Ive been in the trenches of magic for 9 years and never saw myself as a good player. When i finally got into tournament grinding i worked and worked until i got that RC invite and as funny as it it, for a competitive player looking at that piece of paper is my only peace of mind. I went near undefeated at pioneer nights but it just didnt have any real payoff in my head and it was just yknow EXHAUSTING because it was just endless grinding with no goal in sight. So monkey brain looked ar pro tour and said... "yeah we gonna do that" and thats where I'm at rn. So its weird but what got me out of my burnout was locking in to a goal rather than just aimlessly wandering
I'm honestly glad that you mention the competitive aspect because people just keep saying how casual commander is but just because games are longer and you do not have immediate pressure not to missplay on the very first few turns like cedh doesn't means that casual commander doesn't has a winner at the end of the day and one that is largely not determined by luck but by skill and deck construction: there *is* some inherent competitiveness even in the most casual of pods and in fact, because of the time investment I'd argue it can be even more stressful to lose a casual pod than a cedh pod where many games are 15-30 minutes at the most. If you truly want something that's always relaxing and casual I don't think you can fully have that on a format with inherent win and lose states to begin with but I honestly do not know how that looks like in magic, might be fun to explore tho.
i feel the same. i swichted from yugioh to mtg when strixhavens released and played limited and edh for some time and swiched than to 60 card constructed (Pioneer and Standard) but the fact that so many products released over the last years and the prices.... it took away a lot of the fun
It's a double-edged sword being immersed and expressing your identity through a game. When it's good, it's great. But when you stop playing, be it through boredom, frustration, or exhaustion, you have to wrestle with your identity beyond the game, and that can be a harsh reality-shock.
One of my things with magic is avoiding spoilers before prerelease. Going into prerelease blind really helped bring back that magic of opening a pack and the sense that literally anything could be in their that I had as a kid and then making a deck out of the random stuff I got.
Totally agree with what you said. Have been going out and back multiple times since odyssey block and now I just play casual commander with slightly powered pre-con. Same goes to my flesh and blood as well, I just do regular updates for my teklovossen deck. And now I have been looking into heroscape just to for a change.
Great advice here. I've come to a lot of these similar conclusions throughout the years, not only for Magic but just life in general. From what I've learned burnout tends to happen when we overwhelmed ourselves with with whatever it is we're burning ourselves out from. Even though we love the things we do sometimes we fail to see the signals our body sends us telling us to slow down or take a break and that turns into burnout. Greatly reducing my exposure or even just taking a break has helped me to manage my burnout with MTG. Going out on walks and journaling has also helped to get these complicated feelings out into more tangible problems I can work with. And then changing my mindset or my view on things has also helped a lot the biggest one is comparison which being in the competitive mindset tends to have people do.
This is such a timely video! I am going through something exactly like this. I am fairly new to MTG but I've been a huge fan of TCGs and online cards games for many years. What i truly love about the games is the possibility of creating new funny or quirky decks to experiment but I'm currently fatigued with having to constantly buy new decks/expansions to have the newest and shiniest cards or constantly have to rebuild my decks. Honestly, its something that has been taking my sleep away. I suffer from the similar problem when it comes to videogames, where I always have to be playing something and have little time for my mental health or for my significant other. My goal for this month is also jump into roleplaying games (specifically Call of Cthulhu) and solo journaling games, so I don't end up disappointing anyone. And most importantly, realizing that what I have already as far as decks and games is enough :) Thanks for the video - it helped me re-align my head
Hobbiest on mtg for 20yrs i balanced it out on skateboaring , i think if you have the passion that involves mental perspective you need to have something for physical stuff too,i dnt dwell on the frustrations on something you know you can not do anything about it (anyways d&d, mtg or tcg etc.)you can quit anytime or take a break and do some physical activity
I’m a brewer, not a player. My guardrail has been one new commander deck from each set. For MH3 I built Ashling, Flame Dancer (loved your video on her); AC was Surtr, Fiery Jotun; Bloomburrow was Wildsear, Scouring Maw. I’m done now, though. I’m gonna build Eladamri, Korvecdal Beast tribal big flips with portal art and enchantment hate sub-themes and I’m out.
