Welcome to the Mental Game guide! 

This guide is going to teach you the absolute fastest ways to improve your skill, your rank, and your $PRIME rewards in the game of Parallel TCG. But first I’d like to share a little bit about how I got here and why I became obsessed with this thing called “mental game.”

During the start of the COVID pandemic, I lost my job and moved into my mom’s basement. With lockdowns keeping me inside, I started streaming games on Twitch and became obsessed with doing long streams of PvP games, often 12+ hours at a time.

My stream did pretty well, but there was one problem: I was bad at competitive gaming. No matter what I did, I was always hardstuck Platinum in whatever game I played.

Over time I got a bit better, but I was never really good enough and I could never figure out why. It just seemed like everybody else was better at games than me, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply didn’t have “what it takes” to be a great competitor in gaming.

That was when I discovered the concept of the MENTAL GAME. Improving your mental game means paying attention to the way that you think about games, the processes that you use to try to get good at any game regardless of which one it is. In the context of Parallel, mental game is this: 

"How can you get 10x better at the game without discussing any cards or decks?"

Sounds crazy, but there is a LOT you can do without talking about cards. In fact, the most important parts of getting good aren’t about any one deck in particular! It’s all about the process of how you play and how you work on your skills, regardless of what the “fleeting meta” of the moment is.

I would argue that mental game is the point of “maximum leverage,” where small changes make the biggest difference. This guide will walk you through the basics of how you can build your mental game to massively improve your competitive results in Parallel TCG.

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Stop Paying Attention To Your Rank

One of the most common questions beginner players ask is: How do I make my rank higher? 

Honestly, this is not a very useful question. Of course we all want to have high ranks. The problem is that focusing on your MMR gets you tilted more easily and makes you more likely to misplay. You’re nervous every time you lose, and you get too confident (“winner’s tilt”) when you get a few wins in a row. It is really not helping you play well.

Of course there is some RNG in this game, but over time your rank will be an honest reflection of your skill level. It is not a coincidence that the same competitive players end up at high ranks season after season.

Instead, try to reframe your mindset and focus on this question: How do I play better?‍

You can break this question down into multiple mini-questions: How do I build better decks? How do I make better decisions for the mulligan? How do I make better banking decisions in the early game? How do I do a better job of playing each matchup correctly? How do I review my matches and figure out where I am making mistakes?‍

These are just a few of the questions that come up when you start by asking “How do I play better?” This stuff is way more useful than focusing directly on ranks.

Most importantly, when you focus on getting better your losing days aren’t so bad. It always feels bad to lose, no doubt about that, but it feels a lot less bad if you are learning as you go. Even on a bad day, it can be satisfying to identify mistakes and figure out how to correct them. When you do this you know that you are improving your overall quality of play, and you know this will result in a higher rank over time.

Compared to all that progress, one losing day is nothing!

This might seem like a small thing, but it really is not. I think that shifting my focus from “how to get ranks” to “how to play better” was one of the biggest steps in me starting to get good and going from hardstuck platinum to consistently top 100.

One other question that I find useful is: “How can I achieve my full potential of skill in this game?” I like this one because it reframes the things you are bad at, instead of seeming like failures, they become opportunities to discover just how much better you can be. 

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You Need to Focus

When high-level players compete in chess, poker, Magic: The Gathering, or any other strategy games, they are always extremely focused. Every single brain cell is locked in to the task at hand, there is no room for distraction.

Yet many players in online games like Parallel will *always* have distractions up. Many people are constantly listening to podcasts or watching YouTube videos / streams on the second monitor while trying to play games!

Listen, I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. But the truth is you play worse when you have movies and podcasts playing in the background.‍

If your goal is to play as well as you can, you must lock in and focus on the game. You cannot have media running in the background. TV shows, podcasts, streams, anything where people are talking and saying things is a huge distraction. There is no chance that it is improving your quality of play, and it is highly likely that it is greatly increasing the amount of mistakes you make.

