FF Battle Tested

It’s been a little over a year since @GoricaLoL started playing TCGs, so I thought it’d be cool to share his improvement arc from an “inside” perspective. Back in February, after watching Alanzq win RQ Bologna, Alex got deep in thought, so I asked what was up. He took a long time to respond, but finally, he said he was confident he could win a regional. I’m not sure why, but intuitively it felt true to me too. Maybe it resonated with me, since I’ve felt similarly before playing League competitively. But I’ve also struggled with not “realizing” that potential in time, and I didn’t want that to happen to him. So I told him we needed to start setting specific goals to make it happen. The path was pretty rocky… At RQ Vegas, Alex didn’t even make top 64 despite feeling very strong on Ezreal. He practiced a lot online, but had issues going to time in person, so we decided he needed to take in-person practice much more seriously. For a while, we had scheduled “dates” to play so we could spend time together and meet his goals. We focused on dexterity, speed, and pace of play, since he got burnt on time A LOT at RQ Vegas. At RQ Atlanta, he got in his head and overcooked Teemo, fixating on making a “bad deck good” instead of “a bad deck as good as it can be.” He swears it wasn’t bad, but realistically, he didn’t have enough reps to pilot it in time. After not even Day 2ing, we had another deep talk. He felt like he was at a crossroads: play meta and seriously try to win a regional, or commit to metal hunting for EV. But I kept revisiting that “I can win an RQ” moment because of how powerful and aligned it felt, so I pushed him to go for a RQ win. We made a rule that he’d only play a deck if he genuinely thought he could win a RQ with it. He swapped to Diana in Set 3 and played pretty well in testing, but struggled at his RQs. I think he was putting a ton of pressure on himself, especially since Diana was considered BDIF. He felt like he had no reason to lose except his own lack of skill. I often caught him doing results-based analysis after losses, blaming himself even when he’d played correctly based on the information he had. Eventually he’d accept it was fine, but still be unsettled. By the end of Set 3, he seemed pretty burnt out. He was still putting a lot of effort in, but something was wrong. It was hard to tell what though. When Akali came out, we weren’t sure it could actually win a RQ. The teased cards looked pretty mid, and Alex kept praying Akali would be good, which I found really funny. But in early testing, he told me she was a lot better than he thought and was down to lock her in. I was so happy, so I forced him to play Riftbound as much as I could. After work every day, I’d push him to test or ask if there were tournaments he should play that weekend. I can only recall 2 or 3 times when he thought resting would be better. Seeing him like this reminded me of when he was building Teemo for RQ Houston. He was constantly thinking about the game again, testing ideas, changing things, and trusting his own understanding. Out of my own anxiety for him, I’d link him every list I saw on X, and most of the time his reaction was “that list looks like some ass” or “they don’t know how to build her”. I think that’s what was missing in Set 3. Since he considered Diana “solved”, there wasn’t much of himself in it, but with Akali, he had complete ownership. He wasn’t playing just to prove he could win a regional, but because he strongly believed in his own ideas about the deck. His mental form was immaculate; once he stopped putting so much pressure on himself, he played the best Riftbound I’ve seen him play. Our goal for this event was top 8, so it’s crazy to me that he won it all. I still haven’t fully processed it yet tbh 🥲 Watching him become more of what I knew he could be keeps making me think of this line: “Perhaps the best we can do for those we love is to make them more.” Congrats again, Alex 🥺❤️