I started playing TCGs through Yugioh, and I still do today, but Yugioh matches are extremely tiring. They don't take long, but you need to read the board a lot and think about the possibilities that can come out of it. Not only do you have to think about what you're going to do, but you also have to anticipate your opponent's moves. So yes, it does get tiring, even though that's the fun of the game. Because of that, I started looking for less tiring games that were easier to relax in, and after testing a few, I came across Magic, and it fit like a glove for my Yugioh fatigue. Even though Magic has a high level of competition, Standard, Modern, and Pauper, I definitely don't consider them as exhausting as Yugioh. So my hobby routine ended up becoming playing Yugioh until I got tired, relaxing by playing Magic, returning to Yugioh, and so on. Basically, I think that if you have hobbies that alternate between them, the burnout ends up being less.
For me switching from Warhammer to Magic was a real relief. I started playing WH about 6 years ago and finally ended having remorse for not painting miniatures. I felt like it was a duty I was failing to do. Now I play Magic when I meet with my friends and I can finally enjoy other things that make me happy. No more feeling that I wasted my time”painting time” while playing a computer game.
Cool video. The game is addicting and people who have addictive tendencies can easily get sucked into the game. I personally had this issue. I've been getting into old school magic now because I cant keep up with the releases and It not only has beautiful art, but the cards are more expensive so I can only buy a few at a time and it allows me to put restrictions on my spending. The amount of releases and fomo is ridiculous and mtg players are going to either run themself broke, quit the hobby, or let the hobby consume their life.
Ive been in the trenches of magic for 9 years and never saw myself as a good player. When i finally got into tournament grinding i worked and worked until i got that RC invite and as funny as it it, for a competitive player looking at that piece of paper is my only peace of mind. I went near undefeated at pioneer nights but it just didnt have any real payoff in my head and it was just yknow EXHAUSTING because it was just endless grinding with no goal in sight. So monkey brain looked ar pro tour and said... "yeah we gonna do that" and thats where I'm at rn. So its weird but what got me out of my burnout was locking in to a goal rather than just aimlessly wandering
I'm honestly glad that you mention the competitive aspect because people just keep saying how casual commander is but just because games are longer and you do not have immediate pressure not to missplay on the very first few turns like cedh doesn't means that casual commander doesn't has a winner at the end of the day and one that is largely not determined by luck but by skill and deck construction: there *is* some inherent competitiveness even in the most casual of pods and in fact, because of the time investment I'd argue it can be even more stressful to lose a casual pod than a cedh pod where many games are 15-30 minutes at the most.
If you truly want something that's always relaxing and casual I don't think you can fully have that on a format with inherent win and lose states to begin with but I honestly do not know how that looks like in magic, might be fun to explore tho.
i feel the same. i swichted from yugioh to mtg when strixhavens released and played limited and edh for some time and swiched than to 60 card constructed (Pioneer and Standard) but the fact that so many products released over the last years and the prices.... it took away a lot of the fun
It's a double-edged sword being immersed and expressing your identity through a game. When it's good, it's great. But when you stop playing, be it through boredom, frustration, or exhaustion, you have to wrestle with your identity beyond the game, and that can be a harsh reality-shock.
One of my things with magic is avoiding spoilers before prerelease. Going into prerelease blind really helped bring back that magic of opening a pack and the sense that literally anything could be in their that I had as a kid and then making a deck out of the random stuff I got.
Totally agree with what you said. Have been going out and back multiple times since odyssey block and now I just play casual commander with slightly powered pre-con. Same goes to my flesh and blood as well, I just do regular updates for my teklovossen deck. And now I have been looking into heroscape just to for a change.
