Well well well, look what the (fat) cat dragged in. I have been so busy over the last six months working in the backgrounds launching the MTG Site, organizing Worlds Qualifier Coverage and trying to keep the lights on at MaRu that playing the actual games that I love wasn't really an option. I hit a wall this month however and no matter how much I wanted to do more work my mind was just not having it. I thought I was getting sad or depressed and then I realized I was just burnt out. So I decided to focus more on my self and my mental health and that led me to playing LoR and MTG for fun, for myself and with no strings attached. I wasn't try harding to break a format or climb a ladder, I was just trying to have some fun playing decks I enjoyed.
Fast forward to Wednesday morning and I was feeling ready to once again try and race to Masters and be the first one to plant my flag in the leaderboard. I woke up, worked out, showered, had some food and coffee ready to take on the ladder and everyone else in the America's region when I logged on and saw the ladder wasn't going to be available until 12 AM aka Midnight. How frustrating, normally the ladder starts around 11am PST and the APAC and EU regions were already playing. I thought for sure this must be a typo and that at noon the ladder would be live so I waited....alas noon came and went with out any movement. After waiting another hour or so I finally gave up and started working on other things. Later in the day someone had tweet out that the Eternal Ladder was indeed finally going. It turns out that for some reason Riot had listed the time in UTC so 12 am UTC is 5PM Pacific time. Despite some confusion I saw a tweet that the ladder was live and jumped in to find out that we all started over at the very bottom of ranked Aka Iron level 4
I started my climb with Anni Jhin seeing that it had already been doing quite well on the Meta Tier List and knowing that it's one of the fastest decks in the game which is exactly what you want when you are trying to be the first person to Masters. Annie Jhin is a solid Aggro decks and I think will be seen in the competitive Aggro line ups being the third deck to round it out. If you are looking to climb quickly this is a great choice.
27 cards
13 cards
22 000
I quickly started ranking up the Ladder but didn't want to pull an all nighter and decided to go to bed early and wake up the next day to grind some more. I woke up at 7am and started my climb from gold getting to Platinum before I had to record the Mastering Runeterra Podcast and post articles on the site. Once my work was done however I saw that someone had unsurprisingly already beat me to Masters. This was to be expected however and I still wanted to see how quickly I could make it to Masters myself and I wanted to grab the coveted first place rank. I've actually never been straight first before, for some reason I would get to second on the leaderboard and need one more win and just kind of stop. I knew I could get there and thus for some reason that demotivated me from actually doing the thing. This is an issue I have tried to combat as I have gotten older, "Finishing Strong" so to speak. The job isn't done until it is all the way done.
I was having troubles continuing my climb in Platinum constantly bouncing up and down in rank so I tried changing decks. Next up was Poppy Taric.
20 cards
20 cards
28 700
Again a deck I have loved from a by gone age of LoR. A lot of decks simply fold any time you cast Golden Aegis on Taric and get to attack three times in a row. Mountain Soujourners acts as a third Champion and in many cases is better than either of your real Champions. With the addition of Champions Strength to the deck, I highly recommend giving it a try. But the games were taking a bit too long at times and I needed something that could close out faster if I was going to make it to Masters in one day. Enter Poppy Ziggs.
15 cards
25 cards
29 800
This deck was absolute work horse for me. I had around a 76% win percentage over 60+ games. As everyone knows it's still a slog trying to get through Platinum and then Diamond. I actually had to play three win and ins to Masters after getting knocked down twice I finally made it in on the third try with 50LP. I then had to win two more games just to get into the first place slot. At 2AM I finally had done it. I took a screenshot, shared for Twitter clout and finally went to sleep feeling slightly accomplished but wonder, was it all worth it?
Takeaways From the Climb
The best thing that came from this experience was getting to play against so many different players from the community, many of whom messaged me after the game to say hi or thank me for the game. Since I stopped streaming regularly to make and operate this website, I haven't been as able to interact with the community as much as I want to. I love this game and the amazing community that surrounds it, so this was no small treat. Being able to take time to play the game more and interact with people has been great for my general levels of stress and anxiety. So a huge thank you to all of my opponents and to you for reading this article. It's lit a new fire in me to make more content. I often have a hard time writing, I'll store up a bunch of thoughts and feelings then unleash them in one long tirade. But other than that it can be like pulling teeth trying to put words on paper. The trick seems to be finding ways to make the topics meaningful to me and connecting with the community has done that for me. So fingers crossed that you will see more articles from me starting this week.
The second takeaway is that the ladder really isn't for me and that's ok. The amount of time it takes to stay at the top coupled with the fact you need to maintain a very high win percentage which almost locks you out from playing certain decks because they can't compete leads me to not really like the Ladder climb. I end up playing decks that I don't want to for longer than I want to causing me to burn out. There also isn't an incentive for me to grind the ladder other than Worlds points or cloud chasing. The Worlds points are useless to me as I only have three from last Months Worlds Qualifier Top Cut and if I don't do well at this months Runeterra Open I don't have a chance of being in the top three points earners for the Season. Thus my plan is to focus on the coming Opens and if I am able to put together a couple strong finishes that would allow for Ladder points to put me over the threshold, then I will grind as needed. I think my biggest issue with the ladder is that if you don't have a large amount of time to dedicate to it than you will never be able to be at the top. This massive time commitment is simply not possible for myself and many like me. I am not sure if rank decay would make a difference, but I'd be interested to see how that would work.
Alright I was able to get this article done finally after a lot of dragging my feet, but I'm happy with how it turned out and am looking forward to writing some guides on my favorite decks for everyone. Until next time, Happy Climbing!