You stare across the opponent’s board, trying to figure out the optimal play. Game 1 you locked away thanks to landing a turn 5 Sarkhan the Mad while he was stuck on three lands, but game 2 has proven to be a lot more intricate. Your board is cluttered with Sprouting Thrinax tokens while his is filled with Putrid Leeches and a living Thrinax, and a Duress last turn revealed his last two cards as a pair of Siege-Gang Commanders. Your biceps wind up tightly as you caress your hand of cards by fanning them in and out, eyes flickering between the board and the spells clutched by your sweaty palms. Your life total is eleven to his seventeen, and figuring out what to do here is going to determine your line of play for the rest of the game.
Racing seems to be your best call. You cast Sarkhan the Mad and allow him to transfigure your lowly saproling into one of Jund’s winged gods, then pass the turn across the table. You set your cards down and lower your hands — your actual hands — to your knees to wipe sticky sweat off on your jeans as you watch your opponent draw his card, noting his facial expression. No reaction. The far left corner between your lips breaks rank to turn jagged, revealing the slightest hint of a smile to a more careful observer than your opponent. You watch him hit the tank, and you can tell he’s doing the math — and adding up it doesn’t work in his favor.
Your nostrils release a sigh only audible to a mouse as you watch him agonize. His eyes squirm just as yours must have the turn prior, and he reaches for his mana.
“Bloodbraid Elf,” he announces, gesturing to his library. “Cascade?”
As if that were a question! Of course you can cascade! You lose your concentration for a moment, allowing your burgeoning smile to take root on your face. You waive the momentary break in posture off by opening your mouth to conceal what could have been a grin, saying sure and issuing a nod for good measure.
He reaches for his library, and everything quiets as you feel the universe lean in. The walls around you bend as your vision narrows on his pile of black-sleeved cards. He flips over the top card.
“Maelstrom Pulse,” he announces. The room stops bending. The quiet retreats and is overtaken by the scuffling of cardboard. Any hint of a grin vanishes as quick as it came. “Target a Sprouting Thrinax token.”
He left those in!? Unbelievable! I can’t believe he would do that!
You calmly collect your Green colored beads and set them off to the side. He primes his creatures for combat, declaring Sarkhan as his target. Your dragon swoops in to eat his Thrinax and the crazed planeswalker falls. He passes it back to your turn.
You look up at the game state as your heart rate heightens and you reach for your card. Why did I block his Thrinax there? That’s a terrible block! You shake your head and audibly sigh.
The card on top of your deck reaches your fingers, and your vision soon translates what it is. A Raging Ravine. You roll your eyes and play it, then attack and send him down to ten. A Thrinax of your own offers to buy just enough time for your dragon to send this lesser Jund mage back into the plane’s savage jungles.
You watch as he untaps the four lands he draws in a neat stack and draws. This time, he smiles. This time, there is no hesitation. He retaps the same four lands and lays down another copy of the hasted, cascading menace. He gestures to his library. “Cascade?”
You roll your eyes then raise your hand then drop it, using the teenage sign language words for “whatever, I guess.” He flips over the top two cards. Lands. Then, he stops on the third. “Terminate.” He points it at the dragon token.
Really now? Really!? That’s such —
“Would you like to cut?” he presents you with his two lands in a pile he had apparently been shuffling.
Are you serious?
The center of your gut wrenches inward and crashes into a colossal lagoon, cutting off your adrenaline and sending a red tinge into your face as you move to slouch. You reach out and cut his two card pile with a brash sneer, a trying attempt at retaliation. Were this a casual match, you might have been tempted to spit on the cards.
He attacks with everything. You block with your Thrinax and earn another round of blocking next turn — though it’s not like it matters at this point.
You draw another land. You clench your empty fist and pass the turn.
He draws and his smug lips curve into an open smile as his ridiculously shaped hands reach for the same four lands. “Bloodbraid Elf?” he queries.
Like that was necessary, you moron.
“Cascade?”
“Yeah yeah, okay already!”
He flips over the top card of his library. As if it were necessary, it was Blightning.
A crevice in the corner of your brain bursts and a mental fog begins to form. You gather up your cards and crunch them into a sixty card pile with violent strength.
It’s okay. You still have the next game. You exhale. Don’t tilt, don’t tilt, don’t tilt…
You mush your deck together a few more times, then present and forcefully shuffle his for good measure, hopefully bending the corners of his rares. You draw your opening seven and try and dismiss the red from your face, the fog from your head, and the murk from your stomach to think about the hand. It’s a two-lander with three Goblin Ruinblasters. You consider it. If you can draw two lands, you’re going to crush this idiot’s soul.