Trust me - as someone who streams a lot, it is WAY easier to play offstream when I am not trying to talk to chat at the same time! 

There is one possible exception to this rule, which is music. Some people do find that listening to certain kinds of music can help them to focus by cutting out other distractions, for example drowning out background noise of your family or whatever else is going on around you. Also, music may have a calming/focusing effect by reducing your internal chatter. 

Even with music, you should be self-aware and consider if it is helping or hurting. If your favorite song comes on and you completely lose track of the game, that’s not a great sign! Be mindful of what things are helping you focus and what is taking away your focus, and be relentless about maximizing your ability to focus on the task at hand.

If this sounds boring or lame to you, I just have to ask – what’s the priority? Is it to win as many games as possible? Or is it not that? It’s up to you how far you want to go on your competitive journey, but focus is non-negotiable if you want to achieve your full potential.

If you want to just be at 70% of your full potential while listening to podcasts and spamming games at medium focus, that’s up to you. As for me, I ain’t got time for that! 

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Coaching, Co-Piloting, and Teamwork

When I started making friends with some of the best competitive players in Parallel, one thing really surprised me. There are no “lone geniuses” in this game. All of the best players are always working with teams, sharing ideas, testing decks together, and generally using a ton of teamwork in their process to get better.

I figured since only one person can win a tournament, it would be highly competitive even during the preparation phase. I thought people would be keeping all of their best ideas secret. This could not be further from the truth!

It turns out that discussing decks and strategies with other players is one of the best ways to improve your skill at this game.

Of course, since you’re reading this guide, you are already aware that there are some amazing resources for improving your play. Paragons Academy is one of the best places you can go to find guides on how to improve your play.

Coaching takes this to the next level. 

Working with a coach means that you share your screen with a high-level player (the coach) and talk through your gameplay with them. They can point out many spots where you might be making blunders, identifying your “blind spots” and helping you to really see the parts of your game where you can improve the most.

Another form of coaching is where you record yourself playing a game, then send it to a coach for review. They can go over the video with you and talk about all the things you could’ve done better.

At the high end, people will pay for coaching. However as a beginner or even intermediate player, you can get high quality coaching for free. If you are in the Paragons Alliance bond, you have access to a monthly “match review” where you can get one of your matches reviewed by a high level player each month. This is a great way to experiment with the process of being coached.

To take advantage of this opportunity, just share a video of a match you want reviewed to the #vodreview channel in the Paragons Discord.

Even better, if you just ask some of the best players in your bond for coaching, there’s a high chance that they will do it for free. As a top 100 player, I absolutely enjoy jumping into a voice chat and coaching someone for an hour or two. 

I’d also like to point out something else similar to coaching, which I call “co-piloting.” This is when two players of similar skill sit in a voice chat with the screen shared and just talk through the turns together. 

It turns out, even if someone is at your same skill level, they’re likely good and bad at different things than you. You might be great at mulligans and openings, but bad at the midgame – and maybe your friend is in the opposite situation. If you co-pilot each other for a few hours each week, you’d probably both make big improvements in your ability to play well.

If nothing else, coaching and co-piloting force you to be at your best. You will feel really dumb if you make a mistake while someone is watching just because you were distracted by Twitter or just rushed to make a move without thinking. Having another player present will help you to increase your self-awareness of the little mistakes you make on a regular basis, and will help you to hone in on the skills and strategies that unlock your best potential.

If you’ve never done this before, I recommend you try it ASAP. Next time you play, send a DM to 3 of your fellow Parallel friends asking if any of them will join you in the voice chat for a co-pilot session. I bet at least one of them will say yes.

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Keep Track of Your Results

There is a famous saying in the business world, “what gets measured gets managed.” This means that when you measure the results of something, you will probably find ways to improve those results over time. The mere act of measuring the results tends to make you start thinking about it more, and it motivates you to find ways to improve those results.

This is why so many people are so focused on their MMR - because it’s constantly being measured for you! But you can do a lot better than just watching your rank go up and down.

