Keeping it together, the four sicknesses.

This may be the last of the philosophical posts. As my personal development in this area is reaching its current limit.

In this post I will address the four sicknesses of the mind in kendo known as shikai and a state of mind I had omitted previously called Heijoshin. Again I will relate how the four sicknesses can be applied to the tabletop. Most of these have been gone over in some way so I expect this post to hopefully be a bit shorter.

To preface a little I talked about Mushin and may not have been giving a clear impression. While Mushin is a calm mind, it is also a void. Meanwhile Heijoshin is a calm mind but a present one.

The four sicknesses are what we should be striving to avoid, or cleanse or even purify our mind from. Its not expected that you could ever really fully achieve these without becoming some kind of zen master demigod. But its supposed to be the pursuit of them that is virtuous.

Kyo
Surprise

Ku
Fear

Gi
Doubt

Waku
Hesitation / Confusion

These emotions as concepts of weakness are not uniquely Japanese.  I am sure we all know how these can affect our performance from the table top to pickup lines. In Kendo this is particularly focused on and overcome in ways that I have covered about zanshin, mushin, shoshin, fudoshin.
What I think would be beneficial here is to extrapolate how these can be used to your advantage over your opponent on the table. While Kendo practitioners seek to master these emotions within themselves, it helps to be able to recognize them in your opponent too.

Surprise, the dark horse effect.

Surprise can come a few ways across the table. It might be seeing Garryth in your competitive list pairing (I actually think Garryth is completely legit) or it might be your opponent not realizing that you can decimate his infantry in a single turn. Generally what happens after this surprise is the tilt, that's what sends your opponent into damage control and when their judgement becomes clouded.
Ways to avoid this yourself is not to rely on one piece or one interaction as your victory condition. You should always try to have at least 2 victory conditions in mind at all times.
Surprise can come from not reading rules or not being aware of interactions. A great example for me was when I arranged a game with last years champion who came up from Fukuoka.
We both had a week of list prep and had sent them to each other before the game. I had Vyros1 and Issyria. He was playing CoC and while I cant recall the casters, if I mentioned the lists you might know. Double battle engine list, and a list with the female backlash caster.
I mention backlash because this was the crux of the problem. I know what backlash does, I have won games with it. I locked in Vyros with a Banshee and 3 Manticores because I wanted to break the armor he was bringing. I also felt like they had enough armor or attacks to get through all of those servitors he was bringing in the other list. I also knew they had puncture. I just didn't put the two together.
So after turn 2 Vyros was on about 3 hit boxes. I had to completely change my game plan. He caught me by surprise even though it was all right in front of me. Domination, Backlash, Puncture.
The immediate threat of Backlash assassination made me forget that I could spend focus to negate the damage. I ended up spending focus to heal, which was counter productive as then I was not able to commit to reliably killing his servitors.
Because of the surprise inflicted on me I could no longer make accurate threat assessments and couldn't decide what my target priority was.
I tried to position for assassination. But because of the advantage he had in the first couple rounds I couldn't regain my footing and eventually over 4 turns was Backlashed to death.

Fear, The flavor of the month theme list.

Dropping what you know people are scared of. Building lists that people are genuinely afraid of. Just to force them into unfavorable match ups. Its that triple colossal or griffon spam list that exists just to play the dupe.
Or just having a reputation for being that guy, or the top dog.

Doubt, the Mage Hunter Assassin

Fear is closely related to doubt. Putting your opponent into positions where they don't know if they need to commit or not. They don't know if they can be assassinated or not. Some models are great for this, like Nayl for example. Can I just ignore Nayl? Should I throw him? Is it worth using this warjack or warbeasts activation just to do that? Meanwhile Vyros2 feat can have similar effects. Doubt works great with dice swings, Issyria, Strike Force against jacks, Mage Hunter Assassins. Odds are the Assassin does 4 damage, but there is a chance it could one shot his Stalker. So because of doubt he plays cagey.

Hesitation, analysis paralysis.

This is the result of doubt. But hesitation comes in when its eating your opponents clock. In Kendo this is your opening to strike. On the tabletop its not as obvious. It betrays confidence to have hesitation. Basically when you see your opponent hesitating to commit to a play you know you are forcing him into an unfavorable position. Of course the other side of this is he may just have too many good options. Either way however, they are losing clock time. But it also comes in to timing, activation and when to feat.
A good example of this was an opponent who pushed me into a Snipe Feat Go assassination with Ravyn. I knew that my odds of pulling off the assassination were pretty low. He had good armor and I couldn't deliver all of the Strike Force. He kill boxed himself to avoid the assassination, but I knew if I gave him the time to reduce my unit further my odds would become even less. So I feated early and didn't kill him. This left him feeling safe and he didn't predict my Artificer using Magno blast to push his Shield Guard away the next turn so a Sniped Force Generator could finish him off.
If I had hesitated to feat, I never would have put the earlier damage on him.
Another simple example is holding your feat for an assassination play, which you are never given an opening for.


There we have it.
I should probably point out that I don't consider myself a fantastic player. Since I have not been playing as much as I would like, I feel my skill has slipped a lot. So I have moved to trying to keep a better record of my games and experiences. Using these concepts helps me analyse what is happening in my games and between them.
More often than not I find myself at sea with new releases and new rules. Just the other day I had an idea for a way to use Nayl, but then completely failed to put it into practice on the table. I hear a lot about people getting frustrated with the game, people who feel like the new version of the game is unbalanced and that is the reason why they are less successful or are loosing worse.
I think its more the fact that All New War has new challenges that every player needs to overcome, and its not necessarily a game imbalance but just the player needing to learn how to navigate his way around a new game.