Article by: One Who Gets Crits, Commander Jaime

Hey amigos, today we’re going to cover self confidence as players in multiple aspects. We all come into Cardfight!! Vanguard in different levels of familiarity and confidence. For some of us it’s not our first card game, but for others it is. Even as playing casually or competitively, it is still different for all of us.

To be quite honest, it can be broken in many different areas. For this article, let’s break it down into two categories, as a player versus with a certain deck. I will go over what these two categories look like and from there we’ll build up our way from total newbie to a seasoned competitive player.

The Two Sides of the Coin

As A Player

If you came from a different card game, there’s a good chance that you have some confidence in yourself on playing games, deck building, strategies, etc. For example, I came from Yu-Gi-Oh!, and I have played that card game for years. At first casually and then competitively. For me, it was quite easy to pick up a deck in Vanguard and start learning how to play the game. A lot of the card games have similar terms, mechanics, etc. I was pretty confident on picking up a deck and just play with knowing that I may only need some training wheels in a game or two.

However, for someone that it is their 1st card game, please have patience on teaching them. It will take many more games to really get the hang of it.

Ultimately, as you learn how to play and improve, you’ll become confident in yourself with more than just a single deck. You’ll be more confident in picking up a new deck to play for either fun or competitively. I’ll discuss later how this can be achieved.

With A Deck

Most people start with playing with a single deck in any card game. They learn how to play the deck and get better at it. They simply build self confidence in the realm of playing that deck. If they start playing with another deck, they may not be confident at all in playing that new deck. Unless, they have developed some level of self confidence as a player.

I will say this, I have seen many players play with one deck or clan in Vanguard for a long time. If they are reluctant in trying a completely new type of deck or clan, sometimes they don’t feel COMFORTABLE in not being good/confident in playing something new. That’s fine in playing causal games, but if you plan to play at a higher level and top events, you need to COME OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE and learn as many different decks as possible at your pace.

The Levels of Self Confidence

Let’s break it down as if you were to start as a newbie. Here are some levels or points in your card game career that you’ll come across. Some of them don’t have a strict order of when you’ll come across.

Learning the game as a newbie

Learning a new deck

Learning match-ups

Trusting yourself in your plays in matches

Trusting yourself in card choices

Trusting yourself in being emotional stable during critical times

Believing in yourself that you can win events

Learning from your failures in games and tournaments of competitive play

Develop the expectation to win

Results

Learning the Game as a Newbie

We all at one point started playing as a complete newbie to card games. This is an exciting experience since it’s something completely new and foreign. You have to learn game mechanics, turn phases, terms, effects, zones, etc. It’s basically where you have your training wheels the longest until you can learn the flow of the game and can even teach someone else as well.

In this early stage, there really isn’t any confidence at all in playing the game well or even with a deck yet. So I wouldn’t recommend throwing someone into an event if they haven’t played one game at all. That’s just throwing them into the fires.

Learning a New Deck

Now this can be your very first deck ever or perhaps a new deck that you’ve decided to pick up and play for casual or competitive play. A lot of decks vary in their unique play styles or flows. For example, if you’re used to playing a fast aggro deck then it’s going to be a complete different experience playing a slow grindy deck.

In this stage, once you have a good number of games (that varies from player to player), you then start developing familiarity with the deck itself and feel a bit confident in putting up a good game or even winning one.

Learning Match-ups

I will emphasize in this section that it is one of the most key things that a player must learn and consistently practice because it will help them achieve winning events. Many times it is a HUGE determination factor that will decide for you to even win a small locals event and to even getting into Top 8 in a bigger event.

As you practice playing against different decks, you’ll realize your strategy may differ slightly or greatly depending on the match-up. Where as you played a certain way initially, it may not be the best way to face another opposing deck.

It’s in this stage you start developing different game plans for the deck you’re playing with. It’ll expand your mind on how your deck can still win against other decks.

