I believe that this year, I have managed to improve my Magic-playing a bit (despite the abundance of embarassing mistakes).I also believe I’m slightly better at Limited than I am at Constructed. TO back up these beliefs, I could point to my DCI ratings. But as a programmer who loves stats, I compiled additional stats for my own pleasure: My Playing Stats.
A bit of background: I’ve been playing Magic on and off since Revised, but only gotten into the tournament scene seriously in 2006. I’ve played in a few Limited tourneys before that, but I guess I took them with a different DCI number as they don’t reflect on my ratings history. In particular I remember placing 2nd at a Team Sealed event at BCI Makati back during the Invasion block era. And I’m pretty sure I went 4-0 at an Onslaught prerelease, as I have the shirt to prove it.
As can be seen in the stats page though, this was the year I started taking it seriously. I devoted more time to Magic, studying my own technical play for faults and missteps, struggling to learn from every mistake. I read more articles online and tried to practice on Magic Online more to improve my game. I joined more tournaments (31 this year versus 18 the previous year), and got 9 top 8’s this year as opposed to 2 last year. (Granted, some of those were for Prereleases :p) I managed a GPT top 8 and a PTQ top 8 this year, my first ones ever!
Still, I have a long way to go towards improving. I was disappointed to find out my match win percentage was under 60% (although I have no idea how much higher the match win percentage of top players would be.) For next year I hope I can push that win percentage even more, make fewer misplays and get more PTQ top 8s (although I doubt I will be able to play in the extended season… maybe Block Constructed). My goal is to stabilize my rating in the top 75 of the Philippines so that I can play in Nationals without having to go through those horrendous qualifiers.
Wish me luck 😀
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