What's up, Wizards? It's time for Rule Zero, the show that helps you prepare for the best game of Commander. I'm Sean. It is our hope that through our combined 20 to 30 plus years experience of playing EDH and cultivating a great play group, tons of great decks, and also trying a lot of outside the box variants and homebrew rules, that we can pass that golden knowledge on to you. Today, we have a topic that's near and dear to my heart as a licensed therapist. Fighting, We all have experienced tilts. We all have experienced what some may call salt and how do we best that? Where does it come from? Well, we're going to go in depth talking about it today. Unfortunately for this episode, I had to fight my own tilt and I only thought it was appropriate. You see, uh, gamers, haunt owner, Sharla and I had sat down, had a great conversation about this very topic. I went several days thinking that was in the bag. I can't wait to edit that show. And lo and behold, as I realized in about 30 or 40 minutes of scrambling, squad cast has an option called backstage and stage. And unfortunately, one of us was on the backstage, which means that that app does not record that person. They're allowed to talk, allowed to hang out. but it doesn't record a track for their voice. So I had to fight my own strong dose of tilt that night. And what do you do when you have no other options? I think you just have to breathe a little bit, muster up some courage and move on. So here we are. I'm going to run the episode. On my own today. I think it's still going to be great. As I said, I am a therapist, so I hope that soon we will be getting some more conversational style on these episodes instead of just me kind of yammering on, but please bear with us as I am trying to learn new skills, things that I haven't done before. In the recording of the show, RC Dallas, or how I learned to stop thinking and smash my hands into the table. So back in the distant past of June, dream hack, Dallas, a event was happening and there was a regional championship or RC that occurred. And on day three of that event, two players sit down for a match, both on the bubble of qualifying for the pro tour, the magical majestic entity that we Any competitive player searches for, chases. They're both at x and 3, meaning they have three losses each. One of them is new standout Nicole Tipple, who fell just shy of top 8ing PT Outlaws of Thunder Junction just the previous week or two. The other guy is, well, I don't know his real name, but we'll call him by his Twitter username. Because he's put it out there himself. He's been very transparent with his own feelings on the matter. His name is Stanley 2099. So the players come to a point in the game that feels unwinnable for Nicole tipple. She concedes after looking at the top of the deck, offering this as a possible solution before she actually does so. Stanley in his own words says, He's uncertain as to what he responded with exactly, but it was something to the effect of a judge sees this occurring. And as the game is wrapping up, Stanley has it in his mind. Oh my God. Oh my God. I have made it to the pro tour. I can finally get there. The judge sits down. And gives a game loss to both players as they've committed a IDW or improperly determining a winner, the looking at the top of the deck, the, the proposition of like, can I look at the top of the deck? And if so, I'll concede is not allowed at that level of magic. You can't determine magic. by anything other than playing the game. And that's very specifically done to protect wizards from the thing they are most terrified of being seen as a game of gambling. It's also there because at that level, you're really supposed to be on the ball. Now this went through the Twitter discourse. Many people were on one side or the other, as far as should the judge have made that decision. And we're not here to litigate that because what happens is Stanley tilts hard and from his own description, which he has put in a Google doc for everyone to see I've left the link in the show notes for you to read the entire thing if you'd like to He is not even kind of present mentally at this point rather thinking about his pro tour dreams being crushed the unfairness of the situation Several judges sit down over the course of the next 15 minutes or so. And Stanley is not in a position anymore mentally where he can take accountability for the mistake that caused this. He is instead so lost feeling that his dreams have been destroyed. And then he slams his hands into the table. He's asked to leave the event and escorted out the ego magic players. You may have heard of like different terms, egocentric, egotistical, egomaniacal ego is the Latin word for I. It comes into the pop lexicon with noted superstar and closeted thumbsucker Sigmund Freud in 1899 from his book The Interpretation of Dreams. In his psychoanalytic theory, the ego is part of the triumvirate that governs over every human. It is the shield that suffers slings and arrows, and it is concerned with the advancement and survival of the person. So how does this affect Stanley 2099? We can see that his pro tour Dreams, his His feeling that everything he has worked for is coming to a crashing halt Reduces his ability to think clearly in the moment and instead he reacts as if his advancement and survival is at risk And he slams his fist into the table Unsure of honestly even probably what to do in that moment because he's so lost in the sauce so to speak Now this is something that we all go through. When