I meant to write this when I hit 666 games, but then in a burst of enthusiasm I stayed up super late and played a violent game with my Clan Moulder, and then another bit of assault and battery with a league Nurgle team.

External vs internal influence
For me, it turns out one big motivator for improving is what other people think of me. When I could infer the careworn sighs of Malmir trying to politely review my inept Witch Elf foulfest that started this journey to improvement, or MenonaLoco sadly seeing all his lessons ignored in favour of just relying on hot dice, they were cues that I should change my approach and do things better than before.

On the other hand, who really cares what others think, if they're going to end up playing a game with 80s graphics and pogoing goblins? Apparently not me, because I went, against the advice of much wiser people, and started up a min-max Chaos Chosen team. Because I'm a dreadful person, I expect.

Progress
I've played 43 more games in Box. I won 10, drew 12, lost 21. Then I did a chi-squared test that shows that there's a 0.5% chance that I'm the same player that I was for the first 273 games I played. Or I've stopped playing tier 3 teams quite so much. Who can say? Unless I really went for it and mono-activated forever, and died of boredom, I might never know. But I can almost relax, rest on my laurels and say I've improved.

You need to hurry up
Except I hadn't, as given by my penultimate match, where I drew with my Nurgle vs Menona's Chorfs, in the most lamentable way possible. At the end, Menona, with the patience of a saint, pointed out where he thought I was going wrong: I was playing like there are 32 turns in the game. Lunatics on Facebook aside who suggest a 32 turn game as a Good Thing, he was correct - I was trying to demolish the entire team, so I could then score at my leisure in the second half. I wasn't doing anything to pressure the ball carrier, because I knew if my sluggish bloaters started to make a move towards the end zone, he'd score and I'd have wasted more fouling opportunities.

So a new epiphany: on defence, play as aggressively as you dare, and act as you would if you believe you could get the greatest dice every time. On offence, take as little risk as you can.

So off to my next match, where apart from getting carried away and prematurely launching my wizard (because I thought it would be funny, which it was), I followed Menona's advice. And lost 2-1. But it was epic, and things got smashed. But this got me thinking, Box is not the same as League. In my favourite league, all I do is smash and smash and smash, and I'm doing fairly good at it, but in the short term that doesn't win tournaments. Perhaps in the long term it destroys the opposition, but there's a never ending procession of fresh pixels to break, and ... where am I going with this again?

Main thing is, I'm hovering around 150 CR. I'm not quite there yet, but it feels almost in my grasp, and if I can prove to myself that I can winch myself up from the 140s to the 150s, just for even one match, then I'm ok to get back on the stunty train again. So let's see where this takes us next...