Emotional Awareness and Cognitive Biases in Magic the Gathering

Hello all, Daniel/GulDukat here. I wrote the following piece to give a sample of the writing for my deck guides and an insight into my approach to MTG for people interested in my coaching. (dm me on twitter for both)

Let’s begin with emotions

1) Tilt (Anger)

Last year I was watching a DOTA2 Stream, the streamer made a mistake and got very frustrated, he began talking about how the game was in such a poor state now and he wasn’t sure if it was recoverable, the reasoning for his plays deteriorated and his position in the game further sunk.

It struck me that if he was playing reasonably, he would have been in a strong position, but his inability to focus after tilting sealed his doom. It had never been so clear to me before, the destructive nature of tilting, how quickly it can deteriorate one’s abilities to perform and lead to instant death.

I had noticed that happen in myself quite a lot, that generally me being frustrated in an event had led to significantly subpar performance.

A few weeks after watching that stream I was playing in a Manatraders event, a Grixis Midrange mirror vs my friend Stefan in standard. Slightly distracted by the excitement of being paired vs a friend, I felt I had performed poorly and lost. After the game my mood had taken a big turn for the worse, A 1–0 or 2–0 start into losing like this in such a high stakes event. But as I was waiting for the next round I noticed my emotional state, and being aware of the destructive path/cycle of tilting, I knew I had to do something, to try and get my brain in a good mood again I put on Louis Armstrong and thought of Kittens skipping in green fields.

I turned myself around, I won every round in the swiss and made it to the finals, qualifying for the manatraders finals via that. Perhaps one of my best results in 2022.

I will follow up on this more in the 3rd section.

2) Diligence (Joy)

In magic you have to weigh a lot of factors. Do I play this land or that? Do I cast my better spell or my weaker one first, do I attack or block etc.

When you are in a bad mood, it is easy to rush through these choices, “autopilot”, use heuristics or so on. You may be impatient, you may just want to get the game over with, whatever it is it will be hard to sit down and accurately weigh the pros and cons of your options.

Losing a game of magic can happen on a razor thin edge, all gamers know the feeling of making a very small mistake, realizing it, then moments later instantly losing from it. Only in being diligent in weighing your options can you prevent this, that diligence goes such a long way in competition.

When you are in a good mood, (in my experience) it is very easy to have the diligence to go through the motions. But individuals aren’t always in a good mood, and negative events can sour your mood, leading to a cycle of doom/self destruction.

My view is a bit more tame, I think if you are reasonable overall you will do well so don’t fret too much if you can’t meet Al Pacino seems a bit intense to you but it’s a good reminder on the importance of details.

3) Emotions/Cognitive Biases

Emotions inform our perception of the world and give us intuitions, our intuitions are powerful, but can also deceive us via cognitive biases, unchecked which can lead to large fallibilities in reasoning.

Shame and pride inform our perception of ourselves, and can be become quite powerful voices when we are performing in high stakes situations, generally to unhelpful ends.

One exercise for dealing those voices is to imagine shedding your emotions and focusing as much as possible on the performance, zooming out, looking at things in the 3rd person, unpersonal. Perceive the facts and what actions make sense to take, as opposed to how do I win, I really want to win, or how do I not lose, I really don’t want to lose. Instead try and think : what are my options, and which ones seem best.

When striving to perform as best as you can, it’s important to consider cognitive biases and the emotions that inform them.

I constantly see people (including myself) make illogical decisions as their emotions take control and they forgot to stop and check in on their emotional and mental state.

4) Related reading/Things to think about.

Recently I was reading an interview with a successful game theorist and he made some points about Loss Aversion.

“Playing this game for me is always about winning. I can feel that my opponents are worse and more conservative than me. Still, many people are afraid of losing.

Let me give you the most straightforward example: Why should I buy insurance when playing poker? I have never bought insurance since playing poker. Buying insurance is -EV. This is one of the simplest truths, but why do so many people still do it? Someone has experimented and found that human nature is afraid of sudden bad news when they can make stable money, then they will buy insurance. And conservative people’s attitudes toward money, attitudes toward mathematics, and perceives of EV all have some problems.” — Aaron Zang

An interesting example of a cognitive bias.

I quite liked this tweet from Justin Bonomo one of the most sucesful poker players of all time on what drives us, it’s always important to remember why we are doing what we are doing and what motivates us, our perspective greatly inform our performance and perception.