Say you were in what they call life's rush hour, aka your late 30s. Say that between your family life, job, the occasional social call and watching Game of Thrones on Bluray, you'd be lucky to squeeze in three Fumbbl games per week. Say you had a competitive mindset and therefore, your goal was to compete in, and win, tournaments. You'd also have a mind for metagroups and you'd have done your E.L.F. cycle, your HLC sprint, your ARR sprint, but you'd have realized that this basically meant playing only one team for two months, and no tourneys, so you'd have set this aside for now.

You wouldn't be so crazy to think you could handle scheduling more than one tourney at a time. So you'd always apply for a new tourney only once you'd be out of the current one, meaning you'd play one tourney match per week, which would leave you with two other matches per week, on average.

So if you wanted to keep playing those tourneys, you'd need those matches as preparation matches. You'd need to build the next team for a tourney, or recover one coming out of a tourney. And here's a thing about preparation matches: They suck. At least compared to a match where you just pull out all the stops and play for the win, they suck. You'll maybe compromise the win because you try to protect key players, or farm extra SPPs, and half the time it won't even work out. Then you'll suffer setbacks anyway because Nuffle says that a Wood Elf Journeyman can very well 1d-pow-perm your +stat player. And with only two games per week such setbacks take forever to recover and you'll feel you're really never getting anywhere.

And deep down you'd know you're competing with people who play ten times the matches. Who can afford to cycle players until they get the stats or doubles they want. Who don't mind the setbacks and will absolutely optimize their teams for the bracket they want to play in. And I'm not even talking about hyper-breeding a team for Majors, I mean yeah, you might get lucky and have a stat freak one day but you'd never be able to build up the team around him to really support him. Maybe you could make a decent run or two in a Major before the team gets torn apart but you'd always be outgunned sooner or later.

So what would you do? Forget Majors entirely and play only RRRs? Play your pick-up games just for fun and screw team-building? Never look past the next match, always pick the skill that helps the team best immediately, and if a good team evolves by accident so be it? That'd probably be the sane thing to do. Spare yourself the frustration of striving for something you know you can't achieve, at least not within a reasonable time frame. If only it weren't for the fact that you enjoyed those times you had a half-way decent team and played in those Majors, kicking ass and taking names, with dozens of specs watching. They were really the most glorious, memorable, fun times on Fumbbl.

And one day in late April, having skipped all Majors since the CoS, and having no team anywhere near Major shape for the GLT, you'd find yourself going, sanity is no solution either.