“Keep.”
You should have never kept. Five turns later, you still only have two lands to your name.
Don’t tilt, don’t tilt, don’t tilt…
…
Tilt is the cancer of Magic.
It sneaks up on you when you think you’re fine. It eats away at you. It’s difficult and painful to make go away. And it can cost you your life. (Points.)
The thing about tilt is it seldom just grabs you and throttles you. That’d be easy to prepare for. You could tell when it was coming and try to cut it off. Occasionally tilt will surprise you when your opponent does something entirely inane and it works out, but even then, players with enough experience should be able to shrug off a single blow. Much more often, like a tower of cards slowing leaning until it all falls, tilt builds up.
It can start with the smallest event. Maybe something your opponent says sticks out and your mind chews on it, or a single bad block your opponent makes that turns out to be in his favor creeps under your skin like a parasite. Whenever something like that happens, you might tilt just a few degrees. Not enough to make a difference in your game, but enough to just slightly show up in your body language and your mental processes. But, like a plaque, it builds up over time.
Your opponent’s irritating habit of licking his braces. The guy next to you who can’t pronounce the word “reliquary” correctly. That topdeck your opponent just made. Your cascade into the one card that didn’t do anything. The 2% chance not cracking your fetchland would cause you to draw your last basic land. All of those things can pile on and cause your once-upright stature to turn the full ninety degrees. Before you know it, every turn you’re making another mistake.
Here’s the worst part: it’s not you know there isn’t a problem. You can tell you’re a little irritated. You just can’t seem to fix it.
I don’t want to get too deeply into the “how” of tilt. Zac Hill wrote an excellent article on why and how of we tilt, and his predates the formulation of these words by over a year. On matters of that regard, I would offer his article. Rather than merely rehash what some eloquent squirrel chose to chatter up one April evening, I would much rather prefer to look at not how we tilt, but how to stop us from tilting.
As with any problem, though, we need to look at the source. Let’s go there first.
There are many offbranches and offshoots to tilt, and I’m sure if I drew it up I could make it look like some kind of cross between a bamboo tree and a family tree. At its core, though, tilt essentially stems from two different reactions, leading to two different kinds of tilt. What we classify as tilt is actually two very different things from two different reactions that ultimately funnel into the same vents that can block off our rational thinking.
The first kind of tilt is anger.
You’re angry at yourself because you made an incorrect play. You’re angry at how your draw has developed. You’re angry because people keep calling you while you’re trying to play. You’re angry because your 5-2 opponent won’t scoop you into Top 8. You’re angry because your opponent is a complete drooling groodion — and he’s beating you.
Whether it’s something small or large, anger begins with a single bubble in your blood, then simmers, and, if you don’t turn the heat off, it will quickly boil. When you’re angry, usually your head begins to feel cloudy, and you can mentally feel corridors you would usually walk through in your mind being closed off to you. Your body temperature begins to rise. Small things your opponent does begin to annoy you, accentuating your anger tilt even more. Tilt due to anger is something naturally impedes your judgment because it distracts your focus away from “how can I win” and onto “how can I take out my aggression on my opponent” — two very different things.
The second kind of tilt is distress.
You’re distressed because you have to face a bad matchup. You’re distressed because you have never won a match against your opponent. You’re distressed because you kept a two-lander and you don’t have a third land to play. You’re distressed because your opponent played a turn 1 Wild Nacatl and you don’t have an answer until turn 3. You’re distressed because you have to mulligan to five on the play. You’re distressed because it’s looking like your opponent is going to win the third game and knock you out of the finals.
This is the kind of tilt you feel when something doesn’t go your way, and it feels like your stomach takes a dive, then all of the energy evaporates from your body. You slouch. Maybe you begin to feel cold. You feel like you can’t win because no matter what happens it’s going to go in your opponent’s favor. They’re always going to have whatever they need to beat you.
Maybe your mind begins to drift and you think about how you “only needed one more win to make Top 8,” or how this is what happened last time, or, possibly the worst but also the most common, begin to think about what story you’re going to tell your friends after the match about how you lost. (Admit it, you’ve done it.)
It’s even worse when the two combine. Anger and distress make for a nasty combination in which you are angry about something, and yet you know you’re going to lose — an ultimate defeatist attitude.
Snap out of it!
As emotional creatures, it is difficult — if near impossible — for some of us to suppress these feelings. We can’t all be Finkel-esque stone gargoyles. It’s even harder to deal with tilt primarily because it is like so many small punches over and over that pile on and deplete your energy. Furthermore, if you focus on not tilting too much then you’re taking your focus off the game.
