Any fool can know. The point is to understand. - Albert Einstein
- Play the "right" deck
This might seem obvious but it’s one of the main reasons players struggle to climb faster. You have probably experienced this before when you picked up a deck that was powerful and well positioned and started racing up the ladder.
The power level of your deck vs the entire “meta” (AKA the other decks that are commonly being played on the ladder) is extremely important. This is an important point about the best of one format. Last season for example Ahri Kennen had barely any bad matchups. So you would either play against a good match up or very occasionally play against a less good match up and still sometimes win.
The important note here is that if you were trying to play a deck that beat Ahri Kennen, every time you didn’t get matched against Ahri Kennen you had a decent chance of having a bad to fair match up and when you did play against Ahri Kennen you would still sometimes lose to its sheer power. Why take this much more difficult route to ladder climbing than simply playing the best deck? It’s not always fun or sexy but if your goal is to climb the ladder with speed than this is simply the best possible option. Obvious, I know and yet many players still won’t do it.
- Play your deck correctly
Again, we aren’t breaking any new ground here. You need to understand your decks plan and how it is supposed to be played vs the other top decks. BUT! How you are doing this is the important part. Are you picking up a new deck and jumping on the ladder for some games? Because it will take you time to learn the ins and outs of a deck and that means losing! For every loss you take that's another one you have to get back, so you should avoid losing as much as you should strive to win.
You can do this by playing in casuals or finding partners to test against. Another good way to offset this is to try new decks when you are at the bottom of a rank and can’t fall any farther. Be wary of this though as the way the ranking system works when you get to Masters you will find that your hidden rank will be very low and you only be getting 15 LP per win since the system sees you as a low ranked player that shouldn’t jump up a lot of points. When this happens it makes climbing in Masters extremely difficult so be sure to take care of your rank.
- Set a goal for climbing
Goal setting is extremely important in all aspects of life and can really help in your rank climbing journey. In fact studies have shown that people who write down their goals are 42% more likely than those that don’t write them down. That’s a huge percentage for such a small task. When writing your goals try to make them measurable and try to be realistic with your time. I think one mistake people make is to not properly evaluate how much time they actually have to dedicate to something and also how long the thing they are doing will actually take.
To give an example, in the last few Seasonals tournaments I have had only 5-10 hours to practice or prepare. I realised this wouldn’t be enough time to learn more than one new deck at the most. So when I was trying to figure out what my lineup would be I knew that I would have to pick two or three decks that I already knew how to play. Random aside, don't ever bring decks you don't know how to play to a tournament, it’s a recipe for disaster. But because I was realistic with how much time I had I didn’t make the mistake of playing games with or considering decks that were outside of my knowledge base.
- Don’t switch decks often
This is in direct contrast to tip number one but something I see all the time is players pick up a deck, play a few games with it and then move on to another deck and they will keep repeating this cycle until they run out of decks. Or they will quickly get bored of a deck and want to play something else. Well my friends, they don’t call the ladder a “grind” for nothing. It’s tough work and while yes we are playing a game that we want to have fun in, most of the time to achieve your goals you will have to put in some work.
This is for each of us to choose. Personally I like winning and find it fun to compete at the highest levels. I also am a big fan of playing silly combo decks like Eggs or Concurrent Timelines. So to balance these two I will play fun decks after seasonals or when there is downtime in the competitive schedule.
The takeaway here is that if you can find a deck you have a solid win percentage with its generally the right play to just keep playing that deck on the ladder and not mess with what’s working. Consistency is very important when trying to ladder climb.
- A learning mindset and avoiding “tilt”
Perhaps the most important aspect of any game is the mental game within the game. There is a reason sports psychology has blown up in the last few decades. We grew up hearing things like the game is ten percent physical and ninety percent mental. This is even more true in online games.
How many times have you seen someone lose their composure and lose a game because they lost control of their emotions? This can happen because you are angry or it can happen because you are afraid. Learning to keep calm in the face of adversity is one of the pillars of any champion in any discipline.
First you need to be constantly aware of your emotions. A lot of people will lose a game on the ladder and immediately jump into another game still steaming from their loss and what happens? Often they will play poorly and make more mistakes. Like we covered earlier, avoiding losses is just as important as racking up wins. They are two sides of the same coin. For each loss you get you need to win another game to make up for it.
I am guilty of this myself. I often get momentarily heated when I lose a game. It’s normally gone within minutes but the first sting of the loss can often get under my skin. Feeling emotions is normal, we are human after all. It’s how we react to these emotions that matters. You can take a break between games, get up and walk around or whatever you need to do to get back into a calm learning mindset.
But the thing that works for me the most is retelling myself that THIS is part of the larger “game”. Because the faster I can regain my composure and continue to learn, the faster I will be able to climb the mountain of information that is the whole game in the first place. IE If you are getting pissed off and taking hours or days to cool off before you can start learning again and your opponents are able to brush things off in minutes guess who is going to win in the long run? And don’t be fooled, as much as you are trying to learn and better yourself you are also competing against all the other players out there. It’s an information race at the end of the day, the people that can learn faster will have a huge advantage.
So whenever I am heated I like to ask myself “I thought you were good?” or “ I thought you were trying to be the best?” and I will immediately realise that I can’t be sitting here upset and not learning when everyone else in the world is climbing up the information mountain and each minute I spend mad for no good reason is another minute I am falling behind. That speaks to my inner competitor and gets me fired up to do whatever I need to to get back in the right mindset and back to competing.
Last and probably most important is keeping a learning mindset. As I just laid out we are in an information war. What plays or strategies work or don’t work. Which decks and which cards in those decks are the best in what metagame and why. Information is what we are after and winning will come with it. Thus instead of focusing on how much you are winning on the ladder you should focus on learning. Winning or losing a game is unimportant compared to learning.
Most players don’t learn or don’t learn very fast, they are simply going through the motions of playing game after game and absorbing info when it smacks them in the face. These players thus stay around the same level they are on and only slowly improve if at all. You need to be questioning everything all the time “Why are you keeping these cards or mulliganing them in this match up?” “Why are you choosing the plays you are choosing and what alternate plays could you make?” “Why is your opponent making the plays they are or aren’t making?” “How is your opponent going to win or how are they going to stop you from winning?” These are just a few of the large list of questions you should be asking yourself and trying to find the answer to all the time. This is how you improve as a player and how you start winning more, by learning. So don’t worry about losing a game or even lots of games as long as you are learning because that means you are winning in the long run.