The Netdecking Chronicles: A Journey To Mythic

Hello and welcome to a series I’d affectionately am calling “The Netdecking Chronicles.”

I’ll begin this first article by stating that before this I wasn’t a Magic the Gathering player and before I got into Flesh and Blood I wasn’t much of a card player at all. I got hooked on Flesh and Blood through friends and from their YouTube’s Algorithms fed me comedy videos for Magic the Gathering. After some time my attitude towards the game began to soften and I got it in me to download the arena app to my phone.

Now as I’ve said before I was not a magic player, I had no idea what I was doing or where to really start, I was fresh and new to this longstanding world of cardboard. I tried on my own for a while just to see if anything stuck but in a game with as much history as MTG I was wandering blindly. I turned to a friend who had been playing magic far longer than I’d been attempting to play card games with any degree of seriousness.

For those of you already well established in TCG’s and who are familiar with MTG, will probably know where I’m going with this. For those who are like me, not so versed, there are valuable lessons ahead I learned. I want to share these lessons with you so you can have it even just a smidge easier than I did. I love these games and I want everyone who puts their time into them to get the same kind of enjoyment out of them as I do.

Now this is called “The Netdecking Chronicles” for a reason. My friend recommended to me a particular style of deck. If you’re familiar with magic you’re probably familiar with the style of Red Deck wins. True to it’s name it will win. This is not just one deck but a style or archetype of deck. A style of deck that aims to squeeze as much value out of the cards we play and end the game quickly. A “no-brains” kind of deck if you will.

These aggro archetypes exist in many of the TCGs out there but for learning and simplicity’s sake I will look at it through the lens of MTG and my obviously foreshadowed climb to Mythic rank in Arena. I really want to stress this fact though, I was not a magic player before this. I went with trust and imported a list my friend sent me and ran with it. I took my hands off the wheel for deckbuilding and everything else and just focused on playing and winning the game.

To it’s credit, the list got me results almost immediately and as the title of this article should suggest it kept giving results. Every step of the way I used the same list. The same cards every time. Eventually if we just play these “no-brain” high value cards over and over again we can start to see why they’re so high value. We can also start to see why the deck isn’t as “no-brain” as it first appears.

The longer I played with these same cards the more I realized if my cards had high value on their own, then they had even bigger value when we start stringing them together in the most efficient ways we can. When we take a brainy approach to “no-brain” decks and cards we can really maximize their value and improve our learning of the fundamentals of what we are playing.

That’s what this series will aim to highlight for anyone struggling. If we can just stop focusing on all the flashing lights and distractions of our games and just hone in our fundamentals our games will become so much easier. From there we can grow, hone our skill set, and maybe even one day play the game in a flavor we want to play it in.

I know everybody can get attached to aesthetics and flavors that we want to have and play. We all have a favorite color, a favorite shirt, a favorite band.

Before we can take our favorite flavors card-wise though we have to take our hands off from as much as possible and hone our fundamentals in something fast and hard to interact with. Our Red Deck Wins, Green Stompys, The White Weenies. Any sort of deck is fine as long as it’s fast, consistent, and generally hard to interact with. These decks let us stop focusing on things we don’t need to when we’re learning and we can just play the game as it were.

I’d really like to attest to that fact because this is everything I’ve used to get myself to Mythic Rank in MTG Arena in a month. I won’t lie to you and say all these things can make it a blissful walk in the park. There is still a challenge to it. A willingness to be stubborn and not give up. To take breaks when you need to. I would have never made it as far as I did if I didn’t couple these tools and this information with a passion for these games and a drive to reach the peak.

If you too have this drive, this want to play your game at a higher level, I want you to take this advice. Stop overthinking everything. Stop worrying about deckbuilding, or what to play. Pick a deck that someone’s already figured out. Something consistent and strong that fits our style. We just run with it and run nothing else. Run it over and over. Eventually you’ll find the Brainy approach to your “no-brain” cards. You’ll find the optimal patterns you have. You’ll start noticing when they aren’t working and when you need to change your game.

The longer you do this the better your skill set will become. The more you’ll learn about what you need to do in matches to keep pace. I know it’s easy to wave this all away a thousand different ways. I was beginning to think I wasn’t cut out for this sort of scene of TCG’s and skill games. I tried these methods and use this information because every time I did I was winning more. Every time I tried to get too hands on and do my own thing I stopped winning again. This isn’t to say you have to be winning all the time either. You don’t have to be a pilot and build the plane.

Loses will be normal and part of the process. We have to take them in stride, take what information we can out of them, and keep moving forward. I bounced out of Diamond 1 several times before I made mythic. I bounced around stuck on a tier a lot of times on my way to mythic. In the end though, I was more stubborn, more driven and more focused on my game. This ended me with more wins than losses to make it past each tier.

This article isn’t meant to be brag but an example of how succeeding might not be too far off for any of us so I’ll leave you with one final note to summarize what’s written here.

If we just persevere, accept our losses where they come, and play a deck with consistent high value cards, we’re getting over hills that were once mountains.