It’s a great idea to keep track of the winrates of each deck you play. If you track each match (I’ll explain how to do this in a moment), you can see which matchups are best and which ones are worst. You’ll see if a certain deck is performing extra well, or if a deck that you thought was good is actually getting more losses than you realized.

Of course sample size plays a role here – if you play 3 games with a deck, it’s entirely possible to get unlucky. But if you play one deck for 30-50 games, you’ll start to gather a useful amount of data. 

There are some great resources that make it super easy to track your results in Parallel. Primea World (https://primea.world/) provides an easy-to-use interface where you can track each game in a day, as well as saving notes (such as: “I shouldn’t have mulliganed X card” or “Watch out for their board clears!”) throughout the day to review after the session.

Another upcoming resource for game tracking is Paragons' own Priming.xyz. This site tracks all of your games and will soon show you a number of gameplay stats, like which decks are performing well and which ones need some work.

Tracking results is a good habit that will enable you to make more informed decisions about what decks to play and where you need to improve – start doing it!

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Imitate Successful Players, Use Meta Decks

When you are trying to improve your skills in Parallel, you should focus on the most popular decks that are being played by high-level players.

I know some players hate the idea of playing meta decks. They want to build their own ideas from scratch and be as creative as possible. Well, here’s the thing. If you want to do that, you can, but it probably won’t result in you achieving high ranks or finding your true potential as a competitive player.

Imagine that you wanted to learn to play Chess, but you didn’t want to study any openings. Instead, you wanted to figure it all out yourself. Would you be a good chess player? Surely not! Skilled chess players are drawing from hundreds of years of chess theory to understand the optimal ways to play the game.

You could spend ten years figuring out that “1. E4” is the best starting move in chess, or you could read it in a book and learn it in two minutes. Which one results in higher ranks?

Card games like Parallel aren’t that different from Chess in this regard. There’s more RNG for sure, but the basic idea is the same: studying the greatest players and doing what is proven to work will get you more wins, faster. The most effective way that you can improve your results is to use the top tier meta decks and learn to play them as well as possible.

If your collection is missing some of the cards so you can’t build the exact meta decks yet, you can still start with a pro list and substitute budget cards for the ones you are missing.

Even if you want to eventually become a creative player who runs unusual decklists and makes them work at a high level, you’ll need to understand the core meta of the game extremely well to do so. Running off-meta decks successfully requires you to have a great understanding of how the popular decks work, so that you can learn how to build around them and find alternative strategies that are viable.

Over time, as you achieve diamond ranks and beyond, you’ll have the necessary skills to decide for yourself if you want to follow the meta or try to invent something new. As a beginner, it’s much more effective to imitate the best players so you can learn to play (and win) like they do.

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Reviewing Games and Reviewing “Spots” 

If you want to get better fast, review games often.

Here’s how it works: Before you play a game, use software to start recording your screen. You can use the popular streaming software OBS to do this (just use it to record, no need to go live).

Play a few games as focused and as well as you can. As soon as you lose a game, end the recording and go back to watch the match over again.

Review each step of the game, starting with the mulligan. Ask yourself: “Could I have done something different that would have resulted in a better outcome during the game?” 

This is useful for a few reasons. One thing is that you have as much time as you want to analyze each spot. If you ran low on time on a turn and had to make a quick decision, you can spend several minutes going back over that spot and thinking through all of the details. 

Sometimes you don’t even need the extra time. Beginner and intermediate players often miss “obvious” lines in the heat of the moment . You might see one of your turns from the lost game and say “What the heck! What am I doing? I should have played that turn differently, it’s clearly a mistake!” By identifying these mistakes, you’ll be more likely to find the correct play in similar situations in the future.

If you never review the match, you may be doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over. In the worst case, you’ll blame RNG for your losses while making mistakes that could easily be identified and avoided. Don’t let that happen!