It can be rough with bad match-ups, especially at first. So it’s important to actually practice against them and try different game plans to see how you can improve your chances of winning. A great example is Aqua Force versus Kagero. Generally, Aqua Force has a very tough match-up with Kagero but if you practice the match-up enough times, you’ll realize you can still win. With that practice your confidence in playing against a specific match-up is increased drastically, especially with a solid game plan.

A bonus tip, what has helped me in learning match-ups a lot better and faster is to actually play with the opposing deck against your main deck. You learn how it is on the other side. Every deck has its weaknesses and strengths and they become even more clearer if you actually put yourself in the driver’s seat of those decks. For example, I mainly played with Aqua Force and Granblue for big events, so I purposely got 2 Link Joker decks (Messiah and Chaos) to play against in real life. I learned a lot about Link Joker’s strengths and weaknesses just by playing with them in general and against the main decks I planned to play at a big event. You can borrow opposing decks from friends, or print out proxies, or play online, etc. It doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg to do this ha.

Trusting Yourself in Your Plays in Matches

Trusting yourself is another KEY thing a player must have in order to achieve great victories. So all the following trust sections are VITAL and are PERSONAL. That’s right, PERSONAL!

You must trust yourself in doing what you believe is the right play during your turns and sometimes even during your opponent’s turn. It’s important to practice enough times to the point it becomes MUSCLE MEMORY on the plays you do in all of your matches.

You CANNOT be second guessing yourself in an event. For a lot of reasons it puts you in a disadvantage.

You take too long which gives your opponent time to formulate a solid play against you

Time in the round is lost

You give into stress and do the worst play ever

You neglect important slight factors such as resources like soul, counterblasts, etc

You’re more focused on you rather than on your opponent

If you’re not focused on your opponent, they may cheat and you won’t even notice

You neglect to remember what cards your opponent has in their hand via drive checks, searches, etc.

Once you have your plays and game plan as muscle memory, you can then truly focus on staying on the game plan. You can be more observant of your opponent’s situation which can show when to win that turn or to delay the victory for next turn. At this point, you’ve become very confident in your plays.

Trusting Yourself in Your Card Choices

Deck building is very important in any card game. It ranges from literally building a deck from scratch or just making minor tweaks from a previous winning deck list. I’ll break it down into two parts.

The first and hardest part is building a deck from scratch with access to all of the card pool. When you put a deck together, what’s your expectation on it? Is it consistent enough, relevant, etc? This is a skill that will have to develop over time and effort. But once you’ve gotten enough experience with building a deck from scratch and having good results, you’ll start trusting your judgement on the massive card choices you’ve made for it. Good examples in the past are decks like Ripples, 7Runner, Wiseman Loop, etc. These are decks, that literally one person or even a group of players, created from scratch that most players would have not of thought of.

Now the second part is where most players do and only still a handful of them master. It’s where you only really do some minor tweaks from a previous winning deck list. You take a previous winning deck list (net decking), and change some cards out to update it to the current format, your meta game in the area, or make improvements. This has tremendous value in mastering because it SAVES YOU TIME! You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel.

You have to play lots of games with different opposing decks to gain confidence in your card choices in general. Even then sometimes your choices CAN BE RADICAL compared to the average players and that’s okay. You have to trust in yourself that your card choices are correct in obtaining YOUR achievement in whatever game event.

You can work on both aspects so you can build your confidence and self trust in your card choices. If you plan to be a consistent topper from event to event, I highly suggest mastering on tweaking previous winning decks primarily because they can save you time and help build up the self confidence in card choices in general quicker. You essentially learn from doing great small card choices to making great card choices as a whole deck.

A disclaimer, net decking is not necessarily bad nor original. Again, it does saves you time because others have done the enormous amount of play testing. But you still have to take the time to learn the deck list and assess if it does need some tweaking or a complete build up from ground zero. To be honest, it gives you something to work with in the beginning and it’s already in a good place to start. I believe starting in a good place is much easier to improve on. HOWEVER, most players don’t really take the time to learn the deck or assess it as well. That’s where those players just net deck and don’t do well and blame the deck for them losing. And then they move onto net decking another deck, which is a vicious cycle.