the ego is threatened, it typically responds in one of three ways. Fight, flight, or freeze. I'm sure you've heard these terms before. We're all super educated on psychology these days, so this is pretty basic stuff. But if not, No need to feel bad. Fight. Obviously, we're fighting the tiger that's coming after us. Flight. We're running from the tiger that's coming after us. Freeze. We're fainting like a goat and pretending to already be dead, which is something that's honestly recommended when you come up against a grizzly bear on a trail. You should Lay down on your stomach, removing access to your soft parts, cover your head with your arms, and hope that the grizzly bear thinks that you're a non delicious, old rotten corpse, and not an actual living delicious berry of a human being. The Hijacking Imagine for a second, if you will, people at your local game shop going through tilt. Or maybe they're just really salty, and they start to get aggressive towards others. Or they become silent and you can tell they're kind of brooding, looking at their hand, kind of like one step away from maybe crushing those cards in their hand. Or perhaps they just asked to leave. Like they're like packing up the cards. I am getting the heck out of here. Why does that happen? Well, I like to call this the hijacking and it's not just me. This is just psychology. Let's talk about what is happening inside of that big old meat thing inside of our skulls. One. Sensory information is received through the thalamus. Thalamus is this little part of the brain that's like dead center. Um, the thalamus then acts like a traffic controller and under normal circumstances routes the information to the cortex. So if somebody's comboing off, we're taking in the information, we're trying to relay that information to the cortex, which is all the stuff around the front and the top of the brain. Cortex put things together. It makes sense of information. It learns how to respond. If we know that this particular spell that's on the stack is dangerous to our game plan, then we're going to respond accordingly and counter it. Or we're going to try and instant speed, remove some of their combo piece that's on the table, or we'll just sigh deeply and be like, why am I here right now? And just accept this wave of whatever happens. The fourth component, however. Is when we are hyper invested in that game. We've been having a really difficult time trying to understand all the information that's on the table. We had an expectation perhaps that we were going to win on the following turn. Then that's when this fight, flight, or freeze kicks in this feeling that our advancement and our safety is at risk. And this doesn't mean that a bear is coming at us, but it, the brain confusing the two, it confuses simple events, simple surprises, simple things with. Actual harm. So the amygdala takes some of the sensory information the brain, um, is receiving. And instead of going to the cortex, going to the place where things are made sense of, and kind of laid out on the table, and then we pick the best decision. The amygdala hijacks that information because what. You should know from evolution is that when that tiger comes after you, if you stop and you pause to think about that tiger, you will be dead. So this is like a natural evolution piece that happens. The amygdala will hijack the brain and says, I'm in control now. I'm the one who's going to get us out of this. And it reacts based on instinct, stored information. It pumps chemicals through the brain that allow you to respond in ways that are perhaps superhuman. Sometimes those moments when you hear about people lifting a car off of a person or, you know, surviving a 25 foot fall or any kind of like feet of superhuman strength often comes from this place of fight, flight, or freeze, because if we don't survive it, we don't survive. Well, that's it. And so the body does everything it can in those moments. The problem is there's no tiger in the magic shop that I know of, unless it's on a card. And if it is, that means I'm playing it. So why am I so afraid of it? I love cats. The way that we can start to avoid this emotional hijacking, this amygdala's hijacking of the cortex is through a few things. And I'm going to share those with you now, creating a fearless, magical inventory. Let us travel back to the magical time of 2007. Sam Stoddard, a now former pro player, was in a slump. He'd had some success getting to the pro circuit at that point. He felt like he had plateaued, however. He'd also noted his salt levels were rising off of the charts. As he states it, and I paraphrase, he was a big fish in a small pond, enjoyed that feeling, but started to buy in to his expertise as being deserved, not earned. And he stopped trying to better himself, stopped being humble enough to be introspective. In 2007, Sam wrote The Fearless Magical Inventory, a famous article that was later referenced by another pro player, Patrick Chapin, in his book Next Level Magic. The idea that we need to tackle our own flaws rather than pushing those things or projecting those things out onto others was key to Sam taking back His game, and in some ways, his life and his enjoyment of the game. So, one of the key ways that we can fight Tilt is by doing a magical inventory of ourselves. Before we ever even walk into the shop, no one knows you better than you. The question is, do you have the courage to say out loud, I might have some flaws. Sam goes through 31 different things in his article about his own