A Year in Review: TCGs, Melee, and Perspective
Well, I guess it’s been a while, hasn’t it? The most recent piece I wrote for this blog was all the way back in April of last year. For that, I apologize, as I’ve been a bit… busy. The time it takes to put together a large amount of meaningful seasonal reviews, brief as they may be, did not jive with my schedule over the past year. While not many people might actually have read them, it was always a good exercise that kept my non-technical writing on the sharper side, especially when the activity of watching 15+ seasonal anime is a naturally degenerate one. I’ll get back to those eventually, at my own pace, and will likely put out smaller and more directed reviews of only the recent content I find meaningful (or terrible) rather than large dumps of them. The merit of keeping a seasonal deadline for writing became outweighed by my need for more time to pursue... other things.
Enough beating around the bush, dude. What the hell have you even been doing?
I’ve been playing a game.
Yeah, we already know you play Melee competi-
No, I’ve long been retired from competitive Melee. The game I’ve been playing is a trading card game, like the ones we all grew up with in the 90’s. But, it’s not Magic, or Yu-Gi-Oh, or even Pokemon. It’s something far, far more niche. However, it has a hardcore, dedicated following, with everything from official events played for prizes all the way to regional and world level tournaments. It’s been over this past year that I have dedicated myself to competing in this game, and it’s only now that I’ve found time to come back and tell you all about it. Not just about the game itself, but all the experiences I’ve had over the past year. This is likely going to be a long one, so strap in.
Enough beating around the bush, dude. What the hell have you even been doing?
I’ve been playing a game.
Yeah, we already know you play Melee competi-
No, I’ve long been retired from competitive Melee. The game I’ve been playing is a trading card game, like the ones we all grew up with in the 90’s. But, it’s not Magic, or Yu-Gi-Oh, or even Pokemon. It’s something far, far more niche. However, it has a hardcore, dedicated following, with everything from official events played for prizes all the way to regional and world level tournaments. It’s been over this past year that I have dedicated myself to competing in this game, and it’s only now that I’ve found time to come back and tell you all about it. Not just about the game itself, but all the experiences I’ve had over the past year. This is likely going to be a long one, so strap in.
Part 1: How to get addicted to anime cards
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| the mad lads actually did it, they put anime cards in a REAL anime #meta |
So, the game is called Weiss Schwarz, a Japanese card game with a German name. The schtick with this one is that the game pilfers licenses from popular anime properties, and turns all these shows, movies, manga, light novels, and games into sets of trading cards. While the anime featured in the game vary wildly, the game itself is made and distributed by Bushiroad, who you might know from Cardfight Vanguard or New Japan wrestling. It should be obvious why I’d be interested in the game from that description alone, but I first found out about the game through my local anime convention, Tekko. I was walking around with some friends, and the packages for all the different booster boxes with different anime on them caught my eye. A friend and I grabbed some starter decks and “meister sets” (similar to MTG fat packs) with a pact made to actually play the game together at some point.
Later, drowning in alcohol and with the assistance of a “How-To-Play” video, we tried our first game. It was rough, and we got a lot of things wrong, but the game instantly intrigued me (from what I could remember, of course). I had played a lot of Hearthstone in college to a fairly serious degree, and by that I mean I had achieved legend rank a few times and attended a few in-person competitions. The systems in the game are… unique to say the least, at least when compared to more traditional TCGs. For those of you interested, I’ll include a video about the game, as boring everyone with the specifics is not my intent and it’s hard to explain it in words at points. At that point in time, I think I would consider myself hooked, as I went online and picked up singles to build my first actual deck: A Love Live “Kotori” mono-character deck, colloquially referred to as a “waifu deck”.
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| idols are more addictive than most schedule 1 drugs |
My intention at first was to simply hold on to the deck for the purposes of playing only with the friend I had purchased the game with, but that quickly changed when I got a Facebook ad for a local store’s tournament called a “Shop Challenge”, shared by a friend I had met through the Pittsburgh Melee scene. With nothing else to do that night and some general curiosity, I showed up to Heroes Ink Comics and proceeded to do what all new players do: get clobbered. However, after that night the rest of my year was over: every moment after was spent thinking, playing, and trying to improve at the game. Like any trading card game, Weiss has an inherent but controllable variance in its core mechanics that begs you to keep coming back more, and I quickly became addicted to it. While some of you might find that description to be a bit unhealthy (and it probably is), it was a welcome plug to the hole left by my exit from the world of competitive Melee.
Some of you might already know this, but my short time in the Weiss Schwarz community has been a roller coaster ride. I went from not knowing how effects worked, to playing five or more times a week, to competing in world-level events, all throughout the course of a single year. I was lucky enough and honored to be recognized as the 2019 North American national champion for the Japanese format, which to date is the most validating moment of my entire competitive career, across any game. I got to travel to Japan on Bushiroad’s dime, playing in WGP World Finals as well as locals all throughout Tokyo. My experience has been so amazing that it’s hard to believe that it’s real sometimes, and it’s even harder to look back and rationalize how far I’ve come. All that said and gushing aside, I’m not here to give a breakdown of my year of grinding either, as that’s something that’s better left to its own more directed post. I’ll be putting pen to paper on that in the future, but I’m getting sidetracked here: back on topic.
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| article preview: an accurate depiction of me in japan |
My end goal here is to break down the differences and similarities between my experiences in both of these unique competitive communities. I’ve thought about it a lot over the past year, and since I travel heavily between the two communities on a day-to-day basis, making comparisons became inevitable. I’ve ended up doing the same sort of things I did during my final hours of my Melee career, but it’s had a dramatically different impact on my success. This weird, unique platform I have between competing in and creating for the two games has given me viewpoints that I don’t think many have, and it’s high time that I share those perspectives with y’all.
