Book excerpt: This book will teach a systematic approach to winning tournaments that we will be able to apply to any format, independent of context. While our focus will be on winning tournaments, much of what we talk about can be applied in a broader sense and the scope of what is written extends to many disciplines. We will take from areas such as philosophy, economics, psychology, business, and many of my own personal experiences as a player. The first section of the book will introduce the framework that we will build on throughout the book. Patrick Chapin's "Theory of Everything" is commonly used as the framework for card theory. We are going to start off by taking a look at it, but then we are going to get into some of the problems with using it as a guiding framework. After discussing the problems it has, we are going to attempt to build a better guiding framework. The second section of the book will focus on self. Much of this section will focus on what it means to be rational. We will begin by ensuring that we have the proper tools to make good decisions at our disposal. Next we will explore the various biases that cloud our judgments. Then we will discuss ways we can guard ourselves against these biases and come up with some ways of thinking about things that can better guide our decisions. The final part of this section will deal with properly motivating ourselves to do what it takes to see success. The third section will focus on developing our circle. Our circle is our team. These are the people who will help us see success and who we will help see success. We are going to talk about the tools our circle will use and how to get the most out of those tools, as well as discuss the kind of people we want in our circle. In the fourth section we're going to get down to the ins and outs of technical play. We are going to be talking about the different kinds of resources within a game and about how our role varies within a game. Then we are going to discuss different approaches we can take with our plays to ensure that we are getting the most out of them. The final part of this section will talk about the right approach to have to tournaments to make sure we are on top of our game when the big day comes. The fifth section is going to focus on the mental aspects of the game. We are going to start off by talking about how to gauge our opponents' skill level so that we can adjust our plays and make them more effective. Then we are going to talk about how to get a read on our opponent's card and how to effectively get information out of them. After that we're going to talk about different ways of persuading our opponent into making the moves we want them to make. In the sixth section we will discuss effective deckbuilding. We will start off by discussing the deckbuilding philosophy and the first principles of deckbuilding. We will then discuss the various role cards can play in a game and talk about some shortcuts for evaluating them. Then we're going to talk about how probability affects our deckbuilding. After that we're going to build on the first principles of deckbuilding by introducing some deckbuilding rules to build consistent and powerful decks. We are also going to discuss deckbuilding curves that we can use to guide our choices. Finally we are going to discuss how to effectively side deck. In the final section we will discuss metagames. We will talk about how to identify shifts in the metagame and then move on to discussing some tournament strategies we can take to overcome the metagame. In the final chapter, we will come to understand how we can influence the format and plan for incremental development, so that we will be able to succeed throughout a format.