game, about his own mental state, and he just lays them bare on the table for everyone to read. Things as simple as, I keep hands that are risky solely based on the fact that I won the first game, and I can quote, afford to lose one. He states, I do not pay enough attention to my opponent. If they want to cheat, they could probably get away with it. I just assume that they are being honest. And at this time in Magic, perhaps in all times in Magic, this was a bigger concern for sure. He says, I tap my mana wrong and tell myself it's not a big deal. So, analyze, what are the things and the situations that you found yourself most frustrated in in a magic card shop. Did it have to do with not understanding what particular cards were and I misplayed into a card thinking it was something other than what it was? Well, in that case, maybe I really do need to slow down and read cards more. Any consequences be damned. It's okay. It's a casual game. Do I perhaps not count enough, not do enough math. And then I do an all out flunge on the table and I come up short. If these things sort of frustrate you or tilt you, these are things that you can work on, but only if you acknowledge that they exist before you ever even get to the table. Because when those situations start to come up in the game, if you've already kind of diagnosed the problem and then started to focus in on it and work on it, then that will give you an extra moment In that game to be like, I can feel this situation coming on. I recognize the pattern in this case, the cortex is working. It's doing its job. And the amygdala never gets a chance to hijack and take everything over and kind of flip the table. So to speak deck building to prevent tilt. Now, in the previous section, we talked about a fearless magical inventory and we're taking stock, we're trying to be proactive about making some changes that'll help us not tilt off any little thing that goes on in a game of magic. One of the ways that this will help us is if we can recognize there are certain deck archetypes or certain situations in a game of magic, really present us with triggers for being upset or frustrated, such as personally. I dislike playing against Simic, as if you couldn't tell based on my previous episode, the Nadu paradox, the idea of a person taking a ton of game actions and not really winning either through a paradox engine or a Nadu or something like that just gets me lost in the sauce. So one of the things that I have done to sort of prevent that as a deck builder in competitive settings, I lean towards stacks. I'm going to try and see if I can stacks out the opponent, make it so that they have to take less game actions or play a quote unquote, fair game of magic, not taking six actions to my one every turn, but instead being limited to just one. Now stacks is a tricky, tricky sort of conversation that we're not going to have just yet in casual EDH. And it's probably. If I'm willing to admit it, a little unacceptable. So instead of doing stacks and regular EDH, although I may play occasionally a card like confounding conundrum, which prevents the green player from playing more than one land per turn. Instead, what I often do is I lean a little bit into the aggro or Voltron side. I am a huge stompy player in EDH, and I will attempt to take out the player who is more threatening or scary, at least their commander is. They themselves can be genuinely lovely human beings. But if I see like a Grand Arbiter Augustine at a table, or if I see Joyra on the table and I know there's gonna be tons of artifacts just bouncing in and out of play, then I may actually try to take that person out first. Just because I know that my own mental faculties, my own ADHD and attentive type diagnosis is. Poorly equipped to try and handle with a sense of peace, all of the shenanigans that are about to occur. And it's no offense to that player, but personally, once my brain gets overloaded with the amount of information that has to be taken in, I start to become more prone to tilt myself. So deck building around that is a way that you can, as a player take steps proactively before the game ever even starts. Give me a deck that I can fight against those situations that do tilt me or I can feel more in control of my own game. It's a simple enough deck. I don't have to play a deck that's like insanely complicated or above my current level without taking a lot of gold fishing to figure it out. These will prevent you from feeling sort of out of control or lost or even threatened at a magic table. Now, something I really want to highlight is that it does take a village. You should not have to always fight these battles on your own. My hope is, is that you've got a play group that's emotionally intelligent enough to recognize that maybe you're feeling a little off, or if you're the player at the table. And you're seeing someone across the table. Who's sweating, gripping their palms really tightly have become silent instead of boisterous or jovial. Like they usually are ask them. If you take them aside, Hey, do you want to play a different format or something? I noticed you're frustrated. Just acknowledge that they're feeling away and be like. And if we need to go do something else outside of this game, that's totally fine. Give an option. And one option that I like to present to play groups in the future, and hopefully more people will, will take me up on this because it's an idea of suggested a lot. And sometimes I get some pushback on it and I guess that's fine. You do you, right? One