Part 2: Melee Exodus
Before I get into the nitty-gritty of comparisons, I feel that I need to touch on why I finally quit competing in Melee after hemming and hawing about it for so long. The answer isn’t an easy one to talk about, and some people are probably going to hate me for my answer, but it’s something I’ve needed to get off my chest for a while. First off: Super Smash Brothers Melee is probably one of the most perfect, most difficult, and most fun games you could ever hope to compete in on the entirety of this blue space marble. Unfortunately, the game is played by human beings, and they are insatiable, ridiculous creatures that can ruin even the most incredible of things. That’s throwing a big blanket over a community that to this day I still love and respect, but there’s been a marked shift in how the Melee scene has progressed over the years, and I’m not too keen on where it’s going.
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| this is the part about melee that makes it so sick |
When I started competing in the game in early 2013, the community was a big happy family. Your fellow competitors and rivals were also some of your best friends. These were people you invited over to your home on a weekly basis, both to play and just to hang out. You knew their families, careers, and problems. You were forced to be a friendly, functioning member of society, capable of interacting with other humans amicably in-person. You traveled all throughout the United States with these people to play your favorite game, piling into hotel rooms in Michigan, crashing on floors in Maryland, or even flying across the country to California. You throw yourself at trying to make your scene better, because you want it to be as much fun as it can be for all your friends. You walk three miles uphill both ways to your weekly tournament, 24” CRT TV on your back, just to have another setup available for friendlies. You lug box after box of streaming equipment to that same weekly, because you want the world to see just how much fun this game can be. You run a weekly on Christmas day, because you can’t let the “streak” end and you know that 30 or more people will still show up. These are the things that kept me a part of the community for so long, and the thing that made it so hard to fully and honestly quit. Thankfully, I’ve been able to preserve the friendships I’ve made through playing Melee, and they’re truly lifelong, honest relationships that were born out of nothing more than a love for the same nearly two-decade-old party game.
The long and the short of it is that the newer player base destroyed that feeling of family and passion for not only myself, but many of the other older community members. None of that is to say that it is expressly the fault of newer players themselves, but rather a collective shift in the mindset of those who were just entering the community. The pillars of the community that the older players (even those that came far before me) had been building and supporting for so long began to be taken for granted. The advent of Melee netplay began to push the in-person, friendly nature of the community to a more online, toxic one. Weeklies went from fun parties with your friends to far more unfriendly and thankless events. Tournaments came to be seen as a “right” to attend rather than a privilege. Organizers are barely even treated as human beings by ravenous players. Streaming became a necessity and big business while simultaneously being consistently under-appreciated. Smashfests slowly became salt-fests, and people started to put the entirety of their self-worth in the community into their ranking, which has the flip side of inflating the ego of these people to near-bursting points. The majority of the people that are now playing the game are younger than the game itself, and are near completely unrelatable. Eventually, it becomes a chore to go to your weekly rather than something you look forward to every week. You don’t want to show up and be subjected to a serial 0-2’er saltily throwing their controller at the wall for the third time that night, something we used to ban people for back when we started that very same weekly!
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| it me |
Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe I am just being an old man, yelling at the clouds, being mad at the kids for playing on my lawn. Even so, I can’t shake how I feel about it. Pittsburgh held out longer than any other local scene to this change in community values, and for that, I think that we should be proud. If you’re someone who’s disagreed with me throughout this entire section and think I am just a salty “washed” player, that’s fine, I don’t expect everyone to see it this way. For many, the Smash community is still a welcoming place where many enjoy their time, but it’s just not the kind of community I want to be in anymore. Anyway, all of this sappy shit is secondary to the issue of not having the ability to grind the game at the same level I used to. At the height of my “career”, I was playing Melee upwards of 7+ hours per day in college, both practicing alone and with others, as well as streaming at least one event per week. Now that I’m happily employed and enjoying a normal social life, there isn’t much drive left for me to practice perfect ledgedashes for multiple hours on end. I have always been a player that needs to grind continuously to keep up my skill level, so not being able to keep up the intense level of training required for me to compete was the final death knell. All that said, I still love Melee, and I continue to play it “casually” with those same friends I made in my time in the competitive scene to this day.
Part 3: “That’s a Big ProCon”
Alright, with that out of the way, let’s dig into the big similarities and differences between these two communities. Some of them are specific to just Weiss Schwarz, but you could probably extrapolate out much of what I’m going to highlight to TCG communities as a whole. There’s no easy way to rattle this all off, so I’m going to run them down in a list, machine-gun style, and we’ll get into them more deeply as we move along. Some of them have more meat on the bone than others.
The “Financial Barrier”
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| me organizing all my anime cardboard |
This is going to sound terrible coming out of my mouth, but the financial barrier to entry for TCGs is something I consider to be largely beneficial to the community as a whole. For those of you that don’t know, the Melee community operates on a reality where the core components necessary for play are literal trash you might find on a street corner. CRTs are worth less than garbage, so much so that even the garbage truck won’t take them away. The most popular way to run the game is to hack a half-broken Wii and load the game off a USB stick. If these aren’t things that you already have lying around your home (or your friend’s home), your entire forever-setup will likely run you somewhere in the realm $20 or less. This is good for life. It doesn’t rotate, it doesn’t get banned, and unless your dumb ass chucks your controller at the wall after being four-stocked, it’ll last you forever. “Nintendium” is actually the realest meme you’ve ever heard when it comes to the Smash community; those products will never, ever break if handled with even the minimum level of respect. On the flip side, TCGs have a fairly high up-front cost to start taking them seriously, somewhere in the realm of 5 to 10 times that of your CRT and duct-taped Wii. You can expect that to expand exponentially over time too, as factors like “power creep” and an evolving metagame will keep players spending quite a bit of cash just to remain competitively relevant. Having “supplies” that don’t expire or become less relevant over time is a boon that Melee players take for granted, as even other popular fighting games are subject to new software releases, and mandated hardware updates to financially consider if they want to stay up to date.
