Play to Learn: Card Games
Hi, welcome to the “Play to Learn” blog series! This is a series where I go through games that I have played and explore life lessons that can be taken from them.
Introduction
When I was in pre-school age, my parents bought me a set of Pokémon cards. They like to remind me that I wasn't into it. In my defence, I couldn't understand the rules because I was 4. However, I do remember that in elementary school, I just made up my own rules to play by myself, like playing Solitaire, it was kind of fun!
The first card game that I played with its actual rules was “Yu-Gi-Oh!”. I had some physical cards and played at school. But it wasn't until I got the video game version that I got really into it. The game was mainly single player, with a LAN multiplayer mode. I played until I unlocked all the cards and then created many decks to play against the CPU. At some point, I figured out how to do a LAN connection over the internet with Hamachi, which I used to play with my friends. My journey of digital card games had started.
When I was in university, Blizzard Entertainment released their new card game, Hearthstone. I was really hyped for it. I remember when I started, I could not even beat the Priest class CPU, haha. I played on and off for many years. Hearthstone has a ranking system with Legend being the highest tier, which apparently is the top 0.3-0.5% of players. I never hit that tier, the closest I got was Rank 1 with 5 stars, which is just one win away from hitting Legend! I lost the deciding game and ranked down. I stopped playing Hearthstone some years ago
The latest card game that I went into seriously was Legends of Runeterra (LoR), made by the creators of League of Legends, Riot Games. When they introduced ranked mode, I decided to try to go for the top rank group, the Master rank. I used an integrated statistic tool from Mobalytics to help analyse my games. It tracked how I'm performing with a certain deck, against certain match ups, winrate on going first vs second, and so on. Eventually, I reached Masters!
For me, it wasn't a small feat to reach Master in LoR, and there were a few lessons along the way. When I ponder about it on deeper level, I think the lessons from playing card games can be applied to life in general. In this post, I want to explore those lessons that I learned from playing. Let's Play to Learn!
Being the underdog was fun, until I kept losing
In competitive video games, there is a concept called the meta. For card games in particular, the meta would represent the decks (or particular cards) that are deemed to be strong and popular. The popularity here refers to how many people play the deck in ranked matches.
Most of the time, the best players dictate the meta. These players can be the top 100 players, pro players, or popular streamers. These players would create decks and post it online, ready for everyone to copy. Often times, these players would even create a written or video guide on how to optimally play the decks. And so, for many people that want to climb through the ranks, it becomes an obvious choice to use those decks and follow guides.
My favourite way of playing a card game is to play the so-called "off meta" decks, which refers to decks that are not so popular in the ranked ladder, typically have a niche, and have a unique feel to it. The reason I like playing off meta decks is the joy of coming up with something on my own. Instead of copying what other people are doing, I like to come up with a unique deck with my own flair.
However, I discovered that my deck building skill was not good enough. I couldn't match the top players, or even people that copied top players' methods. The top players spent many more hours in the game than me, and even many more hours in total playing other card games. Not to mention I lacked some general card game skills as well, so I couldn't play my already non-optimal decks to their full potential.
So, after I kept losing with my own decks, what did I do? I stopped making my own decks. At least none from scratch.
To win more, I needed to be more “meta”
I started looking at guides of meta decks. Figuring out what is popular in my rank, what are the key cards to look out for, how to play the decks, and also how to beat them.
I enjoyed watching videos from a particular player, Swim. He has a great eye for card games and game design in general. He was able to articulate his deep understanding of the game in a fun and engaging way. I was able to leverage Swim's knowledge that he spent many hours learning.
With my newly found knowledge, I was able to play more effectively. Furthermore, each time I play, the experience that I had become more significant, because I knew what I should be focusing on. I was able to solidify my understanding of the theories. And I was able to really understand the fundamentals of a card game.
In a way, I sacrificed my old play style of making my own niche decks. I leaned more towards the meta. That being said, by being a better player, it did mean that I can start to appreciate the way some decks are better than the other. And the largest difference is in consistency.
Consistency is better than a low chance grand strategy
The decks that I built myself usually has a very satisfying end game goal, if the games ever get to that point. I often tried to maximise my chances to get to the grand ending, but it usually still fell short. In other words, my decks weren't consistent. The decks needed too many good things to happen in a row for me to succeed. Or, I needed the opponent to just let me execute the strategy, without countering it in anyway, which is obviously unrealistic.
On the other hand, the meta decks would have multiple winning conditions. There were still key cards that are very strong when good things happen in a row. And there were still combos that required multiple cards. The difference was, each of the combo cards were strong by themselves. In addition, there would be combos that overlap, meaning card A can be used with card B, but also card C and D. The result were much more consistent decks.
I did lose the joy of creating a strategy of my own and see it beautifully execute. But, playing the consistent meta decks turned out to be more fun. I was able to consistently hit the "high" moments, or "pop off". However, no matter how consistent the deck was, there were still occasions where random events swung the outcome of a match.
Sometimes RNG is exciting, sometimes RNG is infuriating
RNG stand for “random number generator”, which means an object that generates random numbers, typically used in programming. But usually the gaming community doesn't refer to it for its literal meaning. It typically refers to any randomness that happens in a game.
Card games has an inherit randomness in the form of shuffled cards. Players can choose what cards go into their deck, but they can't choose what cards they draw in a match. Trading card games like "Yu-Gi-Oh!" have cards with random effects. For example, on playing the card, flip a coin, if it's heads, destroy an opponent monster, if it's tails, destroy your own monster. Digital card games take it a step further. In Hearthstone, there was a card that triggered a random spell for every spell that you played in a match, and the spell can be anything, not restricted by your deck or anything else.
With a high degree of randomness, even consistent decks can lose to a weaker ones. The outcome of a match does not only depend on my skills in the game, nor my skills outside the game like deck building, it also depends on plain luck. Good players are able to skew their luck to be "mostly good", by choosing random card effects that help them on the positive end, but do not hinder them too much when it's on the negative end.
That being said, even with this skewing, there were matches where "it is what it is", a player can lose by some unlucky string of events, or can win by some lucky string of events, with little or even no skill expression involved.
Life lessons
So, after looking at my card game experience, I certainly can see lessons that I can extrapolate to be general life lessons. Here they are:
To be a master of something, I need to be willing to do what the other masters have done. Learning my own way can only go so far. That being said, I should be able to put my own twist in it as well.
Leveraging the hours that other people spent on something is a good way to expedite my own learning on that thing. It lets me focus on learning the bits that require direct experience.
Sometimes, what is fun is different to what works best. That being said, the thing that works best can be inherently enjoyable because it's the most efficient way to get to your goal, and reaching goals is satisfying.
Consistency is the key to keep going towards your goal. Consistently chipping away at something is better than planning a grand strategy that ends up not able to be executed.
There will be random events in my life that are beyond my control. I can skew events to my advantage to a certain degree, but random events are unavoidable, and they can take my life to either direction. It's important to remember that these events don't define my journey, see point 4 to know what does define my journey.
Outro
That has been the first instance of Play to Learn! I have been a big card game fan for a long time. Taking a game more seriously is one of the ways that I have fun. And the life lessons along the way feels like a bonus. But really, if we spend so much time on anything, I believe that we would be able to see things that are related to other parts of our lives.