Many thoughts 17/08 + Raffle Results July

Over the past few weeks, I've been very unwell. Without going into details, I have only just started feeling better over the past few days. It's impacted numerous things, including time taken off my full-time job to recover, as well as my YT content creation and my ability to practice and play TCGs in general.

This weekend, I travelled to Adelaide Regionals for One Piece and finished 10th after Swiss and lost the top 16 match to Belo Betty. It was the last OP11 tournament for Oceania, and I played GP Luffy, which I think is a terrible deck in the current meta. Unfortunately, like I mentioned earlier, I was too sick over the past few weeks to practice other decks. By the time I did feel better, the online sim had already updated to OP12, so I decided to play GP Luffy even though I did not think it was very good, since I owned the cards for it and felt like my level of play on the deck was fairly high. I lost round 1 to Betty, which I believe to be a hard counter matchup (+ their first life was Lindburgh trigger lol) and my top cut match was against another Belo Betty player. Hey, it's not as bad as Roach vs Ward Haven, but it's still pretty bad.

I was going to skip the event altogether, but I'd booked my flights and ticket in May, but it worked out, as top 16 is a great result considering the circumstances.

I am hoping that things will return to normal from next week onwards. I am starting to feel physically much better. In addition, I intend to fix up some issues with my diet and to start doing more exercise. I've been a little ignorant of the way this thing works. As it turns out, living an unhealthy lifestyle doesn't just shave a few years at the end of your life when it no longer matters - it has the potential to impact you negatively even while you are younger. Obvious, yes, but sometimes you need something to spell it out in front of you to process it fully.

In terms of Worlds Beyond, how did you guys enjoy the Roach guide I put together? It's something I pushed myself to complete despite being very sick at the time. My current plans are to push out more guides on a similar level of quality once Set 3 drop, I'm not seeing much of a point to putting one together now when there's only two weeks left of Set 2 to go.

Raffle Results - July

YC Tier: Richard
Supporter TIer: Mohsin

As always, winners of coaching may contact me over Discord to organise a session. Next Raffle will be in two weeks for August (or backdated if I'm late)

Future of the Patreon page

At some point, I need to consider the best course of action for this Patreon moving forward.

The value proposition to you guys is that I consider myself one of the best Western Shadowverse Players of all time, and that the Patrons can feel free to ask me for advice and get insight via guides, etc. In addition, the coaching benefit is especially high value when the number of subscribers is low, I have a general view of how much my time/hr is worth, and if you ran the maths, it's actually at an all-time bargain right now.

Notably, however, there are certain challenges I'm experiencing right now. Firstly, I have no intention to compete in Worlds Beyond. I really enjoy the game, and I am enjoying my current position as a content creator who happens to be very good at the game. However, the existence of this Patreon creates a unique challenge where I need to consider holding back content from YT because I potentially want to put it on Patreon instead, for instance. For example, with the information I had in that Roach guide, I could have put that on YT instead in a video format.

There's also issues where the value proposition isn't adding up on my end right now. As I just alluded to, with the money I earn on Patreon, I'd probably be better off just putting it on YouTube for free and then earning ad revenue off that, while increasing my subs/engagement metrics as well. There's also just the problem that I don't have infinite time. In an ideal world, I'd just do everything, but in reality, I have to start considering where to allocate my limited bandwidth, especially when there are also games like Gundam TCG/Riftbound which are probably higher value than Shadowverse. Don't get me wrong though, I do Shadowverse because I like the game, so there's intrinsic value that has nothing to do with money as well.

So there's probably multiple solutions to this problem - for one, I'm probably not really marketing the Patreon enough, although there's a bunch of other ways to address the situation and I'm just not quite certain as to where I'm going to land on this. For example, I could also expand to Metafy and distribute over multiple platforms instead of just Patreon. Will continue to ponder this topic.

In the meantime, the current plan is to truck along as per usual. Once set 3 drops, I intend to put together another guide that you guys can use for ladder/tournaments etc.