Trusting Yourself in Being Emotionally Stable During Critical Times

This topic I believe is OVERLOOKED by MANY players, whether they are casual or competitive players. You have to develop emotional stability during critical times in events and even just playing for fun. Do you trust yourself that you won’t lose your cool when things don’t go your way? If you’re immature, you’ll do things like yell, be mean, complain, be a sore loser, etc.

You have to realize in order to trust yourself in keeping your cool during a big event or even playing with friends, you have to be mature about all the situations that don’t go in your favor and learn from them. You have to be honest with yourself and start actually trying in improving yourself as a person. Nobody wants to be around somebody that is immature and/or emotionally unstable, so work on it.

How do I work on it? First, you have to realize you won’t win every game and you will mess up from time to time. You will fail your way to success. Learn from your mistakes, losses, failures, etc. Be the bigger person in the room. Is it really worth throwing a fit around people over a card game? No it’s not, I’ll tell you that right now.

People love being around people that are emotionally stable, because they’re chilled and humble people. In fact, they’re predictable in a positive way. Where as someone that is emotionally unstable, they’re unpredictable on when they will snap. You cannot count on them to win for themselves OR WORSE as a team player! It’s very stressful and can make for bad experiences for other players as well.

Competitively, you have to think about when you’re faced with these scenarios:

Final round to determine Top 8 and multiple people are watching your every move and mistakes

Time of the round has been called

When the odds seem really slim

When your opponent is being immature against you

Executing a complex turn, complex interaction, or a judge ruling

Once you’ve become emotionally stable in critical times and in general, you will trust yourself as being a calm, cool collected, great player. Once achieved, you become very self confident as a person as keeping their cool when things don’t go your way.

Disclaimer, I noticed at most events the average age that plays card games are people in their 20s. I don’t understand how you can be 20-something years old and not be mature. Literally most people have the ability to go to the army, buy a house, raise a family, are going to college, owning a business, etc. Yes life is NOT easy, but still it’s not an excuse to still act like child if you make your own money and have your own driver’s license…..

Sorry for the disclaimer, I hope that puts some perspective to some people that need it.

Believing in Yourself That You Can Win Events

Simple as it sounds, you must believe in yourself that you can win in order to really win a game or an event. How can you even be confident if you don’t believe in yourself? Let me give you some counter examples.

There have been players that want to win, but don’t believe in themselves wholly. For example, these are players that tend to say things like, “Oh I never get 1st place”, “I always scrub out”, “I’m bad at this game”, “I always get luck sacked”, etc. I’m sure you’re already thinking of people that you’ve encountered that have said these phrases. And I’m sure you would also agree they tend to not perform well at events nor have a great attitude when they’re playing.

There’s a psychological reason, it’s because they’re programming their subconscious that they don’t believe they can actually win events. They’re called affirmations. Affirmations are phrases that you repeatedly tell yourself over time that will seep into your subconscious. Resulting in programming your thoughts of doubt, fear, disbelief, etc. if they are negative.

Positive affirmations (or positive self talk) goes a long way in the long term. They may seem insignificant but really think about it. Have you ever noticed that when you tell yourself, “Everything is going to be okay”, “I can do this”, “I’m good enough”, “I can win”, etc; you actually feel better afterwards? Sometimes you see immediate benefits from saying positive phrases to yourself too.

How can you be confident in something that you don’t believe in? So in order to build belief you first must make sure to eliminate negative self talk and also not listening to others giving you negative talk. If you listen to the negativity from your “friends” and believe them, how can you believe in yourself? Your self esteem goes on the low. Self esteem is how you view yourself, NOT how others view you.

As you practice enough games and at events over time AND are intentionally learning from your experiences, then you’ll start developing the belief that you can WIN BIG! Just be wary of your self talk and what others say about you. That can either increase your belief or decrease it.

Bonus tip, for others to believe in you that you can win big events, you MUST believe in yourself FIRST. When you believe in yourself enough and are doing the actions that show that belief, THEN other people will start believing in you and even support you. There are a few exceptions where some people just give you hard time in general. Negative people are just insecure people putting their insecurities on you.

