(For once it's all in English, it'll be translated in French and finalized in French).
After the last article you probably made a list of errors to correct, aspects of the game to work on, see a lot of the things you’re doing wrong. (and have plenty of time to go over them since it’s been a long time already!)
But how to work on them and what you can do is a totally different matter.
For this matter, I got no magical answer, nothing that can help you on every aspects of the game. There’s plenty of ways to get better and you probably knows some of them. But I can help you find what should be most useful for you..
First we have to be aware of the fact that we are all different, yet we are all alike.
When it comes to the way we perceive the world around us we can be put in 3 main categories. According to Temple Grandin in her TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html
So we have visual thinkers, pattern thinkers and verbal thinkers. Even if I think that most of the players are pattern and verbal thinkers, I know some visual thinkers also play Magic.
I’m personally a pattern thinker, when reading my article you can see that I’m far from being verbal thinker (otherwise I would be able to do articles way more enjoyable to read) and by experience I know that I’m absolutely not a visual thinker. I’m in fact completely unable to see images in my head or describe someone I just met (which always causes me a lot of mockery).
Some of you probably figured out what kind of player they were. But some other may still be confused about it.
To answer this, you have to analyse yourself and you have to remember that you are most likely a combinaison of types. None exclude another. But you always have one main type.
If you are not good at math you can already dismiss the pattern type.
If you’re all about logic, if you’re a programmer, you are probably a pattern thinker.
If you have a blog and are a prolific writer, you’re probably a verbal thinker.
If you are good at languages, philosophy and like to write and read, you are certainly a verbal thinker.
Visual is more easy to figure out. You have a good visual memory, you probably like arts, drawing and think by seeing images.
We can go on and on like this.
Let’s then see what is the most useful for each types of minds to work on.
As a pattern thinker, I need to understand everything, calculate and organize thought and plans. An article that really hooked me was from Gavin Verhey: http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/17175_Flow_of_Ideas_The_Most_Important_Word_in_Magic.html It explains that the most important word in Magic is « why » and that you have to relate everything your opponent is doing to his plan in order to understand what’s happening, what he got in hand and what to do. If he does anything, it is for a purpose, so figure it out! It really helped me changing how I plan my turns and how to play them.
It’s like when Remi Fortier told me that before I even draw my card every turn, I had to think of what exactly I wanted to do this turn, all the possibilities that I had, and might have. The pattern thinker usually work like this, we need to ordain what we will do, to have routine. We can also process theory more easily than other types, so reading article is very good for us, and especially those about the basic theories of Magic.
Visual thinker work more by experience, they can more easily remember past games, past situations and get information out of them. They need to play more to be able to use more experience. They can also get a lot from videos. We make a lot here at WatchDaMatch but you can find a lot more in English on the internet.
Verbal thinker use more social skills, more mind tricks and a bit of the other two categories. They need to train their way of getting information out of their opponent, and they need to figure out what else matter for them. They can process theory easily too, but need to learn while trying and testing it right away to be able to take out the most of it.
I wrote that I am mostly a pattern thinker, but since I like writing those articles and I am good at foreign languages (only foreign sadly) I have some traits of verbal thinkers.
After trying to figure out some of my plays, I realised that I play a lot with my opponents. This can seems to be an obvious statement, but take players like Guillaume Wafo-Tapa. They are not so much interacting with their opponent, they are much more often in deep though, analysing the game state and thinking about the next plays.
Despite beeing a pattern thinker this is not true for me. I like better talking and "helping" my badguy to make mistakes. I'm interacting a lot and I am used to do small mindtricks to support my game.
While this is certainly not a bad thing, my type would suggest I work more on my thinking instead of my mindtricks.
Now I do so much wihout even thinking about it anymore that it wont be a problem to combine both aspects.
Visual thinkers tends to think about the game in more "experienced based" ways. They are the reason why some peoples think they need to constently remind other to not think "result oriented". But I think it is in fact good for visual thinkers provided they have enough experiences to back them up. (this could be true for everyone of course)
And of course we've seen that they should do this kind of training anyway.
So more than helping you figuring how to better train, it might help you figuring out what aspects to look at.
Now it's probably time to read your fearless inventory and look at type specifics aspects to train. And probably add new lines.
Adding to that we have people that use their intuitions. Louis Scott Vargas wrote a very interesting article about that : http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/initial-technology-playing-intuitively/
I really recommend this read. It’s really an interesting way to use intuitions to help your game. To sum-up the basic idea is that whenever you have an intuition, try to see if it’s reasonable to follow it. Sometimes, when you have a lot of choices, use your intuition to see which one seems intuitively the best, then try to understand why you are pushed toward this play. Sometimes it’ll just be that your subconscious read your opponent’s hand or plan and it’s telling you the best course of action.
I wrote something on this subject way back when StarCityGame was looking for new writers. http://draftwithseiko.blogspot.com/2011/04/use-your-subconscious.html this is probably not polished enough, but still I think it can be interesting since just knowing that you can do those kind of training is sometimes enough. I’ll explain in French (this article will be in French in It’s final form) since I only wrote it in English. Basically you can train your subconscious (or name it intuition, for us it can be the same), to use information in a way you consciously think of good. You can ask him to pay attention at your opponent and his reactions because it’s not something you usually do.
But we have to beware using to much intuition, when our brain relax and we start relying on intuitions, we stop thinking and start just pushing cards.
So we have three types of thinkers and we have using or not our intuition. This is the streamline of what you require to train yourself.
Find how you work so you can get the most out of your trainings.