thing your play group can do is instead of playing your same deck and feeling disappointment in it, or feeling like I really need to win with this deck before I leave, do a. Everyone passes the deck to the left. So you're no longer playing your investment. You're no longer engaged fully in the idea that this thing, this creative thing I've made, this baby of mine needs to perform well and instead you're watching another player play it. This does a couple things. One, it presents you with the chance to root for someone else at the table. Super important and I can't emphasize it enough in a casual game. Sometimes we need to root for someone beyond ourselves. Let our ego rest. Or perhaps recognize that the ego is getting, it's just rewards from seeing the deck that you've built perform well in somebody else's hands. The second thing that this does is it allows us to better understand the cards that our regular play group play with. And I know that you may feel like you understand it in and out, but playing the deck, seeing how it operates in an actual game is going to give you so much. richer of an experience and an appreciation for the things that other people have built, or maybe even appreciation for types of decks that you would have never have built on your own. This exercise can immediately reduce tensions at a table. I guarantee it. And I promise that if you try it, you will recognize that almost instantaneously the stakes have lowered and we're just in that more fun sort of experimental place that most magic players. Open their first pack of cards or first starter deck and live in just breathe. Now I recognize that these tips and tricks we've gone over, aren't going to solve tilt for everyone. It's just the start of the road. And as you go on that road, I'm going to give you one last tool in your tool bag. We call it Ayurvedic breathing so called because it's practice comes from 5, 000 years with yogis and spiritualists, but it isn't just hippy dippy practice. Though I'm not going to poo poo people who want to talk about the Shakti's, which is a fun word to say. I perhaps know nothing of yoga outside of the one time I fell asleep in corpse pose. So I'm going to reference what I do know, the science behind the practice that backs it up. When we feel tilted, our breathing tends to become more shallow, our heart rate and blood pressure tend to rise, and our amygdala at that point is able to tilt. Take over and hijack all processes in the brain, and then all of a sudden we're not thinking we're just reacting now when we start to sense the things that come before that fleshing of face, recognizing of patterns that have happened before, like I don't love this type of game or I am frustrated. I was mad about this commander being played in the first place, and now it's just sort of started to take steps and build and build and build. When we start to get to the point of no return, that is our last chance, our last exit on the interstate before explosion town. So in those moments, as soon as you recognize it, just breathe. And I'm going to walk you through this exercise. It takes less than a minute. You can practice it anywhere. I'm going to walk you through it. We're going to go through three cycles, find a nice comfortable chair. If you have one, And then when you're ready, hit unpause. Here we go. Find yourself in a comfortable space, or if you're not, you can do this anyways. First, I'm going to tell you how it works. I'm going to count on my side for the first one. We're going to breathe in for three. We're going to hold for four. And then we're going to exhale for five, taking a pause to breathe normally between each cycle. And we're going to do this three times. And then I guarantee by the end of the third time, your body will just start to feel a little more tired, a little more relaxed. And you'll have a space to think again, consider things, let the cortex do its magic. So for the first one, prepare yourself. I'm about to start counting. We're going to breathe in for 3, 1, 2, 3, hold 2, 3, 4, breathe out slow 2, 3, 4, 5 and release. Let your body. Relax, breathe normally, belly poofs out, shoulders slump, any tension you were holding on to during this time in between the cycles, release. On the second one, I'm not going to do the counting, but you'll hear me breathing. I hope it's not too ASMR y. But we'll start. We're going to breathe in through the nose, hold, breathe out slow, and release. Let the tension fall out. One more time. We're going to breathe in through the nose, hold, breathe out slow, release. And one more time for good measure. Breathe in through the nose, hold, Breathe out slow. Release. You're grounded now. That's what a grounding technique is called. Takes us out of the heavens, plants us firmly in the grass, touching it and all that. And now we can look around, survey the scene and see what damage is there that we need to take care of. with a rational clear mind. I hope that all of this has been helpful to you. If you have any thoughts or you want to share something, feel free. You can find us on Twitter at rule zero podcast. That's the number zero or You can email us at rule zero podcast at gmail. com and you know, like, subscribe, leave a message in the comments. Always happy to hear from everybody who's checking in on this as you go forward with all this new information, making your play groups, making your play experiences better. Remember that before any of that. In magic, there is no problem that a rule zero conversation cannot solve.