Learning From Your Failures in Games and Tournaments of Competitive Play

This is more for the competitive scene. You’re going to local tournaments, regional tournaments, qualifiers, etc. and you’re gaining experience. How much are you really learning from each game that you play? Are you intentionally looking to improve or learning at least one thing from each game?

To speed up your improvement and confidence as a player, you must be intentional in learning from your games, mistakes, failures, victories, etc. There’s a saying, “Practice makes perfect” but if you can, “Perfect practice makes perfect” is better. What does perfect practice even mean? Perfect practice can be actually practicing in areas you need to improve. That can range from dealing with certain match-ups, managing resources, playing against players that are equivalent or better than you, etc.

When you become intentional in learning and improving in the areas you need to improve on or even refine, you’ll see faster growth in yourself. You feel more confident sooner too, because you’ve done the practicing for it.

Always be open to learning new things from playing and from players with the results you want. You don’t know everything and never will. The things you’ll learn over time will literally change your future. If you’re intentional, it’ll change faster.

Personally I’ve gone through a mind barrier before, I always came close to making the Top Cut. It was frustrating, I did believe in myself and expected to achieve my goal of making Top Cut, but it wasn’t happening. I just had to keep going until I actually achieved my goal. If you want it bad enough and you still work on it, you will have a breakthrough. That’s with anything in life, it’s a success principle. You got this, keep going. A quote I love reminding myself is, “I will persist, until I succeed!”

Develop the Expectation to Win

You don’t get what you want, you get what you expect. So it’s important to develop an expectation to win.

Expecting to winning a game, event, or achieving a certain goal is not being arrogant. Arrogance comes with the sense of being egotistic or having the mindset of seeing others inferior than you. This is something to stay AWAY from. Be a humble person.

To develop the expectation that you will win comes from you practicing, playing in events, preparing, etc. You’ve done the training to prepare for the event, so you know it in your HEART where you are in skill level and preparedness. Depending on the level of expectation, it will take time as well to develop it. You can go from expecting to win at a local tournament to win at a regional tournament.

To win big at a regional level tournament, it takes a lot of preparation for it. Study and learn from players that have the results you want. If you want it bad enough, you’ll do what you have to do in order to achieve that goal.

Results

You finally achieve a level of success that you’ve worked for. Now what? What does it mean in terms of self confidence? Was it you as a player or the deck you piloted with?

There’s a key difference in the results that you achieve. The difference lies in if you were only able to achieve it once OR were you able to consistently achieve the same level? For example, did you only make Top 8 once in two years? Or almost every event you participated, you’ve made Top 8 fairly consistently?

Why does topping consistently matter? It matters because you want to maintain your self confidence. If you achieve Top 8 once, that’s the only time you’ll feel really confident in yourself. But if you can’t do it again, your confidence will take a hit. The exception is when you are participating in tournaments with better players than you and they outplay you. That’s an excellent learning opportunity.

There are players that once they finally achieve a big goal, they stop on what they were doing to get there. After a while, they’ll become rusty or not as competent in playing. You must keep doing what you did to get there in order to stay there.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Which is a bad or a good thing. For example, if you achieve Top 8 for the first time, then keep doing what you were doing in order to do it again. Another helpful quote to remember, “Persistence will help you get it. Consistency will have you keep it.”

Conclusion

It may seem like a lot on building self confidence, but over time you’ll realize it’s straightforward and simple. My goal for this article is to help other players in making the small or big adjustments needed to go to the next level.

I highly encourage on associating with players that have the results that you want and are WILLING to help you on your journey. Honestly, I appreciate the fact that I met and made friends with David Adipratama (a world class player and on Wirab Cardfight Consulting). I was struggling to overcome a mental barrier that I was facing. His help and advice, helped me finally breakthrough and continue to improve further. Always appreciate the people that actually help you and let them know. And give a shout out to them on social media or in public! Good luck on your endeavors and enjoy the journey my amigos!