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| leffen proving he is one of the only smashers finanically stable enough to destroy his controller |
Back to how it benefits Weiss Schwarz though: the big thing is that it cuts down on the amount of people who aren’t as serious about the game. I don’t mean “serious” here as in a top-of-the-game competitor, but rather more into the game than your average card shop patron who might play in a draft every other week. Unlike a game like Magic the Gathering, Weiss does not have a viable limited format, so the only way to play is either to play an underpowered trial deck or shell out the cash for something more playable. Now, you don’t have to go anywhere near crazy to have something I’d consider relatively competitive. Extremely tournament viable lists, albeit “one-track” strategies, are available at extremely cheap prices (anywhere within the range for $50 to $100) compared to any other trading card game, so long as you have no reservations about the art on your cards. Power creep, even if people whine about it, is a necessary mechanic in the lifecycle of a TCG to keep people buying product and invested in the “meta” of the game at large, so the game will financially weed out those who care less about competing.
Again, this all sounds a lot worse than it is, because Weiss is an unbelievably cheap TCG by any reasonable standard. The most expensive meta decks run only in the realm of $700 maximum, compared to the literal thousands of dollars a competitive MtG or Yu-Gi-Oh deck might cost. On top of that, the game is evergreen and English still doesn’t have any sort of banlist, so your “investments” are safe for the most part. However, the up-front cost of starting any TCG is in my eyes a benefit, but I am heavily, heavily biased towards having a smaller, more dedicated community rather than a spread out and casual one. “Sunk cost”, fallacy it may be, is also a pretty good motivator in getting people to stick with a game long term. You want to get your money’s worth out of that deck you bought, so you’ll continue to drag yourself to locals even if you’ve been having a run of bad weeks.
Card Market
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| stonks |
On that same track of thought, the benefit of the cards you play with having inherent monetary value is not insignificant. Cards for any trading card game have a “market” in and of themselves, fluctuating in price due to your basic economic factors such as supply and demand, determined by not only availability but also current meta viability. Many people find this insane secondary market to be obtuse and exclusive, but overall, I find it to be a pretty powerful tool that’s unique to TCGs, mostly because it helps keep people playing. Even if everything goes wrong for you, and you end up quitting the game after hours and hours spent playing, you can at the very least cash-in on your collection of valuable cards. Melee doesn’t have anything like that; your “supplies”, like I mentioned earlier, are worth less than garbage, and all the time you’ve sunk into practicing is now just time wasted.
Comparatively, these two situations are the same: you’re never going to be able to recoup the time you’ve spent competing in anything, but the difference is in how it feels over time, even if you might not be succeeding. For our scene at least, we do $5 buy-in with at least one guaranteed pack of cards for every participant, for every event. That money buys you about two to three hours of “entertainment” (your participation in at least three rounds of swiss-style tournament play) and a sealed pack that retails for somewhere in the realm of $3. This is objectively a pretty good value, even when compared to the low-stakes nature of Melee weeklies. For those events, you’ll drag a CRT and console to some sort of unofficial location, probably a college campus or some type of arcade, to play, where you’ll be charged not only an entry fee, but also a venue fee. Now, for Pittsburgh at least, the cost is the same five dollars, but for that five, you’re only getting entry into a double-elimination bracket. At worst, you’ll only get to play two games, and you won’t get anything for it. This isn’t the fault of the game, as it’s just how fighting game tournaments must be run out of necessity, but this feels like garbage for new players. Even if you go “0 and out” at locals in a TCG, you’re probably at the very least getting an opportunity to gamble on a pack.
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| the average local attendee's lifetime Melee earnings |
The gambling aspect of a sealed pack, or sealed product in general, might be controversial for some, but it makes the experience for less-experienced players a whole hell of a lot better. Not only does it give them some guaranteed value in the playable trading cards, but more importantly provides a way for “pot feeders” to “win” even if they never pull out a record better than 0-X. Yeah, it’s random, and by some might even be seen as degenerate, but a new player maybe cracking that $300 signed card out of a random pack is something that is objectively good for a local scene. Not only does it help that 0-X player feel rewarded after not performing well in the game itself, but also has a good chance to push that very player forward at an accelerated rate. If they like the game but just didn’t want to commit a lot of cash to it, now they have an unexpected windfall to fuel their next competitive deck-build, or maybe even their travel costs to a regional. This kind of financial boom can’t happen for anyone in the Melee scene unless they are already traveling to large regional tournaments, or rather, are already good enough to be consistently winning $20+ per week at their local events.
At the end of the day, some guaranteed sealed product for everyone with a chance at unpacking big money feels a whole lot better than getting eliminated in loser’s round one with nothing to show for it, especially while being forced to carry that heavy CRT all the way home. Even if it is just random and something that Melee (or fighting games in general) can’t really solve, there’s a lot to be said for this fundamental difference in a player’s week-to-week experience.