Yet another aspect of this is that you can go back and forth. If you are in a tough situation on turn 5, maybe you can rewind to turn 4 and think about how a different play would have avoided the situation altogether. Did you bank a card and then wish you hadn’t? This really helps you to start thinking multiple turns in advance, a key part of high level play.

Another even easier way to improve your game - and perhaps the most effective use of your time - is to take a screenshot of one turn per session where you are not sure what to do. 

The first time during a grind session where you are just stumped, you don’t know what the right play is - take a screenshot of the game state (and a second one of what’s in your bank). To make this better, *immediately* share the screenshot in a Discord chat with a few friends and ask them for feedback. What would they have done in this spot?

ParagonsDAO’s Discord has channels available where you can share spots like this and get great advice on what the best lines are. In particular, the “Ask a Pro” channel is a place where you can get strategy advice on specific in-game spots - use it!

I think that for any player who isn’t reviewing games yet, if they just screenshot and analyze *one* spot per day, they would see big improvements in their quality of play (and MMR) within a few weeks. Usually if you study one spot, you’ll be able to apply what you learn to many other similar spots.

This also helps you to understand the difference between matchups - noticing that certain cards are more important in one matchup over another, knowing what to play around in difficult matchups - things that can be hard to figure out in the moment.

Reviewing games and spots requires a bit of extra work, but it is very much worth it if you want to dramatically improve your quality of play.

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The Impact of Physical & Mental Health on Mental Game

Good mental game is a lot easier when you are in a relaxed and well-rested state. The more tired or stressed out you are while playing, the more likely you are to make mistakes.

The quality of your thinking is impacted by basically everything in your life. How much exercise you get, what you eat, how much time you spend on social media, mindfulness/meditation habits, sleep quality - all of these things, and much more, have an impact on your ability to think clearly and play well.

Sleep is the simplest and perhaps best example. Imagine staying up all night, not sleeping for 24+ hours, and then trying to play 10 games of Parallel. Chances are, you’ll make massive blunders that you normally would not make. You might miscount your damage, lose track of how much energy you have, or just completely miss obvious plays that normally you would easily see.

Now imagine the opposite. Imagine you’ve slept a full night’s sleep of 8.5 hours, taken some time to wake up, and are now sitting down to play your 10 games. Chances are, you’ll play a lot better, right? With the same amount of effort, you will win more games and make less mistakes.

Of course it usually isn’t so extreme as no sleep or a perfect night’s sleep - but this, and other health habits, clearly have an impact on your ability to play well.

The exact ways that you can optimize your brainpower are far beyond the scope of this guide - many books have been written about this - but the point of this section of the guide is just to remind you that basically everything you do outside of Parallel has an impact on how well you can play. Trying to be well rested, on a good diet, getting some exercise, and avoiding habits that make you feel distracted or absent-minded are all things that can make you play better at the game.

Of course, we all have our personal challenges with health and wellness. This is a big picture, long-term thing to think about. It’s not something you have to solve immediately.

Still, if you are very serious about seeing your true potential in the game, you’ll probably want to consider lifestyle changes that can improve your ability to think clearly and make good decisions, as these will translate to better results for the same in-game effort.

As a bonus, improving your ability to think clearly doesn’t just improve your ability to play Parallel - it will improve your ability to do just about anything in life!

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How to Stop Tilting and Play Well Under Pressure

‍Imagine this: You’ve been practicing with your main deck for months. You know every matchup like the back of your hand, and you are well-versed in all aspects of the deck’s gameplan. You know how to mulligan like a champ and you’ve even learned to play to your outs when you draw badly.

‍During an important match in a tournament, you make a silly mistake. It’s obvious that you just made a blunder, and now this key match might go from an easy win to an embarrassing loss.

‍All of the sudden, you are angry. How could you do this? How could you make such a dumb mistake? During the next turn, you aren’t thinking about the strategy. You’re pissed off, and you quickly bank and play some cards without thinking, making several more mistakes in the process.

‍For the rest of the tournament, you never get back to a calm state, just feeling annoyed and pissed off while you continue to make way more mistakes than usual. The tournament goes badly and you wonder if all of that preparation was for nothing.

