Ignore Your Health

The objective of most competitive games is simple - deal damage to win. It doesn't matter if you're playing Street Fighter, Magic, or Warmachine. Heck, it's the basic rule for cage fighting and boxing!

Anyone who plays those things casually has one objective - protecting their own life total. They don't want to lose, and so their actions are based around avoidance and minimizing risk. I mean it's an obvious strategy - you can't win if you lose.

When I first started playing Magic, my life total had a terror alert in my head. When that first damage took away from my initial 20 health, I'd just shrug it off because that's part of the game. When I started dipping closer to single digits, that yellow would start intensifying all the way down to 11. At 10, sirens wailed as my strategy headed for the bomb shelter. No matter what style deck I was playing - aggressive, combo, control, burn... if I hit the 50% mark, everything on my opponent's side of the field had to either be neutralized or defended against.

Again, that seems like a decent strategy depending on my opponent's life total. Sometimes I'd get a bit too extreme and fall for bluffs that made me think I should hold back my killing blow because they had a trick up their sleeve. It wouldn't put me on tilt, but I'd definitely go on the defensive because my game plan factored in my own life total.

Brian, the friend who first taught me Magic, had a much different approach. He always had me keep track of health, but he never really cared about the numbers. I'd give him updates after he took some damage, but he wouldn't care. At first I thought this was a mind game - acting confident so I'd think he had something that would win him the game. One day I finally asked him why he never wanted to know life totals, because I had to know if he was messing with me or not.

"I don't care because it doesn't matter," he said matter-of-factly. I calmly encouraged him to go on, but in my head I was screaming that he was out of his mind.

"It doesn't matter what my life is at. As long as I can get yours to 0, what I end with doesn't make much difference." He knew I worried over life totals, and on more than one occasion he'd had to tell me to calm down when I got flustered because I was a few points of damage away from losing.

"I mean you have to care to some degree so you can know when to block, but that's only when you're actually at risk for losing." He explained more, but I'll go ahead and stop pretending I can do more than summarize what he told me 8 years ago.

From that point, I stopped caring about life totals so much. Yes I had to worry because if I'm at 3 life, I either need to win on this turn or prepare to survive the next one. From beginning to end, games are all about risk vs. reward. Will leaving yourself exposed to damage early help you later? Usually, the aggressive strategy is the better one. You attack your opponent, he attacks you, and you swing back even harder and hopefully win the game.

I also noticed that I got less flustered. I stopped seeing the game in terms of my life total and started seeing it as "what can I do to maximize my chances of reducing his first?" It's a slight perspective switch, but one that was crucial in my development as a player. Rather than trying to hunker down and weather the onslaught, I have learned to worry about my opponent's life total.

To reiterate, don't ignore your own! I sometime forget this and just tunnel-vision on winning, overextending my defenses for a small gain and leaving myself open for a big loss. That's just bad planning. But when I stopped saying "Oh man, a few more turns of that and I'm done for!" I have instead tried to make my opponent feel that way first.

Here's why I think this focus is key: Winning also means not losing. If all I do is prevent my loss, I'm doing nothing to secure my win. But if I want to win, I have to reserve brain space for protecting myself. Sure I'll take more damage to accomplish my goal, but as Brian said - as long as their life total reaches 0 first, who cares what mine is?

This idea has stuck with me through my gaming career. In Call of Duty, my focus on making sure my team won was the only thing that made me a valuable teammate (I can assure you it wasn't my ability to get kills!) In Warmachine, my Warcaster toes a dangerous line between being an aggressive threat and being in danger. I'm still finding that line, but it often puts my powerful piece in the game while my opponent hides his behind his army, reducing its effectiveness on the game at hand.

If you're someone who puts a lot of focus on how close you are to losing, I encourage you to try this approach. Just stop looking at life totals and do what you can to make theirs reach 0 before yours. It takes quite a bit of adjusting because there's the temptation to make the pendulum swing to the other end and just run your army or deck in the red. But when you can find that balance you'll find yourself having an upper hand simply because you can have a clear head the entire time. And even if you lose, at least you went down swinging instead of dropping in to the fetal position.


See you tomorrow!

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