. In fact, when I was using Gishki FTK, I was told by Jason from the coverage team that Konami had specifically told him not to give me a feature match. Can’t blame them, because none of these decks were particularly fun or interesting to watch. Rather, they were quite boring. I just executed my gameplan, and as long as I didn’t make a huge blunder, I would win. But I did win quite a bit. Which brings us back to the big question, given the choice, which would you prioritize or ? Are you totally sure?
