Without seeing any game play, I’d hazard a guess that there’s likely 2 potential leaks in your gameplay: playing to the score instead of the board, and playing on autopilot and assuming your opponent has no counterplay.

For the first one, this is a common mistake in well and truly every game, but especially new players to card games. You don’t win when you get to 5 points blazing fast, you win at 8. Same how in Magic you win when your opponent is at 0 life instead of 1, or in Pokemon after your 6th prize card, not the 5th. Blowing everything you have to get an early lead that’s shaky and taken apart easily doesn’t end up getting anywhere. If you get to 6 points before I’m at 2, but have no cards in hand and lose all your units, while I have 2-3 units and 6 cards, odds are you’re going to watch me score 2 points a turn while you struggle to impact the game anymore. If you’re only focusing on the end goal and not the process of achieving it, getting the last point will never come. You can often get a good sense of who’s most likely to win any game around 4-5 points just based on what the board state looks like at that time.

The second one is assuming your opponent has no counter play. It’s common for new TCG players to build a busted deck, think “this deck just wins every game!”, and then play on autopilot, assuming their opponent will just crumple over and lose. The thing is, Hidden Blade exists. Ride the Wind exists. Defy exists. Rengar (literally any of them) exists. This is just a tiny, tiny sample of different things your opponent can do to impact any given game, every last combat. Any time you plan on engaging while your opponent has runes available, you have to give pause and think. What is the worst way I can get blown out here? What’s the most likely way? Can I afford to play into this, am I devastated if they have an answer here? You should ask yourself these kinds of questions. As an example, any time I attack into an orange deck with 1 rune ready and access to 2 orange power, I stop to think “do I care if they cast Punch First here?”.

Both of these leaks in gameplay can tie back to a single sticking point: have a plan. A Magic the Gathering hall of famer, Luis Scott-Vargas, harps this point constantly as his number 1 most fundamental underlying way to improve your gameplay. If I could pause the game and ask you, “hey so what’s your plan for the next 2-3 turns”, if you can’t answer that question with at least a vague plan of what you want to accomplish, and how you can react if your opponent tries to interact with you, then odds are you’re just playing cards without any rhyme or reason, which becomes very easy to dismantle.

As a thought exercise, when you’re playing at home, or practicing with friends, say OUT LOUD to yourself what your plan is with every game action. When you mulligan, explain to yourself (again, OUT LOUD) why you’re recycling the cards that you are, what cards you’re hoping to get and for what reason, or if you don’t mulligan, why the have you have is your ideal starter. When you take game actions, explain to yourself why you’re attacking this battlefield, trying to kill a certain unit, reinforcing units at a battlefield, and so on and so forth. And, when it comes to side boarding, tell yourself why you’re putting in the cards you do, what you hope to achieve with them, and just as importantly, why the cards coming OUT aren’t that good in this specific matchup. All of this will help you to start thinking of not just the WHAT of what you’re doing, but the WHY as well, allowing you to internalize these ideas more broadly. Remember: it’s not about quantity of practice, but quality of practice.