Have you ever chanted “focus, focus, focus…” to yourself? It does nothing. Telling yourself to focus is, ironically, not focusing at all. Telling yourself “don’t tilt, don’t tilt, don’t tilt” is much the same. Telling yourself not to tilt is not actually helping you to stay positioned straight up and down. In fact, doing so may actually make you tilt worse. The easiest way to not tilt is something else entirely.
Let me ask you a question.
Have you ever watched Tim Aten play a game of Magic?
It’s like watching a zombie play basketball. His play has no vigor. Every gesture is made in the exact same motion over and over again. Every word is in the same monotonic voice. Every card is picked up the same way. You know why? Because. He. Doesn’t. Care.
It’s not that he doesn’t care about you — err, actually, he probably doesn’t, but that’s another article entirely — but that the game no longer evokes any emotion for him. He’s been there, sitting in that position, unable to cast his spells, facing a terrible matchup, being delivered a bad beat on a hundred to one odds as some smug 12 year old points Volcanic Hammer at his head a million times. And you know what? He’ll shrug, maybe make some offhand remark if you’re lucky, and pack up his cards. He can distance himself from the game.
Almost every good player can do this to varying degrees.
Tim is a very good example, but there are several others like him that come to mind. Gerry Thompson is another great example. (In fact, you can probably substitute Gerry for Tim in the above paragraph and have it be almost as accurate.) The point is that if you are less invested in each individual game, and if you have had some terrible thing happen to you enough times, at some point you stop caring altogether. When you play as much Magic as somebody like Gerry, you have been served enough beats that you can just shrug them off.
As Zvi Mowshowitz once said, “Caring is an EV tragedy.”
The problem with this approach is that it’s difficult to activate. Sure, playing a lot of Magic helps, but then the takeaway would be that there’s no way to improve yourself other than doing what you were going to do anyway.
What else can you do?
The method that I recommend to people the most and that seems to work for them is to work on invoking the same kind of reaction that those who don’t care have, but without having to play enough to learn how to not care.
The key to this is to recognize when you are tilting. The problem with tilt is that it’s blinding, and often so much you don’t realize you’re tilting. I remember one PTQ when Zaiem Beg came up to me, complained a bunch, and then I told him he was tilting he yelled back “I’m not tilting!” It was much later that he came up to me and let me know that in retrospect he was, in fact, tilting.
Some of the body cues I mentioned earlier — such as a cloudy mind, rising or cooling temperature, or sinking feeling in your stomach — are good starts, but it’s different for everybody. Even more problematic, you have to be in the mindset to ask yourself if you’re tilting and not ignore entirely that possibility after you make a block that doesn’t turn out well for you.
The second part is to calm down. Focus. Exhale. Reassure yourself. Figure out your outs. Put any mistakes you’ve made in the past. You can’t do anything about them now. Look at how you can win the game rather than how you are losing it. Spend a few seconds with your eyes shut. Meditate, if you know how. Come back rejuvenated. It’s amazing what a few seconds can do.
For the third part, you need to come back to the game. The key now is to spend more time thinking rationally. What tilt does is mess up your cognitive processes. Where instinct might have been okay to operate on previously, that is no longer the case. You need to take your game off autopilot and think through every single decision. You can’t just assume your opponent always has it, and you can’t just snap block because it feels like it’s the right play. Think through the repercussions of each play. What happens if I do this? What happens if I do that? Which is better next turn? Which will set me up to win the game?
What Tim, Gerry, and many other professional players do by not caring is allow their instinctual play ability to always be on, and to always have the clear mind necessary to think everything through properly. What you’re doing in the third part is trying to mimic their line of rational thought.
In reality, part three is just practicing good Magic habits. Finding what your outs are, figuring out what the outcome of each play will be, and so on. If you have played at a high level of competition for long enough, a lot of those outcomes are quick to figure out or placed on a near-instinctual level. Tilt sucks those instincts out of you like a leech, and when you go to lean on them they backfire. If you can look at things objectively and answer the same questions your instincts would normally do for you, then the tilt will start to boil off as the game comes back into focus. Repeat step number two as many times as you need during the course of the game to keep your mind fresh.
In the end, it’s all about what works for you. If you have a kind of tilt control mechanism that works for you, that’s great, and I’d love to hear about it in the forums or over e-mail at gavintriesagain at gmail dot com. I’ve tried to share what I’ve found most successful for removing my own tilt and the tilt of others, but I’m sure several people have their own tilt release valves. Nobody can entirely remove the emotional side of them from Magic, but we can try and do the best we can to not let them effect us.
See you in the forums!
Gavin Verhey
Rabon on Magic Online, Lesurgo everywhere else