Tilting and you in the digital age of MTG

Many of us have been there; there are a variety of reasons why people tilt. It could be a string of bad draws, or a string of opponents who just seem to be drawing everything they need exactly when they need it. We each have our limit as to how much frustration our psyche can handle before something gives and when that limit is reached, we tilt.

Tilting refers to the loss of mental composure while under stress, causing the individual to make suboptimal decisions that he or she would not have made otherwise. In a game of MTG, a bad or embarrassing play can cause tilting, leading the player to make even more bad plays. Tilting can also be caused by forces beyond a player’s control, such as having to mulligan to oblivion in game 1. After sideboarding and drawing another one-lander, the player tilts, keeping the hand when the correct play should have still been to take a mulligan.

Handling tilt, then and now

Many articles have delved into how to handle tilt in MTG. Here are some of them:

https://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=11824

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/walking-planes-tilt-2014-05-30

It is worth noting that whereas I have been playing MTG “competitively” since 2013 and have had my fair share of bad beats, missed win-and-ins and so forth, I have never felt the urge to read about tilting until I had to play exclusively online. I moved to another country to study and was living in a dorm on campus. I did not have the time (or means) to go about checking the local MTG scene and so I could only play MTG through Magic Online (MTGO). During that year, all I did was study and play MTGO. I did do moderately well, cashing out tix regularly and qualifying for the MOCS playoffs once. Yet it was also during this same period when I had experienced the most tilting throughout my years of playing. The experience was certainly different and can be quite unpleasant. I would lose a league and feel compelled to go again to make up for it, only to go 2-3 again. Then I would feel like I wasted hours of my time for nothing.

It was during one of these moments when I decided to take a step back and think about why MTGO was so tilting. So I started reading and many of the things I read made quite good sense. For example, one reason is that we play many more games online than we ever did on paper. If you had a bad FNM, at worst you did 0-4. If you had a day of bad league runs, it could be as bad as 0-20. However, one thing I read that really hit the nail on the head talked about the importance of social interaction. On paper, you played face-to-face, typically with people you actually know and play with regularly. So the losses do not sting as much. More importantly, even in big tournaments where you are paired against total strangers, you (or at least I) typically play at those events with my teammates and friends. So, even after a bad beat, I have someone to tell it to and somehow, that makes the bad beat not as bad. Sometimes we would all be out of contention by the 4^th round, and then we’d just pack it in and go grab some dinner somewhere. Other times there would be one of us who is running hot, and so the rest of us would still keep playing rounds just to have something to do while rooting for our last man standing. There is probably a more technical, psychological explanation for all of this but basically, I think it is these social elements which are absent from MTGO or MTGA that make people more susceptible to tilt in those platforms than on paper.

So what now?

I think the free-to-play (FTP) nature of MTGA makes it a platform that is less tilting. There is little to nothing at stake in most games that people play on MTGA (unlike in MTGO where there is no free gold and each constructed league costs $10 to enter). Nonetheless, I see people tilting all the time. I think every post about broken shufflers or biased matchmakers or even the coin-toss algorithm are telltale signs of people tilting or having tilted. People need to vent out their frustrations and MTGA Facebook groups or forums is typically a convenient avenue for this. However, the response to their expressions of tilt vary widely, from empathy to indifference, to downright ridicule. In many cases, it is also difficult to blame the people responding, as the way that the message is expressed can easily be misconstrued as a person peddling conspiracy theories or arrogantly compensating for a lack of competence in the game rather than one of plain frustration from a bad beat and a wanting to share and get it off one’s chest. I think that if the message is clearly understood as the latter, there would be far fewer condescending remarks and far more messages of support and understanding. Both the person sending the message and the person reading it have a part to play in this, and I think by considering the succeeding suggestions, we may all come out of this with a better appreciation of each other’s roles in helping one another with those tilt moments.

Express frustration without antagonizing everyone

There’s a difference between “Man, I’m just so unlucky today it feels so bad” and “Man, the shuffler is so broken! WotC fix it!” Each of these statements is expressing frustration, but the latter is far less likely to get any sympathy. When you say the shuffler is broken, or make any other rant about the game being unfair to you, it triggers other people in part because it is like you’re saying that the only reason they’re winning (and you’re losing) is that the game somehow favors them over you. It does not. There is nothing wrong with the shuffler, or the matchmaker, etc. etc. Sometimes, we cannot help it; confirmation bias is a thing, after all, but pushing will only make things worse. When you start with “Man, the shuffler is so broken! WotC fix it!” and are met with ridicule or condescension, you can still redeem yourself with a simple “My bad, I was just tilting.” There is no shame in that because guess what, everyone tilts eventually.

Put yourself in the other person’s shoes

At an RPTQ many years ago, I was on Splinter Twin and during one of the rounds lost to a guy playing affinity who was dressed in what looked to me like a Jace costume. The loss stung a bit because I liked this matchup and just felt outdrawn. I did ok at the event but failed to make top 8 from my tie breaks (still won a top-16 playmat and half a box). However, “Jace” did get to the top 8. I watched him play the top 8 match for a spot on the Pro Tour (everyone in the top 4 gets in) and I felt my heart sink when he had to mulligan several times in game 3. I was not rooting for him or the other guy, I was just watching, but something about seeing a person have no choice but toss away several unplayable hands got to me. I think most of us placed in that same situation would feel the same thing. We naturally empathize with people getting bad draws because we know that is just a sad way to lose a game of Magic. That’s the same empathy that we should have for people who go to FB groups or MTG subreddits with rants about bad hands. This does not make their complaints about the shuffler right, but having that empathy will keep us from immediately responding with a condescending “git gud” or some equivalent. Maybe, if we instead respond with some kind words of understanding while respectfully disagreeing with their view that “the shuffler is broken,” the conversation will not devolve to a flame fest and instead get to the point where we all become a bit more thankful about being in this virtual social circle together.

May the shuffler be with you.