Great advice here. I've come to a lot of these similar conclusions throughout the years, not only for Magic but just life in general. From what I've learned burnout tends to happen when we overwhelmed ourselves with with whatever it is we're burning ourselves out from. Even though we love the things we do sometimes we fail to see the signals our body sends us telling us to slow down or take a break and that turns into burnout. Greatly reducing my exposure or even just taking a break has helped me to manage my burnout with MTG. Going out on walks and journaling has also helped to get these complicated feelings out into more tangible problems I can work with. And then changing my mindset or my view on things has also helped a lot the biggest one is comparison which being in the competitive mindset tends to have people do.
This is such a timely video! I am going through something exactly like this. I am fairly new to MTG but I've been a huge fan of TCGs and online cards games for many years. What i truly love about the games is the possibility of creating new funny or quirky decks to experiment but I'm currently fatigued with having to constantly buy new decks/expansions to have the newest and shiniest cards or constantly have to rebuild my decks. Honestly, its something that has been taking my sleep away. I suffer from the similar problem when it comes to videogames, where I always have to be playing something and have little time for my mental health or for my significant other. My goal for this month is also jump into roleplaying games (specifically Call of Cthulhu) and solo journaling games, so I don't end up disappointing anyone. And most importantly, realizing that what I have already as far as decks and games is enough :) Thanks for the video - it helped me re-align my head
Hobbiest on mtg for 20yrs i balanced it out on skateboaring , i think if you have the passion that involves mental perspective you need to have something for physical stuff too,i dnt dwell on the frustrations on something you know you can not do anything about it (anyways d&d, mtg or tcg
etc.)you can quit anytime or take a break and do some physical activity
I’m a brewer, not a player. My guardrail has been one new commander deck from each set. For MH3 I built Ashling, Flame Dancer (loved your video on her); AC was Surtr, Fiery Jotun; Bloomburrow was Wildsear, Scouring Maw. I’m done now, though. I’m gonna build Eladamri, Korvecdal Beast tribal big flips with portal art and enchantment hate sub-themes and I’m out.
I started playing TCGs through Yugioh, and I still do today, but Yugioh matches are extremely tiring. They don't take long, but you need to read the board a lot and think about the possibilities that can come out of it. Not only do you have to think about what you're going to do, but you also have to anticipate your opponent's moves. So yes, it does get tiring, even though that's the fun of the game. Because of that, I started looking for less tiring games that were easier to relax in, and after testing a few, I came across Magic, and it fit like a glove for my Yugioh fatigue. Even though Magic has a high level of competition, Standard, Modern, and Pauper, I definitely don't consider them as exhausting as Yugioh. So my hobby routine ended up becoming playing Yugioh until I got tired, relaxing by playing Magic, returning to Yugioh, and so on. Basically, I think that if you have hobbies that alternate between them, the burnout ends up being less.
For me switching from Warhammer to Magic was a real relief. I started playing WH about 6 years ago and finally ended having remorse for not painting miniatures. I felt like it was a duty I was failing to do. Now I play Magic when I meet with my friends and I can finally enjoy other things that make me happy. No more feeling that I wasted my time”painting time” while playing a computer game.
Cool video. The game is addicting and people who have addictive tendencies can easily get sucked into the game. I personally had this issue. I've been getting into old school magic now because I cant keep up with the releases and It not only has beautiful art, but the cards are more expensive so I can only buy a few at a time and it allows me to put restrictions on my spending. The amount of releases and fomo is ridiculous and mtg players are going to either run themself broke, quit the hobby, or let the hobby consume their life.
Ok but can we be obsessed with your videos? ❤ great content as always!
Thanks, friend! 💕
I smell a boardgame night soon!🎉
Bahahahah! "Worthy of love..."
All cards on the table: I feel like I fucked up and now my friend groups revolve around my hobbies. Can't leave that
Thank you for this video!
Thank you!
One Piece? One Shot? What's next, One Direction?
This is horrible advice. Keep the addiction going, boys. Never stop. ESPECIALLY D&D
😂🫶🏻