Goal setting is something that everyone does in all different walks of life. Students will set goals for what grades they wish to achieve in certain classes, or goals for how well they wish to score on a specific test. A store owner might set goals for how much he or she expects to make on a certain day or month. On a good day that store owner might want to figure out what they were doing right, and learn to duplicate it in the future, and on a bad day a store would want to figure out what went wrong to prevent it from happening again.
In my early years as a Magic player, I was actually spending a lot of my time on sports. High School Wrestling in particular was the sport I poured a large amount of time and effort in to. Goal setting is a huge factor in wrestling. Coaches were very vocal of the importance of goal setting, and made an exercise out of teaching us to set goals each year.
At the start of each wrestling season we would all make goals for the season. Those goals included what weight class you wished to wrestle that season, how many metals you wished to win that season, or how you wanted to finish in Cities, Provincials, or Nationals.
It was also important to set out how you planned on achieving these goals. For some it was important to pack on muscle and go to the gym regularly to be as strong as possible. For others, it was important to lose weight to wrestle at a more favorable weight class. One could make a point of attending each and every wrestling practice or joining an extracurricular wrestling club to practice technique.
In Magic, it is just as important as in anything else to set goals. Setting achievable goals helps to give you focus, helps you plan out what you need to work on and how you plan to go about making a goal a reality.
Knowing What Your Goals Are
People play Magic for a lot of different reasons and Magic means a lot to different people. That’s what makes Magic so great; it is whatever you want it to be.
Some people play Magic for the social aspect. They play Magic to have fun with their friends. Some of these players enjoy traveling with their friends and Magic can be a great excuse to go on a road trip or travel somewhere you wouldn’t otherwise travel.
For some, Magic is a way of making money. Some people travel to GPs exclusively to trade cards and make a profit out of it. Others make a living writing articles and finishing well enough in tournaments to make it profitable.
Some people play Magic competitively. They play to win. They want the glory, money and respect that come along with being the best.
Knowing which of the above three type of players you are, or combination of the three, can help prevent a lot of future heartache but can also help focus a person.
Setting Attainable Goals
It’s important to set goals that are ambitious but at the same time attainable. For a person who has never made day 2 of a Grand Prix it may not be reasonable to set a goal of top 8ing a Grand Prix. But at the same time, if you have already made day 2 of a Grand Prix but didn’t cash, maybe you should be setting a goal of cashing a Grand Prix.
Making Plans for How to Achieve These Goals
Making plans for how you are going to go about achieving the goals that you set is as important, if not more important, than setting the goals themselves. Without a plan for how you are going to go about achieve a goal, you might as well not even have the goal in the first place.
Setting Goals for a Specific Tournament
When setting goals for a specific tournament, it’s important to see where you’ve finished in similar tournaments in the past and planning on improving on those results.
Everyone has different commitments that we must assign time to and no one has infinite time to play Magic. In light of that, it’s important to budget your time efficiently, and spend time on what matters. If you are seriously preparing for a limited Grand Prix, then your time might be better spent skipping standard FNM and grinding Sealed Dailies on MTGO.
When preparing for a specific tournament, it’s important to make time to prepare for that tournament. It may help to literally take a calendar and plan the days that you wish to test. Make plans with your friends or play testing group and set aside days that are good for each person involved. Find out when tournaments that will be good practice are happening online or in person.
When preparing for a tournament you have to identify what it is that you need to work on for the specific tournament. For a multi-format tournament like Nationals, it’s important to divide your time preparing for each format correctly for optimal results. For example, if you know that your weakness coming in to Nationals is going to be limited, like me, then you know that you should probably be spending more time drafting than testing standard.
Setting Goals for a Season
When setting goals for an entire season*, it’s important to set more long term goals. For example, a goal might just be to top 8 your first PTQ, to make day 2 of a GP for the first time or to qualify for the Pro Tour.
When setting goals for a season, it’s also important to think about what the holes in your game were from the previous season and work towards fixing those problems. For example, my goal for next season is to make an effort to play the ‘best’ deck more often. Last season, I wasted a lot of my time playing decks that were inferior to the best decks, and that played a huge part in the disappointing results I had last season.
Whatever that goal may be, like I’ve said before, make it something that is actually attainable. If your goals are too lofty, then at the end of the season you may just say to yourself that your goals were too high and you probably weren’t going to get there anyhow. If your goals are attainable, then at the end of the season if you didn’t get there, then at least you can analyze where you went wrong, and you can’t just write it off as a goal that was unattainable.
Conclusion
In the end, the most important thing is to be able to honestly analysis of yourself, and your goals. Honestly knowing what you are capable of, and what you are trying to achieve will help you approach your goals realistically, and have a real chance of achieving those goals. Then, at the end of the season you can say to yourself that either you have let yourself down and fallen short of your goals, or you have achieved your goals and now have higher goals set for next season. Either way, self improvement is the end goal, and if you want to be the best, you have to work towards being the best player you can be, always improving. As always, thanks for reading!
Francis Toussaint
*I consider the end/start of a season to be Worlds. However, it can be whenever makes sense to you.