Variance, Mindset & Other Delusions

At Springfest in Houston this year, I sat down across from my good friend Kevin in finals. I was on Rushia, he's on 8 SB MTI; a pretty expected meta matchup for the season between two players practiced in it, we're both expecting a pretty tough, albeit good game with a decent amount of back-and-forth. Unfortunately, I proceed to draw 1 playable and 5 climaxes over my first two turns. I claw it back as best as I can, but I unfortunately can never recover from my second turn, where I was forced to pass without any playables, flooded with climaxes and 3s. This put me at 7-2 on the day for my personal record, and although it sucked to get hit by variance right at the end of the run, I left the venue happy with my performance. You can't win 'em all, as they say. Many drinks were had by Kevin and myself afterwards, with the only salt in the air coming from rimmed margarita glasses and tequila shots. 

If you’ve played any TCG for an extended period of time, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term “variance” get thrown around a lot. It might not have been the word itself, more commonly you’ll have heard “I got sacked”, “they just got lucky”, or countless other complaints and groans that try to capture just how bad someone got the short end of the stick. It happens; all card games have variance baked into them from the start, from MtG, to Weiss Schwarz, to classic casino table games. While we do everything we can as players to fight against it, this integral part of the medium is the thing that brings us back again and again, leading to a gambling addiction that masquerades as a hobby. 

This leads players to the inevitable question: if my game contains variance, can it really have any skill element to it? Well yeah, duh, of course it can. Pro poker players exist. Magic is practically an eSport these days. The same host of names are topping Weiss events every single year, in all formats. These things wouldn't occur if these games truly had no skillful elements even if they contain variance in their core mechanics, but identifying these things can be difficult, especially in a game like Weiss. How can we figure out what we can chok up to variance, and what we shouldn’t?

Finding Variance

there will be almost no maths in this post i swear

Let’s start with a polarized example: you play a couple games with the same player, in the same matchup. You win 1, they win 4. In one of the games, you triple triggered and passed back with no climaxes in deck, ate 10 straight, and died from 2-4 to vanilla swings. In another one of them, your opponent canceled 7 times on their first deck, slammed lvl 1 combo, and shot you to 3 while they were still at 1-3, and you lost. However, in the other 2 that you lost, you can't point to any one instance of negative windfall. Your opponent may have had a better game than you, sure, but can you point to any "ridiculous" moment that made the game unwinnable for you? 

The first two examples are what we should correctly identify as variance. These are very explicit examples; variance usually presents itself in much milder scenarios throughout games of Weiss, like cancels occurring even when they're statistically unlikely to do so. While we don't want to write off those 2 "bad" games for us entirely, we'd much rather focus on the other 2 in order to figure out how to improve. Also, remember that these terrible bouts of luck can happen to your opponent too! Being able to recognize which games you are sacking is just as important, if not more so, than identifying when you are the one being sacked. An inability to recognize this will stick you with crippling confirmation bias, making you incapable of improving past the level of a 2-soul slamming potato. If I had a dollar for every time I heard “but it worked”, I’d be a millionaire. 

So in those 5 games, even if we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and say that we didn't sack our opponent for our one win, we can identify that we were certainly outplayed. This could be due to many different factors: matchup, deckbuilding, flatout skill difference, or countless other things, but the important part is that we're able to identify what that actual thing is instead of just blaming our losses on variance. All TCGs give players an easy out to avoid these opportunities to improve, as it's much easier to whine about our opponent getting lucky than it is to sit down, analyze, and figure out what the consequences of our own actions were. Now, what if I told you we can take this approach in variance-ridden games like Weiss even further, so that even those first two examples aren’t meaningless?

Reaching Nirvana

someone please steal this and make it a mat

Even if our games have a high amount of bad beats occurring on both sides, we can still go back over them and try to isolate our in-the-moment decisions even if the outcome doesn’t go our way. This sounds like some wacky insane cognitive dissonance, and that’s because it is, but it will do wonders for your improvement and mentality. Consider a basic case where you’re swinging in for the win. Your opponent is 3-4, you have the ability to make 3 swings for 3, and their compression rate is nearly 1 in 5. You do so, and your opponent cancels every single swing, then cracks back at you with your 1 in 3 compression while at 3-0, and then you lose. 

Was it wrong for you to swing 3 times for 3? Your opponent canceled your first swing on 1. Were you supposed to do some on-attack pings to clear off that climax? Well, no. You had no idea that the climax would be there. If you do any pre-attack burns for less than 3, you’re effectively damage scrying your opponent into a possible cancel. Should you have chipped out for the 3 total damage instead? Also no, as attacking 3 times for lethal forces your opponent to cancel thrice instead of just once, especially with such favorable compression for you to swing into, with all of your 3s being more likely to stick than not. You made the correct, in-the-moment decision with the information you had available, and the numbers didn’t fall your way.

Ok, let’s apply what we’ve talked about so far. Our opponent canceling all of our lethal swings at ~1/5 compression was an instance of variance. They should have eaten it, but they didn’t. In the same vein, you did everything you could to stabilize your gamestate. You maintained adequate compression while staying at the lowest damage possible for your level, and still died. That’s also variance. Notice how we are throwing out any post-decision information. It doesn’t matter that your opponent canceled the first swing on 1, or that you ate all the damage on the crack-back and died, you made the correct plays with the information at hand. To get needlessly philosophical with it, there’s some other parallel universe where your opponent eats one of the 3s and dies, as the numbers say they should have, and you walk away happy with your decisions and your win. However, in this universe, you must be content with only that you made the right decision.

This is what makes competitive TCGs so difficult. You must get to a point where you are perfectly content with this kind of outcome, or you will not last. It’s hard for everyone, at any level, to divorce your play from your results. It’s a bit easier if you’re cultivating a good mindset of playing to learn, but we all know that taking L after L gets harder and harder as they stack up. It’s important to remember that in games with variance, your end goal is only to hit a 51% overall winrate. Some of the best players in all of competitive TCG history only ever scrape slightly above this line, and to try to shoot for anything higher will do nothing but burn you out, or worse, cultivate a horrible case of imposter syndrome. 

To help y’all through this, I have a few tips for all my Weiss grinders out there:

• Take objective notes on your rounds. No reason to get wild with it, but jot down some things after your games conclude. Try to pick out when variance went your way, or your opponent’s, as well as what plays you made to give yourself the best odds.

• Track your winrate. Remember, we’re only shooting for 51%. Start small; make it your goal to simply be positive at the end of your week of locals. Keep this alongside your notes, so that you can track what caused your wins and losses.

• Remember that variance affects everyone equally! For every time you get sacked, you’re sacking someone else. Make note of those instances on both sides. 

• Every game is a learning opportunity, losses more so than wins. If you have a misplay that you can point to that lost you the game, you’re coming out ahead.

—

As always, please check out Pattywagon’s WSAlmanac Reading List. I cannot stress enough how important all of these articles are to our community. I’m going to continue writing these shorter articles as I’m struck with ideas for them, so keep an eye out for more. I always post them over on my Twitter, so give that a follow if you like. Shoutout to all the people I played against and met in NJ & Houston for BSF 2022, I’ll see y’all again for BCS & WGP in the fall.

-Carmen (@Beanwolf)