Protecting Your Platform
Alright, this one is a little more specific to the higher levels of, well… any competitive thing really. There’s this whole idea that after a player may have reached a certain level of performance, that they can quickly become “washed” if they don’t consistently maintain that exact level of play or greater. While the definition can vary from person to person and scene to scene, the base meaning of the term is that the player in question has transitioned at some point from being good at the game, to now being garbage at it. This could be for a lot of different (and valid) reasons, but the status of being “washed” isn’t something that a player factually becomes: it’s something their own community ascribes to them. If you’ve traveled in competitive communities for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly heard this term or similar sentiments thrown about casually. I’m not here to argue whether that practice is toxic or whatever, but the fact is that it happens, and communities are never going to stop doing it.
For Melee, even in just a local sense, you are constantly in fear of becoming “washed” when you’re on your grind to success. Losing in round one or two at your weeklies could be debilitating, not only for your record that day but also your social status. Fighting games in general put a lot of community stock into your ability as a player; when you’re good at the game, you’re generally treated better across the board. But when you eat that round one loss, you start to hear the whispers. “Damn, they lost round one? Must be washed,” you hear echoing throughout the room, and although we can all tell ourselves up and down that we don’t care, and that we’re going to keep our mentality up, that stuff can still get to you after a while. Melee takes it a bit further, having a core community value of devaluing any and all excuses (“no johns”), but this loop is the core of any one-on-one competitive game. Having a near-complete meritocracy based on tournament results is fine and all, but it can be a pretty big hurdle to overcome when you’re trying your hardest to get good, and can create a fairly “toxic” environment. I’m pretty good at shrugging off that kind of stuff and soldiering on, but I’d be lying if I said that this kind of stuff didn’t negatively affect me when I was competing more seriously.
Trading card games, like anything competitive, still have a bit of this community culture in them, but it manifests differently. Inherent variance within the games themselves goes a long way in stamping out some of the worst parts, as you likely aren’t going to catch any social repercussions from “bricking out” at locals a few times. This goes double for Weiss Schwarz, as the game has more variance in it than practically any other competitive TCG. Everyone who plays the game understands that bricks and “getting Weiss’d” can and will happen, so the community is (to a point) pretty supportive in this way. In fact, if you are good at a trading card game, you’re only going to have to prove yourself a handful of times. Your traveled accomplishments in more competitive settings will begin to speak for themselves, and will quickly become unshakable landmarks of your success. With a noted lack of any physical component to competition, so long as your discussion and evaluation of the game and meta continues to remain accurate and valid, you will cement yourself as, at the least, a “respected player”. This also directly feeds into TCG’s idea of “top player privilege”, where although it definitely still exists, is more focused on the leading content creators that are pumping out useful resources. Even though many of these people are also likely the top players of the card game in question, it’s a marked shift from Melee, where the “gods” don’t do much else other than “play the game”.
None of this is to say that you don’t have to actually be good to be good, if that makes any sense. All I’m saying is that you don’t have to be as worried about all your accomplishments immediately becoming forfeit just because of a couple unfortunate instances of poor results, and that’s a welcome change after the hellscape of the Melee community. Doesn’t really help with inward feelings of imposter syndrome, which is a discussion for later, but a lack of outward-facing consequences is nice to have. The majority of competitors in TCG are actually pretty dismissive of this kind of thought themselves, regularly acknowledging the minute differences between making top eight, versus top four, versus winning entirely. This does well to stamp out a lot of poor mentality that can arise in fighting games, but sometimes it can still pop up here and there. If you are unlucky enough to have some subscribers to “Inui logic” in your local TCG scene, kindly direct them to the door of your local game store, so that they can simply remove themselves now rather than letting them waste their time.
The flip side of all this is that everyone in the community thinks that they’re always correct, and to be honest, they probably are. Players with even a iota of skill in trading card games are likely able to make effective reads on their local metagames, and will see immediate results if they’re right. That’s a good thing through: letting players of even lower skill levels see success for their thinking helps push them into higher levels of the game. The bad thing is that the inherent variance in TCGs in tandem with a few good local reads can inflate egos to incredibly high levels. These kinds of attitudes usually only arise in online discussions, and as annoying as they can be sometimes, discounting them wholesale is probably a mistake. Learning to discern the difference between a good local read (and why it’s good) and someone just blowing smoke is an important lesson for players to learn as early as possible. Dealing with this kind of community-wide mentality can be exhausting at times, but I definitely prefer it due to the (sometimes) good discussion that comes out of it.
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| me 2 stocks down in round 1 losers after getting top 8 the previous week |
For Melee, even in just a local sense, you are constantly in fear of becoming “washed” when you’re on your grind to success. Losing in round one or two at your weeklies could be debilitating, not only for your record that day but also your social status. Fighting games in general put a lot of community stock into your ability as a player; when you’re good at the game, you’re generally treated better across the board. But when you eat that round one loss, you start to hear the whispers. “Damn, they lost round one? Must be washed,” you hear echoing throughout the room, and although we can all tell ourselves up and down that we don’t care, and that we’re going to keep our mentality up, that stuff can still get to you after a while. Melee takes it a bit further, having a core community value of devaluing any and all excuses (“no johns”), but this loop is the core of any one-on-one competitive game. Having a near-complete meritocracy based on tournament results is fine and all, but it can be a pretty big hurdle to overcome when you’re trying your hardest to get good, and can create a fairly “toxic” environment. I’m pretty good at shrugging off that kind of stuff and soldiering on, but I’d be lying if I said that this kind of stuff didn’t negatively affect me when I was competing more seriously.
Trading card games, like anything competitive, still have a bit of this community culture in them, but it manifests differently. Inherent variance within the games themselves goes a long way in stamping out some of the worst parts, as you likely aren’t going to catch any social repercussions from “bricking out” at locals a few times. This goes double for Weiss Schwarz, as the game has more variance in it than practically any other competitive TCG. Everyone who plays the game understands that bricks and “getting Weiss’d” can and will happen, so the community is (to a point) pretty supportive in this way. In fact, if you are good at a trading card game, you’re only going to have to prove yourself a handful of times. Your traveled accomplishments in more competitive settings will begin to speak for themselves, and will quickly become unshakable landmarks of your success. With a noted lack of any physical component to competition, so long as your discussion and evaluation of the game and meta continues to remain accurate and valid, you will cement yourself as, at the least, a “respected player”. This also directly feeds into TCG’s idea of “top player privilege”, where although it definitely still exists, is more focused on the leading content creators that are pumping out useful resources. Even though many of these people are also likely the top players of the card game in question, it’s a marked shift from Melee, where the “gods” don’t do much else other than “play the game”.
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| mfw people try to bring up lol-cals results from 4 months ago in a discussion |
None of this is to say that you don’t have to actually be good to be good, if that makes any sense. All I’m saying is that you don’t have to be as worried about all your accomplishments immediately becoming forfeit just because of a couple unfortunate instances of poor results, and that’s a welcome change after the hellscape of the Melee community. Doesn’t really help with inward feelings of imposter syndrome, which is a discussion for later, but a lack of outward-facing consequences is nice to have. The majority of competitors in TCG are actually pretty dismissive of this kind of thought themselves, regularly acknowledging the minute differences between making top eight, versus top four, versus winning entirely. This does well to stamp out a lot of poor mentality that can arise in fighting games, but sometimes it can still pop up here and there. If you are unlucky enough to have some subscribers to “Inui logic” in your local TCG scene, kindly direct them to the door of your local game store, so that they can simply remove themselves now rather than letting them waste their time.
The flip side of all this is that everyone in the community thinks that they’re always correct, and to be honest, they probably are. Players with even a iota of skill in trading card games are likely able to make effective reads on their local metagames, and will see immediate results if they’re right. That’s a good thing through: letting players of even lower skill levels see success for their thinking helps push them into higher levels of the game. The bad thing is that the inherent variance in TCGs in tandem with a few good local reads can inflate egos to incredibly high levels. These kinds of attitudes usually only arise in online discussions, and as annoying as they can be sometimes, discounting them wholesale is probably a mistake. Learning to discern the difference between a good local read (and why it’s good) and someone just blowing smoke is an important lesson for players to learn as early as possible. Dealing with this kind of community-wide mentality can be exhausting at times, but I definitely prefer it due to the (sometimes) good discussion that comes out of it.
Salt. Salt Barely Changes.
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| YOU CAN NEVER BE CLEAN, JUSTIN |
I’ve mostly been digging into the differences between these two communities, so let’s get into something that will never change, no matter what you’re competing in: salt. The level of salt generated by children’s trading cards is out of this world, and that includes myself. No one who takes any game seriously can say that they’ve never experienced the angry, frustrating state that is being the saltiest spitoon imaginable. It’s compounded by trading card games having such a high degree of inherent variance in them, and again, that goes double for Weiss. Understanding that “sometimes you don’t misplay once and still eat five” is a right of passage for any player, but keeping a level head during a run of bad luck can be next to impossible a lot of the time. However, like anything else, the salt starts to fade as you begin to travel more and play at higher levels of the game, giving you a better perspective about what makes a “good” or “bad” player. The biggest lesson to learn is that a local tournament with only three to four best-of-one swiss rounds without a top cut is practically meaningless for determining much of anything, especially for Weiss Schwarz. At larger regional tournaments for this game, X-2’s have a reasonably high chance to sneak into a cut to top eight, depending on their tiebreakers, something that could never, ever happen in a fighting game. In my experience, the saltiest players are the ones who don’t have this kind of perspective; because they haven’t traveled, they don’t really understand how the game works at that level, so it feeds into their loop of high expectations and disproportionate outcomes. Just like in anything though, it’s important to recognize those kinds of players quickly, so you don’t have to waste your time arguing with them or acknowledging their salty comments or behavior.
On this same topic, showing disproportionate improvement to the time you have spent playing a trading card game is still going to catch you a massive helping of hate. It’s not as bad as it would be in a fighting game or Melee, where the “good new guy” would likely get blasted incessantly in social settings, but it still exists. The core of it all is that competitors love to base their time invested in something as analogous to their level of skill in it, and when they see evidence that challenges that notion, they get frustrated and upset. The difference for a card game is that a lot of the skillset between different examples of them is transferable: a good MtG or YGO player will be able to pick up Weiss Schwarz and instantly have advantages over those that are total greenhorns to cards. Even if that’s true, that still is never going to stop people from feeling salty if you happen to improve at the game faster than them. My large amount of time spent competing in Hearthstone at a fairly high level meant next to nothing to those who were visibly frustrated in my quick rise to competency in Weiss. Marking the end of my one-year of playing the game with a JP Nationals win didn’t do me any favors in that department either, but like anything else, you have to get used to shrugging off insinuations that you are “a sack” or “just lucky’. At the end of the day, this is just another flavor of salt, so brush it off and let your accomplishments speak for themselves.
The Local Game Store
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| gotta shout out my home store too |
This is going to be a quick one: God bless local game stores. One of the biggest pains with Melee or other fighting games is consistently finding a good place to meet up and play, but trading card games get to sidestep this entirely. While it might be a lot less funny than setting up CRTs outside in the middle of your campus lawn, power strips strewn everywhere, your hands will thank you in the winter months. Having designated locations for organized play is a boon that many players of TCGs take for granted, but they’re an invaluable resource for any player at any level of play. While not having to meet up at each other’s homes for practice might lead you to think that some of the “intimacy” of the community would be lost, local game stores are primarily communities of players. It’s easy to become fast friends with both your fellow players and the store staff. This is a benefit that I wish the Melee community would have had access to more than anything else in this entire post, so please, if you are lucky enough to have a resource like this for whatever game you play, please support it.
Part 4: Grinding the Game
Moving past general community differences, I want to highlight some of the things I brought over to my Weiss Schwarz efforts from my time spent competing in Melee. Some of them were more valuable to my progress than others, but I’m unsure of the level of crossover between the communities of something with a more physical component like a fighting game and trading card games, so I’ll explain them as simply as I can. I plan on doing a more in-depth article based on my year spent grinding Weiss into the ground, since everyone loves to read “sports” narratives, so here I’ll keep it more based in theory and application rather than my own specific experiences.
The big difference here that divides most people’s approach between card and video games is that card games lack a physical component. The game is purely a mental one, so people don’t put much thought into what they can do to “grind” out improving in it. This is where the merit of the “Melee tech grinder” approach comes into play. This isn’t a mindset that’s at all unique to Melee versus that of any other technical competitive game, but the cult of personality surrounding Melee is notorious for pushing players into this sort of practice. If you want to be good at something, you have to be prepared to live and breathe it, and that’s best defined as dedicating 6 to 8 hours per day, at minimum, to the game. I know that sounds completely ridiculous, but in a game like Melee where you need to reach a very high technical “floor” to even begin playing at a level where your decisions matter in the slightest, that’s necessary time spent. This can be time spent practicing alone, or playing against other players, but you need to get that practice in one way or another. Just because a card game might not require you to execute frame-perfect tech multiple times every few seconds doesn’t mean that throwing yourself whole-hog at it isn’t a valuable practice, especially when you are starting from the complete bottom.
Thankfully, a card game doesn’t dictate that you need to spend hours on end locked in your room practicing L-cancels and wavedashes before you can even attend your first event. Mental dedication is the name of the game here, and although actually playing as much as you can will always be the most direct and helpful way to improve, keeping yourself thinking is a valuable practice. Running through possible scenarios, working through deck-building, and doing card evaluation can be done at literally any time. Unlike in a fighting game, where simulating interactions mentally can be increasingly difficult due to their hyper-contextual nature, these mental exercises are easy to do and continually meaningful for competing in TCGs. You don’t have to develop subconscious reactions to the ridiculous speed of combat in something like Melee just to give yourself the opportunity to use your conscious thought to outplay your opponent; simply dedicating thought to the game can help keep your actual performance sharp.
On to some more competition-based benefits: being (mostly) immune to tournament nerves is something that’s helped a lot. Being in a relatively quiet event hall is nothing compared to the ridiculousness of a Melee tournament, where not only are there tons of screaming and yelling people behind you cheering and jeering, but maybe even that salty low-tier player is quite literally screaming in your ear because they hate your character. It’s been a lot easier to act under pressure at higher levels of the game, simply because I’ve been there before, in a much more unforgiving environment. I wish that there was some sort of way for people to cultivate this “skill”, but the only real way to get over tournament nerves is to just experience them over and over again. In general, the Weiss Schwarz tournaments I’ve attended have had a much more “chill” atmosphere compared to any other competitive environment I’ve been in, so it should be fairly easy for competitors to overcome any sort of nerves after a few regionals. I can’t speak to other trading card games, but I can’t imagine them being much more rancorus or intimidating than these.
Lastly, I want to talk about the pitfalls of becoming too results-oriented in your competitive career, which is something I preached to death in my Melee days to mostly deaf ears. While it might not be as damning in a fighting game where your results are far more consistent, it’s a lot more threatening to your mentality in a TCG. Progression should always be your goal; you are always playing to learn and improve, not specifically to rack up wins. Your success is a byproduct of that learning and improvement, so that’s what should be your focus, no matter what level of the game you play at. Variance makes this a hell of a lot harder to get over, but learning to identify what really is variance and what is poor play on your part helps a lot. No matter how hard you get “sacked” there is always going to be something you can point back to, evaluating what you could have done better in that situation. Learn to harness your immediate salt and transform it into obsessive reflection over what you could do better. Don’t let it leak out and be directed at your opponents or external factors. All of this will help you learn more from your negative experiences as well as your positive one, keeping your head level and eyes faced forward. This will lead you towards a hell of a lot more victories than just being obsessed with the wins themselves.
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| hyperbolic time chamber not required |
The big difference here that divides most people’s approach between card and video games is that card games lack a physical component. The game is purely a mental one, so people don’t put much thought into what they can do to “grind” out improving in it. This is where the merit of the “Melee tech grinder” approach comes into play. This isn’t a mindset that’s at all unique to Melee versus that of any other technical competitive game, but the cult of personality surrounding Melee is notorious for pushing players into this sort of practice. If you want to be good at something, you have to be prepared to live and breathe it, and that’s best defined as dedicating 6 to 8 hours per day, at minimum, to the game. I know that sounds completely ridiculous, but in a game like Melee where you need to reach a very high technical “floor” to even begin playing at a level where your decisions matter in the slightest, that’s necessary time spent. This can be time spent practicing alone, or playing against other players, but you need to get that practice in one way or another. Just because a card game might not require you to execute frame-perfect tech multiple times every few seconds doesn’t mean that throwing yourself whole-hog at it isn’t a valuable practice, especially when you are starting from the complete bottom.
Thankfully, a card game doesn’t dictate that you need to spend hours on end locked in your room practicing L-cancels and wavedashes before you can even attend your first event. Mental dedication is the name of the game here, and although actually playing as much as you can will always be the most direct and helpful way to improve, keeping yourself thinking is a valuable practice. Running through possible scenarios, working through deck-building, and doing card evaluation can be done at literally any time. Unlike in a fighting game, where simulating interactions mentally can be increasingly difficult due to their hyper-contextual nature, these mental exercises are easy to do and continually meaningful for competing in TCGs. You don’t have to develop subconscious reactions to the ridiculous speed of combat in something like Melee just to give yourself the opportunity to use your conscious thought to outplay your opponent; simply dedicating thought to the game can help keep your actual performance sharp.
On to some more competition-based benefits: being (mostly) immune to tournament nerves is something that’s helped a lot. Being in a relatively quiet event hall is nothing compared to the ridiculousness of a Melee tournament, where not only are there tons of screaming and yelling people behind you cheering and jeering, but maybe even that salty low-tier player is quite literally screaming in your ear because they hate your character. It’s been a lot easier to act under pressure at higher levels of the game, simply because I’ve been there before, in a much more unforgiving environment. I wish that there was some sort of way for people to cultivate this “skill”, but the only real way to get over tournament nerves is to just experience them over and over again. In general, the Weiss Schwarz tournaments I’ve attended have had a much more “chill” atmosphere compared to any other competitive environment I’ve been in, so it should be fairly easy for competitors to overcome any sort of nerves after a few regionals. I can’t speak to other trading card games, but I can’t imagine them being much more rancorus or intimidating than these.
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| me after finally winning something after a year of nonstop grinding |
Lastly, I want to talk about the pitfalls of becoming too results-oriented in your competitive career, which is something I preached to death in my Melee days to mostly deaf ears. While it might not be as damning in a fighting game where your results are far more consistent, it’s a lot more threatening to your mentality in a TCG. Progression should always be your goal; you are always playing to learn and improve, not specifically to rack up wins. Your success is a byproduct of that learning and improvement, so that’s what should be your focus, no matter what level of the game you play at. Variance makes this a hell of a lot harder to get over, but learning to identify what really is variance and what is poor play on your part helps a lot. No matter how hard you get “sacked” there is always going to be something you can point back to, evaluating what you could have done better in that situation. Learn to harness your immediate salt and transform it into obsessive reflection over what you could do better. Don’t let it leak out and be directed at your opponents or external factors. All of this will help you learn more from your negative experiences as well as your positive one, keeping your head level and eyes faced forward. This will lead you towards a hell of a lot more victories than just being obsessed with the wins themselves.
Part 5: Dr Streamlord, or How I Learned I’m Cursed to Be a Content Creator
Well, with all that competitive philosophy junk out of the way, it’s time I came clean: I’m pretty sure that at this point I have some kind of certifiable mental illness. No matter what thing I am into at any given time, I end up throwing myself at it so hard that I end up channeling that passion into hours and hours of volunteer content creation. I even tried to fight it this time around, but as the time went on and I became more and more invested, the urge grew and grew to start pumping out something I thought was meaningful. Thankfully, lots of my local scene felt the same, and with their incredible help and efforts, we were able to create a small but unique voice in the greater Weiss Schwarz community. That said, most of you probably know that I’ve been down this road quite a few times, with my most in-depth and ridiculous stint being a streamer for the Pittsburgh Smash community. Since I fell (compulsively) into making content for both, there’s a couple things I wanted to touch on about the differences between the two, and why making content Weiss is so much more rewarding than it was for anything else.
The first reason is super obvious to anyone who’s played a fighting game: being a tournament streamer or content creator basically makes you incapable of being a good player. A streamer doesn’t have the time to be grinding the game in question, as they’re too busy splitting off and uploading VODs from this week’s local while editing more high-effort content on the side. This is a simple benefit, but it compounds over time. Making content and lugging hundreds of pounds of equipment somewhere different every week just to record friendlies starts to eat at you after a while, as the passion to do it in the first place came from passion from playing the game in the first place. Your performance and improvement in the game itself begins to slip, as you can’t keep it up while continuing your content-creation duties. You start to become jaded and bitter towards your efforts, and eventually, you just end up quitting everything out of distaste for it all. This isn’t helped by the general lack of appreciation for tournament streamers (and organizers) in fighting game communities, but I’ve already talked about that stuff here on this blog before, so I’ll avoid beating the dead horse.
Anyway, a big difference that keeps me making Weiss content is that it’s so much easier to produce. That’s not to say it’s “cheap” or “low effort”, it’s more about not needing such a ridiculous amount of equipment to make stuff of at least acceptable quality. Some screen recording and editing software paired with a relatively inexpensive camera is more than enough to make some damn good stuff. Gone are the days of having to transport thousands of dollars in computers, monitors, capture cards, and audio equipment to remote locations to broadcast tournaments live, and I couldn’t be happier. Since the primary form of content for a TCG is discussion rather than an overabundance of gameplay, podcast-style formats that digs into important metagame or community points of interest are very effective while also staying easy to produce. To go even further, that discussion is likely to improve your competitive performance in-game, as you’re continuing to think more critically and having your opinions challenged more often. Dissenting opinion and controversy from created content goes from an annoying negative to an overall positive, as it directly helps you re-contextualize your metagame against other ones.