This, of course, is an example of how “going on tilt” can absolutely ruin your competitive results. In spite of all the practice in the world, if you tilt and stop thinking clearly in the heat of the moment, you will never be able to see your true potential in action.

Imagine the alternative scenario. Imagine that you’ve made that first mistake, and you cringe at yourself. Then you take a deep breath and remind yourself: “Ok, that was an error. I have to play as well as I can to give myself the best chance to win. I’m going to use that one mistake as a reminder that it’s really important to focus, and I will play my best from here on out.”

If you manage to think about it that way, you can resume playing well and come back to win the game, win the match, win the whole tournament! 

Many books have been written on how to maintain a strong mindset and avoid going on tilt. In this portion of the guide, let me briefly lay out some of the core principles on how to avoid and reduce tilt.

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Anti-Tilt Strategy 1: Start by focusing on *recovering* from tilt, not avoiding tilt. 

We ultimately want to avoid getting tilted at all. But this is unrealistic, especially for players who have a problem of tilting often. So, in my experience, the best skill to start working on is how to recover from tilt after it happens. How can you get out of a tilted mindset and return to a calm state as fast as possible?

One way to do this is to simply take a break. If you’re tilted while playing games in the ranked queue, just stop playing and take as long as you need before you feel the tilt go away. This may take 5 minutes, it may take an hour. Whatever it is, take the time you need to return to baseline before you resume playing.

A second option, for mild tilt: Take slow, deep breaths. Try to clear your mind, slow down your physiology, and do a quick mental “cleanse” where you focus on your breath and stop thinking about anything. After even one breath of mindfulness, you may be able to quickly resume in a focused state.

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Anti-Tilt Strategy 2: Figure out your “ritual” for when you get tilted.

One of Parallel’s top competitive players, Lambyseries, had an interesting thing to say about how to deal with tilt when he went on the Parallel League Podcast. He said that every player needs to have a “ritual” that they do when they get tilted, to get out of the tilt mindset. Interestingly, he wouldn’t reveal his ritual - he says it is different for everybody.

For me, the ritual is simple. When I am tilted, I go outside and do 20 jumping jacks. Then I walk around for a minute and just take in some fresh air (and sunlight if it is daytime). It is amazing how much the fresh air and a little physical activity resets my physical state, which in turn resets my mental state.

Experiment with different rituals and try to figure out what 2-3 minute activities might enable you to quickly shake off tilt and return to baseline.

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Anti-Tilt Strategy 3: Identify Negative Thought Patterns and Change Them

There are often specific internal thoughts that go along with our tilt mindset. When we make a mistake, or even just lose a few games to bad luck, we will start thinking certain things. You might think to yourself: “See, I just lost 3 games in a row. I’ll never climb the ranks!” or “I always lose against Shroud. It’s just not fair!” 

Try to identify what your negative thoughts are. Then work on changing those thought patterns.

When you catch yourself saying: “I’ll never climb ranks, I always go on a losing streak” - try to actively remind yourself of a new thought: “If I keep practicing, I will win more games. The key is to stay focused.”

If you often think “Man, I can never beat these diamond/master rank players! Matchmaking is so unfair!” - try to catch that thought and replace it with “These other players are only human. With hard work and focus, I can learn to beat them until they’re afraid to queue into me!” 

If you are constantly trying to remind yourself of more positive thoughts and ideas that you can think about during times of struggle, you can really start reframing your mindset. It’s not a fast process, but it’s very effective over time.

If you are doing the work to become a better player, the positive thoughts are literally true and it is actually common sense to get rid of the old useless negative thought patterns. Many of these negative thoughts are based on past experiences, not future opportunities, and they are really something called self-limiting beliefs.

You may one day reach your true potential where it’s really hard to keep improving… but today is not that day. In reality, you can probably get 1% better per day for many years to come before you’re even close to reaching a real plateau of skill.

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