Use your subconscious

This is something I wrote some times ago for the StarCityGame searching for new talent.


I guess I think it's a little too bad to let it go to waste. I'm skipping a little of the introduction and let go to the subject of using and training your subconscious.

While I've only been playing seriously for about one year now, I've put a lot of effort into understanding magic and people playing it.

Grinding PTQ since the last Extend season was really fun, and top8ing some of them was even more pleasant!

While striving to be the best, I’ve learned a lot and I wanted to share some with everyone one. I’t will be also a very good way to get a lot of feedback for those ideas. Well, today’s mostly about scientific facts.

So, I wanted to write a little something about being good at magic and while I certainly don’t have the level to teach most of you about card advantage or tempo, I have knowledge in other domains that helps me growing in Magic. That’s a point you might want to remember, you can learn a LOT about magic by studying completely different worlds.

Be it close activities like poker or chess, or strange things like for this article dreams study.

Did any of you witnessed a new player seeming very good and beating many other more experienced players? The one which has, like we french people say : "the beginner's luck". Often this guys don't know much about magic, he just play the way he feels and make nearly no conscious choice. You can ask him about his play he won't have real explanations. We all been to this point where we weren't thinking much just feeling the flow of the game.

This is because he’s unconsciously good at some aspects of Magic. We all have aspects of the game where we actually do the right choices without thinking. It can be called talent by some players too.
The point of my article is to actually use those parts by being able to develop them, create new and exploit them consciously.

But before that, we first have to develop our conscious skills.

This means thinking about your game and making the best choices. This is already a long road, but you don’t need to already be the best to continue to the next level.
By being able to play more consciously the first benefit will be being able to reflect more easily, more effectively and more often than you are able to right now. But of course you’ll use more time thinking, since you’ll try to rely on your unconscious no more. Again this is a good thing to be better in Magic, even if you don’t want to go all the way with unconscious and all, this won’t hurt anyone!

So how will I be able to do all of this? Well the first part will be simple yet long. You will have to learn and know all your magic theories. In Magic it’s interesting and fun! Tempo, game state, type of strategies, templating etc... you need to learn more about them, you can’t build something on half assed knowledge right?

There’s many ways to do this, from the most basic knowledge to more advanced, you can find everything on StarCity Games. There’s old Dojo articles, many articles about people trying to defines and explain each aspects of Magic. You won’t fall short if you dig a little, but you’ll need diging if no one points you to those.

You might also be friend with a lot of better/pro players and they’ll be able to teach you much about theories.

It's just about learning... at first! But rapidly it will be about applying. Some will try to apply it on the go and it's a good thing, just don’t start before you got the basics. You will start asking yourself more questions during each game, and if you don't, start forcing yourself to do so. Focus on asking questions, not solving game state. Find what seems to be the best questions for you, the one which will trigger the best answers. It’s not an easy task since it’s not as funny as just playing. A method I developed is the following :

Make a group training session of three people. You need 2 players and 1 trainer. At some point in the game, the trainer stops the game and give papers and pen to both players. He ask them to put down on paper all questions they’re asking themselves at this moment.
For example stops the game at “going to attack step” there’s so much you can ask at those moment, then after the players wrote down the questions (and the answer when they can) ask them to follow to the next step of combat then start again with the questions.
After the combat phase ends, show everyone every materials and then start answering questions. Explain why questions were good or not and look to see if written answers were right, and if the actions were taken accordingly to the answers the players made.
So it’s a really long exercises but should really bring the game of all three players to a whole new level.
Every step of the game should be questioned this way.

Don't fear to ask stupid questions, especially around people. Our brain makes connections between ideas to put everything in order. Asking seemingly stupid questions helps you triggering your brain on some parts of the game. Around people it might help you get better answers and find the cause of possible misunderstanding. It might also help you understanding how the other put their thought in order. And if they are better players this will also help you a lot.

But you might not become better right away. Our unconscious has access to way more information than we have. This forms into feelings like : "I think he has no mass removal" or maybe "he seems hungry or nervous". This is our unconscious processing data and saying us what he fount. But it's not really you who thought about this, you don't control the data used and the thinking behind the conclusion. That way you can't put as much trust on those intuitions, especially when you're a man. This is where trying to consciously think about some things helps. You control everything so you know why you are choosing a line of play.

Sometimes you make a decision after a lot of thinking while you had another feeling at first. Sometimes it was the right call, but sometimes it was in fact a mistake. Depending on the subject and if your unconscious is good at the thing to start with, it might take time to beat your unconscious. I am for example working on understanding my role better in a game. I was unconsciously good at it, but I'm pretty bad consciously. That had me lost some important games lately. But I learned from it!

Trying to beatdown with a more control sealed was bad! I knew it, I just couldn't see that I was the control, even though I felt it.

After a while start watching other people playing, and ask questions. When you're not in the game, you sometimes see things differently. You think more on a higher level since there's nothing at stake, not even your pride.

Then ask questions, lot of them if you can. Be precise when replacing the question in the game context so that you will both be speaking about the same thing.

So now you think more about more aspects, you ask yourself the good questions, you do less mistakes. It's about time to let your unconscious work again.

Since he's faster and have access to more information, he'll be of great help. But this seems to be contrary to what we were trying to achieve right?

Well it depends. Was your goal being stronger? Then it's not.
You're brain is very clever! When you teach him how to do something and prove him it's important for you, he just do it. So while you were over thinking and choosing the right parameters to work with, you in fact also trained your brain to respond to your needs. Now he can more effectively choose the parameters to process while trying to figure out your opponent's hand for example. That's because you worked for it, you explained him and you showed him why.

I learnt it while studying ways to remember dreams. You have to tell yourself you’ll remember the dream, and after the best way is to keep a diary of your dreams to tell your unconscious it’s important to remember them because you use them afterward.

So it's time to let him work again and to play at a more reasonable pace once again. Of course don't forget to stop and think when you need to, and even more often to keep remembering your brain that it's important.

Hope that helped.