Even with all these benefits, I think the biggest one is that it is so much easier to have people help you. Streaming for a fighting game is a singular, thankless job, and the few people that do might want to help are likely incapable of doing so. It’s a lot more technical and easy to botch than people think, and even at the height of my involvement in it, there were probably only one or two other people I had to count on to even run the laptop when I had to step away for even a second. Content creation for Weiss has been a comparative dream: creating graphical stuff for videos has been a breeze, even the most technical parts of recording are doable by almost anyone with even the worst of computers, and tons of people are enthusiastic and willing to help out in meaningful ways. If it wasn’t for all the other people in the Pittsburgh Weiss Schwarz group helping me out like this, I wouldn’t still be doing it, as being a one-man-show streamer in the Melee community for such a long time was one of the most exhausting experiences of my life.
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| sorry harry, but you asked for VODs the night-of too many times. this is your fate. |
The first reason is super obvious to anyone who’s played a fighting game: being a tournament streamer or content creator basically makes you incapable of being a good player. A streamer doesn’t have the time to be grinding the game in question, as they’re too busy splitting off and uploading VODs from this week’s local while editing more high-effort content on the side. This is a simple benefit, but it compounds over time. Making content and lugging hundreds of pounds of equipment somewhere different every week just to record friendlies starts to eat at you after a while, as the passion to do it in the first place came from passion from playing the game in the first place. Your performance and improvement in the game itself begins to slip, as you can’t keep it up while continuing your content-creation duties. You start to become jaded and bitter towards your efforts, and eventually, you just end up quitting everything out of distaste for it all. This isn’t helped by the general lack of appreciation for tournament streamers (and organizers) in fighting game communities, but I’ve already talked about that stuff here on this blog before, so I’ll avoid beating the dead horse.
Anyway, a big difference that keeps me making Weiss content is that it’s so much easier to produce. That’s not to say it’s “cheap” or “low effort”, it’s more about not needing such a ridiculous amount of equipment to make stuff of at least acceptable quality. Some screen recording and editing software paired with a relatively inexpensive camera is more than enough to make some damn good stuff. Gone are the days of having to transport thousands of dollars in computers, monitors, capture cards, and audio equipment to remote locations to broadcast tournaments live, and I couldn’t be happier. Since the primary form of content for a TCG is discussion rather than an overabundance of gameplay, podcast-style formats that digs into important metagame or community points of interest are very effective while also staying easy to produce. To go even further, that discussion is likely to improve your competitive performance in-game, as you’re continuing to think more critically and having your opinions challenged more often. Dissenting opinion and controversy from created content goes from an annoying negative to an overall positive, as it directly helps you re-contextualize your metagame against other ones.
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| live footage of pgh weiss schwarz (read: me and andy) fighting about cards on our podcasts |
Even with all these benefits, I think the biggest one is that it is so much easier to have people help you. Streaming for a fighting game is a singular, thankless job, and the few people that do might want to help are likely incapable of doing so. It’s a lot more technical and easy to botch than people think, and even at the height of my involvement in it, there were probably only one or two other people I had to count on to even run the laptop when I had to step away for even a second. Content creation for Weiss has been a comparative dream: creating graphical stuff for videos has been a breeze, even the most technical parts of recording are doable by almost anyone with even the worst of computers, and tons of people are enthusiastic and willing to help out in meaningful ways. If it wasn’t for all the other people in the Pittsburgh Weiss Schwarz group helping me out like this, I wouldn’t still be doing it, as being a one-man-show streamer in the Melee community for such a long time was one of the most exhausting experiences of my life.
Closing
Thanks for sticking with me throughout this post. I knew it was going to be a longer one, as I’ve been away for quite a while, but a lot of this is stuff I’ve been stewing about for a long time. It’s felt pretty good getting it all out onto the printed (digital?) page, so I hope you’ve at least found something interesting in my experiences I’ve dumped out here. Before I wrap up though, I have to make one thing clear: for all my gripes and complaints, I’m incredibly thankful for my time spent in the Melee scene. I’ve made lifelong friends in that community and learned what kind of dedication it truly takes to become good at something. I want to thank everyone in the Smash scene for being so welcoming for such a long time, and even if things are different now and most of us no longer compete, I hold those years of my life are dear to me like nothing else. If I named names I would be here for days, but you all know who you are. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
Now, for the Weiss people: thank you to everyone I’ve met through this insane yearlong journey into this game and community. I’ve met even more amazing people and made even more great friends. If it wasn’t for all my people in the local Pittsburgh scene, I wouldn’t be writing about all this stuff right now, and I surely wouldn’t have been traveling overseas on Bushiroad’s dime to compete either. I’ve only been able to go this far because of all your support, and for that, I cannot thank you all enough.
And you know, I think that has to be the biggest similarity between these two communities. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the game is, or how much you love it, or how good you are at it. It’s the great people that get you to show up and keep coming back that make everything and anything worth doing.
See ya’ll at Worlds 2020,
Now, for the Weiss people: thank you to everyone I’ve met through this insane yearlong journey into this game and community. I’ve met even more amazing people and made even more great friends. If it wasn’t for all my people in the local Pittsburgh scene, I wouldn’t be writing about all this stuff right now, and I surely wouldn’t have been traveling overseas on Bushiroad’s dime to compete either. I’ve only been able to go this far because of all your support, and for that, I cannot thank you all enough.
And you know, I think that has to be the biggest similarity between these two communities. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the game is, or how much you love it, or how good you are at it. It’s the great people that get you to show up and keep coming back that make everything and anything worth doing.
See ya’ll at Worlds